Tag: covid 19
Anti-Vaccine Activists Say They're 'Advising' Trump Transition Team On Health Policy

Anti-Vaccine Activists Say They're 'Advising' Trump Transition Team On Health Policy

As President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team announce selections for various government positions, multiple anti-vaccine figures with a history of spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines and COVID-19 have claimed to be consulting or attempting to consult with Trump’s team — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — about public health policy.

On November 14, Trump announced that he would nominate Kennedy for HHS secretary, implying that Kennedy would stop what Trump called “deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.” Kennedy, a former presidential candidate, is a known anti-vaccine activist who has spread a range of conspiracy theories — including conspiracy theories about 5G towers, Ukrainian biolabs, chemtrails, and supposed microchips in vaccines — and has associated with QAnon figures.

Since Trump’s announcement that he would nominate Kennedy for HHS, anti-vaccine media figures known for spreading conspiracy theories have claimed to be consulting with the Trump team regarding HHS and public health policy:

  • Robert Malone is a doctor known for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and its treatments, and he has ties to other conspiracy theorists. He toldThe Epoch Times-affiliated outlet NTD that he had “spoken at length with some of the people that are very close to Bobby [Kennedy] that are involved in the transition and the planning” about “major structural changes across HHS.” On a podcast a few days later, Malone went further, claiming that he had even been “asked by somebody in the transition team … to lay out thoughts about how [the] FDA could be reformed” and speculating that he might find himself “on the inside.”
  • Thomas Renz is an attorney who has pursued litigation over, and pushed misinformation about, COVID vaccines, and he has partnered with QAnon figures for some of those efforts. On his podcast, Renz said regarding vaccines that he would “write out a couple of different things … so that, you know, day one, my recommendation for a few different things and send it over” to Kennedy, with whom he said he had “spoken at length a few different times.” (Renz did note that he doesn’t “know whether [Kennedy] will listen or not.“)
  • Mikki Willis is the director behind the viral COVID-19 conspiracy theory videoPlandemic and has been friendly with at least one QAnon figure. On social media, he claimed that “many of [Trump’s] new appointees are personal friends of” his and that he was “privy to private conversations taking place behind the scenes, and what I’m hearing is profoundly inspiring.”

Anti-vaccine figures were also seemingly involved with the transition team ahead of the 2024 presidential election. While Kennedy worked with Trump’s transition team ahead of the election, Charlene Bollinger — a fringe commentator and anti-vaccine activist whose social media account has spread antisemitism and QAnon conspiracy theories in addition to targeting vaccines — told One America News that she was “working with a number of people” in the transition team “to put together something beautiful so that Bobby Kennedy can roll out his vision and we get to be a part of this.” A few days after the election, Malone also told CBS News that “he had spoken with many of the aides from some of the ‘at least four different HHS transition teams’ under Trump … in recent weeks about the future of the department.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Nazi-Promoting Antisemite On Speaking Tour With Eric And Lara Trump

Nazi-Promoting Antisemite On Speaking Tour With Eric And Lara Trump

Extremist commentator Christiane Northrup has promoted a pro-Nazi film that denies the Holocaust, encouraged people to check out the infamous antisemitic tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and repeatedly pushed the conspiracy theory that a secretive mafia is hiding behind Jewish identity to control world events. Still, Northrup has spoken twice at Trump’s Miami resort alongside Eric and Lara Trump and been featured in a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign video.

Northrup is a former OBGYN who initially gained fame as a self-help author who was praised by Oprah Winfrey. Since then, as The Washington Post reported in May 2022, Northrup has claimed COVID-19 “was part of a plot involving Deep State brainwashing and treacherous depopulation schemes” and she “encouraged fans to check out QAnon, called the Centers for Disease Control a ‘covid death cult,’ and described the vaccines as crimes against humanity.”

Northrup is listed as a “featured” speaker on the pro-Trump ReAwaken America Tour. She, along with Eric and Lara Trump — now the co-chair of the Republican National Committee — appeared on the tour’s stops at Trump Doral in Miami, Florida, in May and October 2023.

A poster for the tour’s next stop in Selma, North Carolina, in October lists Northrup, Eric Trump, and Lara Trump as scheduled speakers.

The tour has become a magnet for Hitler-promoting antisemites. Including Northrup, Media Matters has now identified at least five speakers who have shared antisemitic and pro-Hitler material.

Aside from appearing on the ReAwaken America Tour, Northrup also has connections to Kennedy’s presidential campaign. At a launch event, the campaign featured Northrup in a video titled “‘The Experiment’ | Running on Truth | Episode 1” that referred to her as a “world-renowned physician and bestselling author.” Northrup said in the video: “This is a time to bring America back together. We have been torn apart, and if anyone can bring it back together, it's the Kennedys.” (The Kennedy family, minus RFK Jr., has been extremely critical of RFK Jr.’s campaign.)

The Bangor Daily News reported in August that Northrup had donated money to the campaign.

Northrup has also repeatedly appeared on programs hosted by Children’s Health Defense — the conspiratorial group founded by Kennedy — and spoke at a 2021 anti-vaccine rally that was headlined by Kennedy.

Additionally, Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci touts a blurb from Northrup on its Skyhorse Publishing page. (Skyhorse is run by Kennedy ally Tony Lyons.)

Northrup has offered praise of both Trump and Kennedy. In May, for instance, Northrup said that she “can’t prove it" but her "opinion is that Trump and RFK Jr. are working together somehow behind the scenes to take down this entire satanic agenda.”

In the past several years, Northrup has promoted pro-Hitler and virulently antisemitic propaganda.

The pro-Nazi film Europa: The Last Battle

In December 2021, Northrup shared a link to the film Europa:The Last Battle on her Telegram account. The film is pro-Nazi propaganda that portrays Jewish people as the real villains of World War II and Hitler as someone who “ensured racial security for the people,” battled against supposed Jewish subversion, and who actually wanted peace. It also features rampant Holocaust denial.

Here are sample quotes from the more than 12-hours long film:

  • “Hitler's radical program restored German economic independence, ensured racial security for the people, and diverted the nation's wealth from banking cardinals to the ordinary people. Meanwhile, the rest of the world, still ruled under the Rothschild cabal, was still in recession.”
  • “What politically correct historians fail to mention — or deliberately cover up — is the fact that Hitler actually made several documented attempts in an effort to avoid World War II.”
  • “A growing movement of brave scientists, historians, engineers, journalists, and other free speech activists have investigated the official, politically correct Holocaust story and found it to be exaggerated and even false.”
  • “In 1933, when international Jewry had declared war upon Germany, they formally established themselves as an enemy of Germany, which according to international law, gave Germany the legal right to disarm and intern the German Jews. After the repeated attempts of subversion, murders, and terror against the German people, the Jews had made themselves into enemies of the German nation. The National Socialists logically considered Jews as a direct threat to national security.”

In February 2022, Northrup also shared a Bitchute clip from Europa: The Last Battle and wrote: “The Bolshevik Revolution. Substitute the word Jew in here with Khazarian. These are not the Hebrews of the Bible.” The clip is virulently antisemitic and states near the beginning: “The fact that we will never learn in school is that communism actually was a Jewish totalitarian ideology invented by Jews, funded by Jewish bankers, and economically manifested by Jewish Bolsheviks.”

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the most notorious and widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times. Its lies about Jews, which have been repeatedly discredited, continue to circulate today, especially on the internet. The individuals and groups who have used the Protocols are all linked by a common purpose: to spread hatred of Jews.”

Northrup shouted out the antisemitic text during an August 2022 interview as the “playbook” of people she opposes. She stated while talking about vaccinations: “Oh my goodness, the virtue signaling. You know, ‘I am doing this to save you.’ Whenever you hear that, that's just outright Marxism. That's how it works. You find out their playbook, you might, it's still on YouTube. I think the Protocols of Zion. And they say all over it, by the way, ‘This has been debunked.’”

The 'Khazarian mafia' conspiracy theory

As Media Matters previously documented, the antisemitic Khazarian mafia conspiracy theory essentially claims that a group of fake Jewish people (the “Khazarian mafia”) stole Jewish identity centuries ago and now hides behind Judaism to control world affairs.

Northrup has promoted videos about the Khazarian mafia. In February 2024, she shared a Rumble video with the title: “Khazarian Mafia: SATANISTS - CANNIBALS, ADRENOCHROME and The God Eaters PART 1 of 2.”

In December 2023, she shared a Rumble video with the title: “KHAZARIAN MAFIA Pt IV [RED SIREN EMOJI] The SYNAGOGUE of SATAN [RED SIREN EMOJI] Is Real, DEMONIC ATTACKS, EXORCISMS & God’s Jubilee.”

In November 2022, she shared an article promoting the conspiracy theory that the Khazarian mafia was behind the assasination of John F. Kennedy, the uncle of RFK Jr. The piece Northrup linked to claimed that “the Khazarian Mafia had no choice (in their utterly warped collective minds) but to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. And, because of his extremely serious transgressions against the Khazarian Klan, his brutal murder was used as a shocking example to all future heads of state who even thought about leaving the Khazarian-created global reservation.”

In August 2022, she made an audio clip claiming that the Khazarian mafia "infiltrated the Jewish nation.”

In December 2021, she promoted an article — since removed — that included the false claim that the Khazarian Mafia “financed the Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines used to steal the election from Trump.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump's COVID Response Was Far Worse Than We Remember

Trump's COVID Response Was Far Worse Than We Remember

Here are Trump's words from that infamous April 2020 press conference about Covid:

"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light. ... And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. ... I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. ... And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning."

Yet here we are, a little more than four years later, and the narrative about how COVID was handled has shifted. It now seems to be conventional wisdom that the worst errors we committed concerned massive shutdowns and school closings. We hear comparatively little about the large discrepancies between Republicans and Democrats in death rates because of the former's resistance to public health measures and vaccination.

A serious country would look back at Trump's greatest challenge during his presidency and remember what an embarrassing failure it was.

It began with denial of the problem. Trump told Bob Woodward in a February 2020 phone call that "You just breathe the air and that's how it's passed. And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. ... This is deadly stuff."

But in his public statements, Trump repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the virus. On Jan. 22, 2020, he said, "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine." On Feb. 7, he tweeted:

"Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation."

On February 10, he again reported on a chat with Xi, reassuring Americans that "I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control."

On February 26, he urged people to wash their hands (fair enough) but then suggested that the new virus was "the same as the flu" — exactly the opposite of what he told Woodward.

On February 27, he predicted that COVID would "disappear ... it's like a miracle."

On February 28, Trump said the Democrats were politicizing the coronavirus, calling it their "new hoax."

Trump's principal actions as chief executive in the early days of the pandemic were to enact travel bans from China and later Europe. He did nothing to initiate a testing program, though he did assert falsely that anyone who wanted a test could get one.

In March, Trump urged that the Grand Princess cruise ship, with sick passengers aboard, not be permitted to dock in San Francisco because he didn't want to increase the number of cases counted in the United States. "I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault."

Also in March 2020, citing a small French study, Trump declared that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, taken together with an antibiotic, could be "one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine" and should "be put in use immediately."

On April 3, Trump mentioned that the CDC was now recommending that people wear masks but said that he would not wear one.

By July, with the number of cases rising sharply, Trump suggested that the tests were picking up trivial cases: " They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test." By that point, 3.7 million Americans had been infected and more than 140,000 had died.

Also in July, Trump elevated Dr. Stella Immanuel on Twitter. Dr. Immanuel touted hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID and denied that masks were effective. She also believed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

In a September 2020 campaign stop, Trump said that COVID affects "virtually nobody," mainly just "elderly people, elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that's what it really affects, that's it."

Trump modeled contempt for masking, mocking reporters and others for wearing them. He held huge rallies and White House indoor parties that became superspreader events. When he himself became infected with COVID, he failed to disclose it to associates like Chris Christie (who wound up in intensive care) and arguably attempted to infect Joe Biden at the first presidential debate.

Trump denied the problem, failed to coordinate a federal response other than banning travel, embraced quack cures and modeled antisocial behavior. After first praising Xi Jinping to the skies for his "strong" control of the virus, he switched to name calling — the "Kung Flu," the "China virus" — to incite xenophobic responses. He really did only one big thing right — backing Operation Warp Speed, which hastened the development of the vaccine.

Now his party has gone full nutcase, demonizing Anthony Fauci. These are unserious people in thrall to a sociopathic clown. The U.S. death rate from COVID far exceeded that of peer nations. That was not due to excessive lockdowns or masking. It was due to incompetence in the White House. Time for a great remembering.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Jerome Powell

Biden Didn't Cause Inflation -- And Now Prices Are Falling

MAGA Republicans have been quick to blame President Joe Biden for rising prices, although inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic is hardly limited to the United States. Statista published a list of the 20 countries with the world's high inflation rates in 2023, and the U.S. was nowhere to be found.

Inflation has been a global problem, not a problem that is limited to the U.S. And according to new U.S. government data, prices are declining here.

NBC News' Brian Cheung reports, "The Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE), one of two major readings on inflation, fell by 0.1 percent between October and November, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Friday — the first monthly decline in more than 3½ years. Combined with other recent data showing disposable personal income and consumer sentiment rising, the United States' economy appears to be heading into 2024 on strong footing even as it cools down."

A separate report from the University of Michigan, Cheung reports, "showed consumer sentiment soaring 14 percent in December."

The report's author, Joanne Hsu, wrote, "All age, income, education, geographic, and political identification groups saw gains in sentiment this month. The index is now just shy of the midpoint between the pre-pandemic reading and the historic low reached in June 2022."

The U.S. Federal Reserve, after a series of interest rate hikes, is now saying it may cut interest rates sometime in 2024 — although it remains to be seen how much will be cut, and when. The Fed has been raising interest rates in the hope of taming inflation, and Inflation Insights founder Omair Sharif is urging the Fed to proceed with caution before making a decision about a possible cut.

Sharif, according to Cheung, said of 2024's first quarter, "The more benign inflation data is certainly something to celebrate, but there is some turbulence ahead."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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