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Covid-related tech was exploited for mass surveillance, just as we were warned

Various governments across the world have co-opted digital tracing for use by police and intelligence services

New revelations show that the Covid pandemic has allowed for governments and Big Tech to expand the surveillance-industrial complex that tightens the state’s grip on thought and movement.

A recent batch of Twitter internal documents released by Elon Musk via journalist David Zweig on the platform itself reveals that one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of Covid vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative. “Twitter did suppress views – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing,” Zweig wrote. He added that “with Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the non-scientists at Twitter as Covid “misinformation.”

We’ve also learned from previous Twitter file releases under Musk of the cozy relationship between government officials – including those working for the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI – and big US social media outlets like Twitter, which routinely cooperated on various government priorities and agendas ranging from framing of foreign wars to promoting certain narratives about geopolitical competitors (like Russia) under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” All of this in an ostensibly democratic country that’s supposed to value free speech and debate.

It’s only now, when most Westerners are jabbed, that taboos on scientific information about the true efficacy of the vaccines (particularly on new variants), associated side-effects and risks (like myocarditis), and the high protective value of post-infection immunity, are being loosened and no longer routinely suppressed or vilified as dangerous fake news.

Just like they do with war propaganda, the US government and its Western allies went out of their way to manufacture consent, and they used the very same Big Tech platforms that were once the great hope of those seeking to break free from more controlled corporate media. And the gatekeepers of those platforms, like those at Twitter, were far too keen to abide. Under the guise of combating disinformation, citizens ended up applauding censorship and descending in lynch mobs on those designated as the current threat to virtuous Western societal norms – be they “Russians” or “anti-vaxxers.”

From Covid tracking to mass surveillance

And that’s not all that the pandemic has in common with other crises shamelessly exploited by governments. A new report by the Associated Press has found that the pandemic permitted the expansion of global surveillance, with police in multiple countries using “technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies.”

According to the AP’s investigation, Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet, has used contact tracing technology to track people located near a zone of unrest, sending them threatening messages even if they weren’t involved.

China’s health QR code system, managed by three separate levels of government, has required that Covid passes flash green to take a plane or train, but those en route to protests have inexplicably and routinely found their passes turning red.

Authorities in India reportedly used the Covid mask mandate as a pretext to scan faces with hand-held devices using facial recognition software, which can be added or compared to a preexisting database of criminals.

The watchdogs for Australia’s intelligence services disclosed in November 2020 that the country’s Covid contact tracing app was used by the spies to collect data on citizens – “incidentally” – even though it was deemed to be virtually useless in uncovering unidentified Covid cases. But Aussie police have since used the Covid app’s check-in data as an investigative tool, according to the AP.

The US government has used CIA-linked data company, Palantir Technologies, to “power the digital operating system for the U.S. public health response to the pandemic,” according to a February 2022 press release from the company, which has been awarded multiple contracts worth tens of millions of dollars amid the crisis.

https://www.rt.com/news/569601-covid-tech-mass-surveillance/

Pfizer’s Paxlovid not included in China’s national insurance

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Chinese health care authorities declined to include Pfizer’s COVID-19 treatment drug in a national reimbursement list that would have allowed patients to get it at a cheaper price throughout the country, saying it was too expensive.

Paxlovid, an oral medicine developed by New York-based drugmaker Pfizer, has been widely sought after in China since the country began phasing out its “zero-COVID” restrictions and a surge of infections started sweeping through the country. Although it is supposed to be prescribed by medical professionals, that hasn’t stopped people from scrambling to purchase it on their own through any means at their disposal — including buying generic Indian versions of the drug through the internet, according to local media reports.

Health care policymakers can leverage bulk purchases to lower prices in negotiations with pharmaceutical companies that, in turn, can net a steady source of revenue. A drug must be included on the reimbursement list to be covered by the national insurance scheme. China will include two other COVID-19 drugs, the Chinese-made antiviral Azvudine and the Chinese herbal blend medicine Qingfei Paidu Granules, the National Healthcare Security Administration said in a statement Sunday.

https://apnews.com/article/health-china-care-costs-pfizer-inc-medication-ecd6c12dffa3aab463c81f02232f1c1c

‘May Allah Destroy You!’ – Rapist Barber Jailed for Sending COVID Cash to ISIS

A convicted rapist has once again been jailed in Britain after he was found guilty of sending COVID pandemic payments to the Islamic State.

Tarek Namouz, 43, has once again been put behind bars after authorities found that he had sent over £11,000 (~$13,000) to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Some of the money sent by the Muslim extremist is believed to have originated from COVID relief funds provided to him by the British government over the period of lockdown, with the cash injections being aimed at keeping the rapist’s barber shop in west London open.

However, according to a report by The Telegraph, the funding instead appears to have gone to ISIS, with Namouz allegedly bragging to a fellow inmate in prison that he had sent at least £25,000 (~$30,000) to the Islamic State for the purpose of funding jihad.

Namouz — who had previously been jailed for raping a woman at a pub where he was the landlord — has now been convicted of eight counts of entering into a funding arrangement for terrorism between November 2020 and May 2021, as well as a further two counts of possessing terrorist information, which was in relation to extremist ISIS videos found on his phone.

The man was subsequently handed a 12-years isentence during a hearing on Thursday, with the rapist reportedly screaming at police as he was led away.

“May Allah destroy you,” The Telegraph describes him as shouting.

“We will meet on judgment day. You’re a kafir [non-believer] and you will end up in Hell.”

The story of an ISIS sympathiser sending COVID funds abroad to support the efforts of terrorism has garnered the attention of media in the United Kingdom, with various outlets running stories covering how the British government became an unwitting party in the funding of Islamic extremism.

However, while the incident has no doubt resulted in a bad PR day for the Treasury, as well as the country’s security services, history has indicated that the European continent as a whole has long had problems with state welfare being funnelled into extremist programmes.

According to a report by USA Today, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, France, and Britain, among others, have all seen welfare funding end up in the hands of ISIS.

Denmark saw a total of $100,000 being handed to men who ended up fleeing to fight in Syria, for example.

“It is a huge scandal that we disburse money from the welfare fund in Denmark for people who go to Syria,” the country’s then-Labour Minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, remarked at the time.

“Staying in a war zone and directly or indirectly taking part in military operations is not something that is in any way compatible with receiving disability benefits.”

Despite such a strong statement, things do not appear to have gotten much better overall since then, with one expert warning late last year that the European Union, in particular, has lost its focus when it comes to tackling the financing of terrorism.

Tom Keatinge, a founding director of the Center for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), warned in POLITICO that efforts to cut off terror financing within the bloc had dropped off substantially.

Keatinge warned that many groups within the Union are now more concerned with meeting the technical requirements set out by EU laws as opposed to actually working to eradicate the misuse of funds, leaving the EU open to seeing funds potentially mismanaged.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/01/09/may-allah-destroy-you-rapist-barber-jailed-for-sending-covid-cash-to-isis/

United Arab Emirates Says It Will Teach Holocaust in Schools

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The United Arab Emirates will begin teaching about the Holocaust in history classes in primary and secondary schools across the country, the country’s embassy in the U.S. says.

The embassy provided no details on the curriculum and education authorities in the Emirates, a federation of seven sheikhdoms, did not immediately acknowledge the announcement on Monday.

However, the announcement comes after the UAE normalized relations with Israel in 2020 as part of a deal brokered by the administration of President Donald Trump.

“In the wake of the historic (hashtag) AbrahamAccords, (the UAE) will now include the Holocaust in the curriculum for primary and secondary schools,” the embassy said in a tweet, referring to the normalization deal that also saw Bahrain and ultimately Morocco also recognize Israel.

Ambassador Deborah E. Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, praised the announcement in her own tweet.

“Holocaust education is an imperative for humanity and too many countries, for too long, continue to downplay the Shoah for political reasons,” Lipstadt wrote, using a Hebrew word for the Holocaust. “I commend the UAE for this step and expect others to follow suit soon.”

The announcement comes ahead of a planned meeting of the Negev Forum Working Groups in Abu Dhabi this week, which grew out of the normalization. The meeting will see officials from Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the UAE and the U.S. attend. Egypt has diplomatically recognized Israel for decades.

The Holocaust saw Nazi Germany systematically kill 6 million European Jews during World War II. Israel, founded in 1948 as a haven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, grants automatic citizenship to anyone of Jewish descent.

Other Arab nations have refused to diplomatically recognize Israel over its decades-long occupation of land Palestinians want for a future state.

The announcement by the UAE also comes after it and other Arab nations condemned an ultranationalist Israeli Cabinet minister for visiting a flashpoint Jerusalem holy site for the first time since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government took office.

The site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, is the holiest site in Judaism, home to the ancient biblical Temples. Today, it houses the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. Since Israel captured the site in 1967, Jews have been allowed to visit but not pray there.

https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2023/01/09/united-arab-emirates-says-it-will-teach-holocaust-in-schools/

Fauci responds to Musk's Twitter-data leak threat

The former White House medical adviser says he’s not worried if “files” about him are released

Former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci has dismissed criticism from Twitter owner Elon Musk as 'disinformation' and 'conspiracy theories'. His remarks came after Musk hinted that documents related to Fauci could soon be released.

Last month, the billionaire tweeted “my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” On January 1, Musk responded to a tweet that read “Waiting for… Fauci Files” by replying “later this week.”

“I have no idea what he’s talking about. I mean, there’s a lot of misinformation, conspiracy theories and disinformation going on,” Fauci said on Friday while appearing on CBS News’ podcast ‘The Takeout’. He added that he was not “concerned” about Musk’s tweets.

Asked about the ‘prosecute’ tweet, Fauci reiterated that he did not “have a clue” what Musk meant. “I have nothing to say to him. I don’t understand what he’s doing. It’s just unfortunate,” he added.

Musk, who bought Twitter last year and promised more transparency on how the platform operated, has published a series of internal documents that shed light on how the company had worked with law enforcement agencies and political operatives in order to suppress narratives considered to be disinformation.

Fauci, who stepped down as the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) on December 31, had been the public face of the White House’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Republicans vowed to investigate Fauci for “unnecessarily” strict lockdown recommendations and suspicions that he lied about the origins of Covid. Fauci was also criticized for a research grant the US National Institute of Health (NIH) had given to a virology laboratory in Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid was first detected.

Fauci defended the grant on CBS News, saying “collaborative research… has been something extremely beneficial to society in general.”

“A very small grant of about $120,000 a year was given to the Chinese, which has, in the matter of fact, resulted in research that was able to definitively prove that the original SARS-CoV-1 went from a bat to a civet cat to a human,” Fauci said, referring to an outbreak in the early 2000s.

https://www.rt.com/news/569555-fauci-musk-twitter-files/

New Zealand to immunize people with non-approved mpox vaccine

As monkeypox returns to New Zealand, the government seeks to immunize people despite the vaccine remaining non-approved.

Authorities in New Zealand are reportedly preparing to immunize the populace against mpox, also known as monkeypox, using a vaccine that hasn't yet received approval, local media reported on Monday.

The New Zealand Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Authority, or Medsafe, has requested the appropriate documentation from the producer, preventing the authorities from releasing the vaccine as fast as they would want, according to the 1News TV channel in New Zealand.

According to the media, there won't be much of a marketing effort and the vaccine's proprietary name won't be utilized because it is illegal to sell unapproved medications.

Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall reaffirmed with "that’s right, we can’t [promote or advertise unapproved medicines]. But we are making sure that everyone has the opportunity for a funded visit with their medical practitioner to discuss whether the vaccine is right for them."

Imminent threat of renewed Monkeypox outbreak remains, experts warn

Although the monkeypox outbreak has been receding globally in recent months, experts warned in October that the virus may resurge, as some African countries are still faced with this burden as it has long been endemic.

The World Health Organization said this week that since the month of May, more than 73,000 cases and 29 deaths have been recorded in over 100 countries.

The virus peaked in July, followed by a consistent fall in total cases, especially in the European and North American continents which were the hardest hit areas in the early stages of the global outbreak.

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/health/new-zealand-to-immunize-people-with-non-approved-mpox-vaccin