Bomb Threats Trigger Mass Evacuations Across US
A mass-emailed bomb threat received by officials in several US states on Wednesday prompted the evacuation of some statehouse buildings and disrupted government operations. No explosives were found, local authorities have said.
The incidents follow a spate of “swatting” incidents — false reports of gunfire at the homes of public figures. Last week, pranksters targeted a number of US officials with the calls, as well as billionaire currency speculator George Soros.
In the threatening email sent on Wednesday morning, the author said they had “placed multiple explosives inside of your State Capitol.” These bombs were “well hidden inside” and would “go off in a few hours,” the email said, according to multiple reports. The same message was received by government offices in at least 23 states, according to CNN.
Among those who received the threats were officials from Kentucky, Mississippi, Georgia, Connecticut, Michigan, Minnesota, Alaska, Hawaii, and others. Several states evacuated their government buildings after receiving the warning. There were no reports of suspicious items found during the searches.
In Minnesota, the bomb threat interrupted oral arguments at the state Supreme Court in the Capitol, which had to be moved to other courtrooms, Minnesota Judicial Branch spokesman Kyle Christopherson told AP.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear posted about the evacuation of the state capitol on X (formerly Twitter), saying “we are aware of similar threats made to other offices across the country.”
Gabe Sterling, the chief operating officer in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, wrote on X that there would be “chaos agents sowing discord for 2024” and urged citizens not to let them “increase tensions.”
Hours later, Sterling reported that his own family had become victims of “swatting,” saying that 911 received a call that “a drug deal gone bad,” resulting in a shooting at his home.
The FBI later issued a statement on Wednesday, calling the email threats “a hoax” that was being taken “very seriously” because of the danger they posed to innocent people, multiple news outlets reported. The bureau added that so far there was “no information to indicate a specific and credible threat,” but said it would continue to investigate the cases.
Musk to Mark Cuban: If You Believe in ‘Diversity,’ When Will You Hire ‘Short White/Asian Women’ to Play on The Mavs?
X owner Elon Musk on Thursday cut through a rambling thread Mark Cuban posted hailing the wonders of “diversity” by asking him when he’s going to hire “short white/Asian women” to play for the Dallas Mavericks.
“We live in a country with very diverse demographics,” Cuban said. “In this era where trust of businesses can be hard to come by, people tend to connect more easily to people who are like them. Having a workforce that is diverse and representative of your stakeholders is good for business.”
“Cool, so when should we expect to see a short white/Asian women on the Mavs?” Musk said, dismissing Cuban’s yammering.
Cool, so when should we expect to see a short white/Asian women on the Mavs?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2024
“If DEI was present in the NBA for a single team, the team would be the worst team in the league,” Collin Rugg commented.
“They would be last place immediately,” Musk responded.
They would be last place immediately
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2024
Seeing as how the NBA champions all this DEI stuff, I’d actually like to see them operate under their own rules. Let’s have NBA teams that “look like America.”
We need more short, fat, white, Asian and Latinx players on the court so American youth can feel included and see players who look like them!
As Cuban himself said, this should be a business and moral imperative!
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Biden Sues Texas Over State Law to Stop Illegal-Alien Invasion
The Biden administration sued Texas yesterday because Governor Greg Abbott and state legislators decided the Lone Star State must do the job Biden won’t do.
The lawsuit seeks to stop Texas from enforcing SB4, a law that criminalizes entering Texas illegally across the southwest border and also allows state officials to deport illegal aliens. The administration claims that enforcing immigration law is the sole purview of the federal government.
As well this week, the administration sought permission from the U.S. Supreme Court to remove razor wire that Texas authorities installed to stop the illegal-alien invasion that Biden is aiding and abetting.
Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against the State of Texas Regarding Unconstitutional SB 4 Immigration Lawhttps://t.co/UVXGosHCVy pic.twitter.com/dJLGCHq8eT
— DOJ Civil Division (@DOJCivil) January 4, 2024
The Lawsuit
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, the 22-page lawsuit seeks “to preserve its exclusive authority under federal law to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens.”
Texas, the lawsuit says, simply has no right to create immigration laws and arrogate unto itself the power to control the southwest border, at least where Texas is concerned:
Texas’s Senate Bill 4 (SB 4) creates purported state immigration crimes for unlawful entry and unlawful reentry, permits state judges and magistrates to order the removal of noncitizens from the country, and mandates that state officials carry out those removal orders. But Texas cannot run its own immigration system. Its efforts, through SB 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations. SB 4 is invalid and must be enjoined.
The Lawsuit
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, the 22-page lawsuit seeks “to preserve its exclusive authority under federal law to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens.”
Texas, the lawsuit says, simply has no right to create immigration laws and arrogate unto itself the power to control the southwest border, at least where Texas is concerned:
Texas’s Senate Bill 4 (SB 4) creates purported state immigration crimes for unlawful entry and unlawful reentry, permits state judges and magistrates to order the removal of noncitizens from the country, and mandates that state officials carry out those removal orders. But Texas cannot run its own immigration system. Its efforts, through SB 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations. SB 4 is invalid and must be enjoined.
Of course, Traitor Joe Biden is the culprit behind the effort to “frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings.” He refuses to enforce black-letter immigration law on myriad counts.
That not insignificant fact aside, the lawsuit cites the federal Constitution’s Supremacy Clause as one reason Texas has zero authority to regulate the southwest border:
Under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, the Constitution and federal immigration laws, including the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), are — like all federal Laws — “the supreme Law of the Land … any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”… Through the Supremacy Clause, state laws may be preempted in various ways.
Under the doctrine of field preemption, “the States are precluded from regulating conduct in a field that Congress, acting within its proper authority, has determined must be regulated by its exclusive governance.”
Federal laws always preempt or supersede state laws when they conflict, the lawsuit argues, and the Constitution empowers the federal government to control immigration.
“Thus, as the Supreme Court recognized, the ‘Government of the United States has broad, undoubted power over the subject of immigration and the status of’ noncitizens,” the lawsuit argues.
And only the federal government, the lawsuit says, can punish illegal aliens, most notably with deportation…
Unsealed Files Confirm Trump Never Visited Epstein Homes Or Pedo Island
The unsealed documents relating to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein confim that Donald Trump did not visit the pedophiles home nor his notorious island. On Wednesday, Judge Loretta Preska confirmed the release of the initial names from […]
The post Unsealed Files Confirm Trump Never Visited Epstein Homes Or Pedo Island appeared first on The People’s Voice.
Artificial Intelligence Is Allowing Them To Construct A Global Surveillance Prison From Which No Escape Is Possible
Every inch of our planet is being watched, and incredibly sophisticated “artificial intelligence solutions” make it possible for those that are watching our planet to find whatever they want in just minutes. You can try to run, and you can try to hide, but if they really want to find you it won’t be very difficult. All around us, a global surveillance prison is being constructed. Even if you completely stay off the Internet and you totally avoid all forms of modern technology, cameras and satellites will still be endlessly watching you. And once your face has been identified, artificial intelligence can be used to locate you wherever you pop up on the entire planet.
Corey Jaskolski is the CEO of an artificial intelligence company known as Synthetaic, and the system that his company has developed is extremely impressive.
According to NPR, it “really can find anything you want anywhere in the world”…
BRUMFIEL: AI has been getting attention for its potential to bring huge changes to lots of different fields in the near future, but the AI revolution in surveillance is happening now. For decades, cameras have been watching over cities, businesses and even homes. But that footage has mainly been stored locally, and reviewing it took a pair of human eyes. Not anymore. AI systems can now hunt for a van in a city, scan license plates and even faces in real time. The system being developed by Synthetaic has many possible uses. An environmental group, for example, is trying to use it to track large livestock operations globally to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. Synthetaic’s system really can find anything you want anywhere in the world.
JASKOLSKI: We’ve run searches, as an example, across the entire eastern seaboard of Russia for ships, and we can find every ship in a few minutes. It’s pretty remarkable.
BRUMFIEL: Being able to scan the vast coastline of a nation like Russia is why this kind of technology has caught the eye of big government intelligence agencies. Watching everything that needs to be watched has always been a labor-intensive business. Even in George Orwell’s famous novel “1984,” the all-seeing thought police struggled to keep up.
In the wrong hands, such technology could potentially be used to enforce tyranny on a scale never seen before in all of human history.
I wanted to learn more about Synthetaic, and so I went to their official website, and I discovered that they recently announced “a five-year strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft”…
Synthetaic, a leading provider of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, and has announced a five-year strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft aimed at revolutionizing AI data and cloud solutions. As part of this agreement, Microsoft is providing Synthetaic access to nearly 1 million hours (about 114 years) of cloud compute resources. This strategic collaboration will unlock a new era of possibilities in computer vision and data analysis, with a wide range of benefits across defense and intelligence, commercial, and non-government agency applications.
This partnership will help significantly accelerate innovation with Synthetaic’s key product, the Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) tool. RAIC, built on Microsoft Azure, enables unparalleled search capabilities through automated data labelling, allowing for the exploration of massive global datasets, without the need for pretraining or structuring. RAIC was instrumental in the tracing of suspected Chinese balloon flights through 18 trillion pixels of Earth observation imagery without a pretrained model using a rough sketch and unlabeled data.
Most people don’t even know that this sort of surveillance technology exists.
And now AI has made it possible for the watchers to seamlessly connect everything that we do online to everything that we do offline…
However, with the advance of the internet and the increased reliance on it to perform many of our daily activities, governments and other commercial companies can monitor everything we do online and connect it – using different ways – to our real identity, creating a complete profile for every internet user. For example, our online purchases, search queries we submit to search engines, social connections, geographical locations we visit, and anything we do online can be recorded and traced back to our real identity.
AI surveillance will allow interested parties to exploit the power of AI to collect and analyze the tremendous volume of data available online and connect it to each person.
However, it is worth noting that surveillance is not limited to people’s online activities; we mean what people do on the internet. For instance, surveillance cameras powered by AI technology can recognize individuals’ faces quickly and track them across the city.
Like I said, there is nowhere to run and there is nowhere to hide.
Of course most of us willingly hand them vast troves of personal information about ourselves anyway.
And the big tech companies are always searching for new ways to extract even more…
Facebook recently rolled out a new “Link History” setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. You can opt out if you’re proactive, but the company is pushing Link History on users, and the data is used for targeted ads. As lawmakers introduce tech regulations and Apple and Google beef up privacy restrictions, Meta is doubling down and searching for new ways to preserve its data harvesting empire.
The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers “with your browsing activity saved in one place,” rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior. With the new setting you’ll “never lose a link again,” Facebook says in a pop-up encouraging users to consent to the new tracking method. The company goes on to mention that “When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies.” The app keeps the toggle switched on in the pop-up, steering users towards accepting Link History unless they take the time to look carefully.
Needless to say, this isn’t just happening on the Internet.
These days, most new vehicles are systematically collecting information about you…
If you own an EV or a “digital car,” you better watch what you say because you might be under total surveillance, and that goes for your passengers as well. What? Your data will be sold, too? Yep. Multiple times to multiple companies. However, there is an easy opt-out fix: “Never buy them, drive them, sit in them, or exist on the street when they drive by.”
When you go to purchase a new vehicle, be very careful to read the fine print.
For example, just check out what anyone that buys a new Subaru is agreeing to…
Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants”, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes.” Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.
Wow.
We have reached a stage where virtually everything that we do is monitored and put in a database somewhere.
And with each passing day, the surveillance prison that is being constructed all around us become even more intrusive.
So where is all of this ultimately going?
We might want to think about that, because we are moving into one of the most chaotic periods in all of human history.
There is so much potential for AI surveillance tools to be abused, and tyranny is on the rise all over the globe.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
French Researchers Identify ‘Improbably High Rate of Deaths’ in Newborns Who Received New RSV Shot
French researchers identified possible safety signals in babies coinciding with the rollout of Beyfortus, a recently approved monoclonal antibody treatment for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in newborns.
The discovery comes as public health authorities ramp up warnings about the spread of respiratory viruses and step up their promotion of the drug.
In interviews with The Defender, the researchers — French independent scientist and author Hélène Banoun, Ph.D., and French statistician Christine Mackoi — explained that data from France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) indicates an improbably high rate of deaths of babies between 2 and 6 days old in France during September and October 2023.
INSEE is the authority that compiles official birth and death data in France.
This increase, the researchers said, coincides with the introduction of Beyfortus in French hospitals, which began on Sept. 15, 2023. In an interview with cardiologist Peter McCullough, M.D., MPH, Banoun said that over 200,000 newborn babies in France have been injected with Beyfortus since that date.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended Beyfortus in August 2023, while the European Medicines Agency (EMA) authorized the drug in September 2022.
Beyfortus was developed jointly by AstraZeneca and Sanofi.
The drug is offered as a “one-time shot for infants born just before or during the RSV season and for those less than 8 months old before the season starts,” and for some high-risk 8- to 19-month-old infants.
According to The Associated Press, “In the U.S., about 58,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized for RSV each year and several hundred die.” CNBC reported that “RSV is the leading cause of hospitalization among infants in the U.S.” According to the CDC, nearly all children are infected with RSV before the age of 2.
But the French researchers and other medical experts who spoke with The Defender warned that no long-term studies have been conducted involving Beyfortus and newborns and that the administration of monoclonal antibodies on this population is unprecedented. They also pointed to data indicating RSV’s low risk to babies.
Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist, biological warfare epidemiologist and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory committee, told The Defender, “Giving newborns any drug or biologic should be done with extreme caution, let alone a novel, injected monoclonal antibody. You cannot tell if the infant is damaged by the shot, when you don’t yet know how healthy the newborn is and how it normally behaves. This should be a huge red flag for manufacturers as well as parents.”
According to Banoun, “The French government is recommending that Beyfortus be injected into newborns before they leave the maternity ward, from Sept. 15, 2023, even though the product has not been tested on this age group,” Banoun said.
Nass pointed out that the CDC published a paper in 2021 on all U.S. RSV deaths over the preceding 12 years. The CDC reviewed death certificates, and found there were only 26 deaths per year with RSV, and only 17 deaths per year in the entire U.S. caused by RSV in babies under one year old.
According to McCullough, “Among the 22.4 million children under age 5 years, the annual risk of RSV hospitalization is well under 1%.”
Excess deaths among newborns ‘alarming,’ ‘disturbing’
Mackoi told The Defender, “There is an excess of deaths for the months of September and October. The excess deaths in October are very alarming. It is very worrisome that this happened in two consecutive months.”
According to Mackoi, the increase in these excess deaths coincides with the introduction of Beyfortus in France.
“There is a strong concomitance with the Beyfortus injection since Sept. 15, 2023,” she said. “In France, babies receive injections of Beyfortus before leaving the maternity hospital. They leave the maternity hospital three or four days after their birth … These excess deaths are abnormal.”
According to Mackoi, the data show “a 50% increase in deaths of babies between 2 and 6 days of life compared with what would be expected,” noting that “the reference is obtained by dividing the number of deaths by the total number of births in 2018 and 2019; the result is 0.69 deaths between 2 and 6 days per 1,000 births.”
In September, the observed mortality rate was 0.97 deaths per 1,000 births, and in October, it was 1.05 deaths per 1,000 births, Mackoi said. “It is anomalous that this very significant increase should be found two months in a row. It may well be due to the injection of Beyfortus since Sept. 15, 2023.”
“Although of no scientific value, I have received testimonials from relatives and via the internet from families of healthy babies who were hospitalized in intensive care with respiratory distress syndrome immediately after the injection,” Banoun added.
Mackoi said that using the official INSEE data, which she described as “reliable [but] underestimated,” she “calculated for each month, the rate of babies born the month in question and died between 2 and 6 days of life,” and used a Poisson distribution to identify abnormal mortality rates, compiling the findings on her website.
According to the INSEE data, 54 deaths were recorded for 55,489 births in France in September 2023, despite the average number of expected deaths being 38, based on historical averages.
For October 2023, the data showed 61 deaths out of 57,940 births, despite the average number of expected deaths being 40.
Mackoi said that the probability of the September 2023 death figure occurring by chance is 0.9%, while the probability of the increased mortality in newborns in October 2023 is even lower, at 0.1%. She also noted that “there are no excess deaths less than 48 hours after birth,” and that this is “one more indication” that Beyfortus is causing the deaths, because they are not receiving the monoclonal for the first 48 hours of life.
“The coincidence of Beyfortus injections with excess infant deaths is disturbing,” Mackoi said.
Monoclonal antibodies may exacerbate symptoms rather than prevent them
These revelations came as the White House announced on Dec. 14, 2023, that it would make 230,000 additional doses of Beyfortus available last month, in addition to 77,000 doses that were released in November 2023.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on Dec. 28 concluded, “Nirsevimab protected infants against hospitalization for RSV-associated lower respiratory tract infection and against very severe RSV-associated lower respiratory tract infection in conditions that approximated real-world settings.”
The study was funded by AstraZeneca and Sanofi.
According to Banoun, official data do not indicate that Beyfortus is effective. The data do, however, indicate a high prevalence of adverse reactions — including bronchiolitis — even though the treatment is supposed to protect recipients from respiratory illness.
“The most frequently reported adverse events are upper respiratory tract infections, including bronchiolitis,” she said.
Banoun added that data from the French National Authority for Health (HAS) do not “support a possible impact of Beyfortus in terms of reduced length of hospital stay, transfer to intensive care units, and mortality.”
“According to HAS, in the trials, the absolute risk of RSV infection was reduced by 3.8% in the five months following injection, and the absolute risk of hospitalization was reduced by 1% to 2% over the same period,” she said.
Banoun said the trials were not conducted on newborns, whereas the French government recommends injection from the first days of life in the maternity ward.
According to EudraVigilance, as of Dec. 24, 2023, there were 64 adverse events related to Beyfortus in those 1 month old or younger, and 68 for those between 2 months and 2 years of age. One death, that of a baby below 1 month old, was recorded, as were 60 records containing the word bronchiolitis. And according to VigiAccess, there were 104 adverse events reported, including 57 infections and respiratory disorders.
Another study, concerning premature babies and newborns suffering from heart or lung disease that compared Beyfortus with monoclonal antibodies previously used on high-risk babies, recorded six deaths — five due to bronchiolitis. Of the six babies that died, five had been treated with Beyfortus.
Yet, “these bronchiolitis cases are not attributed to the treatment by the investigator, who is also the manufacturer of the products,” Banoun said. “All this suggests that nirsevimab [generic name for Beyfortus] could facilitate and aggravate bronchiolitis: these injections take place during periods when the virus is circulating.”
“Let’s not forget that this whole bronchiolitis ‘prevention’ campaign is supposed to avoid overcrowding hospitals with babies suffering from the disease,” Banoun said. “If this product doesn’t significantly reduce hospital admissions, what’s the point?”
According to NTD, “Monoclonal antibodies are copies of an antibody that seek out foreign material to destroy them,” but the treatments come with a “risk that the body might trigger a strong reaction to the antibodies.”
Complications may be serious and can include “acute anaphylaxis or life-threatening massive allergic reactions and cytokine release syndrome that can result in organ damage.” This phenomenon is one of the adverse effects of Beyfortus.
In his interview with Banoun, McCullough said, “Antibody-dependent enhancements [ADE] have always been something we’ve been worried about because if antibodies bind the virus but not very tightly, that means they don’t neutralize the virus. And then, [a] fragment [Fc] of the antibody binds to a cell receptor. In a sense, the antibody can bring the virus into the cell.”
McCullough told The Defender, “The antibodies will invariably affect the development of natural immunity with repeated exposures to RSV during childhood. Beyfortus-resistant strains can be expected with indiscriminate use.”
Banoun cited a study in which “two of the 25 subjects in the nirsevimab group with RSV … had an RSV isolate containing substitutions associated with resistance to nirsevimab,” while “No subject in the placebo group had an RSV isolate containing substitutions associated with resistance to nirsevimab.”
Banoun also referred to a September 2022 EMA report, which found that during failed RSV vaccine trials in the past, children died of severe bronchiolitis in the vaccinated groups, but none from the control groups died.
“This ADE is due to the deleterious effect of antibodies which, instead of neutralizing the virus, facilitate its entry into the cell via the receptor of the Fc fragment of immunoglobulins. And it’s precisely this Fc region of nirsevimab … that industry has seen fit to modify,” Banoun said.
“Manufacturers are looking for the beneficial effects of this phenomenon and are wary of deleterious effects, which is why they have investigated the risk of ADE with Beyfortus in animal models,” Banoun added. “They claim not to have detected it, but the EMA points out, unmoved, that no histopathological evaluation of rats was carried out after treatment and infection with RSV: This is the only recognized marker of ADE.”
On his Substack, McCullough wrote that this effect may be triggered by aerosolized RSV virions present in hospitals.
“This means as ambient aerosolized RSV virions are present in hospitals, clinics, and home, the monoclonal antibody may backfire and enable the inhaled virion to gain access to the bronchial epithelial lining and cause worse bronchiolitis than the baby would have with their own developing natural immunity,” he wrote.
Beyfortus administered on newborns despite being tested on older babies
During the clinical trial leading up to approval of Beyfortus by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a total of 12 infant deaths were recorded. However, the FDA claimed the deaths were “unrelated” to the antibody.
CNBC reported in June that of the 12 infants, “Four died from cardiac disease, two died from gastroenteritis, two died from unknown causes but were likely cases [of] sudden infant death syndrome, one died from a tumor, one died from COVID, one died from a skull fracture, and one died of pneumonia.”
“Fact-checkers” were quick to respond to any stories indicating that the infants’ deaths were related to Beyfortus, with factcheck.org writing in August 2023, “There isn’t evidence the [Beyfortus] shots have killed any babies, contrary to social media claims.”
But according to Banoun, “According to the HAS and EMA, 11 deaths were reported in the nirsevimab groups, one death in the pavilizumab (former equivalent drug) group and three deaths in the placebo groups. The FDA counted 12 deaths in all treated groups versus three in the placebo groups, not including the one that occurred after the follow-up period.”
“It should be noted that all deaths in the placebo groups concerned premature babies in the Griffin study,” Banoun said. “In trials involving full-term babies, all deaths involved treated subjects.”
Banoun said:
“The FDA has added one death in the placebo groups which occurred after the end of follow-up, but no mention is made of any deaths in the treated groups which occurred after this same period. Similarly, a significant number of babies are withdrawn from the trials and therefore no longer followed up after their withdrawal. This imbalance is therefore potentially more serious than published.”
Other studies also showed infant deaths connected to Beyfortus. McCullough told The Defender, “I am concerned about 3 versus 0 deaths with Beyfortus and placebo respectively in the MELODY trial published in NEJM, 2022.”
Nass pointed out another such anomaly in clinical trial results where “The deaths were said to be disproportionate between the placebo and nirsevimab groups.”
“I don’t trust the data as being reliable,” Nass said, “For instance, in this NEJM-published trial, 9.5% of babies who did not receive nirsevimab wound up with pneumonia and ‘lower respiratory tract’ RSV infections.”
“This seems awfully high,” Nass continued, “Especially when the CDC’s own study showed only 17 babies per year die from RSV. I find it hard to rely on the NEJM data.”
“The problem is that, with potentially billions of dollars riding on the outcome of a few clinical trials, there may be tremendous pressure to come up with the desired results. And there are many ways in which the desired results can be achieved,” she added.
Banoun also pointed out that while Beyfortus is administered to newborns, clinical studies tested the drug on older babies.
If we refer to the descriptions of the deceased babies, in the Domachowske study, “Only 1 was less than a month old at the time of injection (23 days), while all the others were between 1 and 7.5 months old,” she said. “We find the same panel of babies in all the other studies … in the Griffin study, the babies have a median age of over 6 months, in the Hammitt and Domachowske studies, only half the babies are under 3 months old … in the Hammitt study, the median age is 2.6 months (range 1.05 to 4.5 months).”
According to Banoun, public health authorities are aware of this discrepancy, noting that in the HAS Transparency Commission’s report on Beyfortus, Sylvie Chevret, M.D., Ph.D., professor of public health and biostatistics at France’s Université Paris Cité, said:
“In these trials, they included children who were essentially said to be in good health, so tomorrow, do you intend to give this drug to all newborns, bearing in mind that the studies did not include newborns?
“They included children who were less than three months old, of course, but up to more than 6 months.”
“The FDA and the American Association of Pediatrics jumped the gun in 2023 and were reckless in the approval and recommendation of Beyfortus for mass deployment in babies without carefully considering these issues,” McCullough told The Defender.
‘Expectant mothers should be prepared to resist’ Beyfortus for their babies
Despite these indications and possible safety signals, Banoun said that there has been no reaction so far from public health authorities in France or elsewhere.
“The only reaction to my posts was censorship and a video that was supposed to debunk my claims but actually confirmed them,” she said. “Like all critical scientists, I am censored: strict control over social networks, in particular Twitter, where we have been rendered virtually invisible since December 2023, when the European Digital Commissioner threatened Twitter with heavy fines.”
“When all debate is censored, all criticism discredited, even penalized and ostracized, can we still speak of ‘science’?” Banoun questioned, tying the censorship she’s experienced and the promotion of drugs such as Beyfortus to the concept of biopolitics.
Banoun explained that biopolitics was theorized by French philosopher Michel Foucault “to explain how power is exercised over human populations … on a global level” and “which, in our time, tends to impose health standards on all human populations [and] increasingly relies on vaccination as an alternative to care in infectiology.”
“Biopower today is exercised by an alliance of governments and health agencies with big industry. Biopolitics [also] concerns the control of populations in fields other than health: digital identity and climate,” she added.
For Banoun, financial interests are a key reason for this stance on the part of public health authorities and pharmaceutical companies.
“The market for bronchiolitis prevention will therefore represent several billion dollars for Big Pharma in the years to come. Why such a large market for a disease that is benign in the vast majority of cases? … The giants of the pharmaceutical industry are in permanent financial difficulty because of the fines and compensation they have to pay.”
“To compensate for these fines, manufacturers have to launch ‘blockbusters’ — highly profitable products that sell very well,” Banoun said, adding that the vaccine liability shield afforded to vaccines by laws such as the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 may be extended to treatments and drugs other than vaccines.
“It is feared that this exemption from liability will be extended to preventive therapies such as Beyfortus,” Banoun said, pointing out that U.S. and European authorities have mixed the classification of Beyfortus, considering it a vaccine in some instances and not in others.
In the U.S., the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended adding Beyfortus to the childhood vaccine schedule, providing its manufacturers with a waiver of liability, but also recommended coding it as a drug for insurance purposes and leaving it out of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).
In addition to this liability shield, Banoun said that, in France, midwives and nurses reportedly “receive a bonus for each injection — Sanofi pays a sum to each hospital, which is then redistributed to the injectors.”
Experts advised parents and physicians to be wary of Beyfortus.
“Physicians and parents should be conservative in deciding on Beyfortus. I do not recommend it for parents who are expecting healthy newborns or babies without severe pulmonary disease,” McCullough told The Defender.
Banoun said “Expectant mothers should be prepared to resist,” noting the White House’s and CDC’s efforts to promote Beyfortus and pressure placed on new mothers in French hospitals, where “nursing staff insist on giving it to the mother up to four or five times during her stay in the maternity ward.”
This article was updated to reflect the most recent available adverse event data and other clarifications.