The Irony of the Trusted News Initiative

We are all living under the consequences of the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative. It was initiated in 2019 to prevent disinformation about elections. We only have to remember the issues surrounding the 2020 election to know that they failed in their mission to prevent the prevalence of disinformation during that critical time. Unfortunately, this agenda has morphed into a whole other animal regarding Covid-19. I believe their truth regarding all things Covid however is actually mis-information, which is defined as “false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.”

Let’s start at the beginning of this critical decision that has compromised our efforts to impact Covid-19. Trusted News Initiative Director Jessica Cecil explains in a blog post dated 8 October 2020[1] at the BBC how big tech schemed with the mainstream media to "alert each other to the most dangerous false stories, and stop them spreading fast across the internet, preventing them from doing real world harm?":

"A year ago the BBC convened partners across the world in an urgent challenge: at times of highest jeopardy, when elections or lives are at stake, we asked, is there a way that the world’s biggest tech platforms…

from Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Microsoft and major news organisations and others - from the European Broadcasting Union, the Wall Street Journal and The Hindu to Reuters, AFP, The Financial Times, CBC/Radio-Canada, First Draft, The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism - can alert each other to the most dangerous false stories, and stop them spreading fast across the internet, preventing them from doing real world harm?

Jessica Cecil further explains how the Trusted News Initiative controls the narrative on elections across the globe:”

"We have been sharing alerts over Covid-19, and before that, over falsities which posed a threat to democratic integrity during the UK and Taiwan Elections. And now we are sharing alerts over the most serious disinformation in two very different elections - in the US and in Myanmar. And because different news organizations are most relevant in different regions, we are working with a wide and expanding group of publishers. In the US we are also working with the Washington Post, AP and the LA Times."

“A coalition of news providers and tech companies has pledged to work together to tackle harmful misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

The Trusted News Initiative's members include the BBC, Reuters, Facebook, Google/YouTube and Twitter. BBC director general Tim Davie said: "Whether it's a threat to our health or a threat to our democracy, there is a human cost to disinformation."

He said 2020 had seen "the rapid spread of harmful disinformation and a growing number of conspiracy theories online".The project would not prevent "legitimate concerns" about vaccines being aired, but would attempt to stop "harmful disinformation myths", Mr Davie added. Tim Davie has expressed concerns about disinformation. Unfortunately Mr Davie was entirely wrong. They speak of false claims about the vaccines which have been rife on social media. The World Health Organization has said the world is fighting an "infodemic" as well as a pandemic, with an overload of information - some of it false - making it difficult for people to make decisions about their health.

The Trusted News Initiative said its members would alert each other to "disinformation which poses an immediate threat to life so content can be reviewed promptly by platforms, whilst publishers ensure they don't unwittingly republish dangerous falsehoods”. The reality is that only information defined as accurate by our public health agencies is considered credible. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter already say they will remove harmful and misleading claims, and the companies are part of another group with fact-checkers, governments and researchers to come up with a new way of tackling misinformation.”

I’m afraid we’ve let the foxes into the hen house as we are now relying on our public health agencies to be the ones who are defining what’s true and what’s false. Remember Dr. Fauci’s conclusions about ivermectin were that there was no evidence to support the claim that ivermectin was effective against Covid-19.  One can easily go to ivmmeta.com and see that there are 70 international clinical trials on ivermectin and its efficacy at reducing mortality and hospitalization. Again, here’s the party line:

“The project would not prevent "legitimate concerns" about vaccines being aired, but would attempt to stop "harmful disinformation myths”.   What has been happening however is that legitimate concerns, by well respected physicians, scientists and researchers are NOT allowed to be aired. There is complete medical censorship of all information that is not identical to the public health agencies agenda. Again, promised are made which have proven to be dismissed entirely by mainstream media. 

“The Trusted News Initiative partners will continue to work together to ensure legitimate concerns about future vaccinations are heard whilst harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks."

— Tim Davie, Director-General

We have always allowed the free exchange of ideas in medicine which created an environment that was extremely creative and innovative. That is no longer permitted. When the founder of the mRNA technology, Dr. Robert Malone, is silenced and his videos are removed, they are doing exactly what they said would not be done, which is the attempt to silence legitimate concerns about the vaccines and Covid-19.  

We have always relied on our mainstream media to be our watch dogs against government disinformation or other abuses of power. I believe mainstream media may have had their hearts in the right places as they understood the potential crisis of this novel virus and certainly didn’t want to add to those burdens with false information. Before the media made the decision to participate in this initiative however, I believe they had a moral and ethical obligation to do a deep dive into the path that the public health agencies were leading us down.  Let’s not forget the definition of disinformation:

“false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media”.

That appears to be the unfortunate message that has gotten lost in this war against truth… we have been given “false information” which has been “intended to mislead” the public so that only the information “issued by a government organization” is considered true. That is the position that we find ourselves in. Medical censorship has been thorough and complete.

Let me ask you a few questions. There has been widespread concern about the possible deaths attributed to the vaccines. The public health authorities have told us that very few people have died from the vaccines. We have a long standing policy in this country which allows us to determine the actual cause of death in all situations. It’s called an autopsy.  Can you think of any reason that this decades long procedure, has not been done to confirm or refute the possibility that the vaccines may have caused the death of tens of thousands of Americans? 

Some will say, given the reality that hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated so even if 100,000 have died from the vaccine, it’s such a small percentage of those who have been vaccinated. That’s true BUT why have we been prevented from even getting that information? 

How do you feel about the fact that Pfizer doesn’t want to release the clinical trial data for 75 years? That certainly concerns me. The FDA was able to review the trial data in 108 days before approving the vaccine so why can’t the 30 concerned, well respected physicians, scientists and researchers who have written urgent letters to our public health officials be allowed to view that material in a timely manner? We all know that if everything was above board, why not provide that material to the experts as a way of allaying any concerns that might not be valid? The proof is there if that’s the case. Rather than provide transparency, they have chosen instead to hide the facts until it no longer has any relevance to this pandemic. I call Bull shit on that! 

Obstructionism and delay tactics worked well for Donald Trump for many years… until it didn’t. Finally, after 7 years, his tax returns will be reviewed. I would bet the farm on my belief that we’ll find lots of irregularities and likely illegal activities. 

What really gets me going is that the FDA repeatedly promised "full transparency" with regard to Covid-19 vaccines, including reaffirming "the FDA's commitment to transparency" when licensing Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine.

We’re grateful for the advice of the doctors, scientists, and leading vaccine experts on our advisory committee and the important role they have played in ensuring transparent discussions about COVID-19 vaccines. 

With that promise in mind, in August and immediately following approval of the vaccine, more than 30 academics, professors, and scientists from this country's most prestigious universities requested the data and information submitted to the FDA by Pfizer to license its COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA's response? It produced nothing. So, in September, a firm filed a lawsuit against the FDA on behalf of this group to demand this information. To date, almost three months after it licensed Pfizer's vaccine, the FDA is still preventing the documents from being released.  Instead, the FDA asked a federal judge to give it until 2076 to fully produce this information. The FDA asked the judge to let it produce the 329,000+ pages of documents Pfizer provided to the FDA to license its vaccine at the rate of 500 pages per month, which means its production would not be completed earlier than 2076.

“Plaintiff seeks the records submitted to the FDA by Pfizer to license its COVID-19 vaccine (the “FOIA request”) and requests an order requiring the FDA to produce all documents responsive to its FOIA request no later than March 3, 2022. This 108-day period is the same amount of time it took the FDA to review the responsive documents for the far more intricate task of licensing Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine (the “Pfizer vaccine”). 

It took the FDA precisely 108 days from when Pfizer started producing the records for licensure on May 7, 2021,14 to when the product was licensed on August 23, 2021. We assume, as the FDA has stated, that it conducted an intense, robust, thorough and complete review and analysis of those documents in order to assure that the Pfizer vaccine was safe and effective for licensure. The FDA now has an equally important task of making those documents available to the Plaintiff in this case and the public at large in at least the same time frame.” 

Clearly Pfizer can’t allow that to happen as the likely outcome will be that issues will be identified that may cause concern about the safety of this vaccine. Let me ask you one final question. If the trial was performed in an honest, scientific and reliable way, according to well established scientific research methods and analysis, why not make all the data available to allay any remaining concerns about the vaccines? That would be an easy fix. They already had to present all that data to the FDA in order to secure the EUA so it’s already been culled and arranged in a format that allowed for the evaluation of the data. 

In recent news, the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) has finally stepped up and said that their legitimate articles have been defined by facebook as being disinformation.  Despite efforts to correct that, their article remains as disinformation, despite the fact that no one was able to point to anything written that was factually incorrect. In addition, Jen Psaki has stated that the Biden Administration is also helping facebook to identify which articles should be removed. An article in The Hill confirms this information. 

"We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors and medical experts…who are popular with their audience with accurate information. So, we're helping get trusted content out there."

“That's White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki brazenly saying the quiet part out loud regarding the U.S. government colluding with a private company in deciding what constitutes misinformation and what doesn’t.” 

Talk about a slippery slope.