The US senator accuses the Pentagon of concealing the costs and consequences of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy said Tuesday that the Pentagon had denied him access to a US military base in Qatar and refused to arrange a briefing on the US-Israeli war on Iran during his regional tour.
Speaking to journalists in Riyadh, Murphy accused the department of deliberately obstructing congressional scrutiny of the war and concealing its consequences from the American public.
“This trip confirmed for me that there is an active, unprecedented, unconstitutional effort underway to hide the costs of this war and the implications of this war from Congress and the American people,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.
Murphy urges Republicans to challenge Pentagon secrecy
Murphy called on Republican senators to confront the deliberate obstruction by the Department of War.
“I’ve never encountered anything like this in my time in the Senate and it’s part of a deliberate campaign of obfuscation that my Republican colleagues in Congress should demand an end to,” he said.
The senator said the Pentagon had denied him access to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military base in the region. The installation has come under repeated Iranian retaliatory strikes since the US-Israeli aggression against Iran began in February.
He also said the department had declined to organize a briefing on the war while he was visiting the region.
Diplomatic meetings proceed despite military restrictions
Murphy contrasted the Pentagon’s conduct with that of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom he credited with helping organize the trip and facilitating meetings with diplomats.
His regional discussions included talks with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, alongside other senior Gulf officials.
Riyadh was the second stop on the senator’s tour, following his visit to Qatar.
Why were governments and military biodefense programs already investing so heavily in plague vaccines before the current plague hysteria erupted?
As plague hysteria begins spreading across headlines around the world, there is one detail almost nobody is talking about: governments and military biodefense programs have already poured major resources into developing dozens of plague vaccines.
UK — SELF-AMPLIFYING RNA (saRNA-LNP): Researchers at Imperial College London, Institut Pasteur de Madagascar, and Dstl Porton Down published a self-amplifying RNA plague vaccine in 2023. The vaccine used two saRNA constructs encoding the F1 and V antigens of Y. pestis, delivered in lipid nanoparticles. The authors described it as the first RNA plague-vaccine approach using self-amplifying technology. It remains preclinical.
U.S. MILITARY — rF1V-1018: The Department of Defense is funding development of a plague vaccine whose clinical-trial protocol explicitly states that its proposed indication is pre-exposure protection of military personnel against pneumonic plague resulting from aerosol exposure to Y. pestis. The original rF1V candidate was developed at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. The newer program combines it with Dynavax’s CpG 1018 adjuvant and has advanced through Phase 2 testing.
U.S. MILITARY FUNDING: Dynavax states that the program is fully funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. A new agreement worth approximately $30 million was signed in late 2024 to support additional clinical and manufacturing work through the first half of 2027, followed by another approximately $14 million in 2025 for additional nonhuman-primate studies.
OXFORD — ChAdOx1 PLAGUE VACCINE: Oxford launched a human Phase 1 trial in 2021 using the ChAdOx1 adenovirus platform—the same vaccine-platform technology used for the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Forty healthy adults were enrolled in the initial trial.
CHINA — F1+rV: Chinese researchers advanced an F1+rV subunit plague vaccine into human trials. A Phase 2a program included 240 healthy adults, and the international plague-vaccine pipeline subsequently listed the Chinese candidate in Phase 2b development.
RUSSIA — NEW MOLECULAR PLAGUE VACCINE: In April 2024, Russian regulators granted marketing authorization to a new single-dose microencapsulated molecular plague vaccine (PMMM) containing recombinant F1 and rV antigens.
Needless to say, I would NOT take an experimental plague vaccine. I’d rather take my chances with doxycycline and its documented 97% SURVIVAL RATE:
That number comes from an actual randomized human clinical trial. Researchers enrolled 65 patients with plague and randomized 30 to doxycycline and 35 to gentamicin. Among the doxycycline-treated patients, 29 of 30 survived (97%). The only doxycycline-treated patient who died did so during the first two days of treatment after presenting with advanced disease.
Even if a modified plague strain were released and was resistant to doxycycline, that would not suddenly make it resistant to every other antibiotic. We still have numerous treatment options spanning multiple antibiotic classes. And in the highly unlikely scenario that none of the standard drugs worked, researchers could rapidly screen the strain against large libraries of approved, investigational, and repurposed antibacterial compounds to identify agents that could still stop it.
According to Russian authorities, there is currently no plague outbreak, and reports of a laboratory accident are false. But the scale of the response does not match those claims. Nearly 200 contacts were reportedly placed under observation, more than 60 institute employees were isolated, access was restricted at multiple hospitals, and the FSB was reportedly involved.
Nevertheless, a classical plague pandemic in modern times would be almost impossible, as we are not living in the Middle Ages. The only possible exception would be a deliberately engineered, military-grade Yersinia pestis strain designed to spread more efficiently between people, cause more severe disease, and evade existing treatments. Even that would likely not become a pandemic.
Only time will reveal what actually happened in Irkutsk.
In 2021, Murphy wrote a letter to the DoD Inspector General, calling SARS-CoV-2 an American-created bat vaccine
By Jim Haslam
October 4, 2026
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) serves as a venture capital arm of the world’s largest bureaucracy: the Department of Defense. It funds high-risk academic research to protect US troops from future threats.
One team proposed modifying bat coronaviruses to spread more effectively—not among humans, but mammalian bats. Testing would occur in Wuhan, where the right bat colonies existed. This was not a fringe idea. It was a biodefense concept encouraged by DARPA under the first Trump administration.
Taken together, the 2018 DEFUSE proposal, plus FOIA documents, emails, and peer-reviewed papers, support Murphy’s hypothesis: SARS-CoV-2 was created in US labs but tested in Wuhan, where it accidentally leaked. This theory has since been debated in the scientific literature, includingNature.
[…]
The 2018 Blueprint
The very agencies that claimed to be searching for answers had the facts all along, stored in a top-secret folder. They knew that Peter Daszak (EcoHealth), Zhengli Shi (WIV), Linfa Wang (Duke), and Ralph Baric (UNC) had proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and testing them on Chinese bats in Wuhan.
Snowden took on the NSA. His leaks revealed that US intelligence treated global pandemics as surveillance targets, explicitly searching for “SARS in China.” Murphy confronted something far more entrenched: what he called the “biodefense oligarchy,” a network spanning DARPA, intelligence agencies, academia, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
January 10, 2020: An Honorable Resignation
One node of that system was already in Wuhan. A NIAID-linked contractor, Danielle Anderson, was stationed at the maximum-security BSL4 lab. She previously told Bloomberg she worked on Ebola, but her name appears alongside Baric’s in the classified DEFUSE files.
Her Duke supervisor, Linfa Wang, resigned on January 10, 2020—the same day the SARS-CoV-2 genome was published. After Murphy leaked DEFUSE, Wang identified Baric as its author.
After Zhengli Shi published the closest known bat sample, RaTG13, she told the New York Times that “my” lab was not involved in gain-of-function research and that “I” did nothing wrong, so “I” had nothing to fear.
Privately, Baric warned UNC colleagues that Shi could be “arrested” for releasing the embargoed sequence. RaTG13 highlighted what made SARS-CoV-2 unique: the furin cleavage site (PRRAR), which Baric would “introduce” in DEFUSE documents.
RaTG13 mattered not because it was closest, but because it exposed what Baric proposed to add. Notice the PRRAR insertion, which Baric referenced in 2019. He would even “provide” his novel genomes to Wang and Shi “for immune boosting of bats.”
[…]
Why Wuhan Made Sense
[…]
[Following its destruction in World War II], the city was rebuilt into a modern research hub. During the debate over the Wuhan wet market, one question lingered: why Wuhan? In 2017, DARPA’s program manager Jim Gimlett told Daszak he wanted to vaccinate Chinese bats against SARS-like viruses. Daszak responded, “Interesting idea.”
Daszak and Shi even visited Gimlett at DARPA headquarters in Washington, DC. They invited Baric to join their team, who called it a “marvelous opportunity.”
While drafting DEFUSE in 2018, Baric wrote, “I have no bat colony, no way for me to do the experiment, which I definitely think needs to be done, or we have no credibility. My understanding [is] another bat colony exists in China.”
Unlike most R&D projects, which can be tested in US labs, Baric’s biotechnology had to be tested in Chinese labs. His biotech is so advanced that it can be shipped worldwide in 1-mL tubes packed on dry ice.
Daszak later admitted that Danielle Anderson was working with Chinese bats in the Wuhan BSL4. Weibo social media posts indicate the BSL4 dormitory was an early transmission hotspot. Notably, Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan was arrested for videotaping the remote BSL4 facility, not Shi’s downtown BSL2 lab.
The Genome Matched the Proposal
In addition to the “peculiar” furin cleavage site, more evidence emerged. In March 2020, US government biodefense officials asked Baric in the Red Dawn emails whether SARS-CoV-2 contained “any restriction sites.” He replied, “No, there is absolutely no evidence of genetic engineering.”
In June 2020, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is like the CIA but for the Pentagon, analyzed the genome. They identified five restriction sites, yielding six pieces, but labeled the DIA report “secret.”
[…]
Murphy’s Conclusion
In August 2021, Murphy wrote to the DoD Inspector General:
“SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine or its precursor virus.”
This was an unintended consequence of good intentions. The genome was engineered to resemble a natural Chinese bat virus. Why? To better infect Chinese bats. If Baric’s synthetic genome leaked from a Wuhan lab, it would appear to originate from a Wuhan wet market.
[…]
Following the Money
When the New York Timesreported on DEFUSE, it claimed the project “was never funded by the United States,” implying Chinese funding. Yet the proposal invokes the American “warfighter.” Unless China is now a Pentagon ally, the funding logic points back to US agencies.
Murphy attached the unfunded $14 million DARPA DEFUSE proposal to “inoculate” Chinese bats and added:
“As is known, Dr. Fauci with NIAID did not reject the proposal. The work took place at the WIV and several U.S. sites, which are identified in detail in the proposal.”
When confronted about DEFUSE funding, Fauci issued a narrowly worded denial: “We have never seen that (DEFUSE) grant, and we have never funded that grant.” The emphasis mattered. Partial funding through revised or renamed proposals remained an option.
After 9/11, Fauci’s biodefense portfolio at NIAID rivaled DARPA’s annual budget. In 2021, The Interceptsued NIAID to obtain two 2019 grants to EcoHealth:
$3.2 million “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant
Those two grants, plus a later $3 million Laos grant, totaled the same $14 million budget as DEFUSE. Personnel, experiments, and even the language were recycled. DEFUSE was not rejected. It was rerouted through NIAID under different grant names. When asked directly, Daszak, Baric, and Fauci never denied this.
All were also asked to deny that a novel genome listed in 2019 NIAID documents, called HKU3r-CoVs, could be SARS-CoV-2. Baric described his “chimeric spike” as an unnatural combination of genomes from China and Southeast Asia, differing by 25% from SARS-CoV-1. SARS-CoV-2’s spike differs by the same margin.
Only after The Intercept exposed the NIAID grants did Murphy come forward. He stated what the bureaucracy would not: NIAID funded DEFUSE in practice, if not in name. Lab-leak researchers, known as DRASTIC, later confirmed this in Daszak’s emails marked “not to be shared with Congress.”
The Republican-led Congressional committee concluded that the US funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the WIV. But Shi was paid to ship samples (such as RaTG13) to Baric, who could modify Chinese pathogens into live-attenuated vaccines. The dangerous gain-of-function research took place in North Carolina and Montana, not in Wuhan.
From North Carolina to Montana
[…]
Scientists have not identified a reservoir host in the Wuhan wet market; however, SARS-CoV-2 infects and transmits among American lab bats. The reservoir host is the Egyptian fruit bat, an American surrogate for developing global bat vaccines.
This is where the Wuhan narrative collapses. Egyptian fruit bats do not live in China. They are housed at Fauci’s “satellite campus” in Montana, called Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML), an original DEFUSE vendor. Vincent Munster, who would later be arrested for monkeypox smuggling, ran the Egyptian fruit bat colony at RML and controlled the samples shipped to Wuhan. Brownstone asked, Is this the man who created COVID-19 in Fauci’s lab? Yes, it is!
Early 2018 draft of DEFUSE forwarded RML created bat vaccines to Linfa Wang
We know the above details only because Murphy told us where to look. Fauci later funded a Chinese (Rhinolophus) bat-breeding facility in America so they wouldn’t have to test in China.
The Congressional committee interviewed everyone except Murphy, who wasn’t mentioned in their 557-page report. Murphy added:
“The asymptomatic nature is also explained by the bat vaccine’s creators’ intention (a good vaccine does not generate symptoms).”
Designed to Spread
What many assumed was a Chinese bioweapon, owing to Covid’s asymptomatic spread, appeared to be an academic creation. Self-spreading vaccines “evade the immune response” because any “pre-existing immunity to the vaccine vector will slow vaccine spread.” Gimlett testified that “self-disseminating vaccines” were under DARPA consideration.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield echoed a similar theory, calling Baric the “scientific mastermind” while citing aerosolization and immune evasion. But Redfield, like Murphy, claimed SARS-CoV-2 does not infect bats.
In COVID-19 Mystery Solved, the CDC’s Atlanta bat lab confirmed that Egyptian fruit bats are a “non-natural” reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2. These bats are housed in only one other BSL4 facility: Fauci’s Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana.
Fauci called this: Dual-Use Research of Concern. What appeared to be a Chinese virus was actually a contagious animal vaccine, designed to mimic a natural virus and created by a military-academic complex of scientists.
The Military Connection
Covid was not a Chinese creation. It was the culmination of a decades-long US biodefense effort that began after SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, when US military bases in Asia were quarantined. In the DEFUSE draft, Baric noted that tens of thousands of US troops were deployed across East Asia.
Since SARS-CoV-1 emerged from Chinese horseshoe bats in 2003, the US government has funded several projects in the area. The US military even collected the closest progenitor to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic.
During World War II, the Pentagon developed Project X-Ray: bat bombs armed with napalm, designed to exploit bats’ roosting behavior to ignite enemy cities. Eighty years later, DARPA scientists revived the same principle—not as a weapon, but as a delivery system for self-spreading vaccines.
If you were infected with Covid, your body has antibodies to a bat virus collected by a Pentagon agency in Laos in 2017.
[…]
The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (PRRVR, RRAR, RXXR, or intracellular proteases) wasn’t inserted to infect humans; it was inserted to infect bats, whose cells also express furin. To date, no other SARS-like virus has this feature.
The cover-up
In 2024 testimony, Baric admitted the 2018 furin cleavage site idea “was clearly mine,” but said DEFUSE was drafted in response to the 2018 National Biodefense Strategy, which called for a more “active posture” to detect and contain emerging biological threats.
“SARS” was cited in that strategy, issued during the first Trump administration. Recall Trump’s April 2020 press conference, when he canceled the Obama-era grant to Wuhan.
That NIAID grant was renewed in July 2019 during his administration—a $3.2 million investment by Trump in the DARPA DEFUSE project.
DEFUSE was pursued under Trump and buried under Biden. The Pentagon later acknowledged the proposal was moved into a classified system for sharing with intelligence agencies, but not with the public. Murphy added:
“A technological challenge as difficult as inoculating bats in China would be tried at DARPA first. The massive “Manhattan Project”-level of information suppression executed by the government and the Trusted News Initiative indicates that it would be covered up if something bad happened. The lab leak hypothesis and squabbling between Senator Paul and Dr. Fauci indicated that the cover-up was more localized. Further, an actual cover-up would be more disciplined with its paperwork. So, I presumed that unclassified files would be concealed on a higher network and found them where I expected them. I understood what they were and their content, pushed the files off-site, and compiled this [Inspector General] report.”
Murphy’s actions mirror those of Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers. Like Ellsberg, Murphy did not seek fame. Murphy’s modesty is buried in a Brownstone footnote, since he “uncovered the possible blueprint for SARS-CoV-2, called Project DEFUSE, while a Marine Corps fellow at DARPA in 2021.”
What Murphy found was extraordinary. A 2018 blueprint described the kind of virus that would later appear in Wuhan—trained for transmission in American bats. Leading virologists have been challenged to disprove this hypothesis. None have.
AFP via Getty Images.One of Google’s data centres is being built in Muhos, Finland
Florence Freeman
Finnish authorities have ordered a halt to building work at two planned Google data centres amid concerns over the clearance of more than 300 hectares of forest.
The sites form part of Google’s record €13bn (£11bn; $15bn) investment in Finland, announced less than a month ago and described by the company as its largest single investment in Europe.
The Finnish Supervisory Agency (LVV) said work at one site was carried out without a mandatory environmental impact assessment and ordered measures that would “significantly alter the environment” to be suspended by 23 October.
Google said it had “fallen short of our own high standards in this instance” and would follow the agency’s guidance.
The orders relate to preparatory work carried out at the planned data centre sites in Muhos and Kajaani.
According to LVV’s head of environment Tommi Muilu, work at the sites included the removal of trees and topsoil, the construction of site roads and storage areas, and changes to ditches.
Tuike Finland, the company behind Google’s data centre projects, has been asked to provide an explanation and set out how it intends to proceed by 14 October. The agency said it could begin “enforcement proceedings” if the company failed to comply with its demand.
Hanna Halmeenpaa, chair of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, had previously told the AFP news agency that “nature sites which should be preserved” had been felled. The conservation group had previously called for work to be halted while the environmental requirements were examined.
In a statement to the BBC, Google said: “We understand the concerns and have fallen short of our own high standards in this instance.”
It said it had “acted in good faith under the Forestry Act”, carried out nature surveys and put measures in place to protect areas of high environmental value.
“As we continue our long-term work in the region, we are advancing our landscaping and biodiversity plans, which include tree planting across 130 hectares at Muhos,” the company added.
Google announced last month that it would invest at least €13bn (£11bn; $15bn) in Finland over 2027 and 2028. Its plans included new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala, alongside investment in its existing facility in Hamina.
The company said the infrastructure would help it meet growing demand for services including Search, Maps and its AI assistant Gemini.
Google said the construction phase in 2027 and 2028 would support more than 37,000 jobs and contribute an average of €3.6bn a year to Finland’s economy.
As part of its expansion, Google also signed a 22-year power purchasing agreement with Finnish energy company Fortum covering up to half the capacity of the Loviisa nuclear power plant. Fortum said the agreement would help support the plant’s continued operation until 2050.
Finland has attracted growing interest in data centres, with its cool climate and low-carbon electricity among the factors making it attractive to developers. Lower temperatures can also reduce the energy required to cool facilities filled with computer servers.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth attends a D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force ceremony, July 2, 2026, at Meridian Hill Park in Washington. (File by AP)
Press TV
2026/10/06
Several US soldiers wounded in one of Iran’s decisive drone strikes in Kuwait say the military’s medical system has failed them, leaving the troops without adequate treatment.
They say they had to pursue care on their own after the attack on a US tactical operations center at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait on March 1.
Six US Army Reserve soldiers were killed and more than 30 others wounded when the Iranian retaliatory strike hit the center.
Nine wounded service members said they faced significant shortcomings in their medical care following the strike, with some saying they were left to treat themselves or wait weeks and months for specialized treatment, according to the Associated Press.
Army Lt. Col. Arturo Lincón said shrapnel struck his jaw and neck, severing an artery and lodging in a vertebra. Despite being diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and facing a potential stroke risk, he said the Army did not consider his condition serious enough for admission to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, as he was not properly registered as “wounded in combat”.
“I was just kind of on my own, at least it felt like that,” Lincón said.
He said he went days without pain medication and subsequently spent seven weeks receiving specialized outpatient treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Shrapnel remains lodged in his back because doctors considered removing it too dangerous due to its proximity to his spinal cord.
Maj. Stephen Ramsbottom said he waited more than four months to receive MRI results after shrapnel was removed from his head.
“I’ve had to build my own case for everything,” Ramsbottom said. “It’s very frustrating.”
Maj. Billy Key, who suffered a head injury, hearing loss and lung damage from smoke inhalation, said he did not receive specialized treatment until mid-April. “It took too long,” he said.
Other wounded service members said they were forced to rely on one another for treatment and did not receive what they considered proper medical care until returning to the United States.
The Pentagon rejected remarks that the Army had downplayed soldiers’ injuries, saying those wounded during the aggression against Iran received the necessary treatment in the theater or were evacuated to higher levels of care.
However, the accounts of the wounded soldiers point to how the Pentagon failed to handle the medical aftermath of the Iranian strike.
Why statins fail, how their injuries are hidden, and what really causes heart disease.
Story at a Glance:
•There is a widespread belief that elevated cholesterol is the “cause” of cardiovascular disease. However, a large body of evidence shows that there is no association between the two and the real data shows lower cholesterol significantly increases one’s risk of death.
•An alternative model (which the medical industry buried) proposes that the blood clots the body uses to heal arterial damage, once healed, create the characteristic atherosclerotic lesions associated with heart disease.
•The evidence for the blood clot model is much stronger than the cholesterol hypothesis and provides many critical insights for treating heart disease.
•The primary approach to treating heart disease is to prescribe cholesterol lowering statin drugs (to the point, nearly a trillion dollars have now been spent on them).
•Unfortunately, the benefits of these highly toxic drugs are minuscule (e.g., at best taking them for years extends your life by a few days) and the harms are vast (statins are one of the most common pharmaceuticals that severely injure patients).
•Multiple 2026 studies have further shown statins do not extend the lives of the healthy individuals they are primarily prescribed to, while a new wave of expensive patented cholesterol drugs is being approved simply for lowering cholesterol—many of which are being marketed to the same “statin intolerant” patients the industry insists are imagining their injuries.
•In this article we will explore the specific injuries caused by statin drugs, the forgotten causes of cardiovascular disease, and our preferred treatments for heart and vascular diseases.
[…]
Within cardiology, I believe one of the most damaging falsehoods is that cholesterol causes heart disease and that taking statins (or their newer lucrative equivalents), which lower cholesterol, are the key to preventing heart disease. This is because, in addition to those “facts” being incorrect, statins are also some of the most dangerous and widely used pharmaceutical drugs on the market.
Cholesterol and Heart Disease
[…]
In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over what caused heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin effectively argued that the sugar being added to our food by the processed food industry was the chief culprit. On the other side, Ancel Keys (who attacked Yudkin’s work) argued that it was due to saturated fat and cholesterol.
[…]
Ancel Keys won, Yudkin’s work was largely dismissed, and Keys became nutritional dogma. A large part of Key’s victory was based on his study of seven countries (Italy, Greece, Former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan), which showed that as saturated fat consumption increased, heart disease increased in a linear fashion.
However, what many don’t know (as this study is still frequently cited) is that this result was simply a product of the countries Keys chose (e.g., one author illustrated that if Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Sweden had been chosen, the opposite would have been found).
[…]
Likewise, recently, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world published internal sugar industry documents. They showed the sugar industry had used bribes to make scientists place the blame for heart disease on fat so Yudkin’s work would not threaten the sugar industry. In turn, it is now generally accepted that Yudkin was right, but nonetheless, our medical guidelines are still largely based on Key’s work.
However, despite a significant amount of data that now shows lowering cholesterol is not associated with a reduction in heart disease (e.g., this study, this study, this study, this review, this review, and this review) the need to lower cholesterol is still a dogma within cardiology.
[…]
Likewise, despite us endlessly being told to avoid saturated fats, the evidence does not show this prevents death.
[…]
Statin Marketing
[…]
In the case of statins, prior to their discovery, it was difficult to reliably lower cholesterol, but once they hit the market, research rapidly emerged stating that cholesterol was more and more dangerous, that lower and lower blood cholesterol levels were needed, and, hence that more and more people needed to be on statins.
[…]
In tandem, a cancel culture has been created where anyone who challenges the use of Statins is immediately labeled as a “statin denier” accused of being a mass murderer and effectively canceled.
[…]
In addition to doctors being forced to follow these guidelines, patients often are too. Doctors often retaliate against patients who do not take statins (similar to how unvaccinated patients were denied essential medical care during COVID-19). Employers sometimes require cholesterol numbers to meet a certain threshold for employment (although they never did anything on the scale of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates placed on workers around America). Similarly, life insurance policies often penalize those with “unsafe” cholesterol numbers.
Worse still (as the processed food industry intended by creating the war against cholesterol) even if we disagree with this dogma, its difficult to boycott it as the entire food supply has replaced healthy saturated fats (e.g., from animals or coconuts) with unhealthy vegetable oils. Fortunately, after decades of work, we’ve managed to bring enough attention to this subject (especially with RFK’s recent support for returning to saturated fats) that market pressure is at last emerging to make seed oil free foods become more widely available to consumers.
Cholesterol has a few different essential functions in the body. These include:
•It is the precursor to many different hormones.
•The brain’s synapses (which, amongst other things, form memories) require cholesterol to function. Since cholesterol is too big to enter the brain, glial cells (support cells of the nervous system) synthesize it within the brain. Statins, unfortunately, inhibit glial cell production of cholesterol.
•Cognition, in turn, is highly dependent upon cholesterol. For example, one study found that minor cognitive impairment could be detected in 100% of statin users if sufficiently sensitive testing was done (which again illustrates how minor injuries are more common than severe ones). Likewise, a variety of more severe adverse effects on cognition are also observed such as amnesia, forgetfulness, confusion, disorientation, and increased senility.
Finally, one of the most concerning side effects of statins is their tendency to cause ALS (a truly horrible rare disease—curiously also seen in association with the COVID-19 vaccines). This correlation is further supported by many reports of statin ALS improving once the statin is stopped.
Unfortunately, while statin cognitive decline frequently improves when the statin is stopped, in many cases, it instead persists.
[…]
Some of the common energy-related side effects of statin CoQ10 deficiency include:
•Mitochondrial damage
•Lack of Energy
•Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
•Congestive Heart Failure and Fluid Retention
•Shortness of Breath
•Gout
Some of the side effects of statin CoQ10 deficiency weakening cell wall integrity include:
•Hepatitis (interestingly, Graveline noted that the enzyme threshold needed to diagnose statin-induced liver damage was significantly raised after this issue began being commonly reported following statin usage).
•Pancreatitis
•Rhabdomyolysis (rapid breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue)
•Tendon and ligament inflammation and rupture.
[…]
Two of the most common consequences of statins CoQ10 depletion are myopathy (muscle pain, tiredness, weakness, and cramps) and peripheral neuropathy (numbness, tingling, or burning sensations, particularly in hands and feet).
Although myopathy is the most commonly reported side effect of statin usage, much of it (e.g., myositis) goes undetected. This is because the symptoms are often not accompanied by blood work showing muscle enzyme elevations and can only be detected by biopsies (which are rarely done relative to blood work). In many cases, this condition is permanent (one expert in statin injury found it was permanent for 68% of her patients, while Graveline found it was for 25% of his). Sadly, in some cases, like statin neuropathies, the myopathies will continue to progress even if the statin is stopped.
One of the sadder things about statins is how aggressively they are pushed on diabetics (under the logic that since diabetics have an increased risk of heart disease, it is critical they take a statin to prevent them from having a heart attack). To highlight the absurdity of this, statins are well known to significantly increase your risk of diabetes (multiple studies have found this), which I suspect is again due to them impairing mitochondrial function.
Similarly, peripheral neuropathy is a condition diabetics are well known to be at a high risk of. In one study, it was found that the risk of neuropathy (i.e., burning pain with tingling or numbness of the extremities) was increased by 14 to 26 times (depending on the type) for long-term users of statins. Furthermore, other nerve issues, such as neurodegeneration, can be caused by statins.
Combinations of myopathy and neuropathy also occur in statin users, such as progressive pain, weakness, and incoordination throughout the body, alongside trouble rising from a seated position, unsteadiness, and a tendency to fall. Muscles are also observed to develop a distinctive weakened and mushy characteristic and gradually shrink.
Note: in addition to preventing adverse effects from statins, CoQ10 is also one of the more helpful supplements for preventing heart disease.
[…]
Nuclear Factor-Kappa B
The small cardiovascular benefit observed from statins may not be because they reduce cholesterol but rather because they have anti-inflammatory properties (inflammation causes heart disease), as they inhibit NF-kB, a vital part of the immune system.
[…]
In addition to this arguing that some of the benefit of statins “preventing heart attacks” is due to them causing a fatal cancer before you have time to have a natural heart attack . . .
“Cholesterol” Plaques
One of the cleverest campaigns I’ve seen within the medical industry is the widespread belief that heart disease is due to fat clogging the arteries much like they do for a drain pipe.
[…]
Presently, we believe cholesterol somehow gets into a blood vessel and then damages it, leaving an atherosclerotic plaque. Kendrick in turn argued that a competing model (that the medical profession largely buried) provides a much better explanation of the actual causes of heart disease. It is as follows:
1. Blood vessels get damaged.
2. The body repairs those damage with clots.
3. As clots heal, they are pulled inside the blood vessel wall, and a new layer of endothelium (blood vessel lining) grows over them.
4. As this occurs multiple times in the same area, the damage (plaques) under the blood vessel becomes more abnormal.
Shingles vaccine is more potent than chickenpox shot, lasts only 3–5 years, causes serious inflammation, and has zero proven ancillary benefits — despite what the marketing campaign claims.
Please enjoy this episode of Stinchfield the Podcast dedicated to health and wellness.
🎙️ Stinchfield Podcast Summary: Dr. Peter McCullough on the Shingles Vaccine & the Vaccine Cartel
Could you imagine a business where you make a product and governments mandate that all their citizens take it and you are free of any product liability? If not covered by insurances, governments will buy it directly from you. That is the vaccine business, otherwise known as the “vaccine cartel.”
🩺 Shingles Vaccine: The Core Discussion
Stinchfield, 57, opens by noting his older gin rummy buddies at the club are “hell-bent” on him getting the shingles vaccine — but his own research raised serious concerns. He brings in McCullough to break it down.
Key points from McCullough:
Natural immunity matters. If you had chickenpox as a kid, you have a lower chance of getting shingles because your body maintains full natural immunity and suppresses the virus. By contrast, kids who got the chickenpox vaccine are at higher risk of shingles.
The Zostavax shingles shot is a massive dose. It’s about 14 times stronger than the chickenpox vaccine — a hefty load of live attenuated virus. The newer Shingrix is a recombinant subunit vaccine, not a whole-virus vaccine. Each 0.5 mL dose contains 50 micrograms of varicella-zoster virus glycoprotein E (gE), a single protein from the virus, plus the AS01B adjuvant system. It does not contain intact virions.
McCullough took Zostavax himself (pre-COVID, before he became the leading vaccine critic) and wouldn’t recommend it. His arm swelled to roughly three times normal size with intense injection-site pain.
Duration is short. Protection lasts only about three to five years, so any benefit is temporary.
Pleiotropic benefit claims are bogus. The vaccine cartel is pushing claims that the shingles shot reduces heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and other conditions. McCullough calls this invalid: these come from non-randomized ICD-code database studies with no verification of actual diagnoses. People more health-conscious in general take vaccines, creating a healthy-user bias. No large prospective double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial supports these claims.
Inflammation is the real mechanism. Shingles vaccine causes inflammation, and inflammation is linked to heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer’s progression — not protection from them.
🧠 The Dianne Feinstein Connection
Feinstein died from neuroinvasive varicella zoster — shingles that invaded her brain through her eye.
McCullough notes this is rare but happens in immunocompromised people.
He adds that 100% of Senate Democrats are assumed to be COVID-19 vaccinated, Feinstein among them.
📈 Shingles Cases Surging Post-COVID
McCullough reports seeing a ton of shingles cases in his practice since COVID — attributable to both the infection and the vaccines. Both provoke the immune system, letting the dormant varicella zoster virus reactivate.
His treatment protocol: Treat immediately with valacyclovir and prednisone. Don’t let shingles brew for weeks or the experience can be severe.
💉 No Vaccines He’d Recommend — With Nuance
Stinchfield asks point-blank:
McCullough’s answer: No, at this point in time. Improved sanitation, nutrition, and personal hygiene have dramatically reduced infectious disease rates. Even with measles — about 600,000 cases worldwide — you can’t find evidence of adjudicated measles deaths because treatment is effective.
The exception: His brother-in-law had his spleen removed and can’t fight encapsulated organisms (Haemophilus, pneumococcus, meningococcus). For him, McCullough strongly recommends those specific vaccines. Every patient is different — the problem is the one-size-fits-all mass vaccination approach driven by maximal revenue.
🧬 mRNA Technology: Fundamentally Flawed
Stinchfield asks if mRNA has any future validity. McCullough’s position:
Maybe for cancer — Moderna and Merck are running a melanoma trial producing about three dozen neoantigens targeting tumor proteins.
The Achilles’ heel: You can’t get mRNA out of the body and you can’t shut it off. It keeps producing protein indefinitely.
For melanoma proteins that are relatively benign, maybe tolerable. But producing spike protein (COVID), hemagglutinin (flu), or fusion protein (RSV) is dangerous.
He favors suspending the technology until they figure out how to shut it off and eliminate it from the body. As it stands, “these light up and now they’re forever working in your body.”
🏥 The Medical Establishment’s Collective Failure
McCullough’s pinned social media post summarizes what he never thought he’d see in his career: a US-Chinese collaboration creating a novel coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, fear-based trance with lockdowns and masking, suppression of early treatment protocols, genetic vaccines with persistent spike protein causing disease, no government acknowledging the gravity, no recalls or safety evaluations, and the biopharmaceutical complex consuming trillions.
Stinchfield’s evolution: He was initially most angry at the deep state and big pharma — but he expected evil from those quarters. His deepest anger now is at the “zombie-like doctors” who blindly followed protocols based in nothing. They were the real catalyst for spreading the disaster.
McCullough agrees:
~1 million doctors, ~500,000 NPs/PAs, ~7 million nurses — the majority bought the narrative.
Only a small fraction said “we’ve got to save lives now.”
Patients are waking up. They want doctors who level with them. Many took the shot, got blood clots, and their doctors responded with “I can’t help you, I don’t see it that way.”
The WikiLeaks co-founder played a key role in creating an alternative to the mainstream media, which has been controlled by intelligence services for decades, Ray McGovern said
Julian Assange is a key figure in the creation of alternative media, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has said, expressing hope that the Australian journalist and activist is preparing to get back to work.
McGovern spoke to RT as WikiLeaks marks its 20th anniversary. The website, co-founded by Assange in 2006, has published some of the most explosive leaks of the past two decades, exposing CIA hacking tools, classified US war records, illegal mass surveillance, and other closely guarded secrets.
The platform became a global phenomenon, making Assange one of the most prominent contemporary publishers, while also embroiling him in more than a decade of conflict with the US and other governments. Ahead of the anniversary, Assange suggested that he will return to public life two years after striking a deal for his freedom with the US and securing his release from British custody.
Assange is a key figure in the creation of the alternative media, the “fifth estate,” McGovern said, adding that traditional media has lost its intended purpose, becoming closely controlled instruments for governments worldwide.
“The media in our country, and I dare say in many countries, the UK, Germany, is very tightly controlled. And so that’s the fourth estate, as Edmund Burke said, more important than Parliament itself. The fourth estate is co-opted now, it has been for decades,” he said.
“It’s very clear that the intelligence services have a lot of influence over what goes out into the media. And so you need an alternative. That’s why we placed great hope in what we call the ‘fifth estate,’ namely WikiLeaks and outfits like it that would encourage people to blow the whistle in a secure way and not endanger themselves.”
McGovern welcomed the prospect of Assange’s return to active work, calling it “salvation” for people willing to blow the whistle on dirty government secrets.
“He will find ways to make it possible for people like me and my colleagues, if we come upon information that needs to be spread out into the media or out into the public, to have a secure way of doing that. That was his success. He’s bright enough to do that again, I am convinced.”
The ruble-backed credit line is part of a wider push by both countries to break free of US-controlled financial systems
Russia has cleared a $1 billion loan to Iran for release; however, the transfer is stalled amid an “internal dispute” in Tehran over spending, Fars News Agency reported on 6 October.
According to Fars, the Planning and Budget Organization is pushing to use the money to fund vehicle imports, while the Oil Ministry wants to buy equipment for the oil industry and the Agriculture Ministry wants to put it toward imports of essential goods.
With no final decision reached, the government has not submitted the account details needed to complete the transfer.
The $1 billion marks the first installment of a planned $20 billion Russian credit line to Iran, first reported in June, according to Fars.
That month, Tehran unveiled plans for a ruble trading board to strengthen banking ties with Moscow, and an Iranian lawmaker said the $20 billion would be issued in rubles at an annual interest rate of six percent.
The two countries have been deepening economic and financial cooperation, expanding the use of their national currencies in bilateral trade to cut their dependence on western-controlled financial systems.
Iran remains under sweeping US sanctions targeting its oil exports, banking sector, and access to the global financial system.
Washington has escalated its economic strangulation campaign against Tehran in recent months, imposing secondary sanctions on foreign entities it accuses of facilitating Iranian transactions or extending any sort of financial lifeline to the country.
In September, the US Treasury sanctioned Russia’s VTB Bank over alleged correspondent banking ties with blacklisted Iranian financial institutions.
Washington has also targeted financial networks it accuses of helping Iran move funds and evade sanctions.
Several US allies have since fallen in line with Washington’s economic siege on Iran, moving against Iranian banks and its national airline on their own soil.
Turkiye revoked Bank Mellat’s license on 18 September, ending its 44-year presence in the country, and moved to ground Mahan Air after Washington sanctioned three Turkish firms servicing the airline.
The UAE followed on 23 September, cutting off Bank Melli Iran’s local branches from all dealings with Iran.
Weeks earlier, the US Treasury had stripped the UAE branches of Egypt’s Banque Misr of dollar access over their transactions with Tehran.
On 4 September, it also sanctioned Turkiye-based Golden Global Bank and two of its Istanbul units, accusing them of moving tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
These measures fall under Washington’s Operation Economic Outcast, a campaign to strangle the Iranian economy launched after the US failed to achieve its military objectives against the Islamic Republic.
A new hacking group claims to have stolen data on over 3,000 Trump Mobile customers by infecting an employee at a related company with malware.
Straight Arrow News first reported on the alleged hack, for which a group called BYOD has claimed responsibility. Last week, the gang’s site on the dark web published a file claiming to contain the personal data of 3,615 customers. “Trump Mobile was informed they had been breached, they then replied with ‘We have no team to handle this’ and that anyone who hacks them [is] a terrorist,” BYOD alleged on their website.
There are signs that the breach is real. Three people in the leaked file confirmed to PCMag that they had interacted with Trump Mobile in the past. We were able to reach out to them because the leaked file contained their name, phone number, email address, and physical address. One customer was also surprised that the leaked file accurately showed they had canceled their Trump Mobile service for the “30 Day Unlimited Talk Text Data” plan.
BYOD told PCMag that they “ratted a Liberty Mobile employee,” a Florida-based MVNO known to power Trump Mobile. Ratting refers to installing a Remote Access Trojan on the target’s device, creating a way for a hacker to remotely hijack their computer.
The infection gave the cybercrime gang “no permissions except to look up prepaid numbers, so we pivoted to subdomains, which Trump Mobile was exposed, and decided to exfil that,” BYOD said in an email. “We only stole 3,615 customers due to the fact that’s all they have using their MVNO (different from the prepaid phone orders, these are people using the carrier),” BYOD added. The group also says it has “live access to the dashboard,” apparently TrumpMobile.com.
The gang says the stolen data shows “people who are currently or were previously using the MVNO as their cellular network.” But one affected customer told us she never successfully signed up for Trump Mobile or for a preorder for the long-delayed Trump-branded phone, even though her information appears to be in the file.
“They wouldn’t sell me the phone because my email was already in their system,” the customer said, who added that Trump Mobile’s customer service “sucked.” Still, she did give the company her email address and phone number, which would explain how her information ended up in BYOD’s leaked file. A Trump Mobile customer support rep also called her using the same number.
So far, neither Trump Mobile nor Liberty Mobile has responded to a request for comment. But it’s not the first time Trump Mobile has faced a security issue. In May, two YouTubers sounded the alarm about an exploitable software flaw on TrumpMobile.com that could be used to leak customer information, including names, phone numbers, and physical addresses. Trump Mobile later fixed the issue, saying it found no evidence its systems were ever compromised.
Still, there’s some speculation that BYOD —which has only been active for a week— may have stolen the data using the same exploit. Last month, another hacking group, Endzone, claimed to have stolen data from 4,000 Trump Mobile users.
In response, a rep for BYOD said: “No, we have no affiliation; a member from our group just knows a few people behind Endzone, so there could’ve been a hiccup regarding Trump Mobile & Eteam, although we have published both first… However, we wish them the best, of course.”
US Senator Chris Murphy Nichola Kam AFP
(Photo credit: Anton Vaganov)
