Parents whose kids attend the Rock Academy in San Diego said they’re angry that school leaders didn’t tell them about a deal the school signed with T-Mobile to put nine hidden cell antennas on the side of the school’s building.

The antennas are roughly 50 feet above the school’s preschool playground with the closest antennas only about 20 feet above the playground.

The private school, operated by the Rock Church — one of the largest megachurches in the U.S. — serves over 400 K-12 students and 100 preschoolers. The school and church share a campus.

Rock Church leaders in April 2022 secretly signed a contract with T-Mobile giving the telecom company permission to install the antennas, according to Rock Academy parent Laura Buckley.

“The problem is not just that the Rock failed to inform parents and staff before signing the contract,” Buckley, whose kids are in third, sixth and eighth grade, told The Defender. “They were presumably never going to disclose the antennas at all.”

During installation, the school and T-Mobile hid the antennas behind tarps. “Now they are hidden behind a facade that matches the building,” she said.

“No one would ever have known about the nine antennas had it not been for a mother who happened to be on campus at Christmas break [in early January 2023] when the tarp was down.”

The mother snapped a photo, Buckley said. “That is how people started finding out.”

Tiffany Fletcher, a mother whose sixth grader attends Rock Academy, told The Defender, “Word started spreading like wildfire.”

School tries to be ‘hush hush’

Fletcher, who launched a petition against the antennas, said parents demanded a town hall meeting. The petition so far has garnered more than 1,000 signatures.

School leaders on March 2, 2023, held a meeting with parents, but overall “tried to be hush-hush” about the matter, she said, as the Rock Church was concerned about “managing its brand.”

Parents then “raised a fuss” by flyering the church’s congregation — an estimated 15,000 people — with information about the issue. “That got school leaders’ attention,” Fletcher said.

School leaders in March 2023 told T-Mobile the company couldn’t come on the premises.

Parents filed a legal action — a writ of mandate — against the City of San Diego asking the city to disallow the installation of the antennas at the school.

“We tried every issue we could — permitting, fire risk, etc.” That action is currently on appeal, Fletcher said.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile in January sued the Rock Church and Academy, arguing the Rock committed a breach of contract when it denied T-Mobile’s access to school grounds.

T-Mobile brought a motion for an injunction to access the property. In April, a judge granted T-Mobile’s request, ruling that Rock Church couldn’t legally block T-Mobile from the property.

The company plans to activate the antennas after Memorial Day when the school session ends.

Risking kids’ health and safety in exchange for money is ‘shameful’

Rock Church and Academy’s contract with T-Mobile — which Buckley said she has seen but is not publicly available — stipulates that the telecom company pay the church roughly $4,000 a month for using its school property.

Mei Ling Nazar, Rock Church’s director of public relations and social media, said the agreement was made to generate additional income for the ministry, reported Point Loma-OB Monthly.

“It is shameful for a Christian church to risk the health and safety of the children it has a duty to protect in exchange for $4,000 a month,” Buckley said. “Shameful.”

As The Defender previously reported, there are many independent peer-reviewed studies about serious health risks from exposure to wireless radiation, including:

• A 2017 study found living near a cell tower was linked to blood changes, which are considered biomarkers predictive of cancer.
• A 2018 study showed adolescents exposed to higher levels of wireless radiation had delayed fine and gross motor skills, spatial working memory and attention compared with those exposed to lower radiation levels.
• A 2015 study found higher rates of Type 2 diabetes mellitus in elementary students exposed to higher levels of wireless radiation compared with those exposed to lower radiation levels.

The telecom workers’ union, Communications Workers of America, also warns workers that wireless radiation can cause sterility, eye damage, central nervous system harm and other “serious biological effects.”

The Rock Church and Academy said in a statement they “did not foresee safety or structural issues that could harm our community.”

School leaders also didn’t foresee that the contract they signed would leave them with so little wiggle room, Fletcher said. “The school is failing to recognize that the contract is written solely for T-Mobile’s benefit.”

Buckley agreed. The contract includes a series of renewal periods — but only on the side of T-Mobile. “The 31st year of the contract is the first year the Rock can get out,” she said.

The contract also gives T-Mobile permission to change or increase the number and type of antenna without the Rock’s approval, Buckley said. “The antennas can become 5G at any time.”

“This is significant,” she added, “because according to the Rock’s spokesperson on radiofrequency [RF] radiation, Derek Falconer, radiation from 5G antennas can travel around corners.”

Leaders apologize, propose mitigation plan

The Defender asked the Rock Academy’s top administrator, Chuck Leslie, if and why he had considered it unimportant to inform families that the contract was being considered.

Leslie declined to respond other than to share an official statement, released on May 20, from the Rock Church and Academy, stating, “We realized that it was a mistake to sign the contract without first having a discussion with staff and parents and we sincerely apologized, and apologize, for the stress that this has caused.”

In the statement, the Rock Church and Academy said they proposed two alternative sites to T-Mobile, but the company refused.

The church and school also said they tried multiple times to negotiate an end to the contract and have the antennas removed, but Fletcher said that was untrue.

Buckley agreed. “To the best of my knowledge,” she said, “the Rock still has never made a written settlement offer to T-Mobile for $1.”

‘Too little, too late’

Since T-Mobile has the legal right to activate its antennas, the Rock Church and Academy promised to implement a “mitigation plan” to prevent RF radiation from the antennas from impacting its campus.

The plan includes installing RF-shielding materials, such as metal-based window tinting on the sides of the building where the antennas are located and copper-mesh shade structures over the preschool playground.

School leaders also said they hired the RF radiation mitigation company, EMF & RF Solutions, to measure RF radiation levels before the antennas were activated and to track RF radiation levels in the future.

Fletcher questioned if the school leaders will follow through with their mitigation plan. “They’re only attempting to remediate to appease the parents who are upset,” she said.

She also pointed out that the Rock Church and Academy’s plan proposed RF shielding only for its campus, even though the antennas will be directly pointing at three neighboring charter schools — High Tech High, High Tech Elementary, High Tech Middle — and a local grocery store.

“So as they are ‘protecting’ their own school, they’re radiating hundreds of other children,” she said. “That’s not very neighborly.”

Moreover, their efforts are “too little, too late” in most families’ eyes, Fletcher said. “Their lack of transparency and deceitful covert actions have lost many families’ trust.”

An estimated 30 to 50 families are pulling their kids from Rock Academy, according to a May 20 FOX 5 and KUSI News report.

‘There must be something we don’t know’

Buckley said the Rock Church’s founding pastor, Miles McPherson, has publicly remained “virtually silent” over the last year and a half as Rock Academy parents repeatedly voiced concerns that the antennas’ RF radiation might harm their kids.

This puzzled her because McPherson is a former NFL player known for being health-conscious.

When she asked about it, Rock leadership told Buckley that McPherson won’t talk about it from his platform because he doesn’t want to be seen as “anti-cell antennas.”

She said:

“He has about 1.5 million people that listen to him, I’ve been told.

“Why doesn’t he want to say, ‘Hey, I messed up in allowing these antennas on our building without running it by Rock staff and families. There are many people in our Rock community who don’t feel they are safe. Will you please partner with me now to help fix this mistake so we can keep our community together?’

“I don’t understand why he is so afraid of looking like he’s against cell antennas when his community is being broken apart due to this. There must be something we don’t know.”

Buckley learned from the Rock leadership that they spoke to telecom lobbyists. She wonders if the lobbyists somehow “got to them.”

“The Rock appeared to want the antennas removed,” she said, “and then they just crumbled on the 5-yard line and walked away. It’s unexplainable. It’s either all about the money or something else we don’t know about.”

The Defender reached out to Nazar and Santiago Ruiz, the Rock Church’s executive pastor, to clarify whether McPherson’s silence was due to concerns about being perceived as “anti-cell antennas” or something else.

The Defender also asked if the Rock Church — or McPherson, himself — would be willing to publicly share information that would put to rest speculation about their possible industry ties.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rock-academy-tmobile-cell-antennas-playground/

By Emily Kopp

[…]

A memo and over 150 emails released by the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Wednesday show that Morens spent considerable time and energy avoiding the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — a law that requires federal agency records to be provided to the public on request with limited exceptions.

Morens deleted sensitive emails, conducted official business on a private email account, and worked with an NIAID administrator in the FOIA office to strategically misspell keywords that the public might request to be searched, the committee alleges.

Morens sought to conceal emails in which he championed his close friend EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, a scientist who subcontracted NIAID funding to the lab in Wuhan for experiments that made coronaviruses more deadly.

Morens said that he and Daszak met 20 years ago and were part of the same close-knit “fraternity” among emerging infectious diseases experts.

The subpoenaed emails make clear that Morens repeatedly advocated for EcoHealth and Daszak from within Fauci’s inner circle — serving as an intermediary between Daszak and Fauci — and often using his private Gmail account to shuttle messages.

One email released by the committee suggests that Fauci himself may have subverted public records requests through the use of a personal email account, bypassing official channels.

“I can either send stuff to Tony on his private email or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens emailed on April 21, 2021. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Other emails show Morens and Daszak strategizing about how to convey information to Fauci without leaving a paper trail.

Morens confirmed Wednesday that he discussed grants from NIAID to the Wuhan Institute of Virology with Fauci.

“I certainly told him some things that he asked me to tell him about the situation with Peter [Daszak],” Morens said.

That statement contradicts a transcribed interview Morens gave the committee earlier this year in which he said he did not recall discussing EcoHealth or the Wuhan lab with Fauci.

“The evidence establishes that Dr. Morens likely provided false testimony to the Select Subcommittee,” the committee’s memo states.

The committee may recommend that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Morens for making false statements, a crime in violation of Title 18 U.S. Code Section 1001.

The testimony follows revelations last week that Morens stated he would delete any “smoking guns” implicating a connection between Daszak’s organization and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Far from allaying concerns, Morens’ subpoenaed emails and testimony only raised more questions about the culture at the NIAID around transparency and public records requests.

Indeed, the emails and testimony suggest NIAID may have systems in place to help employees evade FOIA requests.

NIAID did not reply to a request for comment.

In addition, Morens wrote an email about the possibility of a “kickback” for helping to restore EcoHealth’s NIAID funding.

He wrote profane emails that referred to binge drinking and sex and made a remark about former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky wearing a skirt, raising concerns about his lack of professionalism and attitudes toward women.

“It is very disturbing to witness this type of behavior from Dr. Fauci’s senior advisor, but the evidence is clear and overwhelming. Dr. Fauci’s NIAID was unfortunately less pristine than so many, including the media, would’ve had us all believe,” said Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).

In one of the emails obtained by the committee, Morens acknowledges that the reputation of EcoHealth and Daszak affect the reputations of Fauci and former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins.

“From Tony’s numerous recent comments to me, and from what Francis has been vocal about over the past 5 days, they are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputations,” Morens wrote in October 2021.

Morens’ attorneys turned over 30,000 emails to the committee responsive to a subpoena on April 30, just before Daszak testified to the committee on May 1.

It remains to be seen whether more emails come to light following the new revelations that Fauci apparently used a private Gmail account and that Morens used a Proton Mail account in addition to his Gmail account.

Morens said that the emails about a “back channel,” a “kickback,” and “smoking guns” simply reflected “black humor.” Morens also expressed regret for how his emails had undermined trust in NIAID.

“I’ve already apologized for making snarky and profane comments but I made them thinking that they were made on my private Gmail in a manner that was just between a small group of friends,” Morens said. “It’s embarrassing to me. I shouldn’t have done it. But I accept that I did it. I don’t know what to say other than I’m sorry.”

However, Morens gave unclear testimony in response to the question of whether he improperly used his personal email to conduct official business.

Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) read out six separate emails in which Morens referred to avoiding FOIA. It took over three minutes to read every one.

“This Gmail communication thing was set up purely to deal with personal things that were not government business,” Morens said.

“How can you say that when in all of these emails you said you were intentionally avoiding FOIA? You said it in your own words, sir,” Lesko said.

Lesko countered that official emails had been forwarded to his private Gmail and that the emails on his Gmail had his official NIAID position in the email signature.

Morens blamed a technical issue.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe you,” Lesko replied.

‘Do I get a kickback???’

When the novel coronavirus emerged from the same city in China with a high-security lab specializing in coronaviruses, Daszak’s collaboration with the lab and with University of North Carolina gain-of-function corona virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., came under scrutiny — including from non-virologists like Wenstrup.

Morens, Fauci and Daszak all went into action.

Fauci met with virologists concerned about viral engineering, dispatched another aide to investigate any NIAID ties to the research and met with Baric to discuss these papers.

Daszak organized a letter in a prestigious scientific journal dismissing lab-origin concerns as conspiratorial.

For his part, Morens helped Daszak with non-public information when concerns about the Wuhan lab prompted NIH to suspend EcoHealth’s grant. Morens forwarded Daszak an email marked “for official use only” in April 2020.

Morens appears to have helped Daszak navigate around NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Michael Lauer’s request for more information about the Wuhan lab in 2020 as a condition of the reinstatement of the grant, possibly hampering the U.S. government from accessing more information about the research underway there.

Morens even personally edited EcoHealth’s response to Lauer, one email shows. That email too contradicts Morens’ transcribed interview earlier this year, perhaps exposing him to criminal penalties.

Daszak’s testimony earlier this month indicated that he never asked the Wuhan lab for genomic data beyond 2015 or so or for relevant lab notebooks — instead he merely forwarded a request for information from NIH.

Morens also alerted Daszak to the forthcoming publication of documents released under FOIA in September 2021.

Morens invoked Fauci’s name in an email in which he appealed to an EcoHealth Alliance board member to continue to support the organization upon Daszak’s request.

After the grant was reinstated — despite Daszak’s failure to provide the data and information about the Wuhan lab that NIH requested — Morens sent an email referring to a “kickback.”

“Ahem…. Do I get a kickback??? Too much fooking money! DO you deserve it all? Let’s discuss….” he wrote.

“Of course, there’s a kick-back,” Daszak replied.

Morens said the emails were in jest and denied receiving payment or any gifts from EcoHealth or Daszak.

Members of the committee of both parties expressed concerns that Morens used official resources and the imprimatur of the NIAID to improperly assist the embattled EcoHealth, and how that could impact NIAID.

“I just hope you’re going to be very careful as you are telling us what the facts are because I’m very disturbed about other people who may be thrown under the bus in some of the wiley statements you made on your personal statements,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), an apparent reference to Fauci and Collins.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has suspended federal funding both to EcoHealth and to Daszak personally pending an investigation into their handling of taxpayer funds. EcoHealth and Daszak could face debarment of any federal funds for several years.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who recently co-launched a bipartisan investigation into biosafety issues at the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, called upon the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Morens Wednesday and alleged a criminal conspiracy to conceal records at NIAID.

The emails also indicate that Morens played a central role at NIAID in early debates about gain-of-function experiments — specifically, controversial experiments on highly pathogenic avian flu in 2011 — and that he privately criticized scientists in favor of stronger biosafety regulations at Rutgers University, Harvard University and Stanford University.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/david-morens-destroyed-sensitive-emails-hid-niaid-wuhan-ties-rtk/

Federal health officials are ramping up efforts to combat what they claim is the growing threat of H5N1 bird flu with plans to produce 4.8 million vaccine doses and increase influenza surveillance nationwide.

The move comes as two new human bird flu infection cases were identified — in Michigan and Australia — heightening concerns about the virus’s potential to spread among humans.

The new vaccine, currently in bulk form, will be filled and finished in multidose vials by one of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) manufacturing partners without disrupting seasonal flu vaccine production, according to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP).

HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Dawn O’Connell on Wednesday said that active discussions are underway across federal agencies about the key triggers for deploying the H5N1 vaccine doses.

Triggers could include evidence the virus is spreading to people not employed on farms, or between humans rather than solely from animals to humans, or that the virus is causing more severe illness in those infected.

O’Connell also said HHS is in talks with Pfizer and Moderna about developing mRNA-based bird flu vaccines.

Reports of new human bird flu cases and plans for increased vaccine production sparked a surge in the value of vaccine-focused biotech companies’ stock on Wednesday, including Moderna, BioNTech, CureVac and Novavax, according to The Financial Times.

New human cases in Michigan, Australia

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported that the H5 avian flu case in a dairy farm worker was identified through ongoing public health actions, which allowed farm workers to monitor and notify health officials if they developed symptoms, CIDRAP reported.

Reporting on only the second human case of bird flu infection this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the worker’s nasal swab tested negative for H5 influenza. But an eye swab tested positive, suggesting an eye infection similar to a previous case in Texas, reported in April.

Meanwhile, Michigan’s agriculture department reported another H5N1 avian flu outbreak in a dairy herd, bringing the total number of affected farms in the state to 19. The latest outbreak occurred in Gratiot County, where the virus was found at three other dairy farms earlier in the week.

On Tuesday, Australian health authorities reported the country’s first human case of H5N1. According to a report from the Victoria Department of Health, a child contracted the infection during a trip to India.

Although the report described the case as “severe,” it said the child had fully recovered. Contact tracing showed the infection did not spread to anyone else.

An outbreak of the H7 flu strain at a Victoria egg farm is not the same as the one fueling outbreaks in the U.S., according to Australian health officials. They noted that H5N1 was never detected in animals or people in Australia before this case.

Flu surveillance to scale up nationally

The CDC on Tuesday issued new recommendations urging state and local health officials to maintain enhanced levels of influenza testing over the summer to track potential human infections of bird flu, Newsweek reported.

During a call with health leaders, CDC Principal Deputy Director Nirav Shah emphasized the importance of keeping a “heightened awareness” of influenza transmission amid the ongoing H5N1 outbreak in poultry and U.S. dairy cattle.

Shah encouraged local health officials to collaborate with laboratories to increase submissions of positive flu virus samples for subtyping, determining whether an influenza sample is a common, seasonal flu virus or a novel virus like bird flu.

In a related development, an infectious disease-tracking sewage surveillance network began scaling up H5N1-specific testing of wastewater samples from its 190 sites at treatment plants across 36 states, according to STAT News.

The WastewaterSCAN network, led by Stanford University and Emory University in partnership with Verily Life Sciences, will share data with local public health officials and on its public dashboard in the coming weeks.

Marlene Wolfe, an environmental microbiologist and epidemiologist at Emory and one of the directors of WastewaterSCAN, emphasized the importance of testing wastewater for a genetic signature of the H5N1 virus to give officials “one extra piece of information” to help understand the outbreaks.

However, the CDC admitted that wastewater detection is an “evolving science” that cannot yet precisely determine the source of viral contamination.

This news follows the publication on April 29 of a preprint study by Wolfe and others describing the development of a novel polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test to detect the H5 subtype of influenza A virus in wastewater solids.

The researchers detected the H5 marker in samples from four treatment plants in Texas and North Carolina coinciding with areas reporting H5N1 outbreaks in dairy cattle.

Another preprint study published on May 10 by researchers at the University of Texas and Baylor University detailed their detection of H5N1 sequences in wastewater treated at 19 plants across nine Texas cities beginning on March 4.

The CDC has also begun releasing data from its influenza A-tracking efforts on a public wastewater dashboard, including data from 230 sites in 34 states.

While the agency is not conducting H5-specific testing, finding high levels of influenza A in wastewater over the next few months could indicate unusual activity before the higher seasonal flu levels return in the fall.

‘Relatively easy’ to ‘run a fear campaign’ to sell a vaccine

While expanding wastewater testing can be a tool for monitoring the spread of H5N1 bird flu, Dr. David Bell, a public health expert, warned against overinterpreting the results.

Bell told The Defender the presence of a pathogen’s genome in wastewater, including bird flu, does not necessarily indicate the presence of sick or infected humans.

“Birds poo rather widely,” he said, suggesting that finding the bird flu virus in wastewater is almost inevitable, regardless of the time period. “We would have found it if we had done this 20 years ago, 50 years ago or 100 years ago.”

Bell also expressed concern about the pressure to use new and more sensitive tests, incentivizing sales and use and yielding results that are “divorced from actual risk or the production of useful data.”

“It seems almost inevitable that we will find bird flu virus if we look for it in this way,” he said.

As an example of misplaced risk assessments, Bell said most deaths during the 1917-18 pandemic were not due to the virus but occurred because modern antibiotics for treating secondary bacterial infections were unavailable.

“It is relatively easy to demonstrate theoretical risk and run a fear campaign that may change behavior and sell a product such as a vaccine,” Bell said. “It is much harder to run a proportionate, evidence-based and sustainable public health policy.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/hhs-bird-flu-vaccines-two-human-cases/