In this series, we explore the contentious findings surrounding fluoridation of the U.S. public water supply and answer the question of whether water fluoridation poses a risk and what we should do about it.
Previously: A confounding factor in the fluoride debate is the arsenic that contaminates the industrial sources of fluoride added to public water systems.
A groundbreaking federal lawsuit could ban fluoride from drinking water, overturning a decades-long program aimed at preventing cavities that has been challenged by mounting evidence of harm.
The Fluoride Action Network (FAN) sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Toxic Substances Control Act in 2017, and it appears to be nearing its conclusion. Under the act, citizens can challenge the EPA in court when the agency rejects a petition to ban or regulate a toxic substance. The FAN’s suit is the first in the 44-year history of the act to actually get to trial.
The lawsuit has included pointed testimony from leading experts on environmental toxins and admissions from both EPA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials that fluoride could be linked to specific harms. The lawsuit has also revealed government interference in crucial scientific findings.
Science and opinion have become increasingly conflated, in large part because of corporate influence. As we explain in “Science for Sale,” an investigative series by the Center for Public Integrity and co-published with Vice.com, industry-backed research has exploded — often with the aim of obscuring the truth — as government-funded science dwindles. Read more.
The lawyer, Darrell Grams, explained that Ford had been losing lawsuits filed by former auto mechanics alleging asbestos in brakes had given them mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer virtually always tied to asbestos exposure. Grams asked Paustenbach, then a vice president with the consulting firm Exponent, if he had any interest in studying the disease’s possible association with brake work. A meeting cemented the deal.
Paustenbach, a prolific author of scientific papers who’d worked with Grams on Dow Corning’s defense against silicone breast-implant illness claims, had barely looked at asbestos to that point. “I really started to get serious about studying asbestos after I met Mr. Grams, that’s for sure,” Paustenbach testified in a sworn deposition in June 2015. Before that, he said, the topic “wasn’t that interesting to me.”
Thus began a relationship that, according to recent depositions, has enriched Exponent by $18.2 million and brought another $21 million to Cardno ChemRisk, a similar firm Paustenbach founded in 1985, left and restarted in 2003. All told, testimony shows, Ford has spent nearly $40 million funding journal articles and expert testimony concluding there is no evidence brake mechanics are at increased risk of developing mesothelioma. This finding, repeated countless times in courtrooms and law offices over the past 15 years, is an attempt at scientific misdirection aimed at extricating Ford from lawsuits, critics say.
“They’ve published a lot, but they’ve really produced no new science,” said John Dement, a professor in Duke University’s Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and an asbestos researcher for more than four decades. “Fifteen years ago, I thought the issue of asbestos risk assessment was pretty much defined. All they’ve accomplished is to try to generate doubt where, really, little doubt existed.”
The glut of corporate-financed science has yielded mixed results. Exponent had a role in jury trials won by Ford in St. Louis and Pittsburgh last year, for example, and in a trial Ford lost in Tennessee. Judges have noted the infusion of controversy into a subject that for many years was not controversial in the least. A veteran asbestos judge in Wayne County, Michigan, wrote in an opinion that he’d never encountered the argument that “the science was not there” on mesothelioma and brakes until he heard a case involving an Exponent witness.
The discord over brakes bankrolled by Ford “has, in certain cases, tipped the scales for the defendants with juries,” said plaintiffs’ lawyer Jon Ruckdeschel. “More frequently, it has been used by industry lawyers to increase the costs and burdens on the courts and sick mechanics by creating a tidal wave of pre-trial litigation regarding the ‘science.’ ”
A troubling history
Over the past decade 109 physicians, scientists and academics from 17 countries have signed legal briefs affirming that asbestos in brakes can cause mesothelioma. The World Health Organization and other research and regulatory bodies maintain that there is no safe exposure level for asbestos and that all forms of the mineral — including the most common one, chrysotile, found in brakes — can produce mesothelioma.
Worries about brakes as a source of disease go back decades. A 1971 Ford memo shows that while the company didn’t believe brake dust unleashed by mechanics contained significant amounts of asbestos, it already was exploring alternatives to asbestos brake linings. One of them, made of metal and carbon, performed well, the memo says, “but the cost penalty is severe ($1.25/car just for front-end brakes).”
A Ford spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. In its 2014 annual report, the company said, “Most of the asbestos litigation we face involves individuals who claim to have worked on the brakes of our vehicles over the years. We are prepared to defend these cases, and believe that the scientific evidence confirms our long-standing position that there is no increased risk of asbestos-related disease as a result of exposure to the type of asbestos formerly used in the brakes on our vehicles.” Ford announced recently that it earned a record pretax profit of $10.5 billion in 2015.
Dennis Paustenbach (ICIJ.org)
A written statement to the Center for Public Integrity delivered on behalf of Paustenbach by a public-relations firm says, “Dennis was viewed as one of the leading risk assessment experts in the country, and was contacted by Ford because of his experience and expertise in this field. … As Dennis and others learned more about brake dust, it was clear that while there was considerable data on the subject, the scientific information had never been synthesized and analyzed.”
His conclusion after reviewing the scientific literature, according to the statement: “There is no credible study that has shown an increased risk of disease in auto mechanics.”
An Exponent vice president declined to comment. On its website, the 49-year-old firm, originally known as Failure Analysis Associates, says, “We evaluate complex human health and environmental issues to find cost-effective solutions. … By introducing a new way of thinking about an existing situation, we assist clients to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.”
A Center review of abstracts on the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed website turned up 10 articles on asbestos brakes co-authored by scientists affiliated with Exponent or Cardno ChemRisk since 2003. (The latter was known simply as ChemRisk until it was acquired by Brisbane, Australia-based Cardno in 2012). None of the articles reported an elevated risk of mesothelioma among vehicle mechanics.
Many physicians and scientists say, however, that these papers muddy the waters by drawing overly broad conclusions from earlier studies of workers who might have had no contact with asbestos brakes. “In the asbestos area the whole literature has been so warped by publications just supporting litigation,” said Dement, of Duke. “It has a real negative impact on pushing the science forward.” Dement said he has, on rare occasions, consulted for plaintiffs in the past 10 or 15 years, earmarking nearly all fees for the university.
In a 2007 article, two researchers at George Washington University — one of whom, David Michaels, now heads the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration — reported finding six “litigation-generated” papers on asbestos and auto mechanics published from 1997 through 2001. In the ensuing five years, 20 such papers were published. All told, 18 of the 26 papers published from 1997 through 2006 were “written by experts primarily associated with defendants, while eight were written by experts who work primarily for plaintiffs … Sponsorship by parties involved in litigation leads to an imbalance in the literature … whoever is willing to fund more studies will have more studies published.”
Craig Biegel, a retired corporate defense lawyer in Oregon who represented plaintiffs later in his career, did an update of the Michaels paper as part of his doctoral dissertation. Biegel searched the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed website using the words “asbestos” and “brake.” He found 27 articles written from 1998 to 2015 by experts known to work for industry; all, he said, showed either no elevated risk of mesothelioma among mechanics or minimal asbestos exposures.
He found 10 articles written by plaintiffs’ experts; all showed an association between the disease and brake work. And he found 11 articles written by foreign scientists, who, as far as he knew, were not involved in litigation. All but one showed an association or documented high asbestos exposures.
“As far as I’m concerned, both sides in a lawsuit do the same thing: They both fund research to obtain evidence for trial, not to advance science,” said Biegel, who once defended asbestos property-damage claims for a Fortune 500 company he declined to identify. “The only difference is that defense counsel have almost unlimited industry money and plaintiffs’ counsel do not want to spend their own money.”
Ford’s knowledge of asbestos
There are several ways microscopic asbestos fibers can be sent airborne and enter the human body during brake work. Over time, friction wears down brake linings and pads — many of which contained asbestos prior to the mid-1990s and some of which still do — and they need to be replaced. A mechanic who opened a brake drum would find it filled with fine dust from the decayed lining. The easiest and most common way to clean it out was to use compressed air, a technique that generates grayish, fiber-bearing clouds that can trigger disease years later if the worker is not properly protected. Many weren’t.
Other opportunities for exposure: filing, grinding or sanding brakes, or cleaning up work areas.
Ford wasn’t the only U.S. automaker to use asbestos brakes. General Motors and Chrysler did as well and found themselves in court as a result. Of the so-called Big Three, however, only Ford continues to get hit with mesothelioma lawsuits; GM and Chrysler are immune by virtue of their 2009 bankruptcies. “The extent of our financial exposure to asbestos litigation remains very difficult to estimate,” Ford said in its 2014 annual report. “Annual payout and defense costs may become significant in the future.”
Documents show Ford was mindful of concerns about asbestos brakes by the late 1960s. An unpublished report by an industrial hygienist with Ford of Britain in 1968 said that while brake linings at the time contained between 40 and 60 percent asbestos, field tests indicated dust that collected in brake drums had a low asbestos content because much of the material decomposed after repeated braking. Consequently, he wrote, there was no evidence that blowing out the drums presented a “significant hazard to health.”
The hygienist added, “It would be helpful, however, for clinical examinations to be made of some repair mechanics with long experience of brake cleaning to confirm this view. It would also be desirable to include in Service manuals a general instruction that inhalation of dust during brake cleaning should be minimised.”
A 1970 Ford memo titled “Asbestos Emissions from Brake Lining Wear” included a bibliography of 40 articles on the cancer-causing effects of asbestos, dating to 1954. And the same 1971 memo bemoaning the $1.25 cost of asbestos-free brakes noted that the state of Illinois was considering banning the use of asbestos in brake linings, beginning with the 1975 model year.
Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole holds up a photo during a news conference in Washington, Thursday, July 27, 1989, showing alleged asbestos violations at the Friction Division Products Inc. plant in Trenton, New Jersey. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had proposed fining the brake-shoe manufacturing company $2.7 million for exposing workers to potentially deadly levels of asbestos. Bob Daugherty/AP
In 1973, Ford began telling its own employees to use “an industrial type vacuum cleaner” to remove dust from brake drums. “Under no circumstances shall compressed air blowoff be used to clean brakes and brake drums,” the company said. It first told its dealers about what it called “a potential health hazard” in 1975.
In a court filing, Ford said it began putting “caution” labels on packages of asbestos-containing brakes and clutches in 1980; many mesothelioma victims who have sued the company say they never saw such labels. In the same document Ford said it began a “complete phase-out of asbestos-containing brake products” in the 1983 model year, starting with its Ranger pickup truck. A decade later, only Ford Mustangs and certain limousines were equipped with asbestos brakes; some asbestos-containing parts for older model-year vehicles were available until 2001through dealerships and authorized distributors.
That was the year lawyer Grams reached out to toxicologist Paustenbach to gauge his interest in studying mesothelioma in ex-mechanics. “I contacted Dr. Paustenbach because he is one of the leading professional experts in the world,” Grams, who no longer represents Ford, said in a brief phone interview. Grams said he had read none of the recent deposition testimony about the relationship between Ford and its two brake consultants, Cardno ChemRisk and Exponent.
In his curriculum vitae, Paustenbach, president of Cardno ChemRisk, says he is “a board-certified toxicologist and industrial hygienist with nearly 30 years of experience in risk assessment, environmental engineering, ecotoxicology and occupational health.” The 181-page CV shows he has worked on topics ranging from arsenic in wine to heavy metals in hip implants; authored or co-authored 271 peer-reviewed articles; and given 440 presentations at conferences. He is regularly retained as a defense expert in asbestos litigation and other toxic-tort cases.
Paustenbach offered a window into his thinking in a 2009 article written by a University of Virginia business professor.
“Without a doubt, a large percentage of environmental and occupational claims are simply bogus, intended only to extract money from those who society believes can afford to ‘share the wealth,’” Paustenbach told his interviewer. He said, “The vast majority of cases that I’ve seen were fraudulent with respect to the scientific merit and billions upon billions of dollars are redistributed annually inappropriately — at least from a scientific standpoint.
“… Nonetheless,” Paustenbach said, “I am a firm believer in the wisdom of juries and support giving generous awards to those that have been truly harmed by bad corporate behavior.”
In a 2010 letter to Dolores Nuñez Studier, a lawyer in the Ford general counsel’s office, Paustenbach claimed his firm’s papers had “changed the scientific playing field in the courtroom. You know this better than anyone as you have seen the number of plaintiff verdicts [in asbestos cases] decrease and the cost of settlement go down over time.”
In the letter, which surfaced in the discovery phase of a lawsuit, Paustenbach complained that the fee structure in place between Ford and Chemrisk was “out of date” and too low.
“Dolores, currently, you are among our largest clients,” he wrote. “And, Ford has certainly been a loyal supporter. The Big 3 [automakers] were the foundation of the firm during our formative years, and for this reason, I have tried to go the extra mile to satisfy your needs.”
Asked to explain the letter during a 2014 deposition, Paustenbach said he was merely emphasizing to Studier that “we invested in scientific research to answer questions that remained unanswered in the courtroom for many, many years …. And I was pretty proud of that.” He said he didn’t feel it was fair for his firm to lose money “when, in fact, I was so committed to getting the science straight.”
Creating doubt
The World Health Organization estimates that 107,000 people die each year from asbestos-related diseases. “Exposure to asbestos, including chrysotile, causes cancer of the lung, larynx and ovaries, and also mesothelioma (a cancer of the pleural and peritoneal linings) [and] asbestosis (fibrosis of the lungs),” the WHO says. “No threshold has been identified for the carcinogenic risk of asbestos, including chrysotile.”
OSHA says, “There is no ‘safe’ level of asbestos exposure for any type of asbestos fiber. Asbestos exposures as short in duration as a few days have caused mesothelioma in humans.”
Taking the WHO and OSHA statements at face value, the case against asbestos would seem to be closed: Even someone with very low exposure to the mineral should worry.
In papers published over the past 15 years, however, scientists with Exponent, Cardno ChemRisk and other consulting firms have questioned whether brake mechanics truly are at heightened risk of developing mesothelioma, the disease that has fueled litigation against Ford and others.
A 2004 Exponent paper funded by Ford, GM and Chrysler, for example, concluded that “employment as a motor vehicle mechanic does not increase the risk of developing mesothelioma.” An update of that paper in 2015 found the same result. Each paper was a meta-analysis — an agglomeration of the results of multiple studies that, taken individually, may be too weak to indicate an effect.
In a deposition last October, Exponent’s Mary Jane Teta, a co-author of both meta-analyses, defended her firm’s findings. “I disagree when they say there is no safe level [of asbestos],” she testified. “I know the level of chrysotile … experienced by vehicle mechanics is safe.”
In his statement to the Center, Paustenbach wrote, “It is implausible that nearly 20 epidemiology studies” – on which he bases his legal opinions – “would conclude that there is no increased risk of mesothelioma for the time period during which brakes contained chrysotile asbestos if that were not the appropriate conclusion.”
The studies Paustenbach cites, however, are fraught with limitations, such as small sample sizes, vague job classifications and lack of exposure data. And not all of them found, as he put it, “no increased risk of mesothelioma” among mechanics. In a 1989 paper, for example, a Danish researcher who studied causes of death among auto mechanics reported finding a single case of mesothelioma among her subjects, where none would have been expected in the general population. As with other cancers, she wrote, this number was “too small to state or rule out a potentially increased risk.”
A co-author of another paper, Kay Teschke of the University of British Columbia, testified in a 2012 deposition that her research was being mischaracterized.
“Vehicle mechanics do many different things in their day; some might work on engines, some might only work on wheel alignment,” Teschke testified. “And when you dilute the [asbestos] exposure in that way, you can’t find the relationship with the job … It doesn’t mean that people in that job are somehow immune to the effects of the exposure … “
Christian Hartley, a lawyer in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, who has represented about 100 mesothelioma victims in brake cases, said the papers used in the defense of such lawsuits “push all this data together that’s totally incomparable. That’s what gets reported in the literature and is used to persuade judges and some experts. It’s very misleading to think we have any kind of real handle on what a typical mechanic has for exposure.”
Dr. David Egilman, a clinical professor of family medicine at Brown University and editor of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, argues that the papers are deceptive by design. Many reanalyze previously published studies of workers described as mechanics who may have had no contact with asbestos brakes, he said. The effect, Egilman said, is to dilute the cancer data so the overall risk appears low.
Egilman, who consults for asbestos plaintiffs, spends much of his time rebutting Paustenbach and other industry-funded researchers. “They can throw a lot of things at the wall and hope something sticks with the jury,” he said. “It forces people like me or other scientists to try to clean up each thing that was thrown at the wall, one at a time. And by the end of the day, that could be confusing to a jury or judge.”
Egilman said the body of work underwritten by Ford and other asbestos defendants is being used to try to deprive sick workers, or their families, of compensation. “Some courts have adopted it as a standard,” he said.
More broadly, the industry-funded papers can confuse the public – and even government experts.
In 2009, the National Cancer Institute published a fact sheet on its website stating there was no evidence brake work was associated with an increased risk of mesothelioma or lung cancer. The 2004 meta-analysis funded by the automakers was cited as a reference.
Dr. Arthur Frank, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Drexel University, was incredulous.
“What is truly ironic about such a statement is that it is incontrovertible that asbestos, including chrysotile, the type of asbestos found in brakes, does, in fact, cause lung cancer and mesothelioma,” Frank wrote in a letter to the institute’s director obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request. “Since we have not banned asbestos in this country, those who might read this statement could well think asbestos brakes are safe, putting at risk both professional and ‘shade tree’ mechanics, and their family members.”
Frank said the meta-analysis cited by the institute was “unreliable and should not serve as the basis for any statement by the NCI.”
Then-NCI Director Dr. John Neiderhuber replied that he had discussed Frank’s critique with an in-house expert who agreed that the language on the website should be amended. The new statement, posted less than two weeks after Frank sent his letter, read that while studies of cancer risks among auto mechanics were limited, “the overall evidence suggests that there is no safe level for asbestos exposure.” The citation of the 2004 paper was deleted.
The brake studies have had global reach. The “chrysotile-is-safe” argument has been used to stave off asbestos bans and preserve markets in developing nations such as India and China, where building materials and other products containing asbestos are widely used.
“The real nefarious part of this research … is that a lot of people who live in those countries are continuing to be exposed under uncontrolled conditions to asbestos,” Egilman said. “That’s the real horror story here.”
Ronnie Stockton’s auto repair shop in Jackson, Tenn. (Courtesy of the Stockton family)
Ronnie and Joyce Stockton. Courtesy of the Stockton family
A Ford loss in Tennessee
While the brake papers and the experts who write them have contributed to defense verdicts in mesothelioma cases, things occasionally go the other way.
Ronnie Stockton operated an auto repair shop 100 feet from his home in Jackson, Tennessee, for 30 years and specialized in brake jobs, often on Ford vehicles. He’d attended training classes in which instructors recommended that paper masks be worn around brake dust but never heard a “full description of what asbestos did,” he said in a recent interview. “We wasn’t warned it could kill you when you swept it up and didn’t wear the mask.”
As it turned out, Stockton’s wife, Joyce, was the one who got sick. She used to help her husband sweep out the shop. She kept the books and washed Ronnie’s dusty clothes. One night in December 2010 she lay down in bed and felt her chest tighten. “I thought I was having a heart attack,” she said. A biopsy confirmed that she had mesothelioma, to that point merely a strange word she’d heard in lawyers’ TV commercials. “I would sit in front of the television trying to learn how to pronounce it, not ever knowing I had the disease,” she said.
The Stocktons sued Ford and went to trial in August. Two Exponent scientists were among the defense experts.
In his closing argument after nearly two weeks of testimony, Ruckdeschel, the Stocktons’ lawyer, said Ford’s experts had “spun the literature” on asbestos. “They’re not taking what the studies say; they’re putting a spin on it.”
If independent research had shown no connection between brake work and mesothelioma, Ruckdeschel said, “they wouldn’t have had to go and pay Exponent to write all the papers to say, ‘Well, we’ve reanalyzed the data, and there really isn’t any evidence.’ ”
Defense lawyer Samuel Tarry urged jurors not to be swayed by the millions of dollars Ford had invested in the papers. It “shouldn’t come as any surprise that over time it costs a lot of money to defend these cases and to publish research where it can be critiqued and criticized and start discussions,” he said. Tarry recounted the testimony of Exponent’s Mark Roberts, who “told you that the majority of mesotheliomas in women are unrelated to asbestos. … He explained that all of us have a background risk, not just for mesothelioma but for any type of cancer …. They can happen naturally. They can happen with an environmental insult.”
After deliberating about two days, the jury returned a $4.65 million verdict in the Stocktons’ favor. It assigned 71 percent of the liability to Ford and 29 percent to brake manufacturer Honeywell, which had been brought into the case on Ford’s motion. Ford has asked for a new trial.
Latisha Strickland was the jury foreman. She’d wanted to assign 100 percent of the blame to Ford but agreed to the 71-29 split to avoid a hung jury.
“I felt ashamed — I had compromised what I thought it should be,” Strickland, a home-school teacher, said in a telephone interview. “You couldn’t give me the Powerball lottery to go through the amount of surgeries this woman [Joyce Stockton] has gone through.”
Strickland said she was especially put off by the 1971 memo showing Ford decided not to spend $1.25 per vehicle to replace front-end asbestos brakes.
For decades, Swiss chemical giant Syngenta has manufactured and marketed a widely used weed killing chemical called paraquat, and for much of that time the company has been dealing with external concerns that long-term exposure to the chemical may cause the dreaded, incurable brain ailment known as Parkinson’s disease.
Syngenta has repeatedly told customers and regulators that scientific research does not prove a connection between its weed killer and the disease, insisting that the chemical does not readily cross the blood-brain barrier, and does not affect brain cells in ways that cause Parkinson’s.
But a cache of internal corporate documents dating back to the 1950s obtained by The New Lede in a reporting collaboration with the Guardian suggests that the public narrative put forward by Syngenta and the corporate entities that preceded it has at times contradicted the company’s own research and knowledge.
And though the documents reviewed do not show that Syngenta’s scientists and executives believed that paraquat can cause Parkinson’s, they do show a corporate focus on strategies to protect product sales, refute external scientific research and influence regulators.
In one defensive tactic, the documents lay out how the company worked behind the scenes to try to keep a highly regarded scientist from sitting on an advisory panel for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency is the chief US regulator for paraquat and other pesticides. Company officials wanted to make sure the efforts could not be traced back to Syngenta, the documents show.
And the documents show that insiders feared they could face legal liability for long-term, chronic effects of paraquat as long ago as 1975. One company scientist called the situation “a quite terrible problem,” for which “some plan could be made….”
That prediction of legal consequences has come to pass. Thousands of people who allege they developed Parkinson’s because of long-term chronic effects of paraquat exposure are now suing Syngenta. Along with Syngenta, they are also suing Chevron USA, the successor to a company that distributed paraquat in the US from 1966 to 1986. Both companies deny any liability and continue to maintain that scientific evidence does not support a causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease.
“Recent thorough reviews performed by the most advanced and science-based regulatory authorities, including the United States and Australia, continue to support the view that paraquat is safe,” Syngenta said in a statement.
Chevron issued a statement saying that the company and predecessors had no role in causing the plaintiffs’ illnesses, and it “will vigorously defend against the allegations in the lawsuits.”
As part of a court-ordered disclosure in the litigation, the companies provided plaintiffs’ lawyers with decades of internal records, including hand-written and typed memos, internal presentations, and emails to and from scientists, lawyers and company officials around the world. And though the files have not yet been made public through the court system, The New Lede and the Guardian reviewed hundreds of pages of these documents.
Among the revelations from the documents: Scientists with Syngenta predecessor Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. (ICI) and Chevron Chemical were aware in the 1960s and 70s of mounting evidence showing paraquat could accumulate in the human brain.
Dr. Suneel Dhand 280K subscribers 44,354 views Oct 18, 2022I will not be joining any of these again or attending their conferences. Join my Red-Pilled Community and Follow me on Locals, the uncensored platform, for more open and real discussions: https://drsuneeldhand.locals.com Subscribe to my Newsletter here: https://suneeldhand.com/newsletter/
The ‘Assange precedent’ means state powers will be able to rip foreign journalists from their country to silence them, and as a result, journalists have become too frightened to tell the truth.
Thousands of people have now pledged to surround the British parliament building this Saturday, October 8th, by forming a ‘Human Chain’ that will extend across the Thames river, along a portion of the south bank and back. The action, led by the “Don’t Extradite Assange” Campaign, includes many institutions, human rights groups, lawyers and concerned doctors calling for the immediate release of journalist, Julian Assange. There are solidarity events in 18 cities worldwide including Washington DC, where there is an action at the Department of Justice, as well as events in Melbourne, Canberra, Byron Bay, Bendigo, Ottawa, Victoria, Toronto, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Pretoria, Tulsa, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Mexico, Rio and our very own Wellington.
Many who refer to corporate media for their world news, will be surprised that the fate of one man could muster such worldwide passion and support, when so many other serious issues dominate the airwaves, but they fail to understand that the legal precedent being set here, will guarantee our young generation has no ability to hold power to account, and journalism will be entirely replaced with stenography, if it hasn’t already.
Whatever issue your passion is directed to in these current times, without a functioning fourth estate, without journalists willing to report news that conflicts with a government’s preferred narrative, we have effectively already enslaved and neutered our civilisation. There will be very little hope for your pet topic, unless your “elected officials” feel exactly the same way as you do on the issue.
Consider Jacinda Ardern’s United Nations speech this week, condemned widely around the world, where she called to regulate free speech as a ‘weapon of war’! In response journalist Glen Greenwald wrote: “This is the face of authoritarianism – even though it looks different than you were taught to expect. And it’s the mindset of tyrants everywhere. This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow”.
California’s Legislature on Monday approved a dangerous bill that would allow regulators to punish doctors for spreading “false information about Covid-19 vaccinations and treatments”, but considering the fact-checkers are largely funded by the industry that stands to benefit financially, can we be sure the medical specialists are indeed spreading false information?
Free press is essential to the proper working of a democratic society. Julian Assange has been publicly tortured and smeared for more than a decade which has undoubtedly caused a “chilling effect” on investigative journalism in the West. Senior CIA officials during the Trump administration discussed abducting and even assassinating Assange, according to both a US report and a Spanish court case, yet British “Justice” have agreed to send a journalist to the very state that made this threat, despite the fact he never worked there. Are we prepared to allow any state to rip foreign journalists from their countries to silence them? How about Saudi Arabia?
The US government is attempting to use the 1917 espionage act in order to imprison Assange for a 175 year sentence to turn him into an example yet, Julian published accurate material that was wholly in the public interest and has won numerous international journalism awards for his work. Indeed, this is the first time a journalist has ever been charged under the Espionage Act.
This Saturday, 8th October, there is a New Zealand-based solidarity action for Assange “TellTheTruthMSM – Human Chain For Assange”‘ at the Beehive, NZ Parliament Lawn at 12 Noon. There will be information exchange, open mic for speeches, music and we will display #YellowRibbons4Assange around the grounds to spread awareness. Details for events around the world can be found at “Candles4Assange” on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram as well as a website of the same name.
Bayer has been in the news recently (rightfully so) for – you guessed it – poisoning the planet. We have stood against Bayer/Monsanto for twenty years and it’s high time they stand accountable for their planetary injustice.
This week you may have seen that the CDC released a report which stated 80% of urine samples taken from Americans contained glyphosate, “Roundup”.
What you likely didn’t hear is that Bayer/Monsanto has been systematically undercutting science and making large investments to build propaganda that attacks organizations like IRT, GM Watch, NonGMO Project, and other non-GMO activists.
In a 2019 Huff Post article, Bayer stated they, “no longer provided support for the Genetic Literacy Project” – a misinformation website designed to produce content devaluing other scientific studies which are not pro-GMO.
The article (again dated in 2019) points out how Bayer leveraged its many resources to suppress evidence of the health and environmental damage caused by glyphosate and challenged the World Health Organization’s determination that it’s probably “cancer-causing.”
During the Monsanto trials, a secret company email targeted our founder Jeffrey Smith. The subject line was “Whack-a-Mole,” an internal Monsanto joke about how they attack those who expose the true dangers of their products. They even had a large budget-item called “Let Nothing Go,” funding used to suppress all evidence that GMOs, glyphosate, and Gene Editing cause dangerous side effects. Jeffrey’s extensive reporting over two decades was one of their familiar targets.
Their lies and attacks continue. The latest is pretending that gene edited GMOs are safe. And they’ve paid all sorts of organizations and scientists to repeat the lie. Tragically, numerous governments have been tricked, and now allow gene edited GMOs to be introduced into our food supply and environment without any safety checks or even notifying regulators This poses an unprecedented threat to each of us, and future generations. The time to act is now.
Destroying the food supply, creating a food shortage (hang we’ve been hearing about the shortage for a long time) … meanwhile Bill Gates is buying up African farmland … how else does one create total dependency on the (corrupt) government? Get growing your own food peeps. Our forbears did. And they managed very well with no mobile phones, pcs, supermarkets and fast cars. I think on reflection their lives were actually a whole lot better. EWR
theeconomiccollapseblog.com
Can anyone explain why absolutely massive fires just keep erupting again and again at critical facilities all over America? The tragic destruction by fire of the headquarters of Azure Standard in Oregon shocked millions of people, and since that news broke quite a few readers have been reaching out to me about the long string of unusual blazes that we have been witnessing from coast to coast in recent months. I decided to look into this phenomenon for myself, and I am sharing what I have discovered so far in this article. Dr. Benjamin Braddock and others had already been digging into this, and their research proved quite valuable as I began my investigation. Some of the incidents that people have reported I was not able to independently verify, and others I felt were too minor to be put on this list. With all that being said, the following is a list of 16 major fires that have occurred at key food industry facilities in the U.S. since the start of 2022…
If ever you suspected corruption well this is it right here! Many I know will be suffering from cognitive dissonance at all this. My many years of uncovering lies & corruption have made me no longer surprised at all. My learning began with lies about our histories (victors write those remember) … then it was ‘harmless’ (poison) sprays like glyphosate, then 1080, all bona fide ‘checked’ by the (fake, corrupted) protective authorities … then it was all the food additives & various other environmental poisons that Dr Samuel Epstein exposed as causing cancer way back in the 1970s (swept under the google rug) … then it was the poisons falling from the sky exposed by Elana Freeland, Cliff Carnicom and many many others … then it was the real history of modern medicine courtesy of the Rockefeller fraternity … and that’s only the half of it, on and on, it has been lies upon lies upon lies. This latest episode aka plandemic with all those associated untruths comes as no surprise at all to me. The difficult matter is getting folk to see it.
Here anyway, we have proof of how the stats are being fiddled with…
Since his perjurious contretemps with Sen. Paul (it seems his nose just grew too long at last), Dr. Fauci has been looking ever more like a cornered rat (and I say that with all due respect). And now this story takes him down another peg—a story broken by The Australian, a major Murdoch property outside the USA, and now picked up by Consortium News, which, since Bob Parry left us, has been a highly serviceable organ of Covidian propaganda.
From markcrispinmiller citing mercola.com & Whitney Webb
Story at-a-glance
While mainstream media outlets apparently agree that Jeffrey Epstein was a likely factor in the Gates’ recently announced split, what these same outlets refuse to cover is the real extent of the Bill Gates-Jeffrey Epstein relationship
The mainstream narrative holds that Gates’s ties to Epstein began in 2011, despite the evidence pointing to their relationship beginning decades earlier
The likely reason for the continued cover-up of the true extent of Epstein’s ties to Gates has much more to do with Gates’ company Microsoft than with Bill Gates himself
The lack of mainstream media concern over the documented ties of the Epstein network to other top Microsoft executives of the past, such as Nathan Myhrvold, Linda Stone and Steven Sinofsky, makes it clear that, while it may be open season on the relationship between Bill Gates and Epstein, such is not the case for Microsoft and Epstein
The ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to Silicon Valley, not just to Microsoft, are part of a broader attempt to cover up the strong intelligence component in the origin of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies
The biggest reason why the military/intelligence origins and links to the current Silicon Valley oligarchy will never be honestly examined is that those very entities are working to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which would make artificial intelligence, automation, mass electronic surveillance and transhumanism central to human society
While more revelations about the Bill Gates–Jeffrey Epstein relationship have begun trickling out following the Gates’s divorce announcement, the strong evidence pointing to their relationship beginning decades prior to 2011 continues to be covered up by the media—not necessarily to protect Bill but to protect Microsoft.
One of the world’s most prominent medical doctors with expertise in treating COVID-19 has gone on the record with a scathing rebuke of the U.S. government’s approach to fighting the virus. He says the government’s strategy, carried out in cooperation with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations World Health Organization, has resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and is now being followed up with thousands more deaths caused by a mass-injection program.
Dr. Peter McCullough, in a 32-minute interview with journalist Alex Newman, said if this were any other vaccine it would have been pulled from the market by now for safety reasons.
McCullough holds the honor of being the most cited medical doctor on COVID-19 treatments at the National Library of Medicine, with more than 600 citations. He has testified before Congress and won numerous awards during his distinguished medical career.
One might expect these numbers would trigger an exhaustive investigation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But the opposite has occurred. According to McCullough, the government has taken what amounts to a passing glance at the alarming numbers and dismissed them with a bare minimum of scrutiny.
“A typical new drug at about five deaths, unexplained deaths, we get a black-box warning, your listeners would see it on TV, saying it may cause death,” McCullough said. “And then at about 50 deaths it’s pulled off the market.”
The U.S. has a precedent for this. In 1976 during the Swine Flu pandemic the U.S. attempted to vaccinate 55 million Americans, but at that point the shot caused about 500 cases of paralysis and 25 deaths.
“The program was killed, at 25 deaths,” McCullough said.
EWR COMMENT: So why has the media come “down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain”? The video in ‘related’ info below is a good eye opener on that. Particularly on the globalist agenda. Do check out the statistics in terms of deaths & adverse reactions as a result of ‘their’ solution. (Look in categories, CV VX deaths etc, left of news page). Stats are also updated regularly, right side of news page. _________________________________________________________________________
“Malcom X once called the media “the most powerful entity on the earth.” They have, he said, “the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of masses”. Today, that power is now infused with the power of the world’s biggest tech and social media companies. Together social and traditional media have the power to make a medicine that has saved possibly millions of lives during the current pandemic disappear from the conversation.“
From nakedcapitalism.com
Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. The 15-page article chronicles the gargantuan struggle being waged by frontline doctors on all continents to get ivermectin approved as a Covid-19 treatment, as well as the tireless efforts by reporters, media outlets and social media companies to thwart them.
Being a book lover I find this article heart breaking. Yet another example of how little those running NZ care, not since Rogernomics anyway. Interesting definition given in this scathing article about ‘consultation’. Those who’ve attended any of these consults will get that … they are a complete scam providing the illusion of choice. EWR
Apologies if a link has brought you here… the article concerned titled “The truth about what is happening to our National Library” is from bookguardiansaotearoa.com dated May 11, 2021, and has been removed on request from the author/s who do not wish to be associated with the information published here. EWR
MANILLA — Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte created controversy this week. He reportedly received the first dose of the China-manufactured Sinopharm “inactivated virus” COVID-19 shot this past Monday night. He broadcast the injection live on Facebook. The problem is that only the China-manufactured “inactivated virus” Sinovac Coronavac and Oxford-AstraZeneca viral vector shots are authorized for emergency use in the country. Duterte issued a public apology after being criticized for what looks like avoidance of the shots that every other Filipino is forced or chooses to receive. The optics look even worse now that deaths and adverse reactions are piling up for the “authorized” shots. At least 24 deaths and 24,698 adverse reactions to experimental injections have been reported to government officials since the March rollout, according to ABS-CBN in Quezon City. AstraZeneca is responsible for 14 of the deaths. Sinovac is responsible for 10 deaths. The Philippines Food and Drug Administration (FDA) went into subterfuge mode from there.
A first-hand message from India: the truth about genocide and starvation
Sources supplied at the end of the article…
From awakeningnation.com
Genocide. Starvation. Corruption. This is the truth about what’s really going on in India under the guise of the COVID19 virus and the alleged pandemic.
These are not my words. These are the words of someone living in India who reached out to me to get her message out about the genocide that is taking place, right now, all under the guise of ‘strains and variants’ of COVID19. People are dying of starvation and lack of medical care. She’s witnessing and experiencing at first-hand the horrors of what is happening.
Here’s her message:
“I am writing to you about the genocide that is taking place in India. Millions have already died of starvation during the ongoing lockdowns. The government and media are lying and making it look like the virus.
Although a national lockdown hasn’t been imposed this year, many states are in either total lockdown or under strict restrictions. Most cities, including Pune, where I live, have been under total lockdown for weeks now.
Restaurants, shops, gyms, theatres, basically everything is shut. The cities are ghost towns. Even so called ‘essential’ businesses are only open till 11 am in the morning. You basically have just an hour to buy food and then your time is up.
Inter-state travel and even inter-district travel is banned. The cops wait at all major crossroads to question why you are traveling outdoors or to fine you if you are not wearing a mask.
The medical community here is also complicit in genocide, lying about hospitals being full and turning away people with genuine illnesses, who need immediate care. They have even created a shortage of oxygen cylinders.
Hospitals are turning people with genuine conditions away, claiming that there are no empty beds. The government has created a shortage of oxygen supply. As I mentioned earlier, all patients undergoing any operation or procedure have to first undergo an RT-PCR test or they are refused treatment. I experienced this first-hand.
Since last year, there has been a government order that you cannot undergo any medical procedure, unless you get a PCR test done. Unfortunately, I had to undergo a procedure last year. I did not have time to use common law or any other tactic as I was in a lot of pain. In the end, I had no choice but to be basically skull raped.
Even in the OR, they taped the mask to my face because I kept pulling it down.
But my plight is nothing compared to that of the poor. Millions have already died of starvation. The people hit hardest are the migrant workers and those in rural areas. Most businesses employ migrant workers and with everything shut, there are no jobs, no income and no food. As result, millions are now dying of starvation or malnutrition.
Please use your platform to highlight the crimes against humanity that is taking place in this country. The world needs to be aware of the seriousness of the situation here. I have attached a few links below. Though some are from the mainstream media, you will get an idea of how dire the situation has now become.
Please do not forget your brothers and sisters here in India.
Sending love and light,
Alisha”
Please share her message and let everyone you know what is really going on in India.
Also here’s a 5 minute video from a British Human Rights Activist explaining how they are using India as a scare tactic to scare the *entire* world into submitting into another global lockdown, the *exact* same tactics and propaganda they used with Wuhan. The same playbook. The same tactics. They are trying to genocide huge chunks of the Indian population with mass starvation. Watch this at the link.
Lastly, here are links to other articles that Alisha sent to me to give you an idea about what is going on in India (yes some of them are MSM):
A doctor from Northern Ireland has come out strongly against COVID hysteria and the sinister agenda behind it in a viral video spreading across social media. Listen at the link below:
Gates’ business strategies were called into question in 1998 & Microsoft was sued for anti-trust violations. An eighteen months long trial. Anti competitive & exclusionary practices designed to maintain its monopoly in personal computer operating systems. Gates then went on to spend on a repackaging campaign to see himself viewed globally as a ‘philanthropist’. Do watch James Corbett’s ‘Who is Bill Gates?’ an expose of Gates’ history. It’s far from philanthropic.
Deal with the devil: Monsanto PAID Google to CENSOR search results, discredit journalists
(Natural News) If you’ve ever wondered why there isn’t more outrage over the dangers of pesticides and herbicides, even as environmental consciousness seems to be rising, the answer is simple: Manufacturers like Monsanto have entire departments devoted to discrediting journalists who expose their corrupt ways and paying off Google to censor search results.
The same Gates Foundation which is behind every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic from financing much of the WHO budget, to investing in favored vaccine-makers like Moderna, is engaged in a major project in Africa which is destroying traditional small farmer production of essential food crops in favor of monoculture crops and introduction of expensive chemical fertilizers and GMO seeds that are bankrupting small farmers. The project, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), is directly connected with key global institutions behind the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.
If we know the actual history of the Rockefeller Foundation and related tax-free undertakings of one of the world’s most influential families, it is clear that in key areas the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has inherited the Rockefeller agenda from the medical industrial complex to education to agriculture transformation.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working in tandem with the closely allied Rockefeller Foundation, is not only at the center of the orchestration of unheard-of severe economic lockdown measures for the much-disputed COVID-19 illness. The Gates foundation is also at the very center of the UN Agenda 30 push to transform world agriculture into what they call “sustainable” agriculture. A keystone project for the past 14 years has been Gates’ funding of something called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa or AGRA.
Typically, this line “debunks” the CDC update by carefully avoiding its key point: that the vast majority of “COVID-19 deaths” were deaths caused by COVID-19 and serious comorbidities, among the very old.
This propaganda blurp from the Miami Herald (and no doubt recycled everywhere) tightly focuses on whether, in those fatal cases, COVID-19 was the decisive factor, “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” so that those dead would still be living if they didn’t have that, too. That is “how infectious diseases work,” the doctor quoted tells the Herald‘s scribe.
Whatever. Whether COVID-19 did or didn’t finish off those people is beside the point, which is that the lockdowns were, and are, unnecessary. As sane epidemiologists have been insisting since this nightmare started, the rational response to “the coronavirus” would have been to quarantine those very vulnerable people—as always has been done during epidemics and pandemics—and let the rest of us lead normal lives.
Instead, our “leaders,” guided by the likes of Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates, locked down America almost entirely—a twisted policy that has killed countless people, well and vulnerable alike, by crashing the economy, thereby murdering millions with no serious illnesses; and, as for those people most at risk, not only separating them from family and friends, which isolation did them in (the cause of that weird “COVID peak” in April, as Denis Rancourt has shown), but also killing tens of thousands more of them by ordering nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients (a lethal practice carried out not just in the US, but in Canada, too).
In short, they gave us the worst of both worlds, ostensibly to “keep us safe” from a virus that posed little risk to all but just a few of us, as the CDC update has made clear to anyone who still has eyes to see with.
It also provides funding to dozens of media organizations that regularly give Gates and the foundation favorable coverage.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides over $250 million dollars in funding to news organizations, charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, journalistic organizations, and fact-checking groups that regularly give investor and philanthropist Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation favorable coverage, according to an in-depth report from Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).
“ Violent criminals are being released back onto the streets in cities across America. This is all thanks to district attorneys who were bought and paid for by George Soros. One America’s Pearson Sharp has more on how the radical left-wing billionaire is working to undermine our nation’s justice system”.
In light of ex Mayor Feyen’s info on the Horowhenua this is on topic (see also our LG Watch pages/Horowhenua and peruse journalist Veronica Harrod’s info both here in ‘categories’ at left of page, & on Veronica’s public FB page. She writes extensively about property development).
From iso.org.nz
A whiff of corruption hangs over moves to urbanise Plimmerton Farm, a 384 hectare greenfield property within the Porirua district that has been bought by Plimmerton Development Ltd (PDL). The Porirua City Council and PDL are working together to get the property rezoned under the district plan from rural to an urban zone and pave the way for a 2,000 unit residential development. For several reasons, which I will touch on below, the site is wholly unsuitable for urban development. That is not just my opinion; the process for changing the district plan has attracted 138 submissions, mostly hostile to parts or the proposal as a whole. Big-hitters against the plan change include Forest & Bird and the QEII National Trust.
Horowhenua’s former mayor Michael Feyen offers many insights into how local governance has operated since the 1989 LG Act, information that many of us are not aware of. Michael points out what needs to change and why … vital info for moving forwards. EWR
As we lurch towards the 2020 elections, with a semblance of medical martial law materializing, given all the speedy law changes coming down the pipeline I wonder at times will we even make it there. Headlines of lamestream media are a fruit salad of corruption. Hailing from the ’60s I’ve never seen so much of it. Penny Bright, may she rest in peace, uncovered much of this before she passed. Particularly the outright lie that NZ enjoyed the reputation (only) of being the least corrupt country in the world.
Those of you who’ve followed this site for more than a year will recall the term of former Horowhenua Mayor Michael Feyen. During his Mayoral term at the Horowhenua District Council he was, in his own words, nothing but stonewalled & neutered. (You can read some of the goings on from that council at the LG Watch pages, Horowhenua. See here also for articles on topic by journalist Veronica Harrod).
Almost a year out from ending that term, recently teaming with the NZPP, and highlighting for the public where he is coming from, he is speaking out in the first video on the state of local governance in NZ within the context of UN Agenda 2030 policies, an issue that the NZPP party is bringing to the forefront of discussion as we move toward election time. Even if you are not interested in the NZPP or any politics, have a listen and hear about how local governance operates since becoming corporatized. Michael also touches on other issues that percolate down from government (consultation, pollution, debt etc) and particularly on the corrupt state of affairs now. In the second video he speaks similarly about the DHBs. He is speaking from the unique view of an insider. Valuable information for moving forward. We are observing in this era, rapid changes and in a direction that most thinking citizens recognize is not right. We are witnessing daily the vanishing of more & more of our freedoms and particularly our democratic right to free speech. Time to turn the tide. EWR
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White Elephant Theory
Environmental Health Watch NZ 
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