Canada’s first COVID-19 vaccine trials approved for Halifax university

Source

http://www.cbc.ca

Haley Ryan 

May 16, 2020

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the trials will take place at Dalhousie University

The first Canadian clinical trials for a possible COVID-19 vaccine have been approved by Health Canada. Dr. Scott Halperin, the director of the Canadian Center for Vaccinology, explains the different phases of testing that a potential vaccine would have to go through. 8:56

A Halifax research team will be working with a Chinese manufacturer to run the first Canadian clinical trials for a possible COVID-19 vaccine.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the announcement during his daily remarks on Saturday.

The trials have been approved by Health Canada and will take place at the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology (CCfV) at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

“Research and development take time, and must be done right. But this is encouraging news,” Trudeau said.

He added the National Research Council will be working with the manufacturers so that if these vaccine trials are successful, the vaccine can be produced and distributed “here at home.”

The CCfV team of about 45 people is working with a potential vaccine from Chinese company CanSino Biologics.

Health Canada said in an email Saturday that their decision followed a careful review of the trial application, which “met the necessary requirements for safety and quality.”

Researchers say about 600 participants will be needed

Scott Halperin, director of the CCfV and a professor of pediatrics, microbiology and immunology at Dalhousie University, said they are building on trials that have already begun in China.

The vaccine strain, called Ad5-nCoV, uses another virus that’s been modified so it can’t cause infection in humans, he said. It expresses one of the COVID-19 antigens on its surface called the “spike protein.”

If participants develop antibodies to fight this antigen,”one hopes that one would be protected against COVID-19,” Halperin said.

Once their team gets approval from an ethics board, Halperin hopes the trials can begin within the next two weeks.

Dr. Scott Halperin, director of the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology and a professor of paediatrics and microbiology and immunology at Dalhousie University, hopes the trials will begin in the next two weeks. (CBC)

In Phase 1, Halperin said there will be just under 100 participants of different ages involved. In the early stages, they will begin with “very healthy individuals” about 18 to 55 years old. Once their team sees some “early safety data” from those trials, he said they will bring in those 65 years of age and older.

Then in Phase 2, Halperin said they will add 500 additional participants, who might be anywhere from 18 to 85 years old.

Their team follows participants for six months after they’re immunized, Halperin said, so the whole study runs about six to eight months. However, after even a few weeks of each phase they will likely be able to learn enough to move onto the next stage.

The Phase 1 trials are “quite intensive” in terms of monitoring, Halperin said, including screening to ensure participants are healthy.

Once someone is given the vaccine, the CCfV team tests their blood, holds physical examinations, and looks at other signs and symptoms including immune response. People must also keep a diary of any symptoms.

Participants will come in a couple times in the first week, then less frequently as the weeks go on, for a total of nine to 13 times over the six months.

Director hopeful Phase 3 could come this fall

Halperin said they may be able to move to Phase 3 studies as soon as they have good data from Phase 2, which could be as early as “late summer, early fall.”

The third phase is designed to see “if the vaccine works,” Halperin said. It looks at whether participants who have received the vaccine are protected from getting COVID-19, if exposed to the virus.

Halperin said the only part of the study their Halifax team is conducting alone would be Phase 1.

When they move into Phase 2, likely in a couple months, they will be joined by multiple centres across the country through the Canadian Immunization Research Network (CIRN).

The network was originally set up around the 2009 H1N1 pandemic by the federal government, to have a national capability to “rapidly” start Phase 1 studies in extreme cases like this, Halperin said.

“It’s satisfying that the infrastructure was there in order for us to be able to respond,” he said.

An ’emergency release’ could come before study ends

He also noted that this vaccine is not the only one which will be going into clinical trials in Canada. Halperin said there will likely be others announced within the next few weeks.

Any potential vaccine won’t be publicly available until after Phase 3 is complete, Halperin said, which “could take quite a long time.”

However, Health Canada could allow the vaccine to be used before that in an “emergency release,” and there are some talks ongoing now about how that could be done.

That was the case when the Ebola vaccine was used in west Africa before Phase 3 trials were complete, Halperin said.

The CCfV team consists of nurses, data managers, research assistants, laboratory personnel, and three or four other physician investigators.

Rockefeller Foundation white paper reveals plan to issue ‘mark of the beast’ number to all Americans who wish to buy, sell, attend work, school, events

Are you willingly going to accept the mark of the beast or will you stand up and resist it at all costs?

Source

INTELLIHUB

With permission from

By Shepard Ambellas

May 17, 2020

A Rockefeller Foundation white paper released in late-April reveals a dastardly plan that once adopted by state governments will require all Americans to be inoculated for COVID-19 at which point they will then subsequently be assigned a tracking number and tag which will reflect their current antibody status in order for them to be able to work, attend school, make use of shared or public transportation, attend movies, concerts, sporting events or purchase tickets and if that’s not enough to make you sick the plan entails hiring an army of 300,000 COVID Community Healthcare Corps workers to carry it all out.

The white paper titled National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan: Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities plans to sell the sinister plot to the “private and public sector leaders across the country, and of individual Americans” by telling them that “they and their loved ones will be safer when we begin to return to daily life” forcing them to give up their freedoms for a false sense of security.

The plan, which is nothing more than a pretext to roll out the mark of the beast, insists it’s “bad news” that the United States is not conducting enough coronavirus testing on a weekly basis and insinuates it’s “good news” that the government will eventually have the tools needed to contact trace, tag, and track its populace.

“This will be a delicate balancing act,” the white paper states. “Reopening the economy will be most successful if we move decisively to both increase testing capacity and optimally deploy testing supplies.”

You see, the true architects of this plan are the men and women behind the proverbial curtain who ultimately want to see a fusion of government, business, philanthropy, and the public thus allowing the last few steps of their New World Order control grid to be stitched together so they can once and for all separate the serfdom from the ruling class.

The scheme

Step 1 of their plan is to scale-up COVID-19 testing capacity which according to the architects will provide “reassurance” to the general public until a vaccine is developed and rolled out. This is how they will buy time. Testing, testing, and more testing. They want to wear out the American people and exhaust all their resources using extended lockdowns as a means to weaken the general public.

“… over the next eight weeks, the country could conceivably get to the point where 3 million people–roughly one percent of the population–are tested weekly,” it reads. “It is a level that, combined with vigorous contact tracing, would allow crucial parts of the economy to restart”

According to their calculations, it will take another six months to reach a point where 30 million people a week can be tested which means that it will take at least one year to be able to test 30 million people daily at which point they will offer a vaccine and swoop in to save the day.

Step 2 of the plan calls for the establishment of a COVID Community Healthcare Corps comprised of up to 300,000 workers capable of testing millions of people on a weekly basis.  Government grant money will be used to entice prospective workers to join the corps much like Adolph Hitler’s Schutzstaffel which was spawned from a smaller guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz.

Privacy concerns? What privacy?

The Rockefeller Foundation white paper maintains that “some privacy concerns must be set aside for an infectious agent as virulent as Covid-19” which is how they intend to move in for the kill on a nationwide scale.

“The loss of privacy engendered by such a system would come at too high of a price if the arrival of a vaccine early next year was a certainty… but vaccine development and manufacture could take years, and when it comes certain populations may be excluded from receiving it for health reasons,” their scheme states.

The mark of the beast

From the Rockefeller plan:

Those screened must be given a unique patient identification number that would link to information about a patient’s viral, antibody and eventually vaccine status under a system that could easily handshake with other systems to speed the return of normal societal functions. Schools could link this to attendance lists, large office buildings to employee ID cards, TSA to passenger lists and concert and sports venues to ticket purchasers. Such connections should be made in a way that protects personally-identifying information whenever possible. For example, accessing the viral and antibody status of an individual can be done by using a cryptographic hash of an individual’s private information without actually sending any personally revealing details.

This infection database must easily interoperate with doctor, hospital, and insurance health records in an essential and urgent national program to finally rationalize the disparate and sometimes deliberately isolated electronic medical records systems across the country. Analytics across myriad platforms must be operationalized so that population-level health information can be used to identify at-risk populations, perform contact tracing, facilitate decision support, and evaluate interventions for effectiveness.

There you have it, the powers-that-be plan to implement a no buy/sell/attend policy for those without antibody tracking. This is the mark of the beast, plain and simple.

Step 3 of their scheme is to create a data commons and digital platform that will eventually link all Americans to a nexus based Skynet-like system that will ultimately be integrated with artificial intelligence (A.I.).

There is a need to develop a real-time common data-sharing platform to better understand available testing capacity. This could take the form of a state-by-state heat map of laboratories to help governors and other elected officials make informed decisions on how to allocate scarce resources. States should be encouraged to use a common platform, as there are multiple competing platforms in place, limiting the effectiveness of existing data. This should be done in partnership with the National Governors Association. To further encourage the uptake of this data commons, a set of compelling use cases should be put forward for how certain states have optimized data and its impact on curtailing the impact of Covid-19.

…

Marrying much of this information into easy-to-understand dashboards to improve decision-making by both public and private sector leaders will be an ongoing challenge as a flood of data threatens to create a thickening fog of information. Such a platform should allow users to integrate multiple datasets on the fly, model interventions, and track disparate impact on minority communities.

Platforms and apps can be used not only to identify emerging hot spots but also for developing and operating back-to-work predictive models. Such models can help make decisions about which regions at which times should move from shelter-at-home to work, and, as necessary, back to shelter-at-home again.

Additionally, they are all set to roll out tracking and tracing apps which they plan to entice the general public into using by offering incentives this way that the program will not be perceived as forced but will rather be perceived as voluntary. However, if need be they will force the issue by either ramping up media propaganda or by making it mandatory altogether in the name of the invisible enemy known as COVID-19.

Ladies and gentlemen, when the New World Order is upon us how will you react? Are you willingly going to accept the mark of the beast or will you stand up and resist it at all costs? The choice is yours but just remember what you choose to do may drastically affect not only your life but the lives of future generations to come.

#AmericaStrong

Related: Trump admits U.S. military, other forces, will vaccinate most Americans by 2021

Please comment below in the comments section of this blog and share this far and wide on all your social media platforms. 

Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, analyst, political pundit, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics (Intellihub.com). Shepard is also known for producing Shade: The Motion Picture (2013) and appearing on Travel Channel’s America Declassified (2013). Shepard is a contributor to Alex Jones’ Infowars platform and is also a regular on Coast To Coast AM with George Noory. Read more from Shep’s World. Follow Shep on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Shep’s YouTube channel.

©2020. INTELLIHUB.COM. All Rights Reserved.

 

‘Propaganda machine says it’s OK for there to be Bezos and Zuckerberg’: Roger Waters tells RT how media shields Covid-19 villains

Source

rt.com

16 May, 2020

©  RT America

Mankind is headed for annihilation unless societies reject unjust economic systems and media war propaganda, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters told RT, noting that the Covid-19 crisis could serve as a much-needed wake-up call.

“Clearly what Covid-19 has told us all is that in order to face a common enemy, like a virulent virus, we’re going to need to cooperate, to act together… as a global community,” Waters told RT’s Rick Sanchez on Friday.

If we don’t cooperate, we’re all dead. The planet’s over. We’re heading for the cliff of omnicidal destruction of everything. So will this be a wake-up call? I hope so.

Calling “neoliberal economics” the “elephant in the room,” Waters said such cooperation is made near-impossible when public policy is driven by a “motive to maximize the bottom line of profit for the corporations that run our countries.” As many struggle to afford rent or put food on the table, some nations have responded to the pandemic by printing “billions, trillions of dollars” to dole out to the politically well-connected.

ALSO ON RT.COM‘Interests of elites v human rights’? UN warns against hasty lockdown lifting as global death toll tops 300,000

Fortunately, the rockstar went on, the internet has shattered the “constraints of the mainstream media,” allowing a community of like-minded people interested in human rights and “the truth” to flourish and grow.

“The main focal point of our conversation often is: How do we combat the huge propaganda machine that has persuaded most of our brothers and sisters that this is normal – that it’s OK for there to be Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg… and everybody else is on the bread line?” he said.

The propaganda that we’re faced with everyday is: ‘Ah don’t worry about that, leave it to your leaders, we’ll figure it out – what’s important is that we have a war with the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians or the Venezuelans.’

Despite the obstacles, Waters said countless people are “slowly waking up” and growing more skeptical of corrupt institutions, encouraging them to keep up the pressure and continue speaking out.

“We refuse to shut up, we refuse to be quiet, we continue to rebel,” Waters said when asked about solutions to the social ills he diagnosed. “We say ‘No, this is bulls**t, this is just not good enough.’”

Pompeo warns the International Court of Justice (ICC) of ‘consequences’ if it probes Israeli war crimes

Source

http://www.presstv.com

Sunday, 17 May 2020

Israeli snipers target Palestinian protesters near the separation fence on March 30, 2018.

 

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has threatened that Washington will “exact consequences” if the International Criminal Court (ICC) moves ahead with a potential war crimes investigation into Israel.

Pompeo’s warning came after the ICC prosecutor decided to consider Palestine a state with the ability to submit complaints that could trigger probes into war crimes it says Israel committed in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

In December, ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that a five-year preliminary examination of the “situation in the state of Palestine” had provided her with a “reasonable basis to believe that war crimes were committed” by Israel.

Before launching an investigation, Bensouda had asked the Hague-based court’s pre-trial chamber to confirm whether the ICC had jurisdiction over alleged offenses committed there.

In a critical statement on Friday, Pompeo described the ICC’s investigations “illegitimate” and deemed the international tribunal a “political body, not a judicial institution”.

Israel, US team up to sabotage ICC war crimes investigation

The US and Israel are reportedly coordinating a joint campaign against the International Criminal Court as both face potential war crimes charges at the Hague.

“This unfortunate reality has been confirmed yet again by the ICC Prosecutor’s attempt to assert jurisdiction over Israel, which like the United States, is not a party to the Rome Statute that created the Court,” the statement read.

Pompeo said the US does not “believe the Palestinians qualify as a sovereign state”.

“The United States reiterates its longstanding objection to any illegitimate ICC investigations,” he said, adding, “If the ICC continues down its current course, we will exact consequences.”

Pompeo’s statement came two days after his trip to Israel for a meeting with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss Tel Aviv’s plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.

The US and Israel have previously claimed that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Israel and Palestine, that Tel Aviv is being “targeted unfairly” and that Palestine does not qualify as a state.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of US House and Senate legislators sent separate letters to Pompeo urging him to defend Israel, a firm US ally, against ICC investigations, saying the tribunal’s assertion amounted to a “politicization” of the court’s mission.

Palestine was accepted as an ICC member in 2015, three years after signing the court’s founding Rome Statute, based on its “observer state” status at the United Nations.

Both Israel and the US have refused to sign up to the ICC, which was set up in 2002 to be the only global tribunal trying the world’s worst crimes, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Both have claimed they have credible legal systems that can properly adjudicate human rights violations which make ICC intervention dispensable.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump’s administration has backed Israel in its battle against the court.

The Trump administration maintains a tense relationship with the ICC, having previously revoked Bensouda’s visa when she intended to investigate potential war crimes by US soldiers in Afghanistan.

ICC rejects Australia’s ‘unfounded’ challenge to probing Israeli war crimes

The International Criminal Court has rejected Australia

Bensouda previously dismissed Australia’s demand that the tribunal halt an investigation into war crimes committed by the Israeli regime in Palestine.

She affirmed that negative speculations surrounding the probe would not influence the ICC’s work and that the Palestine case would be conducted with “utmost professionalism, independence and objectivity in strict conformity with the Rome Statute”.

“Any insinuation or assertion to the contrary is simply misled and unfounded,” Bensouda said.

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War and Plagues: Military Spending During a Pandemic

War and Plagues: Military Spending During a Pandemic

Home

by CONN HALLINAN

MAY 15, 2020

Photograph Source: U.S. Navy – Public Domain

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise”

–Albert Camus,  “The Plague”

Camus’ novel of a lethal contagion in the North African city of Oran is filled with characters all too recognizable today: indifferent or incompetent officials, short sighted and selfish citizens, and lots of great courage. What not even Camus could imagine, however, is a society in the midst of a deadly epidemic pouring vast amounts of wealth into instruments of death.

Welcome to the world of the hypersonic weapons, devices that are not only superfluous, but which will almost certainly not work. They will, however, cost enormous amounts of money.  At a time when countries across the globe are facing economic chaos, financial deficits and unemployment at Great Depression levels, arms manufacturers are set to cash in big.

Hypersonic weapons are missiles that go five times faster than sound—3,800 mph—although some reportedly can reach speeds of Mach 20—15,000 mph. They come in two basic varieties, one powered by a high-speed scramjet, the other –launched from a plane or missile—glides to its target. The idea behind the weapons is that their speed and maneuverability will make them virtually invulnerable to anti-missile systems.

Currently there is a hypersonic arms race going on among China, Russia and the US, and, according to the Pentagon, the Americans are desperately trying to catch up with its two adversaries.

Truth is the first casualty in an arms race.

In the 1950s, it was the “bomber gap” between the Americans and the Soviets. In the 1960s, it was the “missile gap” between the two powers. Neither gap existed, but vast amounts of national treasure were, nonetheless, poured into long-range aircraft and thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The enormous expenditures on those weapons, in turn, heightened tensions between the major powers and on at least three occasions came very close to touching off a nuclear war.

In the current hypersonic arms race, “hype” is the operational word. “The development of hypersonic weapons in the United States,” says physicist James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ”has been largely motivated by technology, not by strategy. In other words, technologists have decided to try and develop hypersonic weapons because it seems like they should be useful for something, not because there is a clearly defined mission need for them to fulfill.”

They have certainly been “useful” to Lockheed Martin, the largest arms manufacturer in the world. The company has already received $3.5 billion to develop the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (Arrow) glide missile, and the scramjet- driven Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (Hacksaw) missile.

The Russians also have several hypersonic missiles, including the Avangard glide vehicle, a missile said to be capable of Mach 20. China is developing several hypersonic missiles, including the DF-ZF, supposedly capable of taking out aircraft carriers.

In theory hypersonic missiles are unstoppable. In real life, not so much.

The first problem is basic physics: speed in the atmosphere produces heat. High speed generates lots of it. ICBMs avoid this problem with a blunt nose cone that deflects the enormous heat of re-entering the atmosphere as the missile approaches its target. But it only has to endure heat for a short time because much of its flight is in frictionless low earth orbit.

Hypersonic missiles, however, stay in the atmosphere their entire flight. That is the whole idea. An ICBM follows a predictable ballistic curve, much like an inverted U and, in theory, can be intercepted. A missile traveling as fast as an ICBM but at low altitude, however, is much more difficult to spot or engage.

But that’s when physics shows up and does a Las Vegas: what happens on the drawing board stays on the drawing board.

Without a heat deflecting nose cone, high-speed missiles are built like big needles, since they need to decrease the area exposed to the atmosphere Even so, they are going to run very hot. And if they try to maneuver, that heat will increase. Since they can’t carry a large payload they will have to very accurate, but as a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, that is “problematic.”

According to the Union, an object traveling Mach 5 for a period of time “slowly tears itself apart during the flight.” The heat is so great it creates a “plasma” around the craft that makes it difficult “to reference GPS or receive outside course correction commands.”

If the target is moving, as with an aircraft carrier or a mobile missile, it will be almost impossible to alter the weapon’s flight path to intercept it. And any external radar array would never survive the heat or else be so small that it would have very limited range. In short, you can’t get from here to there.

Lockheed Martin says the tests are going just fine, but then Lockheed Martin is the company that builds the F-35, a fifth generation stealth fighter that simply doesn’t work. It does, however, cost $1.5 trillion, the most expensive weapons system in US history. The company has apparently dropped the scramjet engine because it tears itself apart, hardly a surprise.

The Russians and Chinese claim success with their hypersonic weapons and have even begun deploying them. But Pierre Sprey, a Pentagon designer associated with the two very successful aircraft—the F-16 and the A-10—told defense analyst Andrew Cockburn that he is suspicious of the tests.

“I very much doubt those test birds would have reached the advertised range had they maneuvered unpredictably,” he told Cockburn. “More likely they were forced to fly a straight, predictable path. In which case hypersonics offer no advantage whatsoever over traditional ballistic missiles.”

While Russia, China and the US lead the field in the development of hypersonics, Britain, France, India and Japan have joined the race.

Why is everyone building them?

At least the Russians and the Chinese have a rationale. The Russians fear the US anti-missile system might cancel out their ICBMs, so they want a missile that can maneuver. The Chinese would like to keep US aircraft carriers away from their shores. But anti-missile systems can be easily fooled by the use of cheap decoys, and the carriers are vulnerable to much more cost effective conventional weapons. In any case hypersonic missiles can’t do what they are advertised to do.

For the Americans, hypersonics are little more than a very expensive subsidy for the arms corporations. Making and deploying weapons that don’t work is nothing new. The F-35 is a case in point, but nevertheless, there have been many systems produced over the years that were deeply flawed.

The US has spent over $200 billion on anti-missile systems and once they come off the drawing boards, none of them work very well, if at all.

Probably the one that takes the prize is the Mark-28 tactical nuke, nick named the “Davy Crockett,” and its M-388 warhead. Because the M-388 was too delicate to be used in conventional artillery, it was fired from a recoilless rife with a range of 2.5 miles. Problem: if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction the Crockett cooked its three-man crew. It was only tested once and found to be “totally inaccurate.” So, end of story? Not exactly. A total of 2,100 were produced and deployed, mostly in Europe.

While the official military budget is $738 billion, if one pulls all US defense related spending together, the actual cost for taxpayers is $1.25 trillion a year, according to William Hartung of the Center for International Policy. Half that amount would go a long way toward providing not only adequate medical support during the Covid-19 crisis, it would pay jobless Americans a salary

Given that there are more than 31 million Americans now unemployed and the possibility that numerous small businesses—restaurants in particular—will never re-open, building and deploying a new generation of weapons is a luxury the US—and other countries—cannot afford. In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or vaccines.

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More articles by:CONN HALLINAN

Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com 

1918 American Flu Historical Documentary (39 min)

Historical documentary about 1918 Swine Flu or Spanish Flu and the role of World War I in spreading the disease among troops making it into a worldwide plague of devastating proportions. The video covers where it began, how and where it spread, the symptoms, how it affected America, and whether it could happen again. (It did, it’s here!)