Health & Fitness

Robert Epstein, who received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1981 and served as the former editor in chief at Psychology Today, is now a senior research psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, where for the last decade he has helped expose Google's manipulative and deceptive practices. He explains what got him interested in investigating the internet search monopoly in the first place:

"In 2012, January 1st, I received some emails from Google saying my website contained malware and that they were somehow blocking access. This means I had gotten onto one of Google's blacklists.

My website did contain some malware. It was pretty easy to get rid of, but it turns out it's hard to get off of a Google blacklist. That's a big problem. I started looking at Google just a little bit differently.

I wondered, first of all, why they were notifying me about this rather than some government agency or some nonprofit organization? Why was a private company notifying me?

In other words, who made Google sheriff of the internet? Second, I learned they had no customer service department, which seemed very strange, so if you have a problem with Google, then you have a problem because they don't help you solve the problem.

I learned also that although you can get onto a blacklist in a split second, it can take weeks to get off a blacklist. There have been businesses that have gotten onto their blacklists and have gone out of business while they're trying to straighten out the problem.

The thing that really caught my eye — because I've been a programmer my whole life — was I couldn't figure out how they were blocking access to my website, not just through their own products … Google.com, the search engine, or through Chrome, which is their browser, but through Safari, which is an Apple product, through Firefox, which is a browser run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization.

How was Google blocking access through so many different means? The point is I just started to get more curious about the company, and later in 2012, I happened to be looking at a growing literature, which was about the power of search rankings to impact sales.

This was in the marketing field and it just was astonishing. In other words, if you could push yourself up one more notch in their search results, that could make the difference between success or failure for your company; it could mean a lot more income.

It turns out that this initial research was saying that people really trust those higher ranked search results. I simply asked a question. I wondered whether, if people trust those higher rank search results, I could use search results to influence people's opinions, maybe even their votes."

What Epstein discovered through his subsequent research, which began in 2013, is that yes, biased search results can indeed be used to influence public opinion and sway undecided voters. What's more, the strength of that influence was shocking.

He also eventually discovered how Google is able to block website access on browsers other than their own. His findings were published in 2016 in U.S. News & World Report.¹

Google's Powers Pose Serious Threats to Society

Google's powers pose three specific threats to society:

While surveillance is Google's primary business, their revenue — which exceeds $130 billion a year — comes almost exclusively from advertising. All that personal information you've provided them through their various products is sold to advertisers looking for a specific target audience.

How Google Can Shift Your Perception Without Your Knowledge

Epstein's controlled, randomized, double-blind and counterbalanced experiments have revealed a number of different ways in which Google can shift public perception. The first effect he discovered is called SEME, which stands for search engine manipulation effect. For a full description of the basic experiment used to identify this effect, please listen to the interview.

In summary, the aim of his experiment was to see whether search results biased toward a particular political candidate would be capable of shifting users' political opinion and leanings.

"I had predicted, when we first did this, that we would get a shift," Epstein says, "because … people do trust higher ranked search results, and of course we had biased the search results so that, if in that first group, someone was clicking on a high-ranking search result, that would connect them to a webpage which made one candidate look much better than the other …

I predicted we could get a shift in voting preferences of 2% to 3%. I was way off. We got … a shift of 48%, which I thought must be an error because that's crazy …

I should note that in almost all of our experiments, especially those early ones, we deliberately used undecided voters. That's the key. You can't easily push the opinions or voting preferences of people who are partisan, who are strongly committed to one party or another, but people who are undecided, those are the people who are very vulnerable. In our experiments, we always find a way to use undecided voters.

In these early experiments, the way we guaranteed that our voters were undecided was by using people from the U.S. as our participants, but the election we chose was the 2010 election for the prime minister of Australia.

They're real candidates, a real election, real search results, real webpages, and of course, because our participants were from the U.S. they were not familiar with the candidates.

In fact, that's why, before they do the search, we get this almost perfect 50/50 split regarding who they're going to vote for, because they don't know these candidates. The information they're getting from the search, that, presumably, is why we get a shift."

Simple Trick Effectively Masks Search Bias

Another thing Epstein noticed was that very few seemed to realize they were seeing biased search results. In other words, the manipulation went virtually undetected.

In a second experiment, they were able to achieve a 63% shift in voter preference, and by masking the bias — simply by inserting a pro-opponent result here and there — they were able to hide the bias from almost everyone.

"In other words, we could get enormous shifts in opinions and voting preferences with no one being able to detect the bias in the search results we were showing them," Epstein says. "This is where, again, it starts to get scary. Scarier still is when we moved on to do a national study of more than 2,000 people in all 50 states."

What this large-scale investigation revealed is that the few who actually notice the bias are not protected from its effects. Curiously, they actually shift even further toward the bias, rather than away from it.

As evidenced by other studies, the pattern of clicks is a key factor that makes search bias so powerful: 50% of all search selections go to the top two items and 95% of all clicks go to the first page of search results.

"In other words, people spend most of their time clicking on and reading content that comes from high-ranking search results. If those high-ranking search results favor one candidate, that's pretty much all they see and that impacts their opinions and their voting preferences," Epstein says.

Subsequent experiments revealed that this click pattern is the result of conditioning. Most of the things people search for are simple matters such as local weather or the capital of a country. The most appropriate and correct answer is always at the very top. This conditions them to assume that the best and truest answer is always the most high-ranked listing.

Google May Have Shifted Millions of Votes in 2016 Elections

The ramifications of the search engine manipulation effect can be immense. Of course, having power to shift public opinion is one thing; actually using that power is another. So, Epstein's next target was to determine whether Google is using its power of influence or not.

"Early 2016, I set up the first-ever monitoring system, which allowed me to look over the shoulders of people as they were conducting election-related searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. I had 95 field agents (as we call them), in 24 states.

We kept their identities secret, which took a lot of work. And this is exactly, by the way, what the Nielsen company does to generate ratings for television shows. They have several thousand families. Their identities are secret. They equip the families with special boxes, which allow Nielsen to tabulate what programs they're watching …

Inspired by the Nielsen model, we recruited our field agents, we equipped them with custom passive software. In other words, no one could detect the fact that they have the software in their computers. But that software allowed us to look over their shoulders as they conducted election related searches …

We ended up preserving 13,207 election-related searches and the nearly 100,000 webpages to which the search results linked … After the election, we rated the webpages for bias, either pro-Clinton or pro-Trump … and then we did an analysis to see whether there was any bias in the search results people were seeing.

The results we got were crystal clear, highly significant statistically … at the 0.001 level. What that says is we can be confident the bias we were seeing was real, and it didn't occur because of some random factors. We found a pro-Clinton bias in all 10 search positions on the first page of Google search results, but not on Bing or Yahoo.

That's very important. So, there was a significant pro-Clinton bias on Google. Because of the experiments I had been doing since 2013, I was also able to calculate how many votes could have been shifted with that level of bias… At bare minimum, about 2.6 million [undecided] votes would have shifted to Hillary Clinton."

On the high end, Google's biased search results may have shifted as many as 10.4 million undecided voters toward Clinton, which is no small feat — all without anyone realizing they'd been influenced, and without leaving a trace for the authorities to follow.

According to Epstein's calculations, tech companies, Google being the main one, can shift 15 million votes leading up to the 2020 election, which means they have the potential to select the next president of United States.

Google Has the Power to Determine 25% of Global Elections

Many who look at Epstein's work end up focusing on Google's ability to influence U.S. politics, but the problem is much bigger than that.

"As I explained when I testified before Congress, the reason why I'm speaking out about these issues is because, first of all, I … think it's important that we preserve democracy and preserve the free and fair election. To me, it's pretty straight forward.

But the problem is much bigger than elections or democracy or the United States. Because I calculated back in 2015 that … Google's search engine — because more than 90% of searches worldwide are conducted on Google — was determining the outcomes of upwards of 25% of the national elections in the world.

How can that be? Well, it's because a lot of elections are very close. And that's the key to understanding this. In other words, we actually looked at the win margins in national elections around the world, which tend to be very close. In that 2010 Australian election, for example, the win margin was something like 0.2% …

If the results they're getting on Google are biased toward one candidate, that shifts a lot of votes among undecided people. And it's very, very simple for them to flip an election or … rig an election … It's very, very simple for Google to do that.

They can do it deliberately, which is kind of scary. In other words, some top executives at Google could decide who they want to win an election in South Africa or the U.K. or anywhere. It could be just a rogue employee at Google who does it. You may think that's impossible … [but] it's incredibly simple …

[A] senior software engineer at Google, Shumeet Baluja, who's been at Google almost since the very beginning, published a novel that no one's ever heard of called 'The Silicon Jungle' … It's fictional, but it's about Google, and the power that individual employees at Google have to make or break any company or any individual.

It's a fantastic novel. I asked Baluja how Google let him get away with publishing it and he said, 'Well, they made me promise I would never promote it.' That's why no one's ever heard of this book."

A Dictator Unlike Anything the World Has Ever Known

Another, and even more frightening possibility, is that Google could allow its biased algorithm to favor one candidate over another without caring about which candidate is being favored.

"That's the scariest possibility," Epstein says, "because now you've got an algorithm, a computer program, which is an idiot … deciding who rules us. It's crazy."

While this sounds like it should be illegal, it's not, because there are no laws or regulations that restrict or dictate how Google must rank its search results. Courts have actually concluded that Google is simply exercising its right to free speech, even if that means destroying the businesses they demote in their search listings or black listings.

The only way to protect ourselves from this kind of hidden influence is by setting up monitoring programs such as Epstein's all over the world. "As a species, it's the only way we can protect ourselves from new types of online technologies that can be used to influence us," he says. "No dictator anywhere has ever had even a tiny fraction of the power that this company has."

Epstein is also pushing for government to make the Google search index a public commons, which would allow other companies to create competing search platforms using Google's database. While Google's search engine cannot be broken up, its monopoly would be thwarted by forcing it to hand over its index to other search platform developers.

The Influence of Search Suggestions

In 2016, Epstein also discovered the remarkable influence of search suggestions — the suggested searches shown in a drop-down menu when you begin to type a search term. This effect is now known as the search suggestion effect or SSE. Epstein explains:

"Initially the idea was they were going to save you time. That's the way they presented this new feature. They were going to anticipate, based on your history, or based on what other people are searching for, what it is you're looking for so you don't have to type the whole thing. Just click on one of the suggestions. But then it changed into something else. It changed into a tool for manipulation.

In June 2016, a small news organization … discovered that it was virtually impossible to get negative search suggestions related to Hillary Clinton, but easy to get them for other people including Donald Trump. They were very concerned about this because maybe that could influence people somehow.

So, I tried this myself, and I have a wonderful image that I preserved showing this. I typed in 'Hillary Clinton is' on Bing and on Yahoo, and I got those long lists, eight and 10 items, saying, 'Hillary Clinton is the devil. Hillary Clinton is sick' … all negative things that people were actually searching for.

How do I know that? Because we checked Google trends. Google trends shows you what people are actually searching for. Sure enough, people were actually searching for all these negative things related to Hillary Clinton. Those [were] the most popular search terms.

So, we tried it on Google and we got, 'Hillary Clinton is winning, Hillary Clinton is awesome.' Now you check those phrases on Google trends and you find no one is searching for 'Hillary Clinton is awesome.' Nobody. Not one. But that's what they're showing you in their search suggestions.

That again got my research gears running. I started doing experiments because I said, 'Wait a minute, why would they do this? What is the point?'

Here's what I found in a series of experiments: Just by manipulating search suggestions, I could turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split — with no one having the slightest idea that they've been manipulated."

YouTube's Up Next Algorithm

YouTube, which is owned by Google, also has enormous influence on public opinion. According to Epstein, 70% of the videos people view on YouTube are suggested by Google's top secret Up Next algorithm, which recommends videos for you to view whenever you're watching a video.

Just like the search suggestions, this is a phenomenally effective ephemeral manipulation tool. There's no record of the videos recommended by the algorithm, yet it can take you down the proverbial rabbit hole by feeding you one video after another.

"There are documented cases now in which people have been converted to extreme Islam or to white supremacy, literally because they'd been pulled down a rabbit hole by a sequence of videos on YouTube," Epstein says.

"Think of that power. Again, it's not powerful for people who already have strong opinions. It's powerful for the people who don't, the people who are vulnerable, the people who are undecided or uncommitted. And that's a lot of people."

The Creepy Line

Most people now have Amazon Prime. If you are one of those who do, you can watch the following documentary for free on Prime. It is well worth your time to do so. Epstein and many other experts provide a very compelling overview of the dangers that we discuss in our interview. In my view, this is a must-watch and one to recommend to your friends and family.

A question Epstein raises is, "Who gave this private company, which is not accountable to any of us, the ability to determine what billions of people around the world will see or will not see?"

That is perhaps one of the biggest issues. Epstein and others attempt to answer this question in this documentary, "The Creepy Line," which is a direct quote from Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

"Traditional media have very serious constraints placed on them, but Google, which is far more penetrating and far more effective at influencing people, has none of these constraints," Epstein says.

"There are lots of good people in ['The Creepy Line'], lots of good data, and it explains my research very clearly, which is wonderful. It explains my research better than I explain my research. 'The Creepy Line' is available on iTunes and on Amazon. I think it costs $3 or $4 to watch … If you're an Amazon Prime Member it's free. It's an excellent film."

Google Runs a Total Surveillance State

In his article² "Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy," Epstein outlines his recommendations for protecting your privacy while surfing the web, most of which don't cost anything. You can access the article at: MySevenSimpleSteps.com

"My first sentence is 'I have not received a targeted ad on my computer or mobile phone since 2014.' Most people are shocked by that because they're bombarded with targeted ads constantly.

More and more people are telling me that they're just having a conversation with someone, so they're not even doing anything online per se, but their phone is nearby — or they're having a conversation in their home and they have Amazon Alexa or Google Home, these personal assistants — and the next thing they know they start getting targeted ads related to what they were talking about.

This is the surveillance problem … The point is that there are ways to use the internet, tablets and mobile phones, to preserve or protect your privacy, but almost no one does that. So, the fact is that we're now being surveilled 24/7, generally speaking, with no awareness that we're even being surveilled.

Maybe some people are aware that when they do searches on Google the search history is preserved forever … But it goes so far beyond that because now we're being surveilled through personal assistants, so that when we speak, we're being [surveilled].

It goes even beyond that, because a few years ago Google bought the Nest company, which makes a smart thermostat. After they bought the company, they put microphones into the smart thermostats, and the latest versions of the smart thermostats have microphones and cameras.

Google has been issued patents in recent years, which give them, basically, ownership rights over ways of analyzing sounds that are picked up by microphones in people's homes.

They can hook you up with dentists, they can hook you up with sex therapists, with mental health services, relationship coaches, et cetera. So, there's that. Location tracking has also gotten completely out of hand. We've learned in recent months that even when you disable location tracking … on your mobile phone, you're still being tracked."

This is one of the reasons I strongly recommend that you use a VPN on your cellphone and computer, as this will prevent virtually anyone from tracking and targeting you. There are many out there but I am using the one Epstein recommends, Nord VPN, which is only about $3 per month and you can use it on up to six devices. In my view, this is a must if you seek to preserve your privacy.

How Google Tracks You Even When You're Offline

You can learn a lot about a person by tracking their movements and whereabouts. Most of us are very naïve about these things. As explained by Epstein, location tracking technology has become incredibly sophisticated and aggressive.

Android cellphones, for example, which are a Google-owned operating system, can track you even when you're not connected to the internet, whether you have geo tracking enabled or not.

"It just gets creepier and creepier," Epstein says. "Let's say you pull out your SIM card. Let's say you disconnect from your mobile service provider, so you're absolutely isolated. You're not connected to the internet. Guess what? Your phone is still tracking everything you do on that phone and it's still tracking your location."

As soon as you reconnect to the internet, all that information stored in your phone is sent to Google. So, even though you may think you've just spent the day incognito, the moment you reconnect, every step you've made is shared (provided you had your phone with you).

In terms of online tracking, it's also important to realize that Google is tracking your movements online even if you're not using their products, because most websites use Google Analytics, which tracks everything you do on that website. And, you have no way of knowing whether a website uses Google Analytics or not.

Steps to Protect Your Online Privacy

To protect your privacy, Epstein recommends taking the following steps, seven of which are outlined in "Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy." The last one, Fitbit, is a more recent concern.

Use a virtual private network (VPN) such as Nord, which is only about $3 per month and can be used on up to six devices. In my view, this is a must if you seek to preserve your privacy. Epstein explains: "When you use your mobile phone, laptop or desktop in the usual way, your identity is very easy for Google and other companies to see. They can see it via your IP address, but more and more, there are much more sophisticated ways now that they know it's you. One is called browser fingerprinting. This is something that is so disturbing. Basically, the kind of browser you have and the way you use your browser is like a fingerprint. You use your browser in a unique way, and just by the way you type, these companies now can instantly identify you. Brave has some protection against a browser fingerprinting, but you really need to be using a VPN. What a VPN does is it routes whatever you're doing through some other computer somewhere else. It can be anywhere in the world, and there are hundreds of companies offering VPN services. The one I like the best right now is called Nord VPN. You download the software, install it, just like you install any software. It's incredibly easy to use. You do not have to be a techie to use Nord, and it shows you a map of the world and you basically just click on a country. The VPN basically makes it appear as though your computer is not your computer. It basically creates a kind of fake identity for you, and that's a good thing. Now, very often I will go through Nord's computers in the United States. Sometimes you have to do that, or you can't get certain things done. PayPal doesn't like you to be in a foreign country for example." Nord, when used on your cellphone, will also mask your identity when using apps like Google Maps.

Do not use Gmail, as every email you write is permanently stored. It becomes part of your profile and is used to build digital models of you, which allows them to make predictions about your line of thinking and every want and desire. Many other older email systems such as AOL and Yahoo are also being used as surveillance platforms in the same way as Gmail. ProtonMail.com, which uses end-to-end encryption, is a great alternative and the basic account is free.

Don't use Google's Chrome browser, as everything you do on there is surveilled, including keystrokes and every web page you've ever visited. Brave is a great alternative that takes privacy seriously. Brave is also faster than Chrome, and suppresses ads. It's based on Chromium, the same software infrastructure that Chrome is based on, so you can easily transfer your extensions, favorites and bookmarks.

Don't use Google as your search engine, or any extension of Google, such as Bing or Yahoo, both of which draw search results from Google. The same goes for the iPhone's personal assistant Siri, which draws all of its answers from Google. Alternative search engines suggested by Epstein include SwissCows and Qwant. He recommends avoiding StartPage, as it was recently bought by an aggressive online marketing company, which, like Google, depends on surveillance.

Don't use an Android cellphone, for all the reasons discussed earlier. Epstein uses a Blackberry, which is more secure than Android phones or the iPhone. Blackberry's upcoming model, the Key3, will be one of the most secure cellphones in the world, he says.

Don't use Google Home devices in your house or apartment. These devices record everything that occurs in your home, both speech and sounds such as brushing your teeth and boiling water, even when they appear to be inactive, and send that information back to Google. Android phones are also always listening and recording, as are Google's home thermostat Nest, and Amazon's Alexa.

Clear your cache and cookies. As Epstein explains in his article:3 "Companies and hackers of all sorts are constantly installing invasive computer code on your computers and mobile devices, mainly to keep an eye on you but sometimes for more nefarious purposes. On a mobile device, you can clear out most of this garbage by going to the settings menu of your browser, selecting the 'privacy and security' option and then clicking on the icon that clears your cache and cookies. With most laptop and desktop browsers, holding down three keys simultaneously — CTRL, SHIFT and DEL — takes you directly to the relevant menu; I use this technique multiple times a day without even thinking about it. You can also configure the Brave and Firefox browsers to erase your cache and cookies automatically every time you close your browser."

Don't use Fitbit, as it was recently purchased by Google and will provide them with all your physiological information and activity levels, in addition to everything else that Google already has on you.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,¹ son of Sen. and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, both of whom were tragically murdered, has continued in the footsteps of these famously courageous men by standing up for the truth.

He co-founded Waterkeeper Alliance — the world’s largest clean water advocacy group — and provides legal counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which help protect organic producers. He has also fought legal battles on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, founded by Del Bigtree, and chairs the board of directors of the Children’s Health Defense.²

Kennedy wrote a brilliant foreword to Judy Mikovits’ book “Plague of Corruption,” in which he quotes his father saying, “Moral courage is the rarest species of bravery … rarer than the physical courage of soldiers in battle or great intelligence.” His father believed “moral courage was one of the most vital qualities required to change the world,” Kennedy says.

While Kennedy was referring to Mikovits’ moral courage, the same can be said for Kennedy himself, whose career as an environmental attorney and activist is built on defending those who cannot defend themselves.

This includes children who are being harmed by vaccines that have yet to be tested for safety, especially when given in combination with other vaccines. In September 2018, Kennedy proved the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) violated its mandate for safer childhood vaccines as stipulated in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Act.³

What Happened to Trump’s Vaccine Safety Commission?

When President Trump was elected, he contacted Kennedy and asked him to run his Vaccine Safety Commission. Unfortunately, the Safety Commission never got off the ground:

“I agreed to do it, but immediately after that, Pfizer wrote a $1 million check to his inauguration committee. He then appointed a Pfizer lobbyist, Alex Azar, to run the HHS, and he handpicked a Pfizer insider, Scott Gottlieb, to run the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As soon as they got in there, they shut down the Vaccine Safety Commission and any other questioning of vaccines,” Kennedy says.

“I think a lot of people were telling him, ‘You shouldn't be doing this,’ and [Bill] Gates was one of them. But I think once he took the money from Pfizer and put in their guys, [the commission] was dead in the water.”

Coronavirus Vaccine Development Has Failed for Decades

Kennedy goes on to share some of his insights and take on what Judy discusses in her book, the potential relationship between the flu vaccine and COVID-19, and his views on the COVID-19 vaccines currently being fast-tracked. With regard to the COVID-19 vaccine, he says:

“We're all waiting for a vaccine, and if they come up with a vaccine and they've actually done real safety testing on it, and the vaccine works, I would be happy to have the vaccine. But the problem is they're not [safety] testing it at this point …

People have tried for many years — for three decades — to create a coronavirus vaccine. The coronavirus can be super virulent, super deadly and super transmissible, or it can be mild, like a cold. The Chinese have been trying to [develop a vaccine] … and when you try to create a vaccine, what you do is you accelerate evolution.”

How to Accelerate the Evolution of a Virus

As explained by Kennedy, the way they accelerate evolution is by taking the coronavirus from the anus of the bat and replicate it in animal tissue such as pangolin kidney tissue. Next, the grown viruses are placed on feral monkey kidney cells, followed by mouse brain tissue.

Each time you transfer the virus to another animal tissue, you increase the risk of zoonotic animal virus contamination in addition to mutations. According to Kennedy, six years of evolution can be accomplished in a matter of days using this accelerated evolution process. Through this process, extremely viral forms of the virus can be rapidly created. Typically, milder forms are used to create a vaccine. As explained by Kennedy:

“You can take a mild form and give a person that mild form, and they don't really get sick. They develop the antibodies, and that's the theory [behind vaccination]. But there are reasons that they like to create those super viral forms. One is, most of the labs where they do it, like Fort Detrick in [the U.S.] and Wuhan lab in China, are not only vaccine labs but they're also military labs.

So, they want to mess around and look at these viruses that they may be able to weaponize. Not only that, the people who are creating vaccines like to create super viral forms. They give them to mice who have been genetically engineered to have a human immune system, essentially. Then they try to cure them.

Those experiments were going on in the United States until 2014. They were Dr. Anthony Fauci's projects. President Obama ordered that to stop because they had a lot of lab escape problems in 2014 from three different labs …

Instead of stopping as he was ordered, Fauci moved those operations to the Wuhan lab in China and continued to do those experiments right up until the time that the coronavirus [pandemic occurred]. In fact, [infectious disease expert] Ian Lipkin was doing those experiments over there when [COVID-19] exploded. And I'll tell you exactly what happened because it's very suspicious.”

Was SARS-CoV-2 Released to Safeguard Continued Research?

Kennedy continues telling the story of how the COVID-19 epidemic may have been generated — by releasing the virus — to ensure that dangerous coronavirus research would continue and receive fresh funding:

“When President Trump came in, Obama had an office in the White House for pandemic defense, for pandemic security. They were involved in funding [coronavirus research projects in Wuhan] through Fauci. President Trump ended all funding for that office September 20, 2019. So that was the last paycheck any of those scientists got.

On September 30 [2019], a whole lot of scientists were laid off in Wuhan. October 1 is when the first case of [COVID-19 was reported]. So, it's suspicious because it looks like there's a possibility — and I'm speculating here; I want to make that clear — but there's a possibility that somebody who lost their job in that lab ... could have released the virus.

Because, immediately, it created an instantaneous market for people with that particular skillset, which is to study how to make a coronavirus vaccine. So, you could go from unemployed to highly employed almost overnight if you released one of those microorganisms they were creating in that lab. I don't know if that happened, but that's something that needs to be [investigated].”

Most Journalists Now Act as Pharmaceutical Reps

An even broader agenda appears to be the introduction of a far more authoritarian regime, along with the transfer of wealth from average people to the richest through a planned economic collapse.

“Of course, that's speculation,” Kennedy says, “and it's stuff that if we were living in a true democracy where there was a free press that was actually permitted to ask those questions and speculate on that, then we would be doing an investigation of those questions. We have a right to know and we all ought to know the answer.

Unfortunately, journalists today are no longer journalists, they're pharmaceutical reps … You're a huge threat to them because you are not part of the pharmaceutical [establishment].

You're telling people the truth, which is that there are problems with germ theory, and that the [first line of defense] we have against illness of all kinds, including infectious disease, is a really strong immune system. And that our immune system functions in an evolution-intended [way], which is to fend off billions, hundreds of billions of infectious viruses every single day.”

Coronavirus Vaccine May Be a Disaster Waiting to Happen

Kennedy goes on to summarize the history of coronavirus vaccine development, which began after three SARS epidemics had broken out, starting in early 2002.

“The first one was a natural epidemic that had moved from bats to human beings. The second two were lab-created organisms where people were experimenting with the coronavirus … That's noncontroversial. Everybody accepts that.

The Chinese, the Americans, the Europeans all got together and said, ‘We need to develop a vaccine against coronavirus.’ Around 2012, they had about 30 vaccines that looked promising. They took the four best of those and … manufactured the vaccines. They gave those vaccines to ferrets, which are the closest analogy when you're looking at lung infections in human beings.

The ferrets had an extraordinarily good antibody response, and that is the metric by which FDA licenses vaccines. Vaccines, as you know, are never tested in the field. They never give 5,000 people the vaccine, 5,000 people a placebo vaccine, and then tell them to go out and live life and watch what happens to those people. That never happens.

The way that vaccines get licensed is that FDA gives people a vaccine or the industry gives them the vaccines, and then they do a serological response [test to] see ‘Did you develop in your blood antibodies to that target virus?’ The ferrets developed very strong antibodies, so they thought, ‘We hit the jackpot.’ All four of these vaccines ... worked like a charm.

Then something terrible happened. Those ferrets were then exposed to the wild virus, and they all died. [They developed] inflammation in all their organs, their lungs stopped functioning and they died.

Then those scientists remembered that the same thing had happened in the 1960s when they tried to develop an RSV vaccine, which is an upper respiratory illness very similar to coronavirus.

At the time, they did not test it on animals. They went right to human testing. They tested it on I think about 35 children, and the same thing happened. The children developed a champion antibody response, robust, durable. It looked perfect, and then the children were exposed to the wild virus and they all became sick. Two of them died. They abandoned the vaccine. It was a big embarrassment to FDA and NIH …

Those scientists in 2012 remembered that, and they said, ‘This is the same thing that happened [back then].’ So, they look closer and they realize that there are two kinds of antibodies that were being produced by the coronavirus. There are neutralizing antibodies, which are the kind you want, which fight the disease, and then there are binding antibodies.

The binding antibodies actually create a pathway for the disease in your body, and they trigger something called … a paradoxical immune response or paradoxical immune enhancement. What that means is that it looks good until you get the disease, and then it makes the disease much, much worse …

Coronavirus vaccines can be very dangerous, and that's why even our enemies, people who hate you and me — Peter Hotez, Paul Offit, Ian Lipkin — are all saying, ‘You got to be really, really careful with this vaccine.’"

Dengue Vaccine Led to Criminal Prosecution

According to Kennedy, the same thing happened in 2014 with the dengue vaccine DENVax, which Fauci owns the patent on. “They knew from the clinical trials that there was a problem with paradoxical immune response,” Kennedy says, but they gave it to several hundred thousand Filipino kids anyway.

They got a great immune response from the vaccine, but those exposed to wild dengue got horribly sick and 600 of the children died. “Today, the Philippine government is prosecuting criminally a bunch of the people locally who were involved in that decision,” Kennedy says.

Coronavirus Mutates Rapidly

Another problem with coronavirus vaccines is that coronaviruses mutate very rapidly. Kennedy cites a recent Chinese study⁴ — “Patent-Derived Mutations Impact Pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2” — which was also reported in the New York Post⁵ April 21, 2020, in which they looked at the coronavirus strains found in hundreds of patients. They identified more than 30 different strains, 19 of which had previously not been seen. According to the authors:⁶

“Current genomic survey data suggest that single nucleotide variants (SNVs) are abundant … Here we report functional characterizations of 11 patient-derived viral isolates, all of which have at least one mutation. Importantly, these viral isolates show significant variation in cytopathic effects and viral load, up to 270-fold differences, when infecting Vero-E6 cells.

We observed intrapersonal variation and 6 different mutations in the spike glycoprotein (S protein), including 2 different SNVs that led to the same missense mutation. Therefore, we provide direct evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity.”

As noted by Kennedy, the question is, if you vaccinate against one of those strains, will it protect against the rest? Or might the coronavirus act more like the influenza virus, where the vaccine will only give you a narrow band of immune response and/or might actually enhance injury from other strains?

“The World Health Organization and the British Medical Services are now saying there is no evidence that even getting an infection from the coronavirus equips you with antibodies that will protect you in the future.

They're seeing a lot of reinfection of people who got COVID-19, got better, and then got [sick from] coronavirus again. If that's true, then it's unlikely that any vaccine will work because natural infection always [gives you] a wider band immune response than a vaccine.”

Flu Vaccination Increases Risk of Coronavirus Infection

Mikovits has strong beliefs on this issue, as she doesn't believe COVID-19 is due to SARS-CoV-2 alone but, rather, that the virus may serve to activate latent XMRV retroviral infection. She points out that retroviruses, not coronaviruses, are what cause the characteristic cytokine storm signature observed in COVID-19. Mikovits suspects that in people who do not have retroviral infections, SARS-CoV-2 causes no or only mild symptoms.

Like Mikovits, Kennedy cites a Pentagon study⁷ published in the January 10, 2020, issue of the Vaccine journal, which found you’re 36% more likely to get coronavirus infection if you got the influenza vaccine in 2017 or 2018. As noted in this study, titled “Influenza Vaccination and Respiratory Virus Interference Among Department of Defense Personnel During the 2017-2018 Influenza Season”:

“Receiving influenza vaccination may increase the risk of other respiratory viruses, a phenomenon known as virus interference. Test-negative study designs are often utilized to calculate influenza vaccine effectiveness.

The virus interference phenomenon goes against the basic assumption of the test-negative vaccine effectiveness study that vaccination does not change the risk of infection with other respiratory illness, thus potentially biasing vaccine effectiveness results in the positive direction.

This study aimed to investigate virus interference by comparing respiratory virus status among Department of Defense personnel based on their influenza vaccination status. Furthermore, individual respiratory viruses and their association with influenza vaccination were examined.”

Results were mixed. Interestingly enough, while seasonal influenza vaccination did not raise the risk of all respiratory infections, it was in fact “significantly associated with unspecified coronavirus (meaning it did not specifically mention SARS-CoV-2) and human metapneumovirus” (hMPV).

Those who had received a seasonal flu shot were 36% more likely to contract coronavirus infection and 51% more likely to contract hMPV infection than unvaccinated individuals.⁸

Looking at the symptoms list for hMPV⁹ is also telling, as the main symptoms include fever, sore throat and cough. The elderly and immunocompromised are at heightened risk for severe hMPV illness, the symptoms of which include difficulty breathing and pneumonia. All of these symptoms also apply for COVID-19. Again, while this study did not look at SARS-CoV-2 specifically, it did look at coronaviruses, so “It’s a red flag,” Kennedy says, adding:

“That study is not alone. We've found — and I've posted these on my Instagram — at least 10 other studies that say, ‘If you get the flu vaccine, you're much more likely to get a non-flu respiratory viral infection.’ The risk goes up, in some of those studies, about 600%. In some other of those studies, less than that — 200%, 300%, 400%.

But virtually all of these studies show that the flu vaccine actually makes you more susceptible to coronavirus, and there may be reasons for that. It's been speculated that there may be coronavirus contamination in the flu vaccines … [or] it could be the XMRV.

You're getting that paradoxical immune response because you've been inadvertently inoculated with the coronavirus when you get the flu vaccine. So, we don't know, but the observed effect is very well documented …

In Northern Italy, right before the outbreak of [COVID-19], there was a mass vaccination [using] a very powerful flu vaccine … But it's anecdotal. There's no proof of [a correlation]."

Mikovits believes one of the reasons older Italians got hit so hard in northern Italy is because the vaccine given there was grown in dog kidney cells, which she claims are contaminated with coronaviruses.

Can Flu Vaccination Trigger a Positive SARS-CoV-2 Test?

What’s more, Mikovits claims that anyone who has received a flu vaccine is likely to register as positive for SARS-Co-V-2 using a PCR test, for the fact that most flu vaccines in the U.S. are made in chicken cells or dog kidney cells, which her research shows are contaminated with coronaviruses. In our interview, she explained:

“[The vaccines] are grown in animal cells and … have some of the same host viral proteins and lock and keys. As they're floating through the laboratory where they’re growing large stocks of these cells, aerosolizing them, it contaminates and cross contaminates through the air ...

This is what we found in 2011. The big ‘Oh my God,’ was, we can't afford to retrofit our laboratories and manufacturing facilities toward biosafety level 3 and 4 to protect the lab workers who are spreading these viruses and getting infected. And now the [retroviruses] are aerosolized … All the cell lines are contaminated …”

Mikovits’ research showed that the contamination occurred during the original creation of the cultured cell lines used to then grow the vaccine in. In other words, the cells in which many vaccines are grown are already infected. That’s how the retroviruses get into the vaccine, and is then spread via injection. She doesn’t believe the contamination of vaccines with retroviruses was an intentional act. But the cover-up certainly is.

“The message of ‘Plague of Corruption’ is that we cannot mix animal and human tissues. Not just coronaviruses, but the infectious retroviruses [are spread this way]. We are injecting lots of animal tissue, fetal tissue, into humans, and we're creating novel viruses all the time, even within the individual or family,” she says.

Could Type 1 Interferon Be Used Against SARS-CoV-2?

According to Mikovits, the existence and function of XMRVs is highly relevant as it pertains to COVID-19. There are many coronaviruses in the natural world, but according to Mikovits, they're not highly pathogenic because they don't cause this inflammatory signature of disease that suggests the immune system is out of control and causing massive cytokine storms.

“This was our work for the last four decades … We were led down a path where we learned in 1991 that you could have HIV and never get AIDS.

If you employ the right treatment at the right time, then you stop the replication of the virus, you stop the reservoirs, you stop the immune destruction, and that could easily have been done in the case of SARS-CoV-2 with simple Type 1 interferon at a very low dose, which has 40 years of research [behind it].

I was part of the team that first used the immune therapy, a purified Type 1 interferon alpha, as a curative therapy for a leukemia. That research has proceeded for decades, [yet] the Food and Drug Administration said, ‘You can't use that in preventing coronaviruses from jumping from animals [to humans].’

[Type 1 interferon] is a simple food. It's a simple spray. We have it on the shelf now, made by Merck, [yet] Merck discontinued its use. Why would you do that if that was the frontline … prevention? Interferon alpha is your body's own best antiviral against coronaviruses and retroviruses.”

Understanding Interferons

One of Mikovits’ primary treatment recommendations is interferon 1 alpha, sold under brand names such as Alferon and Roferon, to shut down the replication of RNA viruses, including retroviruses and coronaviruses. She believes it might be beneficial to take twice a day for the duration of known exposure. Although a bottle costs around $600, one only needs small amounts and a bottle can treat 1,000 people for a week.

Interferon alpha Type 1^10,11 is a type of beneficial cytokine released by your body as one of its first line of defense against viral infections. In a nutshell, it interferes with viral replication. It’s also been shown to suppress certain types of tumors. As part of your immune system, it stimulates the infected cells and those nearby to produce proteins that prevent the virus from replicating within them.

Interferon alpha and beta also help regulate your immune response. As noted in a 2018 paper¹² on the dual nature of Type 1 and Type 2 interferons, “both antiviral and immunomodulatory functions are critical during virus infection to not only limit virus replication and initiate an appropriate antiviral immune response, but to also negatively regulate this response to minimize tissue damage.”

Like Mikovits, Dominic Chan, a Doctor of Pharmacy who recently updated an article on interferon on Medicinenet.com., proposes using interferons against COVID-19. The earlier article, written by Eni Williams, Pharm.D. and Ph.D., before she died in 2017,¹³ says:¹⁴

“Interferons modulate the response of the immune system to viruses, bacteria, cancer, and other foreign substances that invade the body. Interferons do not directly kill viral or cancerous cells; they boost the immune system response and reduce the growth of cancer cells by regulating the action of several genes that control the secretion of numerous cellular proteins that affect growth …”

She goes on to list a number of interferons that are commercially available, including Intron-A (interferon alfa-2b), Betaseron (interferon beta-1b) and many more. In April 2020, Chan added:

“Interferon beta-1a, currently in use to treat multiple sclerosis, and interferon alfa-2b are both under investigation as potential treatments for people with COVID-19 coronavirus disease …

Interferon Beta 1a, specifically, activates macrophages that engulf antigens and natural killer cells (NK cells), a type of immune T-Cell … The theory is, interferon may be able to make the immune system stronger by turning on dormant parts and directing them toward the defense against SARS-CoV-2's assault.”

It’s worth noting the warnings, however. According to Chan, if you already have flu-like symptoms and take interferons, the symptoms are likely to get worse before they get better, as your immune system ramps up. “If someone is already on a ventilator and symptoms are about to overwhelm them, giving them an interferon-based medicine could be catastrophic,” he says.

How to Make a Safe Vaccine

Mikovits also proposes a novel vaccine for weaponized viruses like this that involves the alpha interferon, small amounts of the virus and peptide T, which will block the interaction of the virus and keep your T cells from getting infected.

Unlike conventional vaccines, which are mostly injected, this would be oral and would only stimulate antibody humoral responses. Her version would also cause innate cellular immunity from the T cells.

To learn more about Mikovits’ research and conclusions, see “Could Retroviruses Play a Role in COVID-19?" You’ll find the full interview with her at the bottom of that article. To summarize some of the key take-home messages Mikovits delivers in that interview:

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