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Bill Gates foray into food, seeds, biopiracy and agricultural land goes way back this from 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/feb/25/vandana-shiva-seeds-farmers Vandana Shiva: 'Seeds must be in the hands of farmers' Biodiversity campaigner accuses corporate giants of trying to take over the world's seed supply through genetic engineering 19 Mark Tran Published:07:00 Mon 25 February 2013 Follow Mark Tran Global development is supported by (opens in a new window)About this content Vandana Shiva shows no sign of fatigue despite an overnight flight from Delhi and an hour's audience with Prince Charles before arriving at the Guardian, where she launches into her views on agriculture, food, biodiversity and "seed freedom". The Indian founder of Navdanya, which campaigns for biodiversity and against corporate control of food and seeds, says Africa is the battleground for two very different approaches to agriculture. One is the agroecological approach, based on the use of traditional seeds, diverse crops, trees and livestock, with smallholder farmers and the right to food at the core. The other is an industrial system based on monoculture, the use of fertilisers and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), where companies such as Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, BASF and Dow are dominant. No guesses as to where she stands, as she accuses these corporate giants of wanting to take over the world's seed supply through genetic engineering and patents by writing the World Trade Organisation's intellectual property rights treaty. She quotes a Monsanto representative as saying: "In writing this treaty, we were the patient, the diagnostician, the physician – all in one." Shiva is no fan of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation either, which she accuses of pushing a vision of agriculture based on GMOs and the use of fertilisers. The foundation, which supports the Guardian's Global development site, is one of the biggest players in agriculture. The US will spend around $1bn this year on averting global hunger – but that includes supporting big farms – and, in 2009, the UK Department for International Development (DfID) spent around £20m. In the past few years, the Gates Foundation has invested more than $2bn in trying to help smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia out of poverty. In Africa, the foundation funds several research organisations testing GM, and also Agra, the Nairobi-based Alliance for a Green Revolution, which aims to double the income of 20 million small-scale farmers and halve food insecurity in 20 countries by 2020. Although GM crops are allowed to be grown in only three countries, this is likely to change in the next five years. Sam Dryden, head of agriculture at the foundation, told the Guardian in an interview last year that it lobbies countries to accept GM technology but that he is keen to see more investment in traditional breeding and staple crops such as sorghum, millet and cassava that have been largely ignored by big seed companies. However, Shiva considers Agra to be making an assault on Africa's seed sovereignty. "Agra by itself would have been insignificant. But because of Gates's ability to leverage funding, Agra can have a big impact," says Shiva, adding that Agra ambassador Kofi Annan is trying to win funding from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation. On its website, Agra insists it is not just an extension of big international philanthropies like the Gates Foundation, but an independent organisation with its own board and governance structure. "Our funding comes from a large number of international donors, but our base, approach and leadership are uniquely African," says Agra. Shiva's fundamental argument against GMOs is that they represent a "petri dish" view that fails to take into account the complexity of the real world. "The idea that you can have everything in one gene is too crude to handle a complex living system," she argues. "You can't run away from systems thinking. GMOs represent an attempt to find an escape route, to think of one gene and then to move it." She also rejects the notion that it is possible to isolate a gene to develop a salt or drought resistant variety crop. "Say there are 1,500 climate resistant genes and we go to the gene bank to map drought resistant genes and make a bet on 100 varieties that have the highest potential. We still don't really know what's contributing to drought resistance. It is not a reliable way of finding drought resistant varieties. Diversity has to be the approach, there is no magic bullet. Diversity has to be our partner in adaptation and resilience." Besides, Shiva says, farmers in India have already developed drought tolerant varieties such as Nalibakuri, Kalakaya and Inkiri, and salt tolerant varieties such as Bhundi and Kalambank. In her campaign for seed diversity, Shiva is pushing for groups across the world to preserve seeds – and her visit to the UK in February was part of that drive. She describes her movement as "open source seed", a deliberate echo of open source software. For Shiva, GMOs represent 20 years of failed promises and worse, leading to the emergence of super weeds and super pests. In India, Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton, sold under the name "Bollguard", was supposed to control the bollworm pest, but according to a Seed Freedom report last year, The GMO Emperor Has No Clothes (pdf), the bollworm has become resistant to Bt cotton. On top of that, new pests have emerged and farmers are using more pesticides. Climate change, argues Shiva, makes biodiversity even more crucial. "In a period of climate change, the world needs a biodiverse system," she says. "The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers."

Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill Bill Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible. By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 187 “Gates has a Napoleonic concept of himself, an appetite that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.” — Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding judge in the Gates/Microsoft antitrust-fraud case The global lockdowns that Bill Gates helped orchestrate and cheerlead have bankrupted more than 100,000 businesses in the U.S. alone and plunged a billion people into poverty and deadly food insecurity that, among other devastating harms, kill 10,000 African children monthly — while increasing Gates’ wealth by $20 billion. His $133 billion fortune makes him the world’s fourth wealthiest man. Gates has been using that newfound cash to expand his power over global populations by buying devalued assets at fire-sale prices and maneuvering for monopoly control over public health, privatizing prisons, online education and global communications while promoting digital currencies, high tech surveillance, data harvesting systems and artificial intelligence. For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible. According to the newest issue of The Land Report, Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. Gates’ portfolio now comprises about 242,000 acres of American farmland and nearly 27,000 acres of other land across Louisiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Arizona, Florida, Washington and 18 other states. Thomas Jefferson believed that the success of America’s exemplary struggle to supplant the yoke of European feudalism with a noble experiment in self-governance depended on the perpetual control of the nation’s land base by tens of thousands of independent farmers, each with a stake in our democracy. So at best, Gates’ campaign to scarf up America’s agricultural real estate is a signal that feudalism may again be in vogue. At worst, his buying spree is a harbinger of something far more alarming — the control of global food supplies by a power-hungry megalomaniac with a Napoleon complex. Let’s explore the context of Gates’ stealth purchases as part of his long-term strategy of mastery over agriculture and food production globally. Beginning in 1994, Gates launched an international biopiracy campaign to achieve vertically integrated dominion over global agricultural production. His empire now includes vast agricultural lands and hefty investments in GMO crops, seed patents, synthetic foods, artificial intelligence including robotic farm workers, and commanding positions in food behemoths including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Philip Morris (Kraft, General Foods), Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble and Amazon (Whole Foods), and in multinationals like Monsanto and Bayer that market chemical pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers. As usual, Gates coordinates these personal investments with taxpayer-subsidized grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest and most powerful organization in all of international aid, his financial partnerships with Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Food, and his control of international agencies — including some of his own creation — with awesome power to create captive markets for his products. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé and partner to David Rockefeller, observed that, “Who controls the food supply controls the people.” In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations launched the $424 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) promising to double crop productivity and boost incomes for 30 million small farmers by 2020 while cutting food insecurity in half. Characteristically, Gates’ approach to global problems put technology and his chemical, pharmaceutical and oil industry partners at the center of every solution. As it turned out, Gates’ “innovative strategy” for food production was to force America’s failed system of GMO, chemical and fossil fuel-based agriculture on poor African farmers. African agricultural practices have evolved from the land over 10,000 years in forms that promote crop diversity, decentralization, sustainability, private property, self-organization and local control of seeds. The personal freedom inherent in these localized systems leaves farm families making their own decisions: the masters on their lands, the sovereigns of their destinies. Continuous innovation by millions of small farmers maximized sustainable yields and biodiversity. In his ruthless reinvention of colonialism, Gates spent $4.9 billion dollars to dismantle this ancient system and replace it with high-tech corporatized and industrialized agriculture, chemically dependent monocultures, extreme centralization and top-down control. He forced small African farms to transition to imported commercial seeds, petroleum fertilizers and pesticides. Gates built the supply chain infrastructure for chemicals and seeds and pressured African governments to spend huge sums on subsidies and to use draconian penalties and authoritarian control to force farmers to buy his expensive inputs and comply with his diktats. Gates made farmers replace traditional nutritious subsistence crops like sorghum, millet, sweet potato and cassava with high-yield industrial cash crops, like soy and corn, which benefit elite commodity traders but leave poor Africans with little to eat. Both nutrition and productivity plummeted. Soils grew more acidic with every application of petrochemical fertilizers. As with Gates’ African vaccine enterprise, there was neither internal evaluation nor public accountability. The 2020 study “False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)” is the report card on the Gates’ cartel’s 14-year effort. The investigation concludes that the number of Africans suffering extreme hunger has increased by 30 percent in the 18 countries that Gates targeted. Rural poverty has metastasized dramatically, and the number of hungry people in these nations has risen to 131 million. Under Gates’ plantation system, Africa’s rural populations have become slaves on their own land to a tyrannical serfdom of high-tech inputs, mechanization, rigid schedules, burdensome conditionalities, credits and subsidies that are the defining features of Bill Gates’ “Green Revolution.” The only entities benefiting from Gates’ program are his international corporate partners — and particularly Monsanto, in which the Gates Foundation Trust purchased 500,000 shares worth $23 million in 2010 (but later divested those shares after pressure from civil society groups). Gates himself even filmed commercials for Monsanto’s GMOs, touting them as the “solution” to world hunger. In a typical example of Gates’ strange largess, his foundation apparently made his taxpayer-subsidized “charitable” grants amounting to $10 million to the Big Ag behemoth, Cargill, to build his supply chains for GMO soy in South Africa. Africans call Gates’ program “Neocolonialism” or “Corporate Colonialism.” The AGRA Watch initiative of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice follows Gates’ agricultural and food policies. “The Gates Foundation and AGRA claim to be “pro-poor” and “pro-environment,” but their approach is closely aligned with transnational corporations, such as Monsanto, and foreign policy actors like USAID [United States Agency for International Development]. They take advantage of food and global climate crises to promote high-tech, market-based, industrial agriculture and generate profits for corporations even while degrading the environment and disempowering farmers. Their programs are a form of philanthrocapitalism based on biopiracy.” Gates’ climate activism (A memo to my environmental colleagues) To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.” These causes are all grim realities that pose existential threats to our children and require urgent attention. However, Gates’ record exposes his benevolent intentions as masquerades for his agenda to maximize personal profit and control. It’s baffling to me how so many of my friends in the environmental movement have swallowed Gates’ chicanery. In my 40 years as a climate activist, I saw zero evidence of Gates’ funding of genuine climate advocacy; the Gates Foundation is AWOL in the climate wars. The leading climate groups, National Resource Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Waterkeepers, etc., receive virtually nothing from the world’s largest philanthropy. His investment history suggests that the climate crisis, for Gates and his cronies, is no more than an alibi for intrusive social control, “Great Reset”-scale surveillance, and massive science fiction geoengineering boondoggles, including his demented and terrifying vanity projects to spray the stratosphere with calcium chloride or seawater to slow warming, to deploy giant balloons to saturate our atmosphere with reflective particles to blot out the sun, or his perilous gambit of releasing millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in South Florida. When we place these nightmare schemes in context alongside the battery of experimental vaccines he forces on 161 million African children annually, it’s pretty clear that Gates regards us all as his lab rats. Gates has also heeded Kissinger’s advice, “Control oil and you control nations;” his energy holdings nowhere reflect his expressed antipathy for greenhouse gases. Gates’ personal investments in hydrocarbons include massive stakes in all the oil majors: Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell. He owns the world’s largest private jet company. His outsized commitment to coal includes giant investments in the dirtiest coal-generating fleets including the Canadian National Railway and CSX Richmond which is the largest coal transporter east of the Mississippi River. Gates is betting big on the future of carbon. Gates’ energy-hungry data harvesting, processing and analytics centers are among the world’s fastest-growing sources of exploding energy demand. And, of course, Gates’ chemical/industrial agriculture enterprises are the antithesis of climate-friendly. His GMO corn requires heavy applications of fertilizers, pesticides, agro-chemicals made from natural gas and other fossil-fuel inputs. He effectively forced Africans, in Michael Pollan’s words, to “eat oil.” African farmers call Gates’ program “climate-stupid agriculture.” Gates has learned to fatten himself on global crises, whether it’s pandemics, climate, famine or mass extinction. Climate change has given Gates an excuse to create monopolies over seed, food and agriculture. In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $306 million in grants to promote high-yield sustainable agriculture among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The foundation’s plans included creation, through genetic manipulation, of high-production, drought-resistant dairy cows, and the development and proliferation of super crops resistant to climate change. In other words, climate change was the guise for more mischievous geoengineering. Meanwhile, Gates’ ag policies are destroying our planet’s climate systems, pushing millions of species to extinction, desertifying the soil, destroying water systems and enriching the Poison Cartel. So, a note to my fellow environmental leaders: Bill Gates is not our amigo! Furthermore, Gates has put climate reform in malodour with millions of Americans, who see his climate pretenses in context of his ambitions to control humanity and put an end to economic activity and personal freedom. It’s largely Gates’ doing that half of America sees climate change as either a “Great Reset” flimflam to shift wealth upward, or a geoengineering boondoggle. It’s on them that they don’t recognize the serious peril of climate change. It’s on us that we seem deliberately blinded to the peril of Bill Gates. Gates profits from all this confusion; the polarization of the climate debate paralyzes reform efforts thereby preserving the value of his carbon stakes. We all need to recognize who is really behind that Green mask! Subscribe to The Defender - It’s Free! Name* Email* Biopiracy “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter to all state governors, February 1937 Long experience and research have shown that agroecology based on biodiversity, Seed Freedom and Food Freedom is essential not just to civil liberties and democracy, but to the future of food and farming. For thousands of years, farmers’ innovation and biodiversity evolved together to create the most efficient practices for sustainable food production and biodiversity. The United Nations’ seminal 2009 study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) documents the incontrovertible evidence demonstrating the abject failure of the Gates/Rockefeller “Green Revolution” to improve on traditional agriculture. IAASTD deployed a team of 900 leading scientists, agronomists, and researchers to study the issue of world hunger. Their comprehensive and definitive report showed that GMO crops are not the answer to food shortfalls or rural poverty. That report definitively concludes that neither Gates’ Green Revolution nor his GMOs can feed the world and at the same time protect the planet. IAASTD’s comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the Green Revolution that the Rockefeller Foundation launched in India and Mexico in the 1960s was a catastrophe; the chemical path of monocultures has undermined Earth’s capacity to support life and food production by destroying biodiversity, soil and water, as well as contributing to climate change. Green Revolution policies subvert food and nutritional security, and dispossess small farmers through debt for external inputs. IAASTD and numerous other studies show that Seed Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty and Knowledge Sovereignty are the only viable future for food and farming. The United Nations and the world’s top agricultural scientists have admitted that GMOs cannot fight hunger as effectively as traditional farming. Bill Gates has opted to ignore this reality, dismissing science-based evidence in favor of his messianic faith that he is ordained by God to save the world with technology. According to Dr. Gates, M.D., good health only comes in a syringe (he is the world’s biggest vaccine producer). Likewise, Farmer Bill preaches that good food only comes from monocultures, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, GMO crops and patented seeds that he happens to own. In constructing his agriculture empire, Gates has repeatedly shown himself willing to ignore the voices of scientists and farmers, and to trample laws, treaties, traditions, civil rights, science, and sensibilities. Stealing seeds Since the onset of the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago, farmers and communities have worked to improve yield, taste, nutrition, robust seed qualities that enhance peculiar growth, medicinal and nutritional attributes, and the genetic resilience that allows certain seeds to flourish in particular soil and water conditions or resist predators. These vigorous, ingenious genetics are the products of a miraculous collaboration between humans, nature and their Creator during humanity’s 1,000 generations of intense agricultural innovation. The free exchange of knowledge and seeds among farmers has been the basis for maintaining biodiversity and food security. Since 1979, under World Bank auspices, a consortium of agricultural research centers known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has been collecting these premier seeds from small farmers across the globe and preserving them in 15 independent Public Seed Banks stationed in different countries. That venture sought to archive a complete inventory of heritage seed stocks for the benefit of all humanity so as to preserve crop diversity for the millennia. In the last 17 years, Gates has successfully maneuvered to gain control of those collections — comprising 768,578 seeds — and to assert monopoly ownership of the world’s premier seed inventories. Beginning in 2003, working in coordination with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped $720 million into CGIAR’s Seed Bank project. As the largest funder of the CGIAR, Gates used his financial leverage to force the merger of the CGIAR’s 15 legally independent centers into one legal entity, a sinister initiative that he calls “Gates Ag One.” He then moved to orchestrate the transfer of research and seeds from scientific research institutions to commodity-based corporations like Bayer and Cargill with which he partners. In this way he is raiding, plundering and privatizing the seed stockpile for the most promising seeds from indigenous farmers around the world. Gates Ag One’s director, Joe Cornelius, is a former executive at Bayer Crop Science. Prior to that, he was Monsanto’s Director of International Development. Working with Cornelius, Gates has perfected the techniques Monsanto pioneered in the 1980s when it led the push to propagate GMOs, and to patent seeds. Gates has made himself the Commanding General in Big Data’s pirate war to plunder and monopolize the common genomic data of millions of plants bred by peasants over the millennia. Gates funds Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global project he launched in 2015 to map the genomes and genome sequences of the peasant seed stocks held in seed banks. DivSeek and Gates Ag One are the tips of his spears, “mining” seed data to “censor” out the commons. In other words — to terminate the public’s ownership claims. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies, Gates’ minions at DivSeek and Gates AG One scan these seeds and categorize their genetic data to map, patent and pilfer humanity’s global seedstock heritage. Gates bolsters his patent rationale by using CRISPR technology to selectively edit the heritage seed genomes, making changes sufficient to withstand patent challenges. Gates’ principal objective is to breed Green Revolution varieties engineered to respond to chemical inputs produced by Gates’ “Poison Cartel” partners: Monsanto, Bayer, Dow/DuPont, CropLife, BASF, Syngenta, Corteva, etc. In short, Gates deliberately robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, erasing evolutionary history and its links to the soil, reducing it all to a simple “code.” In this way, Gates captures our planet’s genetic diversity, rewrites it, patents its code, steals the seeds from humanity and marries them off to the chemical conglomerates. By centralizing the Seed Banks and manipulating intellectual property laws, Gates has launched a campaign of “genetic colonialism” to rob the world’s peasants and indigenous farmers of their hard-earned seeds and knowledge. “Gates Ag One’s aim is to take control over the genetic diversity of this planet,” agricultural freedom activist Dr. Vandana Shiva told me. According to Shiva, Gates “continues to subvert and sabotage both farmers’ seed sovereignty and the seed sovereignty of countries. ‘Gates Ag One’ is a clear declaration of his intent to create an empire over life and biodiversity, over food and farming, and over our sustenance.” In the process, says Shiva, “Gates is financing infernal Frankenstein experiments that defile God’s creation.” Citizens, governments and farm organizations have written many laws and governments have adopted international treaties on biodiversity protection, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol to the CBD. By conning government officials, manipulating intellectual property law and rewriting seed regulations, Gates has been able to bypass or trample these statutes and treaties, and to evade the multilateral governance structures that governments put in place to prevent global corporations from hijacking the planet’s biodiversity and the seed commonwealth of peasants and farmers. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) Gates’ missionary faith in technology as the solution for every human ill, from food insecurity and disease to climate health, explains his obsessive promotion of GMOs. Gates’ zealous GMOs idolatry and gene-editing technologies leave him deaf to the mountains of peer-reviewed scientific evidence and warnings by agronomists, nutritionists, toxicologists and other scientists who question their safety. GMO vaccines and medicines are mainstays of his public health enterprise, and Gates finances research, development and proliferation of GMOs as the fix for every agricultural problem. He funded, for example, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the two CRISPR chemists who won 2020 Nobel prizes for gene editing. Gates was also one of the largest shareholders of Monsanto — the world’s most aggressive promoter of GMOs and pesticides. The central mission of Gates Ag One is to fly into the face of virtually every independent science and safety assessment in a blind rush to impose Gates’ untested GMOs, patented seeds, synthetic foods and experimental medicines on humanity. One might expect his Monsanto stake and his partnerships with processed food, chemical and oil companies to discredit Gates’ pretensions as a public health advocate. But Gates’ massive investments in media journalism (a March 2020 Nation magazine exposé reveals the Gates Foundation has bought Gates guarantees of favorable coverage with $250 million in grants to media outlets including NBC/Universal, BBC, NPR, The Guardian, Le Mond, Al Jazeera, and others “to influence the news”) have insulated him from the scrutiny and skepticism the media historically applied to fiendish profiteering schemes and rank hypocrisy by power-mad billionaires. Money talks, and the billions that Gates and his pharma allies annually pour into public and commercial journalism have instead made Gates the media’s chief darling. He uses his biweekly “satellite tours” of leading cable and network news shows to showcase his mesmerizing power to command softball questioning and fawning deference from obsequious hosts (with the exception of Norah O’Donnell) including Anderson Cooper (CNN), David Muir (ABC), Ari Melber (MSNBC), and Chuck Todd (NBC), who gratefully entertain his lofty prognostication on topics ranging from public health to the economy and agriculture policy. Evading government regulation Gates’ wealth and power also allow him to evade government efforts to regulate GMO proliferation. In 2011, when India introduced a moratorium on Gates’ genetically modified Bt Cotton and Roundup Ready crops, Gates shifted his operations to Bangladesh. When the European Court of Justice ruled that gene-edited organisms and GMOs must be heavily regulated to protect public health, Gates launched a lobbying campaign for deregulation across the European community. Gates is currently deploying his billions to orchestrate attacks against GMO and gene editing laws in many of the countries that have imposed safety standards. When scientists and regulators plead that time is essential to accurately assess the safety of gene editing and GMOs, Gates declares that “Time is the enemy!” In 2017, a German human rights group, Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBS), published evidence of a Gates’ secretive campaign to evade democratically imposed restraints on his high-risk gene manipulation experiments. HBS released more than 1,200 emails the group obtained under U.S. Freedom of Information laws. Those documents show that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hired a shady Big Ag/Biotech spy and propaganda outfit to mount an undercover espionage attack aimed at corrupting United Nations officials and sabotaging international efforts to ban a diabolical new technology called “gene drive.” Gene drives are at the cutting edge of genetic engineering, synthetic biology and gene editing. They are the tools of choice for eugenicists and for those seeking to build the technocratic “transhuman future” championed by Gates and his Silicon Valley cronies. Scientists use CRISPR technology to edit genes into an organism’s chromosomes to reprogram DNA to switch off the normal rules of genetic inheritance and “drive” the artificially introduced trait through an entire population and spread it to all future generations. Their capacity to permanently alter the genome of an entire species makes gene drives the biological instrument of ultimate power. Gene-editing technology could facilitate Gates’ schemes to create and patent new-and-improved species of plants and animals, or to exterminate species of which he disapproves. One of his aims is to use gene drives to insert “suicide genes” to eradicate entire mosquito species that spread Zika or malaria — a goal of the Target Malaria Project, in which the Gates Foundation has invested $40 million. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a long-time protégé and partner of Gates and an enthusiastic cheerleader for gene drive, told StatNews, “Getting rid of them would be a blessing.” Critics argue that gene drives pose an existential biosecurity risk to humanity due to their capacity to change or eliminate entire species and to catastrophically alter ecosystems. They are, also, the ultimate biological weapon; the most satanic minds in various military and intelligence agencies covet gene drives to breed supersoldiers or to mint “apocalypse genes.” Critics fear that nations might one day use “genocide genes” to eradicate certain races or undesirable traits. HBS’s Gene Drive Files expose the leading role of the U.S. military in the development of gene drive technology. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent approximately $100 million researching gene drives. The other primary Gene Drive investors are Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested $75 million in researching suicide and anti-fertility genes. At the 2016 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 13) in Cancun, 179 international organizations, including the Heinrich Böll Foundation, voted for the UN to impose a global moratorium on gene drives. The opponents of this technology also circulated a letter, “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience: No Place for Gene Drives in Conservation.” Environmentalists worry about unintended consequences if suicide or extinction genes leap species. The Gene Drive emails reveal that in reaction to the COP 13 resolution, the Gates Foundation hired “Emerging Ag,” a sketchy espionage concern with its own sinister entanglements with Big Pharma and Big Ag, to sabotage and shut down the diverse and unified international coalition opposing gene drive. The Gates Foundation gave Emerging Ag $1.6 million to “recruit a covert coalition of academics to manipulate the UN decision-making process over gene drives.” The emails reveal that the Gates’ campaign was part of the billionaire’s plan to “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents.” Emerging Ag secretly mobilized some 65 allegedly “independent scientists” for hire — “Biostitutes,” in the industry vernacular — and public officials to an online expert group, the UN CBD Online Forum on Synthetic Biology. A senior executive of the Gates Foundation provided these crooked operatives with daily instructions on how to sabotage regulations, undermine the science, discredit advocates, corrupt the process, and subvert democracy. In furtherance of its campaign, Gates simultaneously funded a 2016 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences endorsing gene driving. The DARPA co-funded the whitewash report with the Gates Foundation. As The Guardian noted after the release of the NAS report: “The same US defense research agency (DARPA) who paid for the NAS study have made it known that they are going all-in on gene drive research and development of ‘robust’ synthetic organisms. There is good reason to be worried.” As Jim Thomas of the ETC Group observed: “The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.” In furtherance of its coordinated campaign with Emerging Ag, the Gates Foundation manipulated three members, who were under Gates’ control, of the relevant UN expert committee known as AHTEG (Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group) on Synthetic Biology. Gates and Emerging Ag were successful and the UN shot down the moratorium. The Gates Foundation’s role, exposed by the Gene Drives files, in subverting the environmental movement’s campaign against this dangerous technology confirms Gates and his foundation as a rogue outlaw cartel with contempt for process, for democracy, for science, law, public opinion, public health and the safety of humanity. Subscribe to The Defender - It’s Free! Name* Email* Chemical warfare on human health Mounting evidence points to the kind of industrially grown and processed foods that Gates favors as leading culprits in the chronic disease epidemics that are devastating human health and debilitating children across the globe. The world’s most popular GMOs function to facilitate aerial spraying of pesticides. Monsanto’s technique of inserting genes to make agricultural crops resistant to weed-killing poisons allows Big Ag to fire ground-based farm workers, replacing them with airplanes (or drones) that saturate landscapes (and food) with aerosolized toxins like glyphosate and neonicotinoids. Since the proliferation of chemical pesticides in the 1940s, more than half of American songbirds have disappeared, most of the world’s bee and insect populations have collapsed and chronic disease rates in America have risen to 54% in lockstep with increased pesticide use. As Vandana Shiva pointed out, “Gates has declared chemical warfare not just on nature but on our body’s metabolic systems and the symbiosis in the gut microbiome with his pesticides and herbicides obsession, and his campaign to switch humanity to GMOs.” Synthetic foods: soylent ‘Gates’ Gates’ power, profit and control agenda appears to drive his commitment to synthesize so-called “transhuman” laboratory foods and his massive investments in processed food manufacturing. Gates calls synthetic meat “the future of food.” He holds investments in companies that make plant-based chicken, eggs and others that make food from bugs. Gates owns patents or has patents pending for over 100 animal proxies, from chicken to fish. He is invested heavily in Motif FoodWorks, a company that makes a variety of synthesized laboratory foods and ingredients. He co-founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 with his billionaire buddies Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg — the so-called “Pandemic Profiteers Club.” (U.S. billionaires have increased their wealth by $1.1 trillion since the lockdown began, while the number of impoverished Americans grew by 8 million.) That collaboration has large stakes in Beyond Meat, which they co-own with Tyson Foods and Cargill. Beyond Meat makes plant-based GMO and pesticide-laden chicken tacos. Gates and his Billionaire Boys Club also have big positions in Impossible Foods, which uses heat and pressure to produce synthetic burgers and bratwurst from GMO soy. Lab results show the company’s imitation meat contained glyphosate levels 11 times higher than its closest competitor. Seth Itzkan from Soil4Climate wrote: “Impossible Foods should really be called ‘Impossible Patents.’ It’s not food; it’s software, intellectual property — 14 patents, in fact, in each bite of Impossible Burger. It’s IFood, the next killer app. Just download your flavor. This is its likely appeal to Bill Gates, their über investor.” Another of Breakthrough’s ventures is Memphis Meats, which formulates an engineered meat-like tissue on a substrate of calf’s blood. A bullish Bloomberg predicts that synthetic meat revenues will reach $3.5 billion by 2026. In June 2020, the “Breakthrough Bros” invested $3.5 million in Biomilq, a company that produces synthetic breast milk from “cultured human mammary glands and epithelial cells.” Gates has not explained whether the milk will contain the maternal antibodies — present in authentic mother’s milk — that function to protect infants from infectious diseases, or whether the coming generations of Biomilq kids will need to rely, instead, on additional batteries of Gates’ GMO vaccines. Unimpressed, Vandana Shiva observes that Bill Gates “wants to deprive us of good, healthy proteins and fats and get us hooked on his synthetic lab-grown trash.” Gates is the creator and largest donor to the United Nations’ subsidiary, GAVI, a faux governmental agency that he created to push his diabolical chemical, medical and food concoctions, and conduct villainous vaccine experiments on Africans and Indians. Since 2014, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, funded by the Gates Foundation in the amount of almost $850K has aggressively pushed the use of insect protein — particularly for the poor. GAVI characterizes wasps, beetles, crickets and other insects as “underutilized” food sources. Following Gates’ lead, GAVI is optimistic that bugs will soon be an important food supplement for impoverished and undernourished children. Perhaps in anticipation of that happy day, the Gates Foundation has invested in a South African company that makes edible protein from cultivated maggots. The company’s factory houses a billion flies and produces 22 tons of maggots daily that graze on slaughterhouse, municipal and household waste. Since markets are still immature for maggots as human food, Gates sells his maggot-meal to factory meat operations like those owned by Gates’ partner, Tyson Foods, to feed battery-caged chickens, and to large-scale fish farms, like those owned by Unilever, a $58 billion multinational, which is both a business partner to Gates and a grant beneficiary of his peculiar public charity. As usual, Gates has also mobilized the international agencies that he controls and the large corporations with which he partners to drive his fake food agenda including, most notably, The Gates-funded World Economic Forum (WEF), which assembles the world’s billionaires in Davos each year to plan and plot out humanity’s political and economic future. WEF’s Chairman, Klaus Schwab, is the author of the influential book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset”, which WEF has apparently mailed to most of the world’s elected officials, down to provincial executives. Schwab makes the case that powerful people should use the COVID crisis to impose authoritarian controls, pervasive surveillance, oppressive new economic models and one-world government on a beleaguered, terrified and compliant humanity. The Great Reset is WEF’s plan to rebuild a new controlled economy systematically after the COVID-19 pandemic. Schwab and Prince Charles unveiled “The Great Reset” at a WEF summit in May 2020. It is a vision for transferring the world into a totalitarian and authoritarian surveillance state manipulated by technocrats to manage traumatized populations, to shift wealth upward, and serve the interests of elite billionaire oligarchs. To “reset” global food policies, the WEF has promoted and partnered with an organization called EAT Forum, which describes itself as the “Davos for food.” EAT’s co-founder is Wellcome Trust, an organization founded, funded by and strategically linked to vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline, in which Gates is heavily invested. EAT’s biggest initiative is called FReSH, which the organization describes as an effort to drive the transformation of the food system. The project’s partners include Bayer, Cargill, Syngenta, Unilever, and tech giant Google. The EAT Forum works with these companies to “add value to business and industry” and “set the political agenda.” To further this profit-making enterprise, EAT collaborates with nearly 40 city governments in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Australia. The organization also assists the Gates-funded United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the “creation of new dietary guidelines” and sustainable development initiatives. According to Frederic Leroy, a food science and biotechnology professor at University of Brussels, EAT network is working closely with some of the biggest imitation meat companies, including Impossible Foods and other biotech companies, to replace wholesome nutritious foods with Gates’ genetically modified lab concoctions. “They frame it as healthy and sustainable, which of course it is neither,” Leroy told The Defender. Dr. Shiva also scoffs at Gates’ perennial propaganda claims that his GMO meats are about feeding kids and derailing climate change: “Lab-processed fake food is really about patenting our food, not about feeding people or saving the climate, as Gates and his fellow biotech friends pretend. EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.” Leroy added: “Companies like Unilever and Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies are already chemical processors, so many of these companies are very well positioned to profit off of this new food business which revolves around processing chemicals and extracts needed to produce these lab-made foods on a global scale.” Fortified foods Synthetic and GMO foods tend to be low in the vital micronutrients that support human health. Glyphosate, for example, functions as a chelator. It kills weeds by leaching out the mineral building blocks of life. Farm crops exposed to glyphosate have far less nutritional value than natural foods. People eating Gates’ processed, synthetic and GMO foods may have full stomachs, while being clinically malnourished. Gates is rushing to solve this problem by buying technologies and partnering with companies like Roche and Kraft that fortify foods artificially with minerals and vitamins. He is simultaneously promoting laws in developing nations to mandate food fortification. Those laws benefit pesticide and processed food companies to the disadvantage of traditional and organic farmers. Since U.S. companies, like Roche, Kraft, General Foods and Philip Morris already fortify their processed cheese and cereals, they are Gates’ enthusiastic partners in this grift. I saw this hustle perpetrated by another Big Food swindler earlier in my career. In 2003, I was representing thousands of small-plot Polish farmers in the battle to keep Smithfield Foods’ industrial pork factories out of Poland. Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, Andrzej Lepper, told me that Smithfield officials offered him a $1 million bribe to support a law requiring slaughterhouses to install high tech hygiene technology including laser-operated restroom faucets. Smithfield knew the law would have the effect of shuttering the 2,600 family operated abattoirs that made Poland’s signature kielbasa sausage. As the only entity that could afford the lasers, Smithfield would thereby gain monopoly control of Poland’s slaughter capacity and 100% of its lucrative kielbasa exports. Gates took his food fortification laws from Smithfield’s playbook. By mandating that all foods be fortified, Kraft products like Cheez Whiz and American Singles, and its vitamin-fortified Kool-Aid and Tang, are positioned to displace locally produced goat cheese and goat milk in village markets and put small African farmers out of business. To promote his mandatory fortified foods agenda, Gates created another of his useful quasi-governmental organizations, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to assist multinational food companies (Gates’ business partners) in lobbying for favorable tariffs and tax rates for processed and fortified foods, and speedier regulatory review of new products in targeted countries. Gates’ GAIN consortium also gives local governments money to stimulate demand for fortified foods through large-scale public relations campaigns or by offering governmental “seals of approval” for corporate food products. Gates, GAVI and GAIN Gates modeled his GAIN project after his billion-dollar global vaccine program (GAVI). By masquerading as a public health agency, GAVI has successfully mobilized public agencies and private industry to profitably dump untested, experimental or discredited, and often deadly vaccines to inoculate poor children in developing nations. Following the GAVI model, Gates launched his $70 million GAIN program at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children. His collaboration includes the UN agencies Gates controls, such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and the Big Processed Food companies like Philip Morris and Kraft, in which he has investments. According to Vandana Shiva, GAIN’s objective is to “coordinate campaigns that pressure African and Asian countries to give obscene subsidies, tax breaks and tariff exemptions and other preferences for processed foods.” Some experts are troubled by the idea of Bill Gates and multinational food companies teaming up to colonize food systems in underdeveloped countries, and hawking processed foods under a public health banner. Dr. Mark Hyman, the New York Times bestselling author and Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, told me: “ … despite occasionally being fortified with vitamins and minerals processed foods are loaded with sugar, starch, processed oils, artificial colors, preservatives, pesticides and sodium which contribute to the double burden of obesity and malnutrition, and the chronic disease epidemic. Globally 11 million die every year from an excess of ultra-processed foods and lack of protective whole foods, making processed food the number one killer in the world.” Dr. Hyman calls those foods “the opposite” of nutrition. Shiva agrees. “The GAIN program,” says Shiva, “is less about solving malnutrition than a heavy-handed way to force poor nations to open access to their markets, to obliterate local producers.” “Fortified foods are illusory technical solutions to complex socioeconomic problems. Social and economic solutions would work better in the long run,” argues Professor Marion Nestle. Nestle is the revered food and nutrition icon who occupies the Paulette Goddard Chair of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. Nestle, the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, told me: “With one exception, iodized salt, fortified foods cost too much, fail to reach their intended targets, or are too limited in scope to do what they are intended to do. I see these laws as solving a problem for the companies that make these products, not addressing nutrient and calorie deficiencies. I’m not a fan of fortified foods. I want a wide variety of real foods made more available and less expensive, and locally produced. So I would agree with the critics. I wish the Gates Foundation would invest in projects to promote small, local food production.” Artificial intelligence: ridding the world of farmers Gates says he wants to revive farm economies by transforming agriculture with super-efficient, high tech AI to create “farms of the future.” According to Gates: “We used to all have to go out and farm. We barely got enough food, when the weather was bad people would starve. Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers. And so AI will bring us immense new productivity.” Above all, he wants it to work fast. Gates’ “computational acceleration” will hasten the adoption of these beneficial innovations to achieve his ambitious schemes to deliver scientific breakthroughs to small farmers before climate change destroys their yields. But Shiva warns American farmers, already drowning in debt, to be wary of Gates’ promises to throw them a line: “When Bill Gates forced his devilish ‘rescue’ technologies on Indian farmers, the only one to benefit was Gates and his multinational partners. He gave money to the government and a company called Digital Green and made extravagant promises to digitally transform Indian agriculture. Then with the cooperation of his purchased government officials. “Bill Gates put cameras and electronic sensors in the homes and fields of Indian farmers. He used their cell phones, which he gave them for free, and his fiber optic and 5G installations — which he persuaded the Indian Telecom Company to finance — to catalog, study, and steal farmers’ crop data, indigenous practices, and agricultural knowledge for free. Then he sold it back to them as new data. Instead of digitally transforming farms as he promised, he transformed Indian farmers into digital information. He privatized their seeds and harvested the work of the public system. He ripped out their knowledge assets and heirloom genetics, and installed GMO seeds and other ridiculous practices.” Shiva adds, “His clear agenda was to drive small farmers from the land and eventually mechanize and privatize food production.” Christian Westbrook, an agricultural researcher and the founder of the online podcast, “Ice Age Farmer,” takes comfort that American farmers know Gates’ history in India and Africa: “We know who Bill Gates is, and we know the mischief he made for small farmers in Mexico, Africa and India. We know that his recent land purchases here are just the start of the Green Revolution 3.0. He wants to suck out the democratic essence of America’s pastoral landscapes and our farm families — to steal our livelihoods, our knowledge, our seeds, and our land.” Westbrook takes note of the fact that like all chiselers, Gates is always in a rush: “His strategy is to keep everyone moving so fast they can’t see the scam. He’s always telling us that climate change can’t wait, that we need to accelerate access to these products and adoption of his technologies, that research isn’t happening fast enough.” Westbrook told me that Gates’ endless talk about “accelerating the process” and his extravagant promises of miraculous new technologies, of “investment,” and of “public-private” partnerships, are all part of his con. “He keeps telling everyone we need to ‘accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.’” Many farmers say they don’t care to be rescued by Gates. Westbrook says he thinks Gates intends his baronial U.S. spreads to serve as flagships — showcases for his retinue of digital technologies for American farmers. “He’s doing it for the same reasons he brought his technology to Indian farms — to steal their knowledge, and move them off the land.” Trent Loos, a sixth-generation Midwestern rancher and farm activist, told me that farmers have a knee-jerk reaction against billionaires “playing Monopoly” with American farmland: “It makes it difficult for young farmers or even those who have farmed for generations, to compete with such deep pockets. It certainly creates a barrier for them. When people with this type of wealth start to buy farms, it makes us wonder what they are really up to. Nobody wants to rent land from Bill Gates, or work as his sharecropper.” Westbrook says he believes Gates is pursuing a darker agenda. Like Shiva, Westbrook believes that Gates and the other robber barons are using the pretexts of climate, biodiversity, and the zoonotic pandemic threat to get human beings out of the ag business and off the farm. And there is evidence to support him. The Gates Foundation is significantly invested in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Alphabet has invented “crop sniffing” robots, designed to replace farmers and ranchers, as part of its “Mineral” project. Its “Moonshot” project is “developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics, and more.” Within a year of purchasing Whole Foods, Jeff Bezos — Gates has a considerable investment in Amazon — also invested heavily in robot-controlled vertical farms that also minimize human involvement with farming. Says Westbrook, “He wants to get the people off of the farms, get the animals off, and get us all eating his plant-based meats and bug protein.” “Gates talks about farming as an archaic, quaint, dirty, dangerous, inefficient, barbarous relic from the past that threatens us by increasing the menace of climate change and the risks of global pandemics by putting humans in dangerous contact with microbes,” says Howard Vlieger, an Iowa farmer who has worked as a crop and livestock consultant in the U.S. and Canada since 1992. Subscribe to The Defender - It’s Free! Name* Email* Vlieger is an expert on the impacts of pesticides and GMOs on food products and soils. “Gates’ objective is to move the world “away from sustainable and humane animal agriculture that celebrates our contact with the soil and finds good health in our respectful interactions with nature — and toward artificial cows and a grim chemical paradigm that are all features of top-down dystopia. His vision is one of contaminated and unsavory foods and separation of man from nature.” “Gates seems to have no concept of the joy that ordinary people — people like our family — take in farming,” Nicolette Niman told me. Niman is a California rancher and farmer, and the author of the books “Righteous Porkchop” and “Defending Beef.” Her husband Bill is the founder of Niman Ranch, a co-op of hundreds of small sustainable U.S. cattle and hog growers who market high-quality organic beef and pork from sustainable grass-fed operations. “Regenerative farming and ranching immeasurably enriches human lives. It’s challenging work, based upon our intimate contact with the earth. At its best, good farming is a quest to understand and follow nature’s models,” Niman said. Niman says that Gates seems to have little interest in nature’s wisdom: “He doesn’t seem to understand that our engagement with the soil, and joy we get from our contact with the earth, our complex relationship with our animals, even with all the hardships and difficulties, are sources of our freedom and our pride, and happiness at being masters of our destinies.” “We need to build a world that respects individual self-determination, the humane treatment of animals, and good stewardship of our soils. We need to understand that a wholesome relationship with nature is not only vital to our health and climate, it’s the source of dignity, liberty, and enrichment in our post-industrial era.” Using wide-ranging technologies, all of these activists from various continents expressed their discomfort with Gates’ tendency to look at population, rather than people, and to see the management of population as a problem in urgent need of his technological solutions. “Gates sees the forest, not the trees,” Vlieger observes. “And even when he looks at the forest, he only seems to see board feet of lumber — how he can leverage the landscapes for cash and commoditize people.” Vlieger continues: “Gates’ habit of seeing every human difficulty through the lens of some technological solution from which he can profit is beyond myopic. It’s pathology — sociopathology, really. Gates is a dangerously powerful sociopath with $137 billion and a vision for a top-down technocracy. Does that worry anybody?” Westbrook says Gates, Cargill and Tyson are a powerful cartel on a mission to end animal agriculture and drive human beings from farms. “It is ‘replacement agriculture,’” says Westbrook. “They even use that word, ‘alternative agriculture.’” Westbrook’s view of the dystopian future of technocratic totalitarianism envisioned by Bill Gates sounds like a baseless conspiracy theory if one ignores all the evidence supporting him. He predicts that we will very soon — in months, not years — see engineered food shortages and pressures to empty and “improve” the rural landscapes by idling farmland and replacing farm jobs with robots and artificial intelligence. Westbrook predicts government efforts to push populations toward mega cities and smart cities where businesses are closed, jobs are scarce, and most of us will rely on universal basic income paid in digital currencies — revocable, of course, in cases of noncompliance and disobedience. Westbrook predicts a scenario “where the human cattle are completely dependent on the government for money and food, and all the folks are in one place in the smart cities and they’re easily monitored by the technocrats of Gates’ Great Reset.” Westbrook continued: “They’re shutting down food production and actually more, more broadly, they’re shutting down all economic activity, all human activity, corralling us into their smart cities. It’s pretty appalling. And now that we’ve got these pandemics, we had to implement medical martial law, and since it’s all a health crisis, we’re also going to have to take over all of your food productions and your nutritional needs. They’ve married these two things.” Time will tell us if Westbrook’s nightmare is merely a paranoid conspiracy theory — I hope so. Food Systems Summit In 2009, Bill Gates, an unelected billionaire with no governmental office or diplomatic portfolio, kicked off his global vaccine enterprise with a speech to the United Nations. He announced the $10 billion donation and declared the launch of his “Decade of Vaccines.” His scheme unfolded like clockwork. Gates’ contributions secured him ironclad control over WHO. As Foreign Affairs has reported, “Few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.” Gates created and funded powerful faux-governmental agencies like PATH, GAVI, CEPI, and the Brighton Collaboration, to push vaccines in developing countries, to consolidate his control over public health, and to prepare the groundwork for the global vaccine putsch he had pre-scheduled for 2020. In January 2019, the WHO dutifully declared — citing no specific evidence — that “vaccine hesitancy” was one of the principal threats to global health. The Gates’ Medical Cartel followed that statement with orchestrated campaigns in every U.S. state and in countries around the globe by pharma-financed politicians introducing laws to mandate vaccines and end exemptions. Two months later, the powerful House Intelligence Committee chair, Adam Schiff — yet another of Gates’ financial beneficiaries — demanded social media and media companies begin censoring “vaccine misinformation” — a euphemism for any assertion that departs from official pharma and government pronouncements. Gates has giant stakes in Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Those companies all began enthusiastically censoring criticism of vaccines. A year later, the COVID-19 outbreak provided an opportunity of convenience for Gates and his vaccine cartel to consolidate their control of humanity. A May 2020 article by Derrick Broze in The Last American Vagabond observed that, “By tracing the Foundation’s investments and Gates’ relationships we can see that nearly every person involved in the fight against COVID-19 is tied to Gates or his Foundation by two degrees or less.” Their relationship gave Bill Gates and his Foundation an unchallenged influence over the response to the pandemic. Gates repeatedly declared, in appearances on virtually every network and cable show and on every media platform, that all economic activity must cease until all 7 billion humans were vaccinated and possessed immunization passports. His ten-year Decade of Vaccines that began with his UN appearance had gone off without a hitch. Under the leadership of Gates’ old protégé and loyalist, Fauci, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services arranged immunity from liability for COVID vaccines and committed $48 billion in taxpayer money to buy and distribute a retinue of new experimental vaccines, many of them owned by Gates. Gates’ control of the process has been complete. His execution of his vaccine prediction was elegant and flawless. And now Gates’ surrogates are rolling out the same playbook to push through his totalitarian food agenda. During the October 14 -18 plenary of the 46th Session of the UN Committee on World Food Security, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, announced the convening of a UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. Guterres acknowledged that the Summit had been jointly requested by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Bill Gates and his foundation generously fund and control all four organizations. It gets worse: Guterres appointed Dr. Agnes Kalibata as Special Envoy of the UN Food Systems Summit. Kalibata is the President of Gates/Rockefeller’s AGRA program that orchestrated Gates’ notorious failed Green Revolution in Africa. Kalibata is the perfect leader to bring AGRA to the world. The Summit, she predicts, will bring together all the major stakeholders in a public-private partnership “to make food systems inclusive, climate adapted and resilient, and support sustainable peace.” The UN Food Systems Summit effectively announced a parallel agenda to the one launched by the WEF when it hosted its Great Reset conference in June, 2020. When Kalibata was appointed, over 500 organizations sent two letters to Secretary General Guterres calling on him to revoke Kalibata from the leadership role due to her ties to corporate actors, and expressing concern over the growing influence of transnational corporations at the UN. In response to civil society’s demands, 12 leaders representing banks, academic institutions, and the private sector wrote a letter announcing their support of Kalibata. In their research into the UN Food Systems Summit, AGRA Watch (the grassroots advocacy group that follows Gates and his foundation’s failed Green Revolution in Africa) found that of the 12 individuals involved in the Summit, 11 have strong connections to the Gates Foundation.In some instances, these organizations were directly funded by the Gates Foundation and others Gates funded specific programs that had major roles. Kalibata reminded Food Systems Summit participants of the urgency. They had, she said, only 10 years left to accelerate the transformation of our food systems to meet Sustainable Development Goals for climate, nutrition and pandemic response. The UN Food Systems Summit will lay out Gates’ “Decade of Food” blueprint for the global food agenda to be completed by 2030. We can only pray that Gates’ next new health plan for humanity won’t involve the same level of traumatic violence to our civil rights, to our global economy, to the traditions of our civilization, to the idealism of democracies, and to our self-determination, that accompanied his 2020 “Decade of Vaccines.” Conclusion The Gates Foundation is not conventional philanthropy. It gives miniscule, if any, support to popular causes like the Wounded Warrior Foundation, ASPCA, environmental, or voting rights or civil rights groups. It is a weaponized philanthropy that Gates launched in 1994 to resuscitate his reputation after the Microsoft antitrust case exposed him as a lying, cheating, thieving, manipulator intent on felonious monopoly control of global information conduits. Gates has since invested $36 billion into the Gates Foundation, which has a value of $46.9 billion over which he and his wife exercise total control. The foundation has given away only $23.6 billion in charitable grants, and these “gifts” include billions in tax-deductible donations to companies in which Gates is invested, like Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi. Gates’ brilliant mind devised this scheme to form a foundation that shelters his income, and allows him to leverage taxpayer dollars by investing the foundation’s earnings in projects that multiply his wealth and expand his power and public prestige, while avoiding taxes. Using this structure, he can give tax-deductible donations to companies he partly owns and reap personal and foundation profits while avoiding taxes — and allowing him to hide his money in myriad ways. It’s a win-win! Gates has deployed his foundation as the embodiment of his base instincts for monopoly and control — a vehicle for ruthless philanthrocapitalism that hijacks public access and blurs the lines between corporate and public interests, cloaks private profit agendas with lofty public-spirited rhetoric and gives himself monopoly control over public health, our planet’s life support systems, our economics and people. Gates has made his foundation a tool for consolidating the efforts of his fellow billionaires, captured regulators, and his business partners from Big Pharma, Dirty Energy, GMO food, Telecom and Big Data, and the bought and brain-dead journalists who collectively profit from the multiplying miseries of the dystopian world they have arranged for the rest of us. Gates and his cronies, toadies and minions pump up fear of pandemics, climate change, mass extinction — and offer his vision of new technologies as the salvation, which only he possesses the genius to deploy. Even as he consolidates control over our health and food systems, Gates is promoting digitalized currencies, calling these systems a “global humanitarian priority.” (Kissinger’s final adjuration is, “Who controls money can control the world”), and is funding ground and space-based and 5G infrastructures, city-sized analytics centers, and biometric chips to mine and harvest our data and biodata and as mechanisms of surveillance, profit, and control. Gates is planning a satellite fleet that will be able to survey every square inch of the planet 24 hours per day. Such systems will no doubt be useful should populations become restless with political and economic structures that strip citizens of power, shift wealth ever upward, and doom most of humanity to meaningless, hopeless survival. Democracy and farm freedom advocate Dr. Vandana Shiva says that Gates’ philanthrocapitalism is a “destructive force with the potential to push the future of our planet towards extinction and ecological collapse.” Shiva accuses Gates of using philanthropic capitalism to accelerate the corporate takeover of our seed, agriculture, food, knowledge and global health systems. “He funds the manipulation of information and promotes the erosion of democracy — all in pursuit of personal power and profits.” Shiva says the Gates Foundation has powered an “unholy alliance” between big capital, science and technology institutions and governments to establish a global empire over life, through monocultures, patents and monopolies designed to destroy the natural world of diversity, self-organization and freedom. “You have seen the wickedness they can do with vaccines in the name of public health,” Shiva told me. “Well, now he controls the land. He controls the seed. He controls the food. He has the ultimate power to starve us all to death.”

https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland?amp_js_v=a6&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQHKAFQArABIA%3D%3D#aoh=16191998854968&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From %1%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2021%2Fapr%2F05%2Fbill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland The Guardian - Bill Gates is the biggest private owner of farmland in the United States. Why? Nick Estes Gates has been buying land like it’s going out of style. He now owns more farmland than my entire Native American nation @nick_w_estes Mon 5 Apr 2021 08.45 EDT Bill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub him “Farmer Bill” this year? The third richest man on the planet doesn’t have a green thumb. Nor does he put in the back-breaking labor humble people do to grow our food and who get far less praise for it. That kind of hard work isn’t what made him rich. Gates’ achievement, according to the report, is that he’s largest private owner of farmland in the US. A 2018 purchase of 14,500 acres of prime eastern Washington farmland – which is traditional Yakama territory – for $171m helped him get that title. In total, Gates owns approximately 242,000 acres of farmland with assets totaling more than $690m. To put that into perspective, that’s nearly the size of Hong Kong and twice the acreage of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, where I’m an enrolled member. A white man owns more farmland than my entire Native nation! In a pandemic, billionaires are richer than ever. Why aren't they giving more? | Chuck Collins The United States is defined by the excesses of its ruling class. But why do a handful of people own so much land? Land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race and class. The relationship to land – who owns it, who works it and who cares for it – reflects obscene levels of inequality and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy in the United States, and also the world. Wealth accumulation always goes hand-in-hand with exploitation and dispossession. In this country, enslaved Black labor first built US wealth atop stolen Native land. The 1862 Homestead Act opened up 270m acres of Indigenous territory – which amounts to 10% of US land – for white settlement. Black, Mexican, Asian, and Native people, of course, were categorically excluded from the benefits of a federal program that subsidized and protected generations of white wealth. The billionaire media mogul Ted Turner epitomizes such disparities. He owns 2m acres and has the world’s largest privately owned buffalo herd. Those animals, which are sacred to my people and were nearly hunted to extinction by settlers, are preserved today on nearly 200,000 acres of Turner’s ranchland within the boundaries of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty territory in the western half of what is now the state of South Dakota, land that was once guaranteed by the US government to be a “permanent home” for Lakota people. The gun and the whip may not accompany land acquisitions this time around. But billionaire class assertions that they are philosopher kings and climate-conscious investors who know better than the original caretakers are little more than ruses for what amounts to a 21st century land grab – with big payouts in a for-profit economy seeking “green” solutions. Our era is dominated by the ultra-rich, the climate crisis and a burgeoning green capitalism. And Bill Gates’ new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster positions himself as a thought leader in how to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and how to fund what he has called elsewhere a “global green revolution” to help poor farmers mitigate climate change. What expertise in climate science or agriculture Gates possesses beyond being filthy rich is anyone’s guess. When pressed during a book discussion on Reddit about why he’s gobbling up so much farmland, Gates claimed, “It is not connected to climate [change].” The decision, he said, came from his “investment group.” Cascade Investment, the firm making these acquisitions, is controlled by Gates. And the firm said it’s “very supportive of sustainable farming”. It also is a shareholder in the plant-based protein companies Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods as well as the farming equipment manufacturer John Deere. His firm’s largest farmland acquisition happened in 2017, when it acquired 61 farming properties from a Canadian investment firm to the tune of $500m. Arable land is not just profitable. There’s a more cynical calculation. Investment firms are making the argument farmlands will meet “carbon-neutral” targets for sustainable investment portfolios while anticipating an increase of agricultural productivity and revenue. And while Bill Gates frets about eating cheeseburgers in his book – for the amount of greenhouse gases the meat industry produces largely for the consumption of rich countries – his massive carbon footprint has little to do with his personal diet and is not forgivable by simply buying more land to sequester more carbon. The world’s richest 1% emit double the carbon of the poorest 50%, an 2020 Oxfam study found. According to Forbes, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth swell by $1.9tn in 2020, while more than 22 million US workers (mostly women) lost their jobs. Like wealth, land ownership is becoming concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, resulting in a greater push for monocultures and more intensive industrial farming techniques to generate greater returns. One per cent of the world’s farms control 70% of the world’s farmlands, one report found. The biggest shift in recent years from small to big farms was in the US. The land we all live on should not be the sole property of a few The principal danger of private farmland owners like Bill Gates is not their professed support of sustainable agriculture often found in philanthropic work – it’s the monopolistic role they play in determining our food systems and land use patterns. Small farmers and Indigenous people are more cautious with the use of land. For Indigenous caretakers, land use isn’t premised on a return of investments; it’s about maintaining the land for the next generation, meeting the needs of the present, and a respect for the diversity of life. That’s why lands still managed by Indigenous peoples worldwide protect and sustain 80% of the world’s biodiversity, practices anathema to industrial agriculture. The average person has nothing in common with mega-landowners like Bill Gates or Ted Turner. The land we all live on should not be the sole property of a few. The extensive tax avoidance by these titans of industry will always far exceed their supposed charitable donations to the public. The “billionaire knows best” mentality detracts from the deep-seated realities of colonialism and white supremacy, and it ignores those who actually know best how to use and live with the land. These billionaires have nothing to offer us in terms of saving the planet – unless it’s our land back. Nick Estes

Anyone else pretend scan the QR code and then fill out Rupert Bear, Toyland, if anyone asks for a signature? Just me then.

Busted

A friend of mine has bipolar and their manic episodes aren't the fun light hearted jolly fest the media makes it out to be but like this, where they are convinced only they are right, that every one else is a dick and they can't understand why the other people can't see it. A superior attitude that can be quite frightening to see. But also scary in that a lot of what they say is right, correct, just like this. It's like as humans we know what ride is saying is right but we overlay a level of 'brushing over ' excuses and ignoring the obvious out of politeness to the point we brainwash ourselves. It's self protection though, because to carry on seeing the absolute truth of things but then only relating it to how it affects only your own self is damaging. Maybe the neighbours with firedoors lost someone in a house fire where fire doors were absent or propped open? So it's right the slamming shut of doors whilst annoying to others gives them comfort. What my friend loses when he's on a hyper is any empathy for another human, other people become less than worms underfoot. Not saying the OP is bipolar at all x just an observation that although not wrong this type of thinking is very damaging for the person, all those around them and not entirely incorrect but definitely out of sync. Absent empathy is where a lot of things start to go wrong for people. We all do it.

Out of context, this now sounds like I'm calling David Icke a Bozo, to clarify I was referring to the hacker.

Thanks Kitty. Old thread I know but I'll have a look at this.

Book recommendation Oneness vs The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom (Paperback) Vandana Shiva STORY AT-A-GLANCE In “Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom,” Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., argues that the ultra-wealthy elite are responsible for a majority of the environmental, financial and health crises currently facing us Bill Gates’ wealth and “philanthropic” efforts, for example, have allowed him to gain unprecedented influence over agriculture and global health policies that threaten food security and human health The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed a massive transfer of wealth to the rich While global lockdowns have decimated small businesses and left many to struggle financially, wealthy globalists have amassed immense profits, and lockdowns have prevented public mobilization against tech and retail giants To facilitate the transfer of wealth, the elite lobby for the elimination of labor and environmental laws, as well as human and farmer’s rights

BIOTECHNOLOGY, COMMENTARIES, ENVIRONMENT SEPTEMBER 21, 2020 Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life By Vandana Shiva In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’. ‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said. In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves. The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species. New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity, integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans, we are connected through disease. According to the International Labour Organization, ‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’ According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives. Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism. The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity. On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coronavirus pandemic and in the midst of the lockdown, Microsoft was granted a patent by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ‘Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….’ The ‘body activity’ that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees, or any other information or data. The patent is an intellectual property claim over our bodies and minds. In colonialism, colonisers assign themselves the right to take the land and resources of indigenous people, extinguish their cultures and sovereignty, and in extreme cases exterminate them. Patent WO 060606 is a declaration by Microsoft that our bodies and minds are its new colonies. We are mines of ‘raw material’—the data extracted from our bodies. Rather than sovereign, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings making decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part, and to which we are inextricably related, we are ‘users.’ A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire. But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable. In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to ‘reinvent education.’ Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created ‘a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why with all the technology you have?’ In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades. For him students are mines for data. That is why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test, because these can be easily quantified and mined. In reimagining education, children will be monitored through surveillance systems to check if they are attentive while they are forced to take classes remotely, alone at home. The dystopia is one where children never return to schools, do not have a chance to play, do not have friends. It is a world without society, without relationships, without love and friendship. As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’ people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves. Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we must fight for. It is one we must claim. We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth? The above is excerpted from Vandana Shiva’s book Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom(Chelsea Green Publishing, August 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher. Oneness versus the one percent Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation, and of the Slow Food Movement. Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights, she is the author and editor of a score of influential books, among them Making Peace with the Earth; Soil Not Oil; Globalisation’s New Wars; Seed Sovereignty, Food Security: Women in the Vanguard; and Who Really Feeds the World?. Her latest book is Oneness vs the 1% (Chelsea Green Publishing, August 2020).

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/biotechnology/bill-gates-global-agenda-and-how-we-can-resist-his-war-on-life/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/how-economic-growth-has-become-anti-life

Been watching a reading a lot of what this amazing woman has to say. Will post a couple of Guardian articles and books of hers too. She cannot stand Bill Gates and calls him out scientifically, and in an educated manner.

We had something very similar. Digital music playing through an aux cord split into its component parts, and lost some of the levels. Ie the vocals and some of the drums. Husband is a former power engineer and was freaked as he says its just not possible. Yet he heard it. It pulsed.

Germans absolutely could carpet bomb.

Hitler was either very sure and/or assured of victory that he left these places for himself, which is a theory i'd heard given Edward v111 th alleged leanings and that really wouldn't surprise me. OR there was some other reason. Like the elites hedging their bets.

Good spot Gee. I think you are absolutely right.

TICK you can see it happening and also advertised for neom Neom shows this is a TICK Neom shows this is a TICK including hub links on it's newly advertised in the last 4 days 'the line' Partial TICK neom is petrol free. Not great news for all those aramco shareholders

Please note some main points. There are underground metro links between city hubs There are no cars you have a 5 minute commute They blank out planes with pictures of birds in the main TV ad They call this the post petrol free world. Everything you want or need is within 5 minutes of where you live There are no roads

Adverts for neom now appearing on sky news channel.

Vaccine passports being introduced for Europe. UK government says it's not going down this route. Next paragraph then says UK government money given to 2 uk tech companies and that Microsoft is to develop digital access to vaccine records. The times today. MENU friday january 15 2021 News CORONAVIRUS EU leaders draw up coronavirus vaccine passports to restart foreign travel Countries including Denmark and Greece have announced plans to issue certificates that could allow people to travel freely ALKIS KONSTANTINIDIS/REUTERS Bruno Waterfield, Brussels | Francis Elliott Friday January 15 2021, 12.01am, The Times European Union leaders will discuss plans next week for coronavirus vaccination “passports” to allow people who have had the injections to avoid travel restrictions and go on holiday. British vaccination certificates would not automatically be accepted by the EU, and Britons’ holiday plans could be delayed until European travel plans have been agreed. Greece, Poland, Cyprus and Denmark have already announced plans to issue vaccination certificates that could allow people to travel freely, especially in time for this summer’s tourist season. Next Thursday Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, will urge other European leaders to agree on certificates “facilitating the freedom of movement of persons who have been vaccinated against Covid-19”. In a letter to the European Commission he wrote: “People who have been vaccinated should be free to travel. It is urgent to adopt a common understanding on how a vaccination certificate should be structured so as to be accepted in all member states.” To avoid falling foul of EU anti-discrimination rules, Mr Mitsotakis stressed that his plan was “not going to make vaccination compulsory or a prerequisite for travel” but said that it would entitle “persons who have been vaccinated [to] be free to travel”. Poland is already planning a “vaccine passport” for all Poles who have had their second injections, in the form of a QR code or barcode that could be used for cross-border travel. Yesterday Anna Golawska, the deputy health minister, said: “This will be the so-called passport, which will confirm that the person has been vaccinated and can use the rights to which vaccinated people are entitled.” The Danish health ministry said that Copenhagen was also “working on a Covid-19 vaccine passport, which is expected to be ready by early 2021”. SPONSORED The European Commission is working on vaccination certificates “including a unique identifier for each individual vaccination” but its plans have led to concerns about privacy. At present British people are barred from all but essential travel into Europe. Recognition of British vaccination certificates, which have so far been ruled out by the government, would have to wait until the EU scheme was up and running. To avoid restrictions, Britain would have to satisfy the EU that its spread of the new variant virus was under control and that infections were falling. Any such certificate travel scheme would also have to be reciprocal, allowing vaccinated Europeans to come to Britain. European guidelines say that travel restrictions for countries outside the EU should be lifted “only after the lifting of internal border controls and restrictions to free movement within the EU”. Downing Street said it was not aware of trials of so-called vaccine passports in this country. The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “This is not something we’re looking at introducing and that remains our policy.” TIMES RADIO Tune in We will bring the stories of the day to life with warmth, wit and expertise. Listen for free on DAB radio, your smart speaker, online at times.radio, and via the Times Radio app Start listening Two British companies have received government money from an innovation fund to develop technology that would allow individuals to prove whether they had been inoculated. Yesterday Microsoft and Oracle said that they were joining a coalition to develop common standards to verify an individual’s vaccine status while protecting their privacy. The Vaccination Credential Initiative builds on work by the Commons Project Foundation. Paul Meyer, its chief executive, said: “The goal is to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination records so they can . . . safely return to travel, work, school and life, while protecting their data privacy.” Over-50s rushing to book their summer getaways Holiday companies are reporting a threefold rise in bookings for this summer driven by a boom in demand from older travellers (Graeme Paton writes). It was claimed that the availability of vaccines was giving people the confidence to book trips in the hope that they will ultimately be able to go ahead. Tui, the UK’s biggest tour operator, and National Express, the coach operator, said that bookings were being driven by people in their fifties and ixties who would be likely to be inoculated in the coming months. The government has said that it expects to give 15 million people their first jab by mid-February. National Express said that its package holiday division, which includes Lucketts Travel and Woods Tours, had seen bookings increase almost threefold for spring and summer. Ticket sales were up by 185 per cent compared with the same period in 2020. Tui said that people over 50 accounted for half of all online bookings made so far this year, which is a far higher rate than previous years. It said that destinations such as Greece, Turkey and Spain’s Balearic islands were among the most popular choices for people in that age group. The travel industry has collapsed over the past 12 months, with restrictions imposed to stop the spread of coronavirus leading to a huge drop in holiday and flight bookings. Large numbers of travel companies have gone bust and analysts suggest that it will take four years or more for the industry to return to previous levels. The consumer group Which? urged passengers to “remain cautious” over the coming months, pointing out that spikes in the virus in other countries could lead to the late cancellation of holidays. It suggested that holidays should be purchased with flexible terms that allow customers to switch dates or get their money back. Jit Desai, head of holidays and travel for National Express, said: “We’ve seen an increased appetite for travel . . . with an uplift in inquiries and bookings every time there’s been an announcement about new vaccine approvals and the roll-out programme. Some are telling us that they’ve already had their jab and can’t wait to go on holiday once guidance allows again.” Related articles LEADING ARTICLE Hard Pass If a vaccine against Covid-19 offers a passport to normality, then there looms a long and difficult interim in which parts of... December 02 2020, 12.01am CORONAVIRUS Scientists split over Covid passports The government’s scientific advisers are divided on the idea of issuing “Covid passports” to people who have been vaccinated... November 22 2020, 6.00pm Rhys Blakely, Science Correspondent CORONAVIRUS Vaccine will go on GP file but there’s ‘no passport plan’ Coronavirus inoculations will be recorded on patients’ GP files but yesterday Michael Gove downplayed plans to provide... December 02 2020, 12.01am Francis Elliott, Quote

Vaccine passports being introduced for Europe. UK government says it's not going down this route. Next paragraph then say UK government money given to 2 uk tech companies and that Microsoft is to develop digital access to vaccine records. The times today. MENU friday january 15 2021 News CORONAVIRUS EU leaders draw up coronavirus vaccine passports to restart foreign travel Countries including Denmark and Greece have announced plans to issue certificates that could allow people to travel freely ALKIS KONSTANTINIDIS/REUTERS Bruno Waterfield, Brussels | Francis Elliott Friday January 15 2021, 12.01am, The Times European Union leaders will discuss plans next week for coronavirus vaccination “passports” to allow people who have had the injections to avoid travel restrictions and go on holiday. British vaccination certificates would not automatically be accepted by the EU, and Britons’ holiday plans could be delayed until European travel plans have been agreed. Greece, Poland, Cyprus and Denmark have already announced plans to issue vaccination certificates that could allow people to travel freely, especially in time for this summer’s tourist season. Next Thursday Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, will urge other European leaders to agree on certificates “facilitating the freedom of movement of persons who have been vaccinated against Covid-19”. In a letter to the European Commission he wrote: “People who have been vaccinated should be free to travel. It is urgent to adopt a common understanding on how a vaccination certificate should be structured so as to be accepted in all member states.” To avoid falling foul of EU anti-discrimination rules, Mr Mitsotakis stressed that his plan was “not going to make vaccination compulsory or a prerequisite for travel” but said that it would entitle “persons who have been vaccinated [to] be free to travel”. Poland is already planning a “vaccine passport” for all Poles who have had their second injections, in the form of a QR code or barcode that could be used for cross-border travel. Yesterday Anna Golawska, the deputy health minister, said: “This will be the so-called passport, which will confirm that the person has been vaccinated and can use the rights to which vaccinated people are entitled.” The Danish health ministry said that Copenhagen was also “working on a Covid-19 vaccine passport, which is expected to be ready by early 2021”. SPONSORED The European Commission is working on vaccination certificates “including a unique identifier for each individual vaccination” but its plans have led to concerns about privacy. At present British people are barred from all but essential travel into Europe. Recognition of British vaccination certificates, which have so far been ruled out by the government, would have to wait until the EU scheme was up and running. To avoid restrictions, Britain would have to satisfy the EU that its spread of the new variant virus was under control and that infections were falling. Any such certificate travel scheme would also have to be reciprocal, allowing vaccinated Europeans to come to Britain. European guidelines say that travel restrictions for countries outside the EU should be lifted “only after the lifting of internal border controls and restrictions to free movement within the EU”. Downing Street said it was not aware of trials of so-called vaccine passports in this country. The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “This is not something we’re looking at introducing and that remains our policy.” TIMES RADIO Tune in We will bring the stories of the day to life with warmth, wit and expertise. Listen for free on DAB radio, your smart speaker, online at times.radio, and via the Times Radio app Start listening Two British companies have received government money from an innovation fund to develop technology that would allow individuals to prove whether they had been inoculated. Yesterday Microsoft and Oracle said that they were joining a coalition to develop common standards to verify an individual’s vaccine status while protecting their privacy. The Vaccination Credential Initiative builds on work by the Commons Project Foundation. Paul Meyer, its chief executive, said: “The goal is to empower individuals with digital access to their vaccination records so they can . . . safely return to travel, work, school and life, while protecting their data privacy.” Over-50s rushing to book their summer getaways Holiday companies are reporting a threefold rise in bookings for this summer driven by a boom in demand from older travellers (Graeme Paton writes). It was claimed that the availability of vaccines was giving people the confidence to book trips in the hope that they will ultimately be able to go ahead. Tui, the UK’s biggest tour operator, and National Express, the coach operator, said that bookings were being driven by people in their fifties and ixties who would be likely to be inoculated in the coming months. The government has said that it expects to give 15 million people their first jab by mid-February. National Express said that its package holiday division, which includes Lucketts Travel and Woods Tours, had seen bookings increase almost threefold for spring and summer. Ticket sales were up by 185 per cent compared with the same period in 2020. Tui said that people over 50 accounted for half of all online bookings made so far this year, which is a far higher rate than previous years. It said that destinations such as Greece, Turkey and Spain’s Balearic islands were among the most popular choices for people in that age group. The travel industry has collapsed over the past 12 months, with restrictions imposed to stop the spread of coronavirus leading to a huge drop in holiday and flight bookings. Large numbers of travel companies have gone bust and analysts suggest that it will take four years or more for the industry to return to previous levels. The consumer group Which? urged passengers to “remain cautious” over the coming months, pointing out that spikes in the virus in other countries could lead to the late cancellation of holidays. It suggested that holidays should be purchased with flexible terms that allow customers to switch dates or get their money back. Jit Desai, head of holidays and travel for National Express, said: “We’ve seen an increased appetite for travel . . . with an uplift in inquiries and bookings every time there’s been an announcement about new vaccine approvals and the roll-out programme. Some are telling us that they’ve already had their jab and can’t wait to go on holiday once guidance allows again.” Related articles LEADING ARTICLE Hard Pass If a vaccine against Covid-19 offers a passport to normality, then there looms a long and difficult interim in which parts of... December 02 2020, 12.01am CORONAVIRUS Scientists split over Covid passports The government’s scientific advisers are divided on the idea of issuing “Covid passports” to people who have been vaccinated... November 22 2020, 6.00pm Rhys Blakely, Science Correspondent CORONAVIRUS Vaccine will go on GP file but there’s ‘no passport plan’ Coronavirus inoculations will be recorded on patients’ GP files but yesterday Michael Gove downplayed plans to provide... December 02 2020, 12.01am Francis Elliott,