What an Ecological Civilization Looks Like: In Depth
Winona LaDuke.
Illustration by Enkhbayar Munkh-Erdene/YES! Magazine.
5MIN READ
Feb 16, 2021
More than 20 years ago, Alex White Plume, a leader of the Oglala Lakota, planted his first hemp crop on Wounded Knee Creek, on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. I call White Plume "the Hemperer." He's considered to be one of the grandfathers of the cannabis economy for Native people. Like John Trudell, the great Dakota philosopher and musician, White Plume always said, "Hemp is the way."
But in 2000, Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the reservation and seized White Plume's crop. In fact, there were several raids on his crop between 2000 and 2002. Two years later, he was ordered to stop growing. In 2016, the federal ban was lifted and in 2017, White Plume partnered with Evo Hemp to make hemp supplements. He's just beginning again.
Not surprisingly, White Plume feels a bit resentful of the profits being made in what's now become a largely White-dominated industry, while his tribe had to sit on the sidelines.
But the potential for Native people to benefit economically in the hemp industry still exists.
Now White Plume is involved in processing hemp and plans to make a vertically integrated Lakota industry. He envisions a sustainable industry that will create high-paying jobs and bring in a steady stream of income for Lakota tribes.
"This is going to be all Lakota hemp, grown on Lakota [land], produced by Lakota, and we're going to market it by Lakota," White Plume says.
The hemp world is changing.
With 10,000 uses, hemp is one of the most versatile plants to grow—and in many ways can be a catalyst for change for Native peoples. We see a New Green Revolution in Indian Country, tied to justice, economics, restoration ecology, and a return-to-the-land movement, and it's growing.
Just last year, the Fort Berthold Reservation, Colorado River tribes, Iowa Tribe (Kansas and Nebraska), Yurok, Sisseton and Santee Dakotas, to name a few, all got their hemp plans approved by the USDA, but more than that, tribal growers and thinkers are considering hemp as part of the future for Indian Country. And young leaders such as Muriel Young Bear, a Meskwaki woman from Iowa, and Marcus Grignon—a Menominee and project director at Hempstead Project HEART, a John Trudell initiative—represent a new wave of commitment.
Hemp Is the Way
With all but six states having either legalized, decriminalized, or medicalized marijuana, we're experiencing a renaissance moment of cannabis, including hemp—its non-psychoactive relative. And it's about time. In the next economy, hemp will be foundational to the just transition, or the New Green Revolution.
Let me explain.
In the 20th century, Norman Borlaug, called the Father of the Green Revolution, gave us advanced agricultural technology, including genetically modified plants. It's been said among Native tribes that the United States had a choice between a carbohydrate economy and a hydrocarbon economy—an economy that depends on petroleum, coal, and natural gas. As I've written before, our current health, economic, and climate crises have proven we made the wrong choice.
The carbohydrate economy is one based on plants. Hemp grows easily; it is resilient and doesn't require huge amounts of chemicals or water, although there are specific soil requirements for it to grow. It can be foundational to such an economy.
For the past five years, I've been a hemp farmer, with permits from the state of Minnesota. My business is called Winona's Hemp, and our research partner is Anishinaabe Agriculture. In 2020, we grew 20 acres of fiber hemp, and are working with that hemp to create a local economy. We send off our high-quality, field-retted hemp to processors to make cloth for canvas textiles. Our plan is to restore a hemp economy without a lot of chemicals and fossil fuels. The traditional history of hemp is without fossil fuels. We'd like to do as much to restore that practice as possible—focused on appropriate technology, equity, and innovation.
Our focus has been in fiber varieties, with an interest in reducing any fossil fuel use in production and in processing. We've sourced varieties from Canada and Europe, with the help of Patagonia and our friends at the Lift Economy. We grew those seeds in fields on and around the White Earth Reservation. We did our best to plant with organic fertilizers, using fish emulsion and horse manure to build our soils. We learned from our experience and by talking to as many folks as possible.
That said, we have a lot of experience here in small field crops, horse cultivation, and traditional varieties. We grew in small plots, hand seeded, and in a larger 20-acre plot, mechanically harvested with 40-year-old equipment.
We also put in a field with horses because some of our partnerships here involve not only our horse-drawn agriculture, but also those of our Amish neighbors. We've come to collaborate, as we have similar interests in terms of technology and geography.
We provided seeds to tribes throughout the region, all interested in the same questions: How do you grow it? And, what can you do with it?
What we found is that the plant will teach you: Don't be in a rush. We are re-creating an industry from the seed to the product—whether smokable or for manufacturing. Some tribes are looking at materials processing—car parts, bags, etc.—others are looking at hempcrete, an improvement on concrete because of its sustainability and the fact that it is a carbon sink.
There's a lot of room in the New Green Revolution. After all, if you are going to change the materials economy—well, the whole economy—you will need a lot of producers and also some folks in manufacturing. That's the goal. Indeed, if hemp's potential is realized, we can transform the materials economy, and that's revolutionary. That's our work now, to investigate, vet, and find technologies and economic models that can be replicated.
And though tribes have been reluctant to get into the hemp and cannabis industry, particularly under the Trump era, there's a growing interest among Native people in this new Green Revolution.
The Wisconsin-based Oneida tribe, strategically situated near Green Bay, Wisconsin, points to a growing market for hempcrete, and hemp hurd, which can be used for insulation.
The Sisseton Tribe, based in present-day South and North Dakota, has been growing hemp for two years in collaboration with researchers from the University of Minnesota. They're looking at fiber hemp for a composite bag facility—like shopping bags. The tribe has an industrial facility on the reservation, and also rail access.
The Tudinu, or Desert People in Las Vegas, have a little "colony" downtown, a mile from the Strip. In l970, they were federally recognized as the Las Vegas Paiutes, and in 2017, opened the NuWu Cannabis Marketplace. That's a big deal, as the tribe runs the only cannabis lounge in downtown Las Vegas. They may not have much land, but they have a big dispensary.
Tribes are in a unique position. Tribal sovereignty provides their governments leeway in the development of cannabis policies and will be a stabilizing force in turbulent times. Today, confusing regulations and lucrative growth in the cannabis industry set a complex scene, but tribal nations are in a position to continue a course they set.
Tribes have the potential to revolutionize the industry. We have the land—we just need a bit of time, technology, and finances. This is an opportunity for justice—social and ecological—in this post-petroleum economic transition. And we are ready to go.
Editor's note: This article was edited at 11:30 a.m. on Feb. 26, 2021, to re-insert hyperlinks and include additional paragraphs that were cut from the print edition because of space constraints.See our corrections policy here.
Winona LaDukeis an internationally renowned writer, speaker, activist, focusing on Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and sustainable tribal economies. She is executive director of Honor The Earth, founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, and a former two-time vice presidential candidate. LaDuke is a YES! contributing editor.
Why Scientists Are Starting to Care About Cultures That Talk to Whales
Arctic people have been communicating with cetaceans for centuries. The rest of the world is finally listening in
"Tattooed Whale, 2016" by Tim Pitsiulak. Screen-print on Arches Cover Black. (Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts)
smithsonianmag.com
This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.
Harry Brower Sr. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale.
Although Brower's body remained in Anchorage, the young bowhead took him more than 1,000 kilometers north to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), where Brower's family lived. They traveled together through the town and past the indistinct edge where the tundra gives way to the Arctic Ocean. There, in the ice-blue underwater world, Brower saw Iñupiat hunters in a sealskin boat closing in on the calf's mother.
Brower felt the shuddering harpoon enter the whale's body. He looked at the faces of the men in the umiak, including those of his own sons. When he awoke in his hospital bed as if from a trance, he knew precisely which man had made the kill, how the whale had died, and whose ice cellar the meat was stored in. He turned out to be right on all three counts.
Brower lived six years after the episode, dying in 1992 at the age of 67. In his final years, he discussed what he had witnessed with Christian ministers and Utqiaġvik's whaling captains. The conversations ultimately led him to hand down new rules to govern hunting female whales with offspring, meant to communicate respect to whales and signal that people were aware of their feelings and needs. "[The whale] talked to me," Brower recalls in a collection of his stories, The Whales, They Give Themselves. "He told me all the stories about where they had all this trouble out there on the ice."
Not long ago, non-Indigenous scientists might have dismissed Brower's experience as a dream or the incoherent ramblings of a sick man. But he and other Iñupiat are part of a deep history of Arctic and subarctic peoples who believe humans and whales can talk and share a reciprocal relationship that goes far beyond that of predator and prey. Today, as Western scientists try to better understand Indigenous peoples' relationships with animals—as well as animals' own capacity for thoughts and feelings—such beliefs are gaining wider recognition, giving archaeologists a better understanding of ancient northern cultures.
"If you start looking at the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective that Indigenous people themselves may have had, it reveals a rich new universe," says Matthew Betts, an archaeologist with the Canadian Museum of History who studies Paleo-Eskimo cultures in the Canadian Arctic. "What a beautiful way to view the world."
It's not clear exactly when people developed the technology that allowed them to begin hunting whales, but scholars generally believe Arctic whaling developed off the coast of Alaska sometime between 600 and 800 CE. For thousands of years before then, Arctic people survived by hunting seals, caribou, and walruses at the edge of the sea ice.
One such group, the Dorset—known in Inuit oral tradition as the Tunit—were rumored to have been so strong the men could outrun caribou and drag a 1,700-kilogram walrus across the ice. The women were said to have fermented raw seal meat against the warmth of their skin, leaving it in their pants for days at a time. But despite their legendary survival skills, the Tunit died out 1,000 years ago.
A whaler waits for the bowhead whales from shore in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, during whaling season in the Chukchi Sea. (Steven J. Kazlowski / Alamy)
One theory for their mysterious disappearance is that they were outcompeted by people who had begun to move east into the Canadian Arctic—migrants from Alaska who brought sealskin boats allowing them to push off from shore and hunt whales. Each spring, bowhead whales weighing up to 54,000 kilograms pass through the leads of water that open into the sea ice, and with skill and luck, the ancestors of today's Inuit and Iñupiat people could spear a cetacean as it surfaced to breathe.
The advent of whaling changed the North. For the first time, hunters could bring in enough meat to feed an entire village. Permanent settlements began springing up in places like Utqiaġvik that were reliably visited by bowheads—places still inhabited today. Social organizations shifted as successful whale hunters amassed wealth, became captains, and positioned themselves at the top of a developing social hierarchy. Before long, the whale hunt became the center of cultural, spiritual, and day-to-day life, and whales the cornerstone of many Arctic and subarctic cosmologies.
When agricultural Europeans began visiting and writing about the North in the 10th century, they were mesmerized by Aboriginal peoples' relationships with whales. Medieval literature depicted the Arctic as a land of malevolent "monstrous fishes" and people who could summon them to shore through magical powers and mumbled spells. Even as explorers and missionaries brought back straightforward accounts of how individual whaling cultures went about hunting, butchering, and sharing a whale, it was hard to shake the sense of mysticism. In 1938, American anthropologist Margaret Lantis analyzed these scattered ethnographic accounts and concluded that Iñupiat, Inuit, and other northern peoples belonged to a circumpolar "whale cult."
Lantis found evidence of this in widespread taboos and rituals meant to cement the relationship between people and whales. In many places, a recently killed whale was given a drink of fresh water, a meal, and even traveling bags to ensure a safe journey back to its spiritual home. Individual whalers had their own songs to call the whales to them. Sometimes shamans performed religious ceremonies inside circles made of whale bones. Stashes of whaling amulets—an ambiguous word used to describe everything from carved, jewelry-like charms to feathers or skulls—were passed from father to son in whaling families.
To non-Indigenous observers, it was all so mysterious. So unknowable. And for archaeologists and biologists especially, it was at odds with Western scientific values, which prohibited anything that smacked of anthropomorphism.
Sometime in the late 19th century, an Iñupiaq carver fashioned this amulet for an umiak out of driftwood, carving the likeness of a bowhead whale, its blowhole symbolized with a piece of obsidian. As with other whaling amulets Erica Hill has examined, this object may have also functioned as part of the boat's structure. ( Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institute, Cat. A347918)
In archaeology, such attitudes have limited our understanding of Arctic prehistory, says Erica Hill, a zooarchaeologist with the University of Alaska Southeast. Whaling amulets and bone circles were written off as ritualistic or supernatural with little exploration of what they actually meant to the people who created them. Instead, archaeologists who studied animal artifacts often focused on the tangible information they revealed about what ancient people ate, how many calories they consumed, and how they survived.
Hill is part of a burgeoning branch of archaeology that uses ethnographic accounts and oral histories to re-examine animal artifacts with fresh eyes—and interpret the past in new, non-Western ways. "I'm interested in this as part of our prehistory as humans," Hill says, "but also in what it tells us about alternative ways of being."
The idea that Indigenous people have spiritual relationships with animals is so well established in popular culture it's cliché. Yet constricted by Western science and culture, few archaeologists have examined the record of human history with the perspective that animals feel emotions and can express those emotions to humans.
Hill's interest in doing so was piqued in 2007, when she was excavating in Chukotka, Russia, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska. The site was estimated to be 1,000 to 2,000 years old, predating the dawn of whaling in the region, and was situated at the top of a large hill. As her team dug through the tundra, they uncovered six or seven intact walrus skulls deliberately arranged in a circle.
Like many archaeologists, Hill had been taught that ancient humans in harsh northern climates conserved calories and rarely expended energy doing things with no direct physical benefit. That people were hauling walrus skulls to a hilltop where there were plenty of similar-sized rocks for building seemed strange. "If you've ever picked up a walrus skull, they're really, really heavy," Hill says. So she started wondering: did the skulls serve a purpose that wasn't strictly practical that justified the effort of carrying them uphill?
When Hill returned home, she began looking for other cases of "people doing funky stuff" with animal remains. There was no shortage of examples: shrines packed with sheep skulls, ceremonial burials of wolves and dogs, walrus-skull rings on both sides of the Bering Strait. To Hill, though, some of the most compelling artifacts came from whaling cultures.
Museum collections across North America, for instance, include a dazzling array of objects categorized as whaling amulets. From this grab bag, Hill identified 20 carved wooden objects. Many served as the seats of whaling boats. In the Iñupiaq language, they're called either iktuġat or aqutim aksivautana, depending on dialect.
One amulet in particular stands out. Hill was looking for Alaskan artifacts in a massive climate-controlled warehouse belonging to Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. The artifacts were housed in hundreds of floor-to-ceiling drawers, row after row of them, with little indication of what was inside. She pulled open one drawer and there it was—the perfect likeness of a bowhead whale staring back at her.
The object, likely from the late 19th century, probably functioned as a crosspiece. Itwas hewn from a hunk of driftwood into a crescent shape 21 centimeters long. Carved on one side was a bowhead, looking as it would look if you were gazing down on a whale from above, perhaps from a raven's-eye perspective. A precious bead of obsidian was embedded in the blowhole. "It's so elegant and simple but so completely whale," Hill says. "It's this perfect balance of minimalism and form."
A contemporary paperweight by a Iñupiat artist made of whale tooth. (Peter Mayac / Smithsonian)
Using Iñupiat oral histories and ethnographies recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries, Hill now knows that such amulets were meant to be placed in a boat with the likeness of the whale facing down, toward the ocean. The meticulously rendered art was thus meant not for humans, but for whales—to flatter them, Hill says, and call them to the hunters. "The idea is that the whale will be attracted to its own likeness, so obviously you want to depict the whale in the most positive way possible," she explains.
Yupik stories from St. Lawrence Island tell of whales who might spend an hour swimming directly under an umiak, positioning themselves so they could check out the carvings and the men occupying the boat. If the umiak was clean, the carvings beautiful, and the men respectful, the whale might reposition itself to be harpooned. If the art portrayed the whale in an unflattering light or the boat was dirty, it indicated that the hunters were lazy and wouldn't treat the whale's body properly. Then the whale might swim away.
In "Sounding a Sea-Change: Acoustic Ecology and Arctic Ocean Governance" published in Thinking with Water, Shirley Roburn quotes Point Hope, Alaska, resident Kirk Oviok: "Like my aunt said, the whales have ears and are more like people," he says. "The first batch of whales seen would show up to check which ones in the whaling crew would be more hospitable. … Then the whales would come back to their pack and tell them about the situation."
The belief that whales have agency and can communicate their needs to people isn't unique to the Arctic. Farther south, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula and British Columbia's Vancouver Island, Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth whalers observed eight months of rituals meant to communicate respect in the mysterious language of whales. They bathed in special pools, prayed, spoke quietly, and avoided startling movements that might offend whales. Right before the hunt, the whalers sang a song asking the whale to give itself.
In Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth belief, as in many Arctic cultures, whales weren't just taken—they willingly gave themselves to human communities. A whale that offered its body wasn't sentencing itself to death. It was choosing to be killed by hunters who had demonstrated, through good behavior and careful adherence to rituals, that they would treat its remains in a way that would allow it to be reborn. Yupik tradition, for example, holds that beluga whales once lived on land and long to return to terra firma. In exchange for offering itself to a Yupik community, a beluga expected to have its bones given the ritualistic treatment that would allow it to complete this transition and return to land, perhaps as one of the wolves that would gnaw on the whale's bones.
According to Hill, many of the objects aiding this reciprocity—vessels used to offer whales a drink of fresh water, amulets that hunters used to negotiate relationships with animal spirits—weren't just reserved for shamanistic ceremonies. They were part of everyday life; the physical manifestation of an ongoing, daily dialogue between the human and animal worlds.
Another Umiak seat representing a whale, made of wood and inlaid with glass beads. (National Museum of the American Indian / Smithsonian)
While Westerners domesticated and eventually industrialized the animals we eat—and thus came to view them as dumb and inferior—Arctic cultures saw whale hunting as a match between equals. Bipedal humans with rudimentary technology faced off against animals as much as 1,000 times their size that were emotional, thoughtful, and influenced by the same social expectations that governed human communities. In fact, whales were thought to live in an underwater society paralleling that above the sea.
Throughout history, similar beliefs have guided other human-animal relationships, especially in hunter-gatherer cultures that shared their environment with big, potentially dangerous animals. Carvings left behind by the Tunit, for example, suggest a belief that polar bears possessed a kind of personhood allowing them to communicate with humans; while some Inuit believed walruses could listen to humans talking about them and react accordingly.
Whether or not those beliefs are demonstrably true, says Hill, they "make room for animal intelligence and feelings and agency in ways that our traditional scientific thinking has not."
Today, as archaeologists like Hill and Matthew Betts shift their interpretation of the past to better reflect Indigenous worldviews, biologists too are shedding new light on whale behavior and biology that seems to confirm the traits Indigenous people have attributed to whales for more than 1,000 years. Among them is Hal Whitehead, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who argues that cetaceans have their own culture—a word typically reserved for human societies.
By this definition, culture is social learning that's passed down from one generation to the next. Whitehead finds evidence for his theory in numerous recent studies, including one that shows bowhead whales in the North Pacific, off the Alaskan coast, and in the Atlantic Ocean near Greenland sing different songs, the way human groups might have different styles of music or linguistic dialects. Similarly, pods of resident killer whales living in the waters off south Vancouver Island greet each other with different behaviors than killer whales living off north Vancouver Island, despite the fact that the groups are genetically almost identical and have overlapping territories.
Plus, calves spend years with their mothers, developing the strong mother-offspring bonds that serve to transfer cultural information, and bowhead whales live long enough to accumulate the kind of environmental knowledge that would be beneficial to pass on to younger generations. We know this largely because of a harpoon tip that was found embedded in a bowhead in northern Alaska in 2007. This particular harpoon was only manufactured between 1879 and 1885 and wasn't used for long after, meaning that the whale had sustained its injury at least 117 years before it finally died.
Other beliefs, too, are proving less farfetched than they once sounded. For years, scientists believed whales couldn't smell, despite the fact that Iñupiat hunters claimed the smell of woodsmoke would drive a whale away from their camp. Eventually, a Dutch scientist dissecting whale skulls proved the animals did, indeed, have the capacity to smell. Even the Yupik belief that beluga whales were once land-dwelling creatures is rooted in reality: some 50 million years ago, the ancestor of modern-day whales walked on land. As if recalling this, whale fetuses briefly develop legs before losing them again.
None of this suggests that whales freely give themselves to humans. But once you understand the biological and intellectual capabilities of whales—as whaling cultures surely did—it's less of a leap to conclude that cetaceans live in their own underwater society, and can communicate their needs and wishes to humans willing to listen.
With the dawn of the 20th century and the encroachment of Euro-Americans into the North, Indigenous whaling changed drastically. Whaling in the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Nations essentially ended in the 1920s after commercial whalers hunted the gray whale to near extinction. In Chukotka, Russian authorities in the 1950s replaced community-based whaling with state-run whaling.
Even the whaling strongholds of Alaska's Iñupiat villages weren't immune. In the 1970s, the International Whaling Commission ordered a halt to subsistence bowhead whaling because US government scientists feared there were just 1,300 of the animals left. Harry Brower Sr. and other whaling captains who'd amassed lifetimes of knowledge knew that figure was wrong.
But unlike other whaling cultures, Iñupiat whalers had the means to fight back, thanks to taxes they had collected from a nearby oil boom. With the money, communities hired Western-trained scientists to corroborate traditional knowledge. The scientists developed a new methodology that used hydrophones to count bowhead whales beneath the ice, rather than extrapolating the population based on a count of the visible bowheads passing by a single, ice-free locale. Their findings proved bowheads were far more numerous than the government had previously thought, and subsistence whaling was allowed to continue.
Elsewhere, too, whaling traditions have slowly come back to life. In 1999, the Makah harvested their first whale in over 70 years. The Chukchi were allowed to hunt again in the 1990s.
Yet few modern men knew whales as intimately as Brower. Although he eschewed some traditions—he said he never wanted his own whaling song to call a harpooned whale to the umiak, for example—Brower had other ways of communicating with whales. He believed that whales listened, and that if a whaler was selfish or disrespectful, whales would avoid him. He believed that the natural world was alive with animals' spirits, and that the inexplicable connection he'd felt with whales could only be explained by the presence of such spirits.
And he believed that in 1986, a baby whale visited him in an Anchorage hospital to show him how future generations could maintain the centuries-long relationship between humans and whales. Before he died, he told his biographer Karen Brewster that although he believed in a Christian heaven, he personally thought he would go elsewhere. "I'm going to go join the whales," he said. "That's the best place, I think. … You could feed all the people for the last time."
Perhaps Brower did become a whale and feed his people one last time. Or perhaps, through his deep understanding of whale biology and behavior, he passed down the knowledge that enabled his people to feed themselves for generations to come. Today, the spring whaling deadline he proposed based on his conversation with the baby whale is still largely observed, and bowhead whales continue to sustain Iñupiat communities, both physically and culturally.
Editor's Note, April 2018: This article has been updated to clarify the original purpose of the whaling amulet that caught Erica Hill's attention in the Smithsonian warehouse.
Here is a great list of alternatives you can try instead of Google. It's interesting to compare search topics and see what comes up compared to Google:
Here are ten alternatives to Google search:
StartPage – StartPage gives you Google search results, but without the tracking (based in the Netherlands).
Searx – A privacy-friendly and versatile metasearch engine that's also open source.
MetaGer – An open source metasearch engine with good features, based in Germany.
As of February 4, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had received 12,697 injury reports and 653 deaths following COVID-19 vaccination.1
Of the cases reported between December 14, 2020, and February 4, 2021, 3.69% were life threatening and the number of deaths account for 5.14% of the total reports. The Pfizer vaccine accounted for 58% of deaths; Moderna's accounted for 41%.
What's more, when you look at vaccine-related deaths between January 2020 and January 2021, you find that COVID-19 vaccines account for a staggering 70% of the annual vaccine deaths, and that's while having been available for less than two months. The first doses of Pfizer vaccine were given in mid-December 2020,2 while Moderna's vaccine rolled out during the last week of December 2020.3
While these numbers are staggering, they're likely only a tiny fraction of the actual number of adverse events. According to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study,4 fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are ever reported to VAERS.
This is primarily because VAERS reporting is voluntary. Many don't even know it exists, or that you don't have to be a medical professional to file a report. This would mean that there may, in reality, be over 1 MILLION COVID vaccine injuries, since 99% typically go unreported.
Report All COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects
To address these shortcomings and monitor the public health effects of this mass vaccination campaign, the Children's Health Defense is calling on all who have suffered a side effect from a COVID-19 vaccine to do three things:5
Despite the clear and present dangers of these so-called vaccines, which are in actuality gene therapy, COVID-19 vaccine makers are steamrolling ahead with trials on children as young as 6 years old.
As reported6 by the University of Oxford, which is collaborating on a COVID-19 vaccine7,8 with AstraZeneca, children between the ages of 6 years and 17 years and 8 months are eligible for participation at four U.K. centers. Those over the age of 16 do not even require a parent's approval but can consent on their own. The remuneration for those putting their entire future at risk is £10 (about $14) per visit.
A total of 300 children are scheduled to participate, 240 of whom will receive the candidate vaccine while so-called controls will receive a meningitis vaccine. The lack of a true placebo is a red flag in and of itself, as using a vaccine as a "placebo" helps mask any number of common side effects, making the vaccine appear safer than it actually is.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has received authorization for use in the U.K. but not the U.S. Contrary to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines authorized for use in the U.S., the AstraZeneca vaccine delivers double-stranded DNA for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein inside a chimpanzee adenovirus.9
Moderna started testing its RNA-based gene therapy on American children between the ages of 12 and 17 back in December 2020,10 and the first Pfizer trials involving adolescents began in mid-October 2020.11 In China, Sinovac and SinoPharm trials have been enrolling children as young as 3.12
Children Do Not Need This Vaccine
Considering children are at extremely low risk of severe COVID-19, and have been shown to not be a significant vector of infection,13 why do children even need this vaccine? Dr. Robert Frenck, lead investigator of the COVID-19 vaccine trials at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, told ABC News:14
"If you wipe out the infection in the younger children, they don't spread it to the adults, and so then, you can get a big handle on disease just by targeting the younger children and getting the infection out of that age group."
This is a standard justification, but it's really little more than a mind game. In essence, children are being required to play Russian roulette with their health based on the premise that it will benefit the whole, but is it really reasonable to ask the youngest among us, who are at lowest risk from the infection, to sacrifice their health to, presumably, protect the elderly?
Studies15 have shown children not only very rarely transmit the disease, either between themselves or to adults, but also, if they get the disease, they virtually never suffer any serious complications. So Frenck's argument really flies in the face of the available data. If children don't transmit the disease, how can you get "a big handle" on it by vaccinating them?
In reality, this argument appears to be designed to coerce parents into vaccinating their children even though the public benefit from doing so is minimal. Rather than being a true public health incentive, it seems the drive to vaccinate children is more about increasing profits. Additionally, early reports suggest that the elderly also have a tendency to die shortly after the inoculation,16,17 which is raising suspicions and concern.
Adverse Effects May Take Years to Develop
In children, the side effects are likely to be less immediately noticeable, but may instead result in future health problems. In a Microbiology & Infectious Diseases paper,18 immunologist Dr. J. Bart Classen warns the mRNA jabs may instigate adverse events that take years to fully develop.19
"One such potential adverse event is prion based diseases caused by activation of intrinsic proteins to form prions. A wealth of knowledge has been published on a class of RNA binding proteins shown to participate in causing a number of neurological diseases including Alzheimer's disease and ALS," Classen writes.
Since research had not been done to ascertain whether mRNA gene therapy might trigger prion-based disease, Classen conducted that study. He writes:20
"Analysis of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 identified two potential risk factors for inducing prion disease is humans. The RNA sequence in the vaccine contains sequences believed to induce TDP-43 and FUS to aggregate in their prion based conformation leading to the development of common neurodegerative diseases.
In particular, it has been shown that RNA sequences GGUA, UG rich sequences, UG tandem repeats, and G Quadruplex sequences, have increased affinity to bind TDP-43 and or FUS and may cause TDP-43 or FUS to take their pathologic configurations in the cytoplasm.
In the current analysis, a total of sixteen UG tandem repeats (ΨGΨG) were identified and additional UG (ΨG) rich sequences were identified. Two GGΨA sequences were found. G Quadruplex sequences are possibly present but sophisticated computer programs are needed to verify these.
The spike protein encoded by the vaccine binds angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), an enzyme which contains zinc molecules. The binding of spike protein to ACE2 has the potential to release the zinc molecule, an ion that causes TDP-43 to assume its pathologic prion transformation."
mRNA Vaccines Are Actually Gene Therapies
As detailed in "COVID-19 mRNA Shots Are Legally Not Vaccines," these inoculations are more accurately described as gene therapies, and by referring to them as "vaccines," the U.S. government is likely in violation of the 2011 U.S. Code Title 15, Section 1125,21 which regulates deceptive practices such as false descriptions in medical claims.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,22 a vaccine is "a product that stimulates a person's immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease." Immunity, in turn, is defined as "Protection from an infectious disease," meaning that "If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected."
Neither Moderna nor Pfizer claim this to be the case for their COVID-19 "vaccines." In fact, in their clinical trials, they specify that they do not even test for immunity.
Unlike real vaccines, which use an antigen of the disease you're trying to prevent, the COVID-19 injections contain synthetic RNA fragments encapsulated in a nanolipid carrier compound,23 the sole purpose of which is to lessen clinical symptoms associated with the S-1 spike protein, not the actual virus.
They do not actually impart immunity or inhibit transmissibility of the disease. In other words, they are not designed to keep you from getting sick with SARS-CoV-2; they only are supposed to lessen your infection symptoms if or when you do get infected.24,25 As such, these products do not meet the medical definition of a vaccine.
Not to worry, though, the Merriam-Webster dictionary recently updated its definition of "vaccine" to include mRNA technology,26 just in time for fact checkers to be able to "debunk" the entirely factual claim of the difference between true vaccines and mRNA technology.
Crazy enough, scientists are already discussing the potential for switching out conventional vaccines that use live or attenuated viruses with this novel RNA technology.27
Considering it's a gene therapy that turns your cells into little "bioreactors" that spit out immune system activating proteins and have no off-switch, I don't even want to imagine what might happen if a person were to receive several different ones.
mRNA Therapy Is a Bad Idea, Especially for Children
Aside from the possibility of prion-based diseases, reviewed above, many medical experts warn that mRNA gene therapy can trigger autoimmune problems and a wide range of inflammatory conditions. As just one example, in a recent interview, Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., explained the mechanics that make injecting RNA so hazardous:
"Normally, messenger RNA is not free in your body because it's a danger signal. The central dogma of molecular biology is that our genetic code, DNA, is transcribed, written, into the messenger RNA. That messenger RNA is translated into protein, or used in a regulatory capacity … to regulate gene expression in cells.
So, taking a synthetic messenger RNA and making it thermostable — making it not break down — [is problematic]. We have lots of enzymes (RNAses and DNAses) that degrade free RNA and DNA because those are danger signals to your immune system. They literally drive inflammatory diseases.
Now you've got PEG, PEGylated and polyethylene glycol, and a lipid nanoparticle that will allow it to enter every cell of the body and change the regulation of our own genes with this synthetic RNA, part of which actually is the message for the gene syncytin …
Syncytin is the endogenous gammaretrovirus envelope that's encoded in the human genome … We know that if syncytin is expressed aberrantly in the body, for instance in the brain, which these lipid nanoparticles will go into, then you've got multiple sclerosis.
The expression of that gene alone enrages microglia — literally inflames and dysregulates the communication between the brain microglia — which are critical for clearing toxins and pathogens in the brain and the communication with astrocytes.
It dysregulates not only the immune system, but also the endocannabinoid system, which is the dimmer switch on inflammation. We've already seen multiple sclerosis as an adverse event in the clinical trials … We also see myalgic encephalomyelitis. Inflammation of the brain and the spinal cord …"
Indeed, many of the side effects being reported are suggestive of neurological damage. Examples include severe dyskinesia (impairment of voluntary movement), ataxia (lack of muscle control) and intermittent or chronic seizures. As explained by Mikovits, these symptoms are caused by neuroinflammation, a dysregulated innate immune response, and/or a disrupted endocannabinoid system.
Another common side effect from the vaccine we're seeing is allergic reactions, including anaphylactic shock. A likely culprit in this is PEG (polyethylene glycol), to which Mikovitz says an estimated 70% of Americans are allergic.
COVID-19 Vaccine Is an Unnecessary Risk
Overall, with reported severe side effects and deaths climbing by the hundreds every week, it's astonishing to think that people would voluntarily risk their children in these trials. It's even more astonishing that public health agencies are pushing for mass inoculation of children with these experimental gene therapies, when there's no data whatsoever to assure parents that their children's health won't be destroyed in years to come.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I suspect this global vaccination campaign will result in an avalanche of chronic health problems and deaths so great that any talk of mandates will have to be abandoned, or rescinded if already implemented.
So, if you care about your and your family's health, the answer may simply be to put off getting vaccinated against COVID-19 for as long as possible and wait for the inevitable truth to come to light.
There are several prevention strategies and treatments readily available that have been shown to be highly effective, which means the need for a vaccine in the first place is nearly moot. Among them, nebulized hydrogen peroxide with iodine, which I've written about in previous articles, works very well.
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