SPANISH trade unionists have condemned the sacking of more than 100 Amazon workers following strike action last month.
The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) accused the global logistics company of victimising trade unionists who walked out in a 48-hour stoppage after the introduction of new terms that reduce wages and benefits.
Amazon’s temporary workforce took strike action at the San Fernando de Henares site on March 21 and 22 and are due to walk out again tomorrow.
However the company decided not to renew the contracts of more than 100 temporary staff before the action, which the CGT said was “politically motivated.”
CGT representative on Amazon’s workers committee Marc Blanes said the sackings were unprecedented and he believed that the contracts were not renewed as a reprisal for the employees’ support for the strike.
Amazon dismissed claims their decision was linked to the strike action and said it was due to low demand. However, staff at the site said that layoffs were unusual at this time of year.
Strike action was supported by 98 per cent of the staff at the Amazon site, which has around 2,000 workers, 900 of whom are on precarious contracts.
Some of the temporary workers have been working at the site for 16 months and yet are employed on short-term contracts lasting a week or 15 days.
Under the new terms, pay would be frozen and additional hours payments would be slashed while sick pay would be cut in half.
Unions have called for a day of protest in Madrid today, with action being considered for the company’s biggest sales days including Prime Day and Black Friday.
Meetings are being held with Italian unions to plan joint actions.
In the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, many people just began to become aware of the beginning of how much data Facebook gathers, yet they do not yet understand the power of the deductive analysis upon their data. It seems that few people are aware that Facebook not only gathers and stores everything that you post on your public profile, but everything that you type into your browser, even if you never send it, and this information is combined with the data that Facebook gathers from the tracking cookies that it plants on your computer. Many websites across the internet will put these cookies on your computer, even if you are not a Facebook user.
What can you do? The cookies used by Facebook, and others that are out to gather data about you generally never expire, so you should never allow cookies to last beyond the end of session (you can change this in your browser settings). There are browser extensions that will also help prevent Facebook tracking, and other forms of data collection, and some malware. The extensions “Ublock Origin,” “Disconnect,” and “Privacy Badger” should be used by everyone, and more advanced users should also consider either “NoScript” for Firefox or “ScriptSafe” for Chrome.
In order to prevent Facebook’s gathering of all the information on your phone, like your contacts, call history, texting data, and who knows what else, and giving it essentially total control over everything on your mobile device, the simple answer is to avoid using the Facebook app if you have an Android device. Due to the way the iPhone works, it is not as prone to the blatant breach of privacy, so use at your own risk on iPhones, as you are relying on the IOS to prevent the data gathering.
If you wish to use Facebook to continue to maintain contact with others, yet you either wish to take back your privacy, or wish to have a higher degree of digital security, or maybe you are just tired of “Facebook jail” whenever a Facebook censor needs to make their daily quota, there is now a tool to allow that. Thanks to crypto-activist Patrick Smith there is now a browser extension for Chrome (with Firefox extensions in the works) that will allow you to make encrypted posts that only your preferred audience can see. All others will see only encrypted nonsense. Because it is a browser extension, it does all the work for you, and it is based on the cryptography of OpenPGP using 4096 bit RSA keys. In short, it is truly secure up until an end node compromise, arguably as secure as Signal messenger in its use of cryptographic primitives. A use case even for activists that make practically all of their posts public is the group encryption capability. This allows a group of like-minded persons to create a Facebook group and use it to communicate with others, but securely and privately. Only those within the group that have the group passphrase will be able to read the posts within the group. Even in the case that a person has their device seized by law enforcement, or Facebook turns over their data to law enforcement, or should your Facebook is accessed by a malicious third party, without the passphrase required for your FaceMask decryption no one can read anything that was encrypted by FaceMask.
Setup and use are simple, and even the less technically inclined persons can follow this simple video tutorial. Facebook cannot use data against you that it does not have. Stalkers, law enforcement, and others cannot use information that they do not have. Using this tool, your information will never be revealed to those who you do not wish to see it. The potential to communicate privately and securely across a widely used public platform is simply amazing, and activists, in particular, would be foolish not to take advantage of this new capability.
You can check out the website HERE and the Facebook page HERE. Get the Chrome extension HERE. Even deleting Facebook will not remove the data they have about you, and that alone will not stop their use of tracking cookies. Government regulations will not help you, if anything the Government is attempting to weaken encryption capabilities like this. It’s your privacy. It’s your security. It’s up to you to keep it private and secure. Crypto-anarchists, cypherpunks, and crypto activists of all stripes are here to help you do just that.
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. This audacious claim was made by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in March 1991, only two months after NATO forces had rained explosives on Iraq, shedding the blood of more than a hundred thousand people.
To understand Cambridge Analytica and its parent firm, Strategic Communication Laboratories, we need to get our heads round what Baudrillard meant, and what has happened since: how military propaganda has changed with technology, how war has been privatised, and how imperialism is coming home.
Baudrillard’s argument centred on the fact that NATO’s action in the Gulf was the first time audiences in Western countries had been able to watch a war live, on rolling TV news – CNN had become the first 24-hour news channel in 1980. Because camera crews were embedded with American troops, by whom they were effectively censored, the coverage had little resemblance to the reality of the bombardment of Iraq and Kuwait. The events known to Western audiences as “The Gulf War” – symbolised by camera footage from ‘precision’ missiles and footage of military hardware – are more accurately understood as a movie directed from the Pentagon. They were so removed from the gore-splattered reality that it’s an abuse of language to call them the same thing. Hence, the “Gulf War” did not take place.
Watch | Desert Storm’s First Apache Strikes
Not long after Baudrillard’s iconic essay was published, Strategic Communications Laboratories was founded. “SCL Group provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organisations worldwide” reads the first line of its website. “For over 25 years, we have conducted behavioural change programmes in over 60 countries & have been formally recognised for our work in defence and social change.”
Of course, military propaganda was nothing new. And nor is the extent to which it has evolved alongside changes in media technology and economics. The film Citizen Kane tells a fictionalised version of the first tabloid (or, as Americans call it, ‘yellow journalism’) war: how the circulation battle between William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World arguably drove the US into the 1889 Spanish American War. It was during this affair that Hearst reportedly told his correspondent, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”, as parodied in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. But after the propaganda disaster of the Tet offensive in Vietnam softened domestic support for the war, the military planners began to devise new ways to control media reporting.
As a result, when Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falklands in 1982, they pioneered a new technique for media control: embedding journalists with troops. And, as former BBC war reporter Caroline Wyatt blogged, “The lessons from embedding journalists with the Royal Navy during the Falklands war were taken up enthusiastically by military planners in both Washington and London for the First Gulf War in 1991.”
The UK defence secretary during the Falklands War when the use of embedded journalists was pioneered was John Nott (who backed Brexit). As my colleague Caroline Molloy pointed out to me, his son-in-law is Tory MP Hugo Swire, former minister in both the Northern Ireland Office and the Foreign Office. Swire’s cousin – with whom he overlapped at Eton – is Nigel Oakes, founder of Strategic Communications Laboratories. It’s not a conspiracy, just that the ruling class are all related.
But back to our history: by the time of the 2003 Iraq War, communications technology had moved on again. As the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt explains in the same blog, “satellite communications are now much more sophisticated, meaning we almost always have our own means of communicating with London. That offers a crucial measure of independence, even if reports still have to be cleared for ‘op sec’ [operational security]. The almost total control by the military of the means of reporting in the Falklands would be unthinkable in most warzones today.”
In February 2004, another major disruption in communications technology began: Facebook was founded. And with it came a whole new propaganda nightmare.
As the same time as this history was unfolding, though, something else vital was happening: neoliberalism.
Looked at one way, neoliberalism is the successor to geographical imperialism as the “most extreme form of capitalism”. It used to be that someone with a small fortune to invest could secure the biggest return by paying someone else to sail overseas, subjugate or kill people (usually people of colour) and steal them and/or their stuff. But they couldn’t keep expanding forever – the world is only so big. And so eventually, wealthy Western investors started to shift much of their focus from opening new markets in ‘far off lands’ to marketising new parts of life at home. Neoliberalism is also therefore this process of marketisation: of shifting decisions from one person one vote, to one pound (or dollar or Yen or Euro) one vote. Or, as Will Davies puts it: “the disenchantment of politics by economics”.
The first Iraq War – the one that “did not take place” – coincided with a key stage in this process: the rapid marketisation (read ‘asset stripping’) of the collapsing Soviet Union, and so the successful encirclement of the globe by Western capital. The second Iraq War was notable for the acceleration of another key stage: the encroachment of market forces into the deepest corner of the state. During the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to War on Want, private military companies “burst onto the scene”.
The privatisation of war
An Afghan National Police officer meets a British security contractor during a engagement between U.S. Marines of 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment and Nawa District officials in the Nawa District Bazaar, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, July 22, 2009. (Photo: U.S. Marine Corps/William Greeson)
In a 2016 report, the campaign group War on Want describes how the UK became the world centre for this mercenary industry. You might know G4S as the company which checks your gas meter, but they are primarily the world’s largest mercenary firm, involved in providing ‘security’ in war zones across the planet (don’t miss my colleagues Clare Sambrook and Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi’s excellent investigations of their work in the UK).
In Hereford alone, near the SAS headquarters, there are 14 mercenary firms, according to War on Want’s report. At the height of the Iraq war, around 80 private companies were involved in the occupation. In 2003, when UK and US forces unleashed “shock and awe” both on the Iraqi people and on their own populations down cable TV wires, the Foreign Office spent £12.6m on British private security firms, according to official figures highlighted by the Guardian. By 2012, that figure had risen to £48.9m. In 2015, G4S alone secured a £100m contract to provide security for the British embassy in Afghanistan.
And just as the fighting was privatised, so too was the propaganda. In 2016, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that the Pentagon had paid around half a billion dollars to the British PR firm Bell Pottinger to deliver propaganda during the Iraq war. Bell Pottinger, famous for shaping Thatcher’s image, included among its clients Asma Al Assad, wife of the Syrian president. Part of their work was making fake Al Qaeda propaganda films. (The firm was forced to close last year because they made the mistake of deploying their tactics against white people).
Journalist Liam O’Hare has revealed that Mark Turnbull, the SCL and Cambridge Analytica director who was filmed alongside Alexander Nix in the Channel4 sting, was employed by Bell Pottinger in Iraq in this period.
The psychological operations wing of our privatised military: a mercenary propaganda agency.
Like Bell Pottinger, SCL saw the opportunity of the increasing privatisation of war. In his 2006 book “Britain’s Power Elites: The Rebirth of the Ruling Class”, Hywel Williams wrote “It therefore seems only natural that a political communications consultancy, Strategic Communications Laboratories, should have now launched itself as the first private company to provide ‘psyops’ to the military.”
While much of what SCL has done for the military is secret, we do know (thanks, again, to O’Hare) that it’s had contracts from the UK and US departments of defence amounting to (at the very least) hundreds of thousands of dollars. And a document from the National Defence Academy of Latvia that I managed to dig out, entitled “NATO strategic communication: more to be done?” tells us that they were operating in Afghanistan in 2010, and gives some clues about what they were up to:
“more detailed qualitative data gathering operation was being conducted in Maiwand Province by a British company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) is almost unique in the international contractor community in that it has a dedicated, and funded, behavioural research arm located in the prestigious home of British Science and research, The Royal Institute, London.”
In simple terms, the SCL Group – Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm – is the psychological operations wing of our privatised military: a mercenary propaganda agency.
The skills they developed in the context of warzones shouldn’t be overplayed, but nor should they be underplayed. As far as we can tell, just as the Pentagon used simple tools like choosing where to embed journalists during the Gulf War to spin its version of events, so they mastered the tools of modern communication: Facebook, online videos, data gathering and microtargeting. Such tools aren’t magic (and Anthony Barnett writes well about the risks of implying that they are). They don’t on their own explain either Brexit or Trump (I wrote a plea last year that Remainers in the UK don’t use our investigations as an excuse for failing to engage with the real reasons for the Leave vote). I wouldn’t even use the word “rigging” to describe the impact of these propaganda firms. But they are important.
As the Channel 4 undercover investigation revealed, this work has often been carried out alongside more traditional smear tactics, and – as Chris Wylie explained – in partnership with another nexus in this world: Israel’s conurbation of private intelligence firms, a part of a burgeoning military industrial complex in the country which Israeli activist and writer Jeff Halper argues is a key part of the country’s “parallel diplomacy” drive.
(Of course, this isn’t unique to the UK and Israel. Until Cambridge Analytica achieved global infamy last week, the most prominent mercenary propaganda firm in the world was Peter Theil’s company Palantir (named after the all-seeing eye in Lord of the Rings). Theil, founder of PayPal (with Elon Musk) and an executive of Facebook, wrote a notorious essay in 2009 arguing that female enfranchisement had made democracy untenable and that someone should therefore invent the technology to destroy it. Palantir’s most prominent clients are the United States Intelligence Community, and the US Department of Defence. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie claimed this week that his firm had worked with Palantir. It’s also noteworthy that one of Palantir’s shareholders is Field Marshal Lord Guthrie, former head of the British Army, and adviser to Veterans for Britain, one of the groups which funnelled money to AggregateIQ ahead of the European referendum. Guthrie also works for Acanum, one of the leading private intelligence agencies, who, in common with Cambridge Analytica’s partners Black Cube, listed Meyer Dagam, the former head of Mossad, as one of their advisers, until he died in 2016. Again, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just that these guys all know each other. But I digress.)
Back to SCL: why are NATO’s mercenary propagandists getting involved in the US presidential election and – if the growing body of evidence about the link between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ is to be believed – Brexit?
The obvious answer is surely partly true. They could make money doing so, and so they did. If you privatise war, don’t be surprised if military firms start using the tools of war on ‘their own’ side. When Eisenhower warned of the Military Industrial Complex, he was thinking about physical weapons. But, just as unregulated semi-automatics invented for soldiers end up going off in American schools, it shouldn’t be any kind of surprise that the weapons of information war are going off in Anglo-American votes.
But in a more general sense, this whole history is exactly what Brexit was about for many of the powerful people who pushed for it. As we’ve been investigating the secret donation which paid for the DUP Brexit campaign, we keep coming across this web of connections. Priti Patel worked for Bell Pottinger in Bahrain. Richard Cook, the front man for the secret donation to the DUP, set up a business in 2013 with the former head of Saudi intelligence and a Danish man involved in running guns to Hindu radicals who told us he was a spy. David Banks, who ran Veterans for Britain, worked in PR in the Middle East for four years – and Veterans for Britain more generally is full of these contacts.
I could go on. My suspicion is that this isn’t because there’s some kind of conspiracy revolving around a group of ex-spooks. It’s about the fact that power comes from networks of people, and the wing of the British ruling class which was in and around the military is moving rapidly into the world of privatised war. And those people have a strong ideological and material interest in radical right politics.
“The most corrupt country on Earth”
Iraqis pass by a British tank as they flee Basra, southern Iraq, as smoke looming over the city can be seen in the distance, March 29, 2003. (AP/Anja Niedringhaus)
Another way to see it is like this: Britain has lost most of its geographical empire. And most of our modern politics is about the ways in which different groups struggle to come to terms with that fact. For a large portion of the ruling establishment, this involves attempting to reprise the glory days by placing the country at the centre of two of the nexuses which define the modern era.
The UK and its Overseas Territories have already become by far the most significant network of tax havens and secrecy areas in the world, making us the global centre for money laundering and therefore, as Roberto Saviano, the leading expert on the mafia argues, the most corrupt country on earth. And just as countries with major oil industries have major oil lobbies, the UK has a major money laundry-lobby.
Pesky EU regulations have long frustrated the dreams of these people, who wish our island nation to move even further offshore and become even more of a tax haven. And so for some Brexiteers – this money laundry lobby – there was always strong incentive to back a Leave vote: European Research Group statements going back 25 years show as much.
But what the Cambridge Analytica affair reminds us of is that this is not just about the money laundry lobby (nor the agrochemical lobby). Another group with a strong interest in pushing such deregulation, dimming transparency, hyping Islamophobia in America and turning peoples against each other is our flourishing mercenary complex – one of the only other industries in which Britain leads the world. And so it’s no surprise that its propaganda wing has turned the skills it’s learned in towards its desired political outcomes.
In his essay, Baudrillard argued that his observations about the changes in military propaganda told us something about the then new post-Cold War era. Only two years after Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, he wrote a sentence which, for me, teaches us more about the Cambridge Analytica story than much of the punditry that we’ve seen since: “just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of capital, so war is not measured by being unleashed but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space.”
Cambridge Analytica is what happens when you privatise your military propaganda operation. It walked into the space created when social media killed journalism. It is yet another example of tools developed to subjugate people elsewhere in the world being used on the domestic populations of the Western countries in which they were built. It marks the point at which neoliberal capitalism reaches its zenith, and ascends to surveillance capitalism. And the best possible response is to create a democratic media which can’t be bought by propagandists.
Top Photo | American tanks arrive in Baghdad in 2003, by Technical Sergeant John L. Houghton, Jr., United States Air Force. (Public Domain)
Adam Ramsay is the Co-Editor of openDemocracyUK and also works with Bright Green. Before, he was a full time campaigner with People & Planet. You can follow him at @adamramsay.
According to a growing number of reports, Agriq-Quest Ltd, the Nairobi based testing laboratory appointed by the Kenyan Ministry of Health and the Catholic Health Commission to carry out analysis on selected vials of the tetanus toxoid vaccines to determine whether or not they contained the anti-fertility hormone hCG, have had their license suspended.
Interestingly, the allegation that their license was suspended came a full two years after they had presented their findings, and representatives from the laboratory have told Health Impact News that their license is still intact.
A Brief Background: African Girls Become Infertile through Tetanus Vaccine
In 2014, doctors from the Kenyan Catholic Doctors Association discovered that the tetanus vaccinations that had been administered to 2.3 million girls and women by the World Health Organization and UNICEF had been contaminated with the anti-fertility hormone hCG.
Human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, is a hormone produced naturally in pregnancy to encourage the development of the growing fetus. However, when hCG is combined with the tetanus toxoid carrier in tetanus vaccinations, it causes a pregnant woman to produce antibodies against the pregnancy and leads her to miscarry.
In September of 2017 APA News in Kenya reported that at least 500,000 young girls and women may be infertile, following a tetanus vaccine administered by the government in 2014 and 2015:
“Today, we can confirm to the country that the Catholic Church was right. Hundreds of thousands of our girls and women, aged between 14 and 49, from the fastest growing populations in the country will not have children, because of the state-sponsored sterilization that was sold to the country as tetanus vaccination,” Odinga declared.
Odinga further charged that they accessed the analysis from four highly-regarded institutions, such as AgriQ Quest Ltd, the Nairobi Hospital Laboratories, the University of Nairobi and Lancet Kenya.
Company Accredited to Test Tetanus Vaccines in Kenya Has Their License Suspended
Business Daily Africa reported that the laboratory testing the vaccines has lost its license:
An industrial laboratory that was embroiled in controversy with the government last year has had its licence suspended.
The Kenya Accreditation Service (Kenas) announced that it suspended Agriq-Quest Ltd’s licence this month.
The Nairobi-based company came into the limelight mid last year in a dispute with the Ministry of Health over a controversial tetanus and polio vaccination.
“Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga said girls and women aged between 14 and 49 from the fastest growing populations in the country will not have children, because of a state-sponsored sterilization exercise that was sold to the country as a tetanus vaccination.
The Catholic Church was ignored when it mounted a strong but lonely campaign against the mass tetanus vaccination, after it raised concerns about the safety of the vaccine that was being used, he said.
At the time, the Catholic Church in Kenya claimed that the tetanus vaccine used by the government of Kenya and UN agencies was contaminated with a hormone (hCG) that can cause miscarriages and render some women sterile.”
The Agence de Presse Africaine stated that Odring confirmed the vaccines were contaminated with the hCG hormone:
“Today, we can confirm to the country that the Catholic Church was right. Hundreds of thousands of our girls and women, aged between 14 and 49, from the fastest growing populations in the country will not have children, because of the state-sponsored sterilization that was sold to the country as tetanus vaccination.”
A further report published by Business Daily Africa, stated that when their reporters had spoken to the CEO of Agriq-Quest Ltd, Mr. Fredrick Muthuri, on the telephone, he informed them that that his company was in dispute over the suspension, due to “foul play.”
However, they followed up with this statement by adding that a former employee of the company, who wished to remain anonymous, had stated that:
“The lab lacked capacity to carry out the tests it was handling for its clients, including the Ministry of Health and several industries such as Tullow Oil Plc and purified drinking water manufacturers.”
According to Agriq-Quest Ltd, they presented the results of their findings in January 2015. Their presentation to the Joint Committee of experts, confirmed categorically that the vaccinations tested did contain the anti-fertility hormone, hCG.
If this is correct, then it would mean that the Kenyan Ministry of Health knew that the tested vaccinations contained hCG, two years before Agriq-Quest had their license suspended.
Ministry of Health Accuse Catholic Doctors Association of Contaminating the Vaccines
Dr. Ngare.
We asked Dr. Wahome Ngare from the Kenyan Catholic Association whether or not he could verify that the Kenyan Ministry of Health knew that vaccinations were contaminated two years before their license was suspended. He stated:
“This is correct. However, the then-principal secretary of the Ministry of Health, Dr. Muraguri, who had constituted the joint committee of experts, immediately cast doubt on our results and even suggested that we may have deliberately contaminated the vaccines with hCG, which is ridiculous.
The results showed that the hCG in the vaccine was conjugated and we don’t have the technical knowledge or equipment to do such sophisticated bio-engineering. In any case, if indeed we had deliberately contaminated the vaccine, it would have shown on the HPLC tests performed by Dr. Muthuri, and knowing his level of integrity, he would have exposed us as fraudsters and happily handed us over to the police!”
In January 2017, in response to the report written by Business Daily, Kenya Accreditation Service(KENAS), the organization mandated to offer accreditation services by the Government of Kenya, released the following document confirming Agriq-Quest’s suspension.
Catholic Doctors Association Under Scrutiny
Interestingly, in 2016, Dr. Stephen Kimotho Karanja and Dr. Wahome Ngare from the Catholic Doctors Association, in Nairobi, Kenya, were summoned to appear before the Preliminary Inquiry Committee of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentist Board to answer to a series of complaints received from the Kenyan Medical Association and the general public.
Dr. Stephen Kimotho Karanja and Dr. Wahome Ngare, who were both well respected in their fields, were accused of misleading the general public regarding tetanus and polio vaccination programs and in doing so were said to have stepped outside their fields of specialization.
As the Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board is an organization that determines licensure and maintenance of an annual register of duly qualified doctors and dentists, these two well-respected doctors faced being struck off the medical register for exposing the truth about the vaccines.
We asked Dr. Ngare what happened at the hearing, he stated:
“In brief, they brought in a vaccine expert who gave us a long lecture on the importance of vaccines and the long process and quality checks any vaccine goes through before it is approved for use in human beings.
We were then invited to present our scientific findings, which shocked the board. The board chairman acknowledged that the matter was serious and promised to call representatives from the ministry and arbitrate between us and them so that we can come up with the best possible way to deal with this threat going forward. He asked for our undertaking that we will not discuss the matter in public again until it was resolved internally.
Since the proceedings of this committee are equivalent to a court of law, we were supposed to get signed copies of the ruling so that we could move to the next step. To date, all our lawyers’ efforts to get the signed proceedings and ruling have been futile!
My feeling is that the sermons were used to create a certain impression among the public – that we were summoned by the board for disciplinary proceedings and we have never spoken thereafter!
A very clever political trick, I must admit. Dr. Karanja and I continue to work, just as does Dr. Muthuri, but the impressions created are very misleading.”
If what Dr. Ngare is saying is true, then we need to question whether or not the above hearing was more about silencing these professionals to further their agenda than exposing the truth.
We asked Dr. Ngare whether or not he believed that this was the reason that Agriq Quest had their license suspended. He explained that:
“The body that supposedly ‘deregistered’ Agriq-Quest is a local accrediting organization and most likely has affiliations to international organizations, which would explain its actions. It is not the registering body for laboratories in Kenya and therefore cannot deregister the lab! It had accredited only some minor functions of Agriq-Quest that did not include the test we did.
They only withdrew their local accreditation, which is of little consequence to the functionality of the laboratory. It was most likely a preemptive move to put doubt in the results just in case the results are ever published in a scientific paper as we have done.”
Were Agriq-Quest Equipped to Test Vaccines?
From Agriq-Quest’s Facebook page, it certainly appears that the laboratory was equipped to test the vaccines for hormones, leaving us to question why their former employee brought their capabilities into question?
Agriq-Quest states:
“AgriQ-Quest, a joint venture between Quest Laboratories Ltd in Nairobi Kenya and AgriQ in the Netherlands, offer a wide range of Laboratory Analytical Services for small, medium and large agricultural, manufacturing and service organizations.”
To discover whether or not the laboratory was equipped to do the testing or not, we contacted Agriq-Quest Ltd and asked them if there was anyone available to answer a few questions.
A spokesperson for the company who wished to remain anonymous for legal reasons, agreed to be interviewed.
We asked him what the laboratory had been asked to test and why. He replied:
“We were appointed to test the vaccines by the joint committee constituted by the Ministry of Health and Catholic Church. We were asked to test the vaccines for the presence of beta hCG.”
To demonstrate to readers exactly what tests Agriq-Quest Ltd were asked to perform, Health Impact News was given permission to publish the following letter.
We asked the spokesperson whether or not the laboratories were equipped to test the vaccinations for contamination. He stated that:
“Yes, the method of choice was HPLC. We have 3 HPLC machines and we developed and validated the method. We also carried out checks with the urine of a pregnant mother and a non-pregnant mother to confirm that the method we selected was able to detect the presence of beta hCG. We found that the method detected beta hCG even if it was present in very small quantities.”
We asked him whether or not the laboratories had found the vaccinations to be contaminated and if so, with which substances. He replied that:
“We found that beta hCG was present in the vaccines that had been presented for testing by the joint committee of experts. There were three out of nine vials that were contaminated, though three of them had the same batch number, so it is actually three out of six vials presented for testing that were contaminated with beta hCG.”
We asked him who they had reported their findings to. He replied:
“We reported our preliminary findings to the joint committee. The committee was disbanded before the final report was presented.”
We asked him who suspended the company’s license and why. He explained that:
“Our license was not suspended. We continue to run the laboratory. What happened is that we had an accreditation from KENAS, a government institution for analysis of some parameters in soil and wastewater. They suspended the accreditation which we know was due to some other influence and we decided we did not require it anymore so we withdrew from it.”
Finally, we asked him how the staff at Agriq-Quest felt about what had happened. He told us that:
“We feel we were right in our analysis and that the vaccines were contaminated with beta hCG. No kind of intimidation will hide this and take this scientific fact away. What happened was a systematic scheme to destroy the credibility of the laboratory and cast doubt on the tests since they did not have the capacity to challenge the science and method that was used to analyze the vaccines.”
Health Impact News would like to thank both Dr. Ngare and Agriq-Quest Ltd for their frank and honest contributions to this article and we wish them every success for the future.
This article written by Christina England first appeared first on Health Impact News on February 13, 2018.
