David Dobrodt

As the drumbeat for war grows louder, and the near-misses in the air and near-collisions at sea more numerous, it is more urgent than ever that a summit of major powers happen, as soon as possible. The escalation in rhetoric against Russia and Putin over the narrative being spread about the Navalny “poisoning” — being spread with the usual help of Britain’s Porton Down chemical warfare center and the British-directed media — may have been the deciding factor in Putin’s decision to not attend the UNGA in New York this month.

The exposure of a coup faction among retired military, by former JAG officer Col. Richard Black at last weekend’s Schiller Institute (SI) conference, is reverberating widely, as it reflects the view of patriotic military officials who reject the idea of a coup against Trump. The President himself, in his Labor Day press conference, drew attention to the role of the war party, referring to Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex, and the decision announced on Wednesday to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq demonstrates his intent to move on his pledge to end the “endless wars.”

In discussing this dangerous strategic situation, Helga Zepp-LaRouche urged viewers to use the video proceedings of the SI conference to elevate the level of dialogue in the population. The question that must be posed is, “Do you want war or peace?” If you want peace, join our mobilization to ensure a summit takes place BEFORE the election, as it will become more difficult as time passes, especially as the war party is building for a full-fledged constitutional crisis around the election.

An article in the Dec. 3 China Briefing, titled “China’s COVID-19 Vaccine Development and Availability,” names four of China’s vaccine-producers: the Tianjin-based CanSino; the Wuhan-based China National Biotech Group (CNBG), the Beijing-based Sinovac, and ZLongkema, based in Anhui province. These pharma companies have arrangements to carry out testing and distribution of vaccines in 14 developing sector countries, primarily in Ibero-America and Southwest Asia. Recently, China’s Sinovac licensed Brazil’s respected Butantan Institute to get raw materials to manufacture millions of doses of its COVID vaccine inside Brazil. China has the scientific knowledge, manpower, strong Hamiltonian finances, and production engineering skills capabilities to teach other countries to set up vaccine production factories within their borders, to the effect, perhaps, of expanding vaccine production by 1 to 2 billion doses.

The United States has strong capabilities. Were the U.S. to apply the Defense Production Act of 1950 to expand vaccine-manufacturing facilities, it could greatly add to this process, under HHS’s Operation Warp Speed.

The international organization COVAX was formed decades ago, as a joint fund for equitable distribution of vaccines, joining with an organization named Gavi, a funder of vaccines for low-income countries based in Geneva, Switzerland. On Dec. 18, COVAX announced that through contributions, it has pledged that at least 1.3 billion donor-funded vaccine doses will be made available to 92 low- and middle-income economies that are eligible. This valuable immunization initiative would fund only approximately enough vaccine to vaccinate a targeted 20% of the population.

These nations cannot wait until 2023-24 to get sufficient COVID-19 vaccine. The production facilities must be constructed so that the vaccine is available to a considerable share of those nations’ population by the first quarter of 2021. This will require not only vaccines per se, but also the refrigeration chains and other basic infrastructure required to deliver the doses to the targeted population. The method to address this was outlined in the LaRouche plan “Reopen the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs.”

Excerpts from Panel 1 of the September 5-6 Schiller Institute conference.

Watch the whole panel here: https://youtu.be/np673ypliKM

Speakers include:

Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute
Greetings and Opening Remarks

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. (1922-2019)
Speech delivered to the 2000 Labor Day Schiller Institute conference

Andrey Kortunov
Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council
The Strategic Implications of the Russia-United States Bilateral Relationship

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko
Doctor of Economics, Chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine
Irreconcilable Problems Are Pushing the World Towards Catastrophe

Colonel Richard H. Black (USA, Ret.)
Former head of the Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon; former State Senator, Virginia
Do We Risk a Military Coup?

J. Kirk Wiebe
Former Senior National Security Agency (NSA) analyst
The Unnecessary Tragedy of 9/11

William Binney
Former technical director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis and Reporting section of the National Security Agency (NSA)
Defend the Constitution from the Surveillance State

A great increase in vaccine-making production capacity is needed globally, if billions of people in Ibero-America, Africa, and Asia are to have access to COVID-19 vaccines in a timely fashion to save tens of millions of lives—and if those populations are not to be made into a petri dish for breeding new mutations and new viruses to reinfect nations who survived the first round.

The following is a preliminary look at existing production capacity for COVID-19 vaccines, and what emergency measures and new construction would be needed to ensure success.

In a Dec. 8 interview with Bloomberg television, Rasmus Bech Hansen, founder and CEO of Airfinity, a life-sciences analytics firm that is currently focusing on SAR-CoV-2 virus, said that 6 billion of the world’s present 7.8 billion people would need to be vaccinated in order for COVID-19 to be defeated. This involves mass vaccination for about 75% of the world’s population.

But that is not occurring; the developing sector is, for the most part, being left out of plans for immediate or near-term vaccination. This means death for them, and continuing danger of contagion for the entire human race. A Nov. 30 article in Nature magazine, entitled, “How COVID Vaccines Are Being Divvied Up Around the World,” reports that vaccine-makers specializing in COVID vaccines, “can make sufficient doses for more than one-third of the world’s population by the end of 2021. But many people in low-income countries might have to wait until 2023 or 2024 for vaccination, according to estimates from the Duke Global Health Innovation Center in Durham, North Carolina.”

Nature further reports that “27 members of the European Union, together with five rich countries, have pre-ordered about half [of vaccine doses]. The countries account for only around 13% of the global population.”

To gain a sense of overall production capacity, the estimated capacity for 2021 for the major vaccine-makers, in billions of doses, is: AstraZeneca, 3 billion; Pfizer/BioNTech, 1.3 billion; Moderna, 1 billion; Russia’s Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology (which makes Russia’s Sputnik V), 800 million.

Other vaccine-makers, including Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, Novanax, and others, may have the combined capacity to produce another 1.5 billion doses, bringing the total doses to 7.6 billion. But these figures may be overstated. For example, Russia does not have sufficient vaccine-making capacity inside Russia to make the vaccines it has committed to for foreign countries. Many pharma companies make projections of what they would like to produce, but do not reach them, and so forth.

As Xinhua notes today, “China is making steady progress from a follower to a leader in transport technology“ referencing a new white paper released in Beijing today. China possesses self-developed core technologies, and has made major breakthroughs in transport infrastructure and equipment, according to the white paper titled “Sustainable Development of Transport in China”. The following are some world-leading mega-projects and technologies listed by the white paper:

-— China leads the world in technology for railways at high altitudes and in extremely low temperatures, and for high-speed and heavy-haul railways.

-— It has solved the most challenging technical problems confronting highway construction in difficult geological conditions such as plateau permafrost, expansive soil, and desert. It also leads in core technologies for building deep-water offshore ports, improving massive estuary and long waterways, and building large airports.

-— By the end of 2019, the total length of high-speed railway lines across the country exceeded 35,000 km, making up more than two thirds of the world’s total.

-— The Beijing-Guangzhou High-speed Railway, the longest high-speed rail line in the world, has been completed. The Harbin-Dalian High-speed Railway, the world’s first high-speed rail line operating at low temperatures in winter is open to traffic. The Datong-Qinhuangdao Heavy-haul Railway ranks top in the world in terms of annual transport volume.

-— China leads the world in the total length and number of highway bridges and tunnels in service and under construction. It has seven of the ten longest cable-stayed bridges, six of the ten longest suspension bridges, six of the ten longest cross-sea bridges, and eight of the ten highest bridges in the world.

-— The Fuxing electric multiple units trains have been running at 350 km/h – the highest operating speed in the world – on the Beijing-Shanghai Highspeed Rail, the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Rail and the Beijing-Zhangjiakou High-speed Rail.

-— China became the first in the world to realize autopilot on trains running at a speed of 350 km/h. 

Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, has written an open letter to President Trump asking him to grant a pardon to Julian Assange.

His letter reads:

“Mr. President, Today, I respectfully request that you pardon Mr. Julian Assange. Mr. Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his liberty for the past ten years. This is a high price to pay for the courage to publish true information about government misconduct throughout the world. I visited Mr. Assange in Belmarsh High Security Prison in London, with two independent medical doctors, and I can attest to the fact that his health has seriously deteriorated, to the point where his life is now in danger. Critically, Mr. Assange suffers from a documented respiratory condition which renders him extremely vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic that has recently broken out in the prison where he is being held. I ask you to pardon Mr. Assange, because he is not, and has never been, an enemy of the American people. His organization, WikiLeaks, fights secrecy and corruption throughout the world and, therefore, acts in the public interest both of the American people and of humanity as a whole.

“I ask because Mr. Assange has never published false information. The cause for any reputational harm that may have resulted from his publications is not to be found in any misconduct on his part, but in the very misconduct which he exposed.

“I ask because Mr. Assange has not hacked or stolen any of the information he published. He has obtained it from authentic documents and sources in the same way as any other serious and independent investigative journalists conduct their work. While we may personally agree or disagree with their publications, they clearly cannot be regarded as crimes.

“I ask because prosecuting Mr. Assange for publishing true information about serious official misconduct, whether in America or elsewhere, would amount to `shooting the messenger’ rather than correcting the problem he exposed. This would be incompatible with the core values of justice, rule of law and press freedom, as reflected in the American Constitution and international human rights instruments ratified by the United States.

“I ask because you have vowed, Mr. President, to pursue an agenda of fighting government corruption and misconduct; and because allowing the prosecution of Mr. Assange to continue would mean that, under your legacy, telling the truth about such corruption and misconduct has become a crime.

“In pardoning Mr Assange, Mr. President, you would send a clear message of justice, truth and humanity to the American people and to the world.

“You would rehabilitate a courageous man who has suffered injustice, persecution and humiliation for more than a decade, simply for telling the truth.

“Last but not least, you would give back to Mr. Assange’s two young sons the loving father they need and look up to. You would also reassure these children, and through them all children of the world, that there is nothing wrong with telling the truth, but that it is the right thing to do; that it is honourable to fight for justice and, indeed, that these are the values America and the world stand for.”

“For these reasons, I respectfully appeal to you to pardon Julian Assange. Whatever our personal views and sympathies may be, I believe that, after a decade of persecution, this man’s unjust suffering must end now. Please, use your power of pardon to right the wrongs inflicted on Julian Assange, to end his unjust ordeal and reunite him with his family!

“I respectfully thank you for considering this appeal with foresight, generosity and compassion. Please accept, Mr. President, the assurances of my highest consideration.”