The Great Lockdown Lie

Posted on February 7, 2022February 7, 2022 by Denise Simon

It is almost being admitted by the CDC and the Biden administration that Covid and Omicron is over. Hospital vacancy is in a good place and those affected by any type of variant are being treated by countless therapeutics with recorded success. Meanwhile, the lockdown and mask policies across the country is finally being evaluated and rightly so. But the mainstream media just refuses to publish new truths and statistics.

NR: The authors of a new paper on the impact of Covid-19 lockdown measures may also have to go into hiding, for revealing their true impact on everyday people. The paper from Johns Hopkins University, “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” compares several dozen studies of the impact of lockdown measures in the early part of the pandemic. The authors conclude that “lockdowns have had little or no effect on COVID-19 mortality.” This review of basically all the relevant studies demolishes the elites’ entire justification for ruinous lockdowns.

The authors, hailing from Denmark, Sweden, and the U.S. (the American, Steve Hanke, is a contributor to this publication) sifted through thousands of studies to focus on 34 that met their search criteria, looking at lockdowns all around the world. They then compared the data and conclusions.

The paper starts by noting that “an often cited model simulation study by researchers at the Imperial College London (Ferguson et al. (2020)) predicted that a suppression strategy based on a lockdown would reduce COVID-19 mortality by up to 98%.” The Imperial College simulation was among the sources used by public-health authorities to justify the earliest lockdowns. It turned out to be more than 98 percent wrong.

According to the authors, the most-precise studies found no statistically significant effect of lockdowns on mortality. Looking at the 24 studies from which excess mortality rates could be calculated in comparison to a standardized metric for severity of lockdowns, the authors estimated that severe lockdowns may have reduced Covid-19 mortality by perhaps 2 percent. That amounts to perhaps 1/20th the number of people who die from the flu every year, and to save people from the flu, our public-health authorities resort to little beyond facilitating the provision of flu shots.

But on further investigation, the impact appears to have been even smaller than that. “Indeed, according to stringency index studies, lockdowns in Europe and the United States reduced only COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.” In summary, “Based on the stringency index studies, we find little to no evidence that mandated lockdowns in Europe and the United States had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality rates.”

Some studies actually found that lockdowns increased Covid-19 mortality, particularly in the case of the most severe “shelter in place” lockdowns: “Although this appears to be counterintuitive, it could be the result of an (asymptomatic) infected person being isolated at home under a [shelter-in-place order] can infect family members with a higher viral load causing more severe illness.”

According to some studies, lockdowns that limit gatherings may have increased Covid-19 mortality by as much as 1.6 percent. The authors speculate that because lockdowns limited peoples’ access to safe outdoor places where they could gather without masks, the lockdowns pushed people to meet at less-safe (indoor) places privately. “Indeed, we do find some evidence that limiting gatherings was counterproductive and increased COVID-19 mortality.”

The authors found similar results for mask mandates, though the relevant studies were more contradictory, likely due to small sample sizes. (The study reviews lockdowns in the early pandemic, when mask mandates were not uniformly adopted). The much richer data set from other airborne influenzas found that “wearing a mask probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza compared to not wearing a mask.”

The authors did find that “only business closure consistently shows evidence of a negative relationship with COVID-19 mortality, but the variation in the estimated effect is large. Three studies find little to no effect, and three find large effects.” Moreover, the most effective business closures appear to be bar closures.

One of the study’s more depressing findings is that lockdowns appear to have been heavily driven by intergovernmental peer pressure. “In short,” the authors note, “it is not the severity of the pandemic that drives the adoption of lockdowns, but rather the propensity to copy policies initiated by neighboring countries.”

Further, the review uncovered a significant disconnect between the data and the conclusions drawn in several papers. “We base our interpretations solely on the empirical estimates and not on the authors’ own interpretation of their results,” the authors write.

Where the authors found significant impact on mortality was in people changing their own behavior as a result of relevant information about risks and mitigation. “What Bjork et al. (2021) find is that information and signaling is far more important than the strictness of the lockdown.” Milton Friedman must be smiling up above. According to the authors, “it should be clear that one important role for government authorities is to provide information so that citizens can voluntarily respond to the pandemic in a way that mitigates their exposure.”

The paper’s conclusion should close the book on all the lockdowns:

The use of lockdowns is a unique feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have not been used to such a large extent during any of the pandemics of the past century. However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.

Other experts are starting to speak up along similar lines. Dr. Vinay Prasad of UC–San Francisco speculates in a series of tweets that the Biden administration is obsessed with pushing mandates on the low-risk population perhaps because it has few tools to push mandates on the high-risk population — nursing-home patients — but feels the need to do something. Driven to use the tools they have, the Biden administration has been forcing boosters on younger and younger children, even though we know that (a) they are at little risk of severe disease and virtually no risk if already vaccinated, (b) there is little evidence the boosters help young people at all, and (c) FDA officials are resigning in protest.

Dr. Prasad’s insight is strongly supported by another new study from a team of researchers spanning disciplines and institutions from University of Washington to Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford. The authors of the new study, “The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Policy: Why Mandates, Passports, and Segregated Lockdowns May Cause more Harm than Good,” warn that heavy-handed mandates are not scientifically based, raise basic ethical and human-rights concerns, and are eroding trust in both scientific and public-health authorities:

While COVID-19 vaccines have had a profound impact on decreasing global morbidity and mortality burdens, we argue that current population-wide mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable, ethically problematic, and misguided. Such policies may lead to detrimental long-term impacts on uptake of future public health measures, including COVID-19 vaccines themselves as well as routine immunizations. Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport, and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarization, and adversely affects health and wellbeing. Mandating vaccination is one of the most powerful interventions in public health and should be used sparingly and carefully to uphold ethical norms and trust in scientific institutions.

It’s not just the mandates that are eroding trust in public institutions. On January 5, 2022, the State of California extended its indoor mask mandate through February 15. Violators face up to six months in jail.

That didn’t stop Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, San Francisco mayor London Breed, and California governor Gavin Newsom from whooping it up with “Magic” Johnson at the NFC Championship game last weekend, in pictures that are still up on Twitter:

Needless to say, nobody was wearing a mask, despite the fact that Johnson is immunocompromised with HIV — a significant comorbidity of Covid-19. Mayor Garcetti later clarified that he was holding his breath.

As for the workers down below, they can keep holding their breath, too.

Gotta wonder what Australia is thinking and going to do next…

Meanwhile, Microsoft Details the Russian Hack of Ukraine

Posted on February 7, 2022February 7, 2022 by Denise Simon

The Windows maker’s Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is tracking the cluster under the moniker ACTINIUM (previously as DEV-0157), sticking to its tradition of identifying nation-state activities by chemical element names.

The Ukrainian government, in November 2021, publicly attributed Gamaredon to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and connected its operations to the FSB Office of Russia in the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. Details.

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Gamaredon APT Improves Toolset to Target Ukraine Government, Military | Threatpost source

The Gamaredon APT was first spotted in 2013 and in 2015, when researchers at LookingGlass shared the details of a cyber espionage operation tracked as Operation Armageddon, targeting other Ukrainian entities. Their “special attention” on Eastern European countries was also confirmed by CERT-UA, the Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team.

The discovered attack appears to be designed to lure military personnel: it leverage a legit document of the “State of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” dated back in the 2nd April 2019. Source

For this reason, Cybaze-Yoroi ZLAB team dissected this suspicious sample to confirm the possible link with Russian threat actors.

***

There are several outside government cyber experts that are reporting much the same as Microsoft as noted here.

Source: While Gamaredon has mainly targeted Ukrainian officials and organizations in the past, the group attempted an attack on January 19 that aimed to compromise a Western government “entity” in Ukraine, researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 organization reported Thursday. Gamaredon leadership includes five Russian Federal Security Service officers, the Security Service of Ukraine said previously.

Microsoft threat researchers released their own findings on Gamaredon in the blog post today, disclosing that the group has been actively involved in malicious cyber activity in Ukraine since October 2021.

While the hacker group has been dubbed “Gamaredon” by Unit 42, Microsoft refers to the group by the name “Actinium.”

“In the last six months, MSTIC has observed ACTINIUM targeting organizations in Ukraine spanning government, military, non-government organizations (NGO), judiciary, law enforcement, and non-profit, with the primary intent of exfiltrating sensitive information, maintaining access, and using acquired access to move laterally into related organizations,” the threat researchers said in the post. “MSTIC has observed ACTINIUM operating out of Crimea with objectives consistent with cyber espionage.”

Evading detection

Tactics used frequently by the group include spear-phishing emails with malicious macro attachments, resulting in deployment of remote templates, the researchers said. By causing a document to load a remote document template with malicious code—the macros—this “ensures that malicious content is only loaded when required (for example, when the user opens the document),” Microsoft said.

“This helps attackers to evade static detections, for example, by systems that scan attachments for malicious content,” the researchers said. “Having the malicious macro hosted remotely also allows an attacker to control when and how the malicious component is delivered, further evading detection by preventing automated systems from obtaining and analyzing the malicious component.”

The Microsoft researchers report that they’ve observed numerous email phishing lures used by Gamaredon, including those that impersonate legitimate organizations, “using benign attachments to establish trust and familiarity with the target.”

In terms of malware, Gamaredon uses a variety of different strains—the most “feature-rich” of which is Pterodo, according to Microsoft. The Pterodo malware family brings an “ability to evade detection and thwart analysis” through the use of a “dynamic Windows function hashing algorithm to map necessary API components, and an ‘on-demand’ scheme for decrypting needed data and freeing allocated heap space when used,” the researchers said.

Meanwhile, the PowerPunch malware used by the group is “an agile and evolving sequence of malicious code,” Microsoft said. Other malware families employed by Gamaredon include ObfuMerry, ObfuBerry, DilongTrash, DinoTrain, and DesertDown.

‘Very agile threat’

Gamaredon “quickly develops new obfuscated and lightweight capabilities to deploy more advanced malware later,” the Microsoft researchers said. “These are fast-moving targets with a high degree of variance.”

Payloads analyzed by the researchers show a major emphasis on obfuscated VBScript (Visual Basic Script), a Microsoft scripting language. “As an attack, this is not a novel approach, yet it continues to prove successful as antivirus solutions must consistently adapt to keep pace with a very agile threat,” the researchers said.

Unit 42 had reported Thursday that Gamaredon’s attempted attack against a western government organization in January involved a targeted phishing attempt.

Instead of emailing the malware downloader to their target, Gamaredon “leveraged a job search and employment service within Ukraine,” the Unit 42 researchers said. “In doing so, the actors searched for an active job posting, uploaded their downloader as a resume and submitted it through the job search platform to a Western government entity.”

Due to the “steps and precision delivery involved in this campaign, it appears this may have been a specific, deliberate attempt by Gamaredon to compromise this Western government organization,” Unit 42 said in its post.

Unit 42 has said it’s not identifying or further describing the western government entity that was targeted by Gamaredon.

No connection to ‘WhisperGate’ attacks

The attempted January 19 attack by Gamaredon came less than a week after more than 70 Ukrainian government websites were targeted with the new “WhisperGate” family of malware.

However, the threat actor responsible for those attacks appears to be separate from Gamaredon, the Microsoft researchers said in the post today. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center “has not found any indicators correlating these two actors or their operations,” the researchers said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month suggested it’s possible that Russia might be eyeing a cyberattack against U.S. infrastructure, amid tensions between the countries over Ukraine.

Estimates suggest Russia has stationed more than 100,000 troops on the eastern border of Ukraine. On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden approved sending an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.

U.S. Govt Spent Over $2.3 Million Injecting Puppies With Cocaine

Posted on February 7, 2022February 7, 2022 by Denise Simon

The experiment, revealed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the White Coat Waste Project, follows previously unearthed studies funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci that “debarked” beagle puppies.

Seven six-month-old Beagle puppies were forced to wear a drug-injecting jacket that allowed them to be dosed with cocaine again and again and again for months, along with an ‘experimental compound,’ to see how the two drugs interacted.

The year-long experiment, which began in September 2020, was filmed so research could evaluate the puppies’ adverse reactions” to the drugs. Prior to the drugs being administered, the puppies were forced to undergo surgery, where they were implanted with a “telemetry unit” to monitor their vital signs throughout the experiment.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Institute on Drug Abuse and costed taxpayers of $2.3 million. More here.

But hold on…Dr. Fauci…Frankenstein was up to more disgusting funding….

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding $27 million in studies marked for use of fetal tissue, according to a new analysis.

The White Coat Waste Project (WCW), which opposes animal experimentation, looked through NIH data to uncover the scope of funding, which includes support for things like transplanting fetal lungs, liver and thymus into mice.

The majority of the reported funding – 79.6% – comes from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is run by White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci. Overall, NIH expects to spend $88 million on this type of research in fiscal year (FY) 22.

NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not respond to Fox News’ requests for comment.

Fauci’s institute has come under fire for research surrounding the coronavirus, among other things. More recently, WCW uncovered an experiment in which dogs were injected with cocaine. Other experiments involving humanized mice have surfaced.

One study involved humanizing mice through “reconstitution with human fetal liver (17 to 22 weeks of gestational age).” So far, that project has received funding through multiple NIAID grants, including one with more than $20 million between 2014-2018.

Another study, funded by the National Eye Institute, entailed studying fetal eye cells. That study says the eye cells were obtained from Advanced Biosciences Resources, which has come under fire for its connections to Planned Parenthood. Fetal lungs were also incorporated as part of federally funded research with the University of Wyoming and University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

The conservative watchdog Judicial Watch previously released documents showing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sought “fresh” fetal organs from ABR. In one email, the FDA’s Dr. Kristina Howard tells ABR’s procurement manager Perrin Larton that her company “should be prepaid for $12K of tissue purchases.”

Exhibit from NIH-funded study utilizing fetal lungs, liver and thymus. (National Library of Medicine)

The issue will likely continue to gain political attention as legislators learn more about various research projects, including those involving human-animal hybrids. Last year, the Senate rejected an amendment geared toward criminalizing participation in research that created certain chimeras, or human-animal hybrids, in expectation that the federal government could lift a moratorium on funding for those projects.

“Dr. Fauci’s funding of research using aborted fetal tissue is disgusting and indefensible,” said Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich. “My Safe RESEARCH Act would ensure that scientists can continue important research so long as they’re not using fetal tissue from abortions.” More details here.

Gotta wonder how come not one person in the Biden administration has been critical of this abuse…but we certainly understand why so many loyal religious groups have filed lawsuits and pushed back. What about the Vatican….anyone???

The JFK Assassination Debate Rages on

Posted on February 7, 2022February 7, 2022 by Denise Simon

Last December, President Biden authorized additional JFK assassination records to be declassified and released. The documents were so banal, there was virtually no additional chatter or reporting on it.

In case you missed it, click here for those additional documents. There may be some new names in the released documents and we should be asking what other countries have contributed to the whole affair such as Mexico….

Under the law, as of October 1997, ALL the JFK files in the National Archives were to be released and Biden issued an extension to the release date.

In part: Section 1. Policy. In the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (44 U.S.C. 2107 note) (the “Act”), the Congress declared that “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy . . . should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.” The Congress also found that “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.” Almost 30 years since the Act, the profound national tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination continues to resonate in American history and in the memories of so many Americans who were alive on that terrible day; meanwhile, the need to protect records concerning the assassination has only grown weaker with the passage of time. It is therefore critical to ensure that the United States Government maximizes transparency, disclosing all information in records concerning the assassination, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.

Sec. 2. Background. The Act permits the continued postponement of disclosure of information in records concerning President Kennedy’s assassination only when postponement remains necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. Since 2018, executive departments and agencies (agencies) have been reviewing under this statutory standard each redaction they have proposed that would result in the continued postponement of full public disclosure. This year, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has been reviewing whether it agrees that each redaction continues to meet the statutory standard. The Archivist of the United States (Archivist), however, has reported that “unfortunately, the pandemic has had a significant impact on the agencies” and NARA and that NARA “require[s] additional time to engage with the agencies and to conduct research within the larger collection to maximize the amount of information released.” The Archivist has also noted that “making these decisions is a matter that requires a professional, scholarly, and orderly process; not decisions or releases made in haste.” The Archivist therefore recommends that the President “temporarily certify the continued withholding of all of the information certified in 2018” and “direct two public releases of the information that has” ultimately “been determined to be appropriate for release to the public,” with one interim release later this year and one more comprehensive release in late 2022.

Meanwhile, an expert forensic pathologist. Cyril Wecht has just published a new book “The JFK Assassination Dissected”.

Wecht’s latest book, “The JFK Assassination Dissected” (Exposit Books), summarizes his six decades of research into the subject, and pokes holes in the conclusion made by the seven-man Warren Commission that Oswald, without any help, shot and killed Kennedy when his motorcade drove past the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

“Young people are still being taught that the 35th president was murdered by a lone gunman, and that is simply bulls–t,” Wecht boomed during an interview at his modest office in downtown Pittsburgh last month.

Oswald “had almost certainly been a CIA agent of some kind,” says Wecht, but the directive to kill may have come from higher up. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, had overseen the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion to oust Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and had reason to be disgruntled. Dulles also ended up in prime position to participate in a coverup, Wecht conjectured.

“Kennedy had fired Allen Dulles because he was really pissed off about what the CIA was doing,” said Wecht. “Then who gets appointed to the Warren Commission? Dulles. It stinks to high heaven.”

I’ve been working on the book for six years.”

The former coroner of Allegheny County, Pa., Wecht is both a trained lawyer and doctor who has conducted more than 17,000 autopsies and also provided expert testimony on high-profile cases including the deaths of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Elvis Presley, JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson.

The first non-governmental forensic pathologist to gain access to the National Archives to examine the assassination materials in 1972, Wecht discovered and exposed the ghastly fact that the 35th president’s brain had vanished.

“As we sit and talk today, the president’s brain remains missing. Unaccounted for,” he said. More here from the NY Post.

In full disclosure, Dr. Wecht has been on my radio show twice for his previous book(s)and frankly, I agree we are not being told the whole truth about the assassination. Government employees including some in the FBI and CIA challenged evidence and the Warren Commission report as well.

Will we ever know?

$6.4 Billion in U.S. Pandemic Aid Sent Abroad, Including China

Posted on January 28, 2022January 28, 2022 by Denise Simon

Did you know this? Anyone reporting this? Anyone in Congress yelling about it? Crickets…. but it is an outrage. You gotta wonder if the FBI has assigned anyone to investigate…oh never mind. A billion here and there….does it matter to anyone in government or to the taxpayers….

Some 2,000 foreign contractors and nonprofits in 177 countries received more than $6.4 billion in United States’ federal pandemic response assistance between the spring of 2020 and the fall of 2021, according to a report by the U.S. Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC).

Most of the “prime recipients” are based in the United States and distributed the funds overseas. The $6.4 billion in foreign payments came from two pandemic relief packages passed by Congress in March 2020 and March 2021 totaling $4.1 trillion.

Those prime recipients include federal agencies, including the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Health & Human Services, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and nonprofits, such as North Carolina-based Family Health International and Boston-based JSI Research & Training Institute.

Collectively between spring 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021, these federal agencies and nonprofits have approved more than 4,000 contracts and issued 1,000 grants from pandemic relief funds to “sub-recipients” across the globe, including foreign contractors that provide services for the U.S. government and international development and health care organizations.

The largest single international prime recipient is the United Nations, which received $831.4 million in direct pandemic funding, according to the report.

The United Nations, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees received 43 percent of U.S. pandemic relief funding spent overseas, according to the report.

The other top nine prime recipients which spend the relief funds overseas included were: UNICEF ($224 million); FHI ($99.945 million); General Dynamics Global Force LLC ($96.5 million); United Kingdom-based Acrow Global Ltd. ($83.5 million); International Red Cross/Red Crescent ($73.667 million); International Organization for Migration ($68.242 million); JSI ($64.32 million); the African Field Epidemiology Network ($62.5 million) and “miscellaneous foreign contractors” ($366.5 million).

About $2.132 billion of the $6.4 billion in internationally distributed U.S. pandemic relief funds was deposited and distributed through banks in Switzerland because many international nonprofits and organizations are headquartered in Geneva.

According to PRAC, those Geneva-based recipients include $1.5 billion for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; $401 million for the U.N. High Commission; $87.856 million for the International Organization for Migration; $78.688 million for the World Health Organization; and $61.4 million for Le Comite International de La Croix-Rouge (Red Cross).

The recipient mix varies from nation to nation. For instance, sub-recipients in Kuwait received the second-highest allocation by nation after Switzerland, $411 million, with most providing services for U.S. information technology and defense contractors, such as Colorado-based Vectrus Systems Corp., which distributed $339 million in pandemic relief funds on contractors and organizations in Kuwait.

The pandemic relief funds that went to non-domestic recipients are in addition, or supplementary, to existing U.S. foreign aid programs, which totaled $51 billion in aid obligations to 11,000 recipients across the globe in 2020.

In 2021, while pandemic relief funds were distributed through USAID, its direct allocation actually declined to $36 billion, which was committed to 8,000 “activities” in 181 countries.

Since spring 2020, USAID maintains it has supported “more than 120 countries in their fight to contain and combat the virus” by providing $5.7 billion for vaccinations, including $700 million to strengthen vaccination programs and to purchase 1 billion Pfizer vaccines for distributions around the world.

During fiscal year 2022, USAID reports it had $4.7 billion “obligated”—$502 million in contracts, $4.2 million in grants—and dispersed $3.1 billion in 781 pandemic relief awards to 287 recipients, including many in Africa.

Phone calls and emails left with officials listed as USAID media contacts did not to elicit a response over a two-week period.

PRAC was created within the OIG’s independent Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity & Efficiency (CIGIE) in spring 2020 to track the $2.2 trillion in CARES Act allocations to state and local governments, nonprofits, contractors, and individuals.

With the subsequent adoption of additional federal COVID-19 relief and stimulus packages, including the March 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, PRAC’s 22 inspector generals are now tracking more than $5 trillion in federal pandemic allocations and documenting what is reported by “prime recipients” on its webpage that is accessible to the public on the committee’s website.

But accessibility and transparency doesn’t always translate into comprehensive accounting; there are 21 million “rows” of data on one of PRAC’s dashboards.

OpenTheBooks.com founder Adam Andrzejewski told Epoch Times that while doing a “deep dive” August analysis of the $282.6 billion the U.S. distributed in foreign aid between 2013-18, researchers found discrepancies between the numbers posted by PRAC, USAID, the Department of Treasury, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congressional Research Service.

Many of the discrepancies across the varied tracking and oversight programs are related to specific agency reporting requirements, the type of recipients they deal with, and can mix in assorted federal allocations from different times and programs that are not related to the COVID-19 response.

The bottom line, Andrzejewski said, is it can be daunting to find the bottom line when there are nearly as many haystacks as needles.

“It takes hard work” to ferret through and comprehend the data, he said. “They don’t make it easy.”

According to the Treasury, in 2020 Congress appropriated $3.8 billion for international COVID-19 relief efforts and by April 2021, had added another $10.8 billion in COVID-19 foreign-aid funding, totaling $14.6 billion.

OpenTheBooks maintains the $6.4 billion figure cited by PRAC, and even the $14,6 billion cited by Treasury, does not include all foreign-related COVID-19 spending, such as allocations for the U.S. Health & Human Services global vaccine program, the $9.6 billion in “total COVID-19 budgetary resources” earmarked for USAID, or the American subsidiaries of foreign companies,

According to OpenTheBooks.com, that includes 125 Chinese firms—with “strong ties to the Communist Chinese Party (CCP)”—that received forgivable loans from the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in 2020, which is also not included in the foreign aid outlays.

PRAC’s Award Details Report lists 27 allocations totaling $14.539 million in pandemic assistance on its webpage to contractors in China through U.S.-based organizations and businesses with the largest —$5.18 million—allocated by DHS to U.S. Tactical Supply, Inc., based in Post Falls, Idaho.

According to USASpending, the May 18, 2020 allocation was for U.S. Tactical Supply’s procurement of 5.396 million face masks made in China.

FHI of Durham, N.C., distributed $99.945 million and the JSI Research & Training Institute, based in Boston, dispersed $64.32 million to contractors and organizations overseas.