At the recent “COVID-19: A Second Opinion” panel that was hosted in Washington, D.C., Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) dropped numerous bombshells showing that Fauci Flu shots are neither safe nor effective as claimed.

Doctors and other expert panelists presented damning data showing that not only are the injections a serious medical problem, but the government’s handling of it amounts to a coordinated coverup of Big Pharma’s evil deeds.

Attorney Thomas Renz reportedly told conservative commentator Daniel Horowitz from The Blaze the details about the cancer epidemic sweeping through the military. Here is what Horowitz tweeted in a follow-up to the gathering:

“I can share with you from attorney Thomas Renz that the number of cancer diagnoses in the military’s DMED system went from a 5-year average (2016-2020) of 38,700 per year to 114,645 in the first 11 months of 2021. This is a predominantly young population.”

“Unlike VAERS where the naysayers can suggest that anyone can submit, this is only by military doctors and quantifies every single ICD code in the military for tri care billing of Humana. This is the ultimate defined and finite population with excellent surveillance.”

Horowitz also shared a video of Renz speaking at the panel about other mind-blowing data he accumulated from several whistleblowers whose credentials, he said, “are impeccable.” One of them is one of the only Green Beret doctors in the military. (Related: Renz is the same guy who warned that everything about the pandemic is centered on fear and manipulation rather than facts.)

Chief Nerd@TheChiefNerd
Attorney Thomas Renz reveals what multiple DoD whistleblowers have provided on the safety signals they are seeing

These numbers are mind blowing!

———–
“One of the biggest takeaways here is that the data is beyond reproach and widely accessible by the DoD, CDC, FDA, and across the Biden-Harris regime. In other words, they are all very well aware that the jabs are almost certainly causing an untenable increase in cancer in otherwise young and healthy military-age Americans and they’re keeping that information away from the people.”

America’s military is being killed off by COVID injections
In a perfect world, what Renz alone said at the panel would have been more than enough to convince the government to immediately halt the jab push while reevaluating the data and coming up with a new plan. That reevaluated data would then have been publicly released for independent scrutiny.

The world is far from perfect, though. Instead of honesty and transparency, the government has instead chosen deception and secrecy when it comes to the “science” behind the injections.

“We have substantial data showing that we saw, for example, miscarriages increasing by 300 percent over the five-year average, almost,” Renz further explained at the panel. “We saw an almost 300 percent increase in cancer over the five-year average.”

Since the corporate-backed media will never report on any of this, it is up to you and others like you to share it with anyone who might be willing to listen.

“We saw – this one’s amazing – neurological,” Renz added in his presentation. “So, neurological issues which would affect our pilots, over 1,000 percent increase. 1,000.”

“Ten times,” Sen. Johnson then interjected. “That’s 10 times the rate.”

“82,000 per year to 863,000 in one year,” Renz continued. “Our soldiers are being experimented on, injured, and sometimes possibly killed.”

The latest news about Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “vaccine” injuries and deaths can be found at Genocide.news.

Sources for this article include:

TheLibertyDaily.com

NaturalNews.com

Source: https://vaccineinjurynews.com/2022-01-27-covid-vaccines-military-cancer-rate-tripled.html#

The post ACT OF WAR: Thanks to COVID “vaccines,” the military’s cancer rate has more than TRIPLED first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

This prevented Big Pharma from being challenged by cheap and effective medications that could have prevented them from profiting off the pandemic.

Lawyer, author and health freedom activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made this revelation regarding Fauci during the Dec. 14 episode of the “Thrive Time Show” on Brighteon.TV, where he was interviewed by host Clay Clark and co-host Dr. Robert Zoellner.

Kennedy explained that, thanks to his 40 years working as a lawyer fighting against government agencies, he understood deeply how corrupt they can be and how the agencies that are supposed to regulate corporations end up becoming “sock puppets” for them instead. “It’s something that happens with every regulatory agency,” he said.

“But the public health agency is on steroids,” he added. “And so, when COVID-19 happened, I had known about Anthony Fauci. I knew him, I knew how corrupt he was, I knew that he would try to channel America towards profit-making vaccines and he would ignore public health altogether.”

Kennedy explained that, for Fauci’s entire career, his main goal has always been to make sure Big Pharma companies can make a profit during public health emergencies.

During the AIDS crisis, Fauci developed a playbook to suppress older and effective treatments in favor of new, experimental and deadly medications developed by Big Pharma. This tactic became the blueprint in suppressing effective treatments against COVID-19, such as hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and monoclonal antibody treatments.“He has to kill the other treatments because, under federal law, it is illegal to give an emergency use authorization to a vaccine if it can be shown that there is no approved medication … that is shown to be effective against the target disease,” explained Kennedy. “So if he ever acknowledged that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were effective against COVID, it would have been illegal for him to roll out the vaccines and the EUA. And the entire thing would have collapsed.”

Fauci should be investigated for criminal wrongdoing
Because of this and Fauci’s many other actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy believes he should be investigated for criminal wrongdoing.

During an appearance on the podcast of former President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, Kennedy said Fauci’s policies have probably caused around 80 percent more COVID-19 deaths.

“Around 80 percent of the people who died from COVID should not have died,” he said. “We have the biggest body count in the world because of his policies. We have 4.2 percent of the global population, we have 14.5 percent of the COVID casualties. Why is that a success? He should be criminally prosecuted because what he did was clearly, clearly demonstrably purposeful.”

Kennedy further alleged that billionaires like Bill Gates are funding and colluding with mainstream media outlets, corporations and politicians to further enrich themselves at the cost of continuing the pandemic.

“The most important productive strategy or the big talk around the oligarchs and the intelligence agencies and the pharmaceutical companies who are trying to impoverish us and obliterate democracy, their strategy is to create fear and division,” said Kennedy.

“So orchestrate fear, divide Republicans from Democrats and Blacks from Whites and get a lot of infighting so nobody notices that they are making themselves billions and billions, while they impoverish the rest of us and execute the controlled demolition of American constitutional democracy.”

Clark, Zoellner and Kennedy have a lot more to say regarding Fauci, the COVID-19 pandemic and the experimental and deadly vaccines. Watch the entire Dec. 14 episode of “Thrive Time Show” with Clay Clark and co-host Dr. Robert Zoellner, featuring guests Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mark Sherwood here:

The “Thrive Time Show” with Clay Clark airs from Monday to Friday at 3:30-4 p.m. on Brighteon.TV.

Source: https://yournews.com/2021/12/17/2268436/anthony-fauci-suppressed-effective-treatments-against-covid-19-to-benefit-big/

The post Anthony Fauci SUPPRESSED effective treatments against COVID-19 to benefit Big Pharma first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

“The stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. They all own each other. This means that ‘competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi aren’t really competitors, at all, since their stock is owned by exactly the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments.

The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen …They are Vanguard and BlackRock.

The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.

A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost everything.’”

Who Are the Vanguard?

The word “vanguard” means “the foremost position in an army or fleet advancing into battle,” and/or “the leading position in a trend or movement.” Both are fitting descriptions of this global behemoth, owned by globalists pushing for a Great Reset, the core of which is the transfer of wealth and ownership from the hands of the many into the hands of the very few.

Interestingly, Vanguard is the largest shareholder of BlackRock, as of March 2021. Vanguard itself, on the other hand, has a “unique” corporate structure that makes its ownership more difficult to discern. It’s owned by its various funds, which in turn are owned by the shareholders. Aside from these shareholders, it has no outside investors and is not publicly traded. As reported in the featured video:

“The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig. Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.

In other words, these two investment companies, Vanguard and BlackRock hold a monopoly in all industries in the world and they, in turn are owned by the richest families in the world, some of whom are royalty and who have been very rich since before the Industrial Revolution.”

While it would take time to sift through all of Vanguard’s funds to identify individual shareholders, and therefore owners of Vanguard, a quick look-see suggests Rothschild Investment Corp. and the Edmond De Rothschild Holding are two such stakeholders. Keep the name Rothschild in your mind as you read on, as it will feature again later.

The video above also identies the Italian Orsini family, the American Bush family, the British Royal family, the du Pont family, the Morgans, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, as Vanguard owners.

BlackRock/Vanguard Own Big Pharma

According to Simply Wall Street, in February 2020, BlackRock and Vanguard were the two largest shareholders of GlaxoSmithKline, at 7% and 3.5% of shares respectively. At Pfizer, the ownership is reversed, with Vanguard being the top investor and BlackRock the second-largest stockholder.

Keep in mind that stock ownership ratios can change at any time, since companies buy and sell on a regular basis, so don’t get hung up on percentages. The bottom line is that BlackRock and Vanguard, individually and combined, own enough shares at any given time that we can say they easily control both Big Pharma and the centralized legacy media — and then some.

Why does this matter? It matters because drug companies are driving COVID-19 responses — all of which, so far, have endangered rather than optimized public health — and mainstream media have been willing accomplices in spreading their propaganda, a false ocial narrative that has, and still is, leading the public astray and fosters fear based on lies.

To have any chance of righting this situation, we must understand who the central players are, where the harmful dictates are coming from, and why these false narratives are being created in the first place.

As noted in Global Justice Now’s December 2020 report “The Horrible History of Big Pharma,” we simply cannot allow drug companies — “which have a long track record of prioritizing corporate profit over people’s health” — to continue to dictate COVID-19 responses.

In it, they review the shameful history of the top seven drug companies in the world that are now developing and manufacturing drugs and gene-based “vaccines” against COVID-19, while mainstream media have helped suppress information about readily available older drugs that have been shown to have a high degree of efficacy against the infection.

BlackRock/Vanguard Own the Media

When it comes to The New York Times, as of May 2021, BlackRock is the second-largest stockholder at 7.43% of total shares, just after The Vanguard Group, which owns the largest portion (8.11%).

In addition to The New York Times, Vanguard and BlackRock are also the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, News Corp, four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. media landscape.

Needless to say, if you have control of this many news outlets, you can control entire nations by way of carefully orchestrated and organized centralized propaganda disguised as journalism.

If your head is spinning already, you’re not alone.  It’s difficult to describe circular and tightly interwoven relationships in a linear fashion.  The world of corporate ownership is labyrinthine, where everyone seems to own everyone to some degree.

However, the key take-home message is that two companies stand out head and neck above all others, and that’s BlackRock and Vanguard.  Together, they form a hidden monopoly on global asset holdings, and through their influence over our centralized media, they have the power to manipulate and control a great deal of the world’s economy and events, and how the world views it all.

Considering BlackRock in 2018 announced that it has “social expectations” from the companies it invests in, its potential role as a central hub in the Great Reset and the “build back better” plan cannot be overlooked.

Add to this information showing it “undermines competition through owning shares in competing companies” and “blurs boundaries between private capital and government affairs by working closely with regulators,” and one would be hard-pressed to not see how BlackRock/Vanguard and their globalist owners might be able to facilitate the Great Reset and the so-called “green” revolution, both of which are part of the same wealth-theft scheme.

(Culled from The Indian’s Waking Times)

Source: https://americanfaith.com/the-same-shady-people-own-big-pharma-and-the-media/

The post The Same Shady People Own Big Pharma and the Media first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

America’s fakest “doctor” is back on television fearmongering about the so-called “delta variant” of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), admitting in the process that “vaccinated” people are actively spreading it to others.

Tony Fauci, appearing on the fake news program “Face the Nation,” explained to some robotic suit and tie that the “new thinking” surrounding the delta variant is that it easily spreads from person to person, including people who already got injected with a Trump Vaccine.

Fauci claims that he and his fellow career bureaucrats have determined that the delta variant easily creates “breakthrough” infections in the vaccinated, though the infections are supposedly minimal.

“But since no vaccine is 100 percent effective, you’re going to see breakthrough infections,” Fauci quickly added to try to justify the failure of Fauci Flu shots to prevent the Chinese Infection.

“But what we’ve learned that’s new, John, in answer to your question, is that when you look at the level of virus in the nasal pharynx of people who are vaccinated who get breakthrough infections, it’s really quite high and equivalent to the level of virus in the nasal pharynx of unvaccinated people who get infected – that’s very different from the alpha variant,” Fauci further added.

“The alpha variant, the level of virus in a vaccinated person was extremely low in the vaccinated people compared to the unvaccinated people – not so with delta. So, we know now that vaccinated people who get breakthrough infections can spread the virus to other people.”

Stay safe: Don’t get vaccinated for covid

Why, again, are people being told that they must get vaccinated for the Wuhan Flu? Oh, we forgot: to “minimize symptoms” and “prevent hospitalizations.” Too bad this is also not true, as evidenced by the vast majority of new hospitalizations being among the jabbed.

Furthermore, at least eight times more vaccinated people than unvaccinated people are dying from the Chinese Virus. This means you are safer if you skip the shot than if you obey Fauci’s orders and get it.

Somehow, Fauci and friends are getting away with speaking out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, everyone is supposed to get injected with a Fauci Flu shot to help “flatten the curve,” while on the other the injections are causing the curve to go parabolic.

Which is it? Are Chinese Virus injections really “safe and effective” as Fauci has long claimed or are they spreading more disease, including the dreaded “delta variant?” It would appear as though the latter is true, and yet Fauci is still telling people to get jabbed.

Nothing makes any sense anymore, even as the medical fascists openly admit that Chinese Virus shots are failing to stop the spread as the government claimed they would all last year.

Everyone who already took the shot, believing it to be the final solution to the Wuhan Flu, must be reeling with horror as Fauci fesses up to the fact that they do not work. Everyone else will continue to stay far, far away from the injections for their own safety.

“Fauxi is a worthless bureaucratic hack,” wrote one commenter at Citizen Free Press. “He should be on death row for his crimes.”

“The reason Fauci’s comments are so disjointed and confusing is because the engineering and release of Covid-19 was a political operation, and not ‘accidental’ like they claim, so governmental damage control (Fauci backed up by propaganda media and censor media) must alter the information every time the real truth exposes their lies,” wrote another.

The latest news stories about Chinese Virus injection deception can be found at ChemicalViolence.com.

Sources for this article include:

CitizenFreePress.com

Independent.co.uk

NaturalNews.com

Source: https://pharmaceuticalfraud.com/2021-08-05-fauci-admits-covid-vaccines-are-spreading-disease.html

The post Fauci admits COVID “vaccines” are spreading disease first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The media tells us it’s over.  The election, that is. COVID-19 is running amok, or so all the news-breaks say.  Just as we thought, the COVID-19 scare is still picking up steam 10 months later.

It is setting records every day, maybe every minute.  “Hospitals are being overrun with COVID cases,” they tell us.  Get ready for more lock-downs, assuming you don’t live in a state that’s not still in lock-down.  Maybe just another month to six weeks would do it.  Never mind that we’ve spent nearly an entire year under un-Constitutional orders passed down by power-drunk “officials.” They’ve decided that you can’t go to work, or school, or church or out to eat.  Nope.  It’s just too dangerous at a time when COVID cases are exploding.  Have they ever thought that if masks and lock-downs worked this thing might be a distant memory?  Of course not.

Governors here and there are flexing their mighty powers, demanding that you follow their guidelines for Thanksgiving.  It’s truly bizarre that they think they can exert their personal clout upon a free people, IN THEIR HOMES, no less.  If the media is right, and now it’s every single mainstream network including Fox, we’re going to be punished.  American citizens are going to be punished in every way they can devise.  The speaker of gibberish is beholden to Antifa, BLM, the Deep State, nearly all big corporations and Big Pharma, and will have to satisfy their demands.  After all, they’re all taking credit for his “win,” should it hold.

The flood gates will open and the third world will flood in again.  That’s a good thing, we’re told.  It’s the source of our strength.  What a crock!  Obama had to pretend like he was on America’s side, while making apology and proclaiming America a racist nation.  That’s no longer the case.  Those who plan to continue the “transformation” of the Obama years have exposed their anti-American leanings and will go full tilt to fulfill their socialist dreams.  If they get their way we’re on our way to Venezuela, without ever leaving home.  Should you need reminding, Venezuela was one of the most prosperous nations in South America until they embraced Marxism.  Now they’re sifting through trash for something to eat and trying to evade the government’s goon squads.

The media demands that you give up hope NOW, or else.  Primetime Fredo says, ominously, that those who fight on may lose a lot more than the election.  Oooh, scary!  Fauci says he realizes that Americans are free-spirited people, but now it’s time to “DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD.”  Get used to it.  Mandates and bans are going to be handed down like candy, and mind you, they’re compiling lists of those who dared support Donald Trump, and any who might think they can get away with defiance of their mighty orders.  The squad will teach us a lesson!

If the media call stands, and we’re not getting much hope from anybody save Donald Trump himself and “America’s mayor” Rudy Giuliani, we’ll be banking on Supreme Court decisions and narrow margins in the nation’s legislature to strike down their plans to destroy America.  We’re supposed to believe that the goons looting departments stores and burning up American cities WON a great victory over average American citizens, who will soon pay a heavy price for having loved the country.  How dare we!

Maybe it was too far gone to be salvaged.  After all, the mainstream has rolled over for every bizarre sin.  You know the one that brought down fire out of heaven?  Yeah, that’s an American value.  Because we’re told, “We have to choose our battles wisely, and this one is not worth fighting.”  How often have we heard it?  Many have gone along in agreement.  Maybe that WAS an argument worth having.

It’s not getting very wide coverage, but have you seen the crowds protesting the lock-downs in Germany?  You’d think crowds that size would merit some attention.  But then, we’re drowning in fake news.  We’ve got monopolistic overlords determining what’s important or not.  Forget what’s important, they’re now the arbiters of TRUTH with the power to determine what people can read.

We’ll see Who the arbiter of truth is, and I’ll guarantee you it’s not any of the misfits who dominate social media.

Mark

Source:  http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 13 November 2020 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

“I persisted and said, ‘I’m not leaving here until I get a referral.’”

The day Katia learned the test results, she walked the streets for hours crying, unable to even find her car. The literature she received explained she had the AIDS virus and said the outlook was grim. She read that the virus, if untreated, could kill her in as few as 3 years. Katia, then 30, had a young daughter. Who would raise her? And Katia had to hide her infection from her employer—her father. “If I told my father I had HIV, he wouldn’t understand. He’d run away from me. Overall, the attitude here is horrible. When I look at [Western] Europe or the United States, I don’t understand why it’s so different here.”

For Katia, the differences between east and west would soon become far starker.

Since 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, has recommended treating everyone who tests positive for HIV, but doctors—despite what the literature suggested—assured Katia her immune system hadn’t suffered enough damage to warrant antiretrovirals (ARVs). Two years later, Katia was married to a new partner and wanted to have another child. She had read on social media that HIV was a scam by Big Pharma, but that made no sense to her because the government promises free treatment. Other sites said proper treatment would almost eliminate her risk of transmitting the virus to her husband, who was uninfected, or their baby. She went to the AIDS center and requested ARVs. “They told me, ‘Don’t worry, your level of virus is low, you won’t infect your husband, he’s in the military and he’s strong.’” Finally, in February 2017, after more than 2 months and a battery of tests, the doctors agreed to treat her, and in May, she became pregnant.

In June, the pharmacy ran out of ARVs.

Through social media, Katia contacted an HIV-infected woman, 2000 kilometers away in St. Petersburg, who was part of a “reserve pharmacy”—a network that gathers and redistributes ARVs from people who have either switched treatments or died. The woman told Katia whom to contact in Yekaterinburg. “I asked how much the pills would cost,” Katia says. “She was like, ‘Are you out of your mind? Just go and get your pills.’”

Almost anywhere in the world, an HIV-infected woman who has an uninfected partner and wants to have a baby would be first in line to receive ARVs. The challenges Katia faced in getting treatment amid Russia’s epidemic highlight the country’s faltering response, which critics have blasted as misguided, lackadaisical, and downright dismissive. Some federal health officials even question the term epidemic. “This is a very large and very serious epidemic, and certainly one of the few epidemics in the world that continues to get worse rather than get better,” says Vinay Saldanha, the Moscow-based regional director for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “This is a public health crisis.”

Yet the informal network of HIV-infected people that ultimately supplied Katia with ARVs highlights another, less recognized side of Russia’s response. The darker the night, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment, the brighter the stars. Bold, committed HIV/AIDS advocates in Russia are pushing hard for change—and a few places in the country show signs, albeit modest, of mounting effective responses.

UNAIDS calculates that between 2010 and 2015, Russia accounted for more than 80% of the new HIV infections in the entire Eastern European and the Central Asian region. By Russia’s own estimates, the epidemic grew 10% per year during that period, with the new infections roughly split between people who inject drugs and heterosexual transmission. At about the same time, new infections in the rest of Europe and North America dropped by 9%. By the end of 2017, the Russian Ministry of Health estimates, just shy of 1 million people were living with HIV. Even official accounts acknowledge that only one-third of those receive ARVs.

Many people, even within the government, think those estimates understate the epidemic. Vadim Pokrovsky, who heads the Federal Scientific and Methodological Center for Prevention and Control of AIDS in Moscow, an epidemiological surveillance arm that’s independent from the Ministry of Health, does battle with the divisions that oversee HIV and tuberculosis (TB). His group estimates that between 1.1 million and 1.4 million Russians are infected with HIV. And Michel Kazatchkine, the United Nations secretary-general’s special envoy for AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia based in Geneva, and colleagues concluded in a study published last year that the true number of infected people may be as high as 2 million. They based their number on an estimate by Pokrovsky’s team that only half the infected people in Russia knew their HIV status in 2013.

Kazatchkine, who earlier headed The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, also in Geneva, says Russia has unnecessarily let a containable epidemic explode. “Having gone through years of AIDS in Europe and then in Africa and everywhere as head of The Global Fund, I just cannot accept that there have been so many missed opportunities,” he says.

HIV took off in Russia in the mid-1990s, later than in Western European countries, and at first the spread was limited mainly to heroin users sharing needles and syringes. Even before he took over The Global Fund in 2007, Kazatchkine and others urged the government to use proven “harm reduction” prevention strategies, including needle and syringe exchange programs and opiate substitutes such as methadone. Several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) started programs for drug users, but the government offered no funding for what it saw as “Western” ideas that went against conservative Russian culture—and to this day opiate substitutes remain outlawed. The government also did little for another highly stigmatized group, men who have sex with men (MSM), who also are at high risk of infection. Since 2013, a “propaganda law” has made posting or discussing information geared toward MSM illegal. They rely on NGOs for many HIV services, as do sex workers.

Compounding the problem, several NGOs left the country starting a decade ago after Russia, emboldened by a strengthening economy, began phasing out The Global Fund’s support—which to date has totaled $378 million. “They said, ‘We don’t need The Global Fund or money from outside; we’ll cover everything ourselves,’ but they didn’t do it,” Pokrovsky says. “We not only stopped outreach work, we lost many people working in NGOs because they had no federal support.” Other NGOs pulled up stakes after President Vladimir Putin in 2013 enacted a law that forced many of them to register as “foreign agents.”

“They basically let the epidemic grow because of lack of prevention and because of very low access to treatment,” Kazatchkine says. “In short, they did it all wrong.”

No program yet provides ARVs to high-risk uninfected people, a prevention strategy called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) that has had remarkable success, particularly with MSM in Western Europe, Australia, and the United States. “Who would PrEP be for?” Kazatchkine quips. “There are no MSM.”

On top of all those challenges, Russia has a dysfunctional medical system, says Olga Bogolyubova, a psychologist who did HIV/AIDS research in St. Petersburg but, fed up, moved to the United States in 2015. Bogolyubova, who works at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, says Russia’s broken system vastly complicates attempts to add HIV/AIDS programs for vulnerable populations. “The Russian medical system can be difficult to navigate and abusive even to people who aren’t vulnerable,” she says, noting long waits to see specialists and short supplies of medicines for many conditions. “A navy admiral recently shot himself because he couldn’t get access to cancer care.”

Tereza Kasaeva, a deputy director of the Ministry of Health who coordinates the country’s HIV/AIDS programs (after meeting with Science in November 2017, she became head of WHO’s Global TB Programme), acknowledges that Russia “didn’t pay much attention” to the problem until the past 5 years, but she says the current criticism is overblown. “Everybody is talking about the need to avoid stigma,” Kasaeva says. “We are against the stigma on the Russian Federation about the situation.”

Kasaeva and her colleagues stress that the number of people getting treatment has increased severalfold over the past few years, and they note that they recently completed their first strategic plan to battle the disease. “We understand that now we have a problem and we’re trying to solve it,” she says. Everyone who requests treatment receives it, she insists, although some “people are trying to hide” and don’t request it. Yes, shortages of ARVs occurred in some places last year, but that was only because of speed bumps in a shift away from regional drug purchase and distribution to a more streamlined, cost-effective federally run program.

Kasaeva recognizes that harm reduction programs might slow HIV’s spread in the short term, but they don’t address underlying problems, she says. “They’re very popular and they look so smart and pretty, but in fact if we look into the problem deeply, it’s not solving the problem.” Harm reduction, “according to the opinion of a huge number of Russian experts,” focuses on the symptoms and not the causes of addiction, she says. In contrast, the country’s “systematic program of rehabilitation for drug users,” she insists, has long-term effectiveness.

Yevgeny Roizman, who until last month was the powerful mayor of Yekaterinburg, has embraced that effort. (Roizman resigned in protest after regional lawmakers voted to end direct election of the mayor.) In 1999 he started a rehab program called City Without Drugs that, at the request of parents, forcibly removed teen addicts from their homes and locked them up while they went through withdrawal, chaining them to their beds at times. Criticism from human rights groups—featured prominently in Western European and U.S. media—and lawsuits ultimately shut the centers, but Roizman offers no apologies. He insists the program helped his region, the Sverdlovsk Oblast, eliminate heroin addiction and slow the spread of HIV. “My goal was to stop youth from using drugs,” Roizman says. Although he offers few hard numbers to back his claims that the program worked, he has an abundance of anecdotes, proudly noting that he recently located 22 of the first teens treated at City Without Drugs who now have 38 kids of their own. “They’re not doing drugs ever since they got to us,” he says.

Roizman sees no need for harm reduction programs for drug users; NGOs that offered needle exchange in Yekaterinburg failed to make a dent, he says. He visited Ukraine, which legalized opiate substitution therapy, to see how it worked. “An army of heroin addicts,” he says, was “reconfigured into an army of methadone addicts.”

In other ways, however, Roizman’s agenda is not entirely at odds with the international HIV/AIDS community, and he has a progressive bent. A published poet who opened a free museum of religious icon painting and sculpture, he strongly supported the opposition to Putin in the March election and is critical of “the main government officials” for not speaking about HIV. Roizman promotes condoms and sex education for teens. And he publicly took an HIV test himself to encourage people to know their status and start treatment if needed. “There are more serious problems and issues that we have to battle, but bearing in mind the dynamics, we do understand that HIV might just steal the future.”

A different approach is in view on the banks of the Volga River in Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan. Kazan’s ornate kremlin (which means “fortress”), replete with both a mosque and a cathedral, dates back to Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. The city has fanciful buildings of more recent vintage, too: a 30-meter-tall, copper-colored cauldron, a wedding palace built in 2013; and a swank soccer arena that opened the same year and is hosting World Cup games this month. The city is well-heeled, with an unusually large Muslim population for this part of Russia and a long history of independence—which helps explain why it stands out in its HIV/AIDS response.

Kazan in 1999 began aggressive needle and syringe exchange programs and other harm reduction efforts with support from NGOs, the semiautonomous republic itself, and eventually The Global Fund. “We’ve had a stable epidemic,” says Larisa Badrieva, an epidemiologist and researcher there. “We really reached a lot of people very, very quickly.” The city recorded about 1000 new HIV cases in 2001, she says, and that number fell to about 150 in 2008, with little evidence that the virus was spreading to the general population. A relatively high percentage of HIV-infected people in Tatarstan—about 50%—is being treated with ARVs. Yet Badrieva is worried about the future. With the pullout of The Global Fund and with other outside assistance drying up, Badrieva says only one of seven centers in the city dedicated to drug users is still operating, and she is unsure whether it will remain open much longer. “Unless there’s a dramatic shift in the drug scene, we’ll see an increase of HIV infection across all groups,” Badrieva predicts.

Like Kazan, St. Petersburg is often out of step with Moscow and has made solid headway against HIV/AIDS. The most westernized city in the country, St. Petersburg “is kind of an oasis,” says Gregory Vergus, who works with an HIV/AIDS NGO called the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition. As a federal city, St. Petersburg directly receives funding from Moscow for HIV prevention, and Vergus says it invests the money wisely, focusing on vulnerable groups. “Most regions spend their HIV prevention money on balloons, songs, and working with grannies,” he says.

Saldanha says he’s particularly heartened about the latest data from the city. “We’re hoping that St. Petersburg has now turned the corner,” he says. In 2016, new infections in the city dropped below 2000 people a year for the first time since the epidemic took off, according to the city’s AIDS center. Of the 36,000 residents who know they are living with HIV, about half now receive ARVs, and 82% of that group have undetectable levels of virus in their blood, meaning they are adhering to their treatment regimens. “We’re doing something right,” says Tatiana Vinogradova, deputy director of the St. Petersburg AIDS Center.

St. Petersburg still faces serious challenges, Vinogradova notes. Recent surveys that tested large groups of sex workers and MSM both showed double-digit prevalence of HIV, and only about 5% of the people already knew their status. Many migrants who have HIV also come to the region from former Soviet countries and do not have the proper St. Petersburg registration necessary to receive treatment and care. “It’s a big problem, and we have no instruments to do anything about it,” she says.

Still, Saldanha says, the fact that “St. Petersburg is finally pulling its head above water” gives him hope for the country as a whole. “It’s very much a sign that in contemporary Russia, you can implement evidence-based HIV prevention programs,” he says. But St. Petersburg is only one city in a highly populated, geographically expansive country. “They have a treatment coverage level that is half what it is in Zimbabwe,” he stresses. “This epidemic is not going to go away on its own.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/russia-s-hivaids-epidemic-getting-worse-not-better

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