Findings

Global Research editors do not distinguish posts as either articles or opinion pieces. Chossudovsky’s posts read like editorial commentaries or Op-Eds with sweeping generalizations and value judgements.

Chossudovsky’s narrations are dramatic. They are not often well-sourced despite the abundance of quoted material adorning them, and they often read like advocacy or manifests. Formatting is often inconsistent, and editing seems rushed. Emphasis is often added with boldface and capitalizations to quotes or original writing.

The liberal application of quotes around single or small groups of words throughout Chossudovsky’s posts seems to be a method of designating them as false, irrational, or disdainful, as if the reader should keep their distance from such concepts.

Stockwell (2009) says that elements that take up readers’ attention, especially for a prolonged period or repeatedly, are more likely to be remembered and more likely to be deemed salient by the reader. Chossudovsky takes advantage of this mechanism frequently, in terms of concepts, words, as well as whole sentences, paragraphs, quotes and sometimes, vast sections of articles. While it may be just the easier option, it also works well because readers can more quickly consume material and retain what matters most to the author.

Core Narrative – The Planned Pandemic Conspiracy

The entirety of the narrative structures in the research domain support or draw from the core narrative, which is that pandemics are used by the few to oppress the many.

Power is a guiding aspect of these narratives. Villains abuse their power, victims lose it, and heroes (Chossudovsky’s readers perhaps?) need to rise up and regain that power. If previous pandemics were fake, the current pandemic is fake. The media and health authorities are fudging the number of infections and deaths and are keeping cheap antivirals from the public. The pandemic response is racist and is just a neoliberal scam. The U.S. is losing control of the West to China and the pandemic is a last-ditch excuse to change that.

Seven significant supporting narratives were found: the recurrent narrative, the contradiction narrative, the case inflation narrative, the chloroquine narrative, the racism narrative, the financial narrative, and the China trade narrative.

Recurrent Narrative – H1N1 Was a Scam in 2009, COVID-19 is a Scam in 2020

Chossudovsky leverages long-running conspiracy narratives about the 2009 H1N1 pandemic predicting more of the same with COVID-19. One post (Chossudovsky, 2020, May 2) is titled:

“Déjà Vu: The WHO’s Handling of 2009 H1N1 Pandemic: ‘Deeply Marred by Secrecy and Conflict of Interest’”

He claims that actors like “Big Money,” “Big Pharma,” the (Bill and Melinda) Gates Foundation and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director and White House health adviser Anthony Fauci were behind the H1N1 swine flu, scammed the world, bribed the World Health Organization and are doing it again with COVID-19.

Chossudovsky digs up quotes by the WHO and U.S. officials, predicting the infection of over a third of the world’s population. He points out that millions of vaccines which made “circa $400 billion for Big Pharma” were thrown out after the WHO casually admitted its prediction had been wrong.

“There was no pandemic affecting 2 billion people…” Chossudovsky says again, and oft used phrase which he lets sink in with an ellipsis. He later backs this idea up with a quote from a 2010 Forbes article. The article quotes the health committee chairman of The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Wolfgang Wodarg declaring the 2009 pandemic to be “false” and “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.”

Chossudovsky reiterates: the “financial bonanza,” the vaccines, the multibillion-dollar fraud, by the same people who “are at it again” and who were never investigated.

The June re-release of the post claims that the vaccine caused physical harm, citing reports from the International Business Times and Sunday Time. These reports claim that 60 people in Britain were “brain damaged” after taking the vaccine, each given £1 million in government funds. He quoted a report by The Guardian to explain the extent of the health conditions, stating, “Big Pharma’s Perspective: Never mind the kids… That’s the “Collateral Damage” for Big Pharma which Made billions of dollars selling the H1N1 vaccine.”

Here, he repeats the narrative of the “victim” and the “villain,” with children as the victims and Big Pharma as the villains.

 In July, Chossudovsky (2020, July 15) added a new section at the top of the post featuring a lawsuit against the Canadian “Trudeau Government” by Vaccine Choice Canada, claiming no evidence was provided by the government justifying “the imposition of unscientific and unwarranted measures”, and claiming that mandating vaccine use was a violation of citizen’s rights. He repeats the narrative that the vaccine made Canadians sick, citing a report written earlier about a Canadian girl who died days after taking the H1N1 vaccine.

There are many inadequacies and contradictions in Chossudovsky’s writing, from his unsupported claim that 800 children were affected by the Canadian vaccine, to a reference to a study by its manufacturer on the effects of the new, safer version and its effect on Canadians that he never shares the results of. He also says “flash forward to 2020” before immediately jumping back to 2009 to talk about how the manufacturer was forced to withdraw its H1N1 vaccine from the UK. Throughout the post, he continues to bring the narrative back and forth between 2009 and 2020 repeatedly and in quick succession, acheiving a feverish chiasmus effect. He is careful to re-iterate the narrative that Fauci and the CDC were behind the H1N1 “scam” and are doing it again with COVID-19.

He continues by repeating the narrative of the media as villains abusing their power to control the masses, this time including politicians in the villain narrative by saying that the corruption and lies in politics are “worse than the Spanish inquisition”.

Chossudovsky concludes with a frequently used Associated France Press report excerpt that discusses the fact that at least one member of the WHO’s emergency committee received consulting fees in 2004 from the company that would later go on to manufacture the H1N1 vaccines.

Contradiction Narrative – Fauci and News Media Are Contradictory Because of Ulterior Motives

Chossudovsky (2020, May 1) pointed out how Anthony Fauci criticized President Donald Trump for downplaying the severity of COVID-19 by comparing it to influenza, even though Fauci had been quoted in the New England Journal of Medicine saying that COVID-19 could be like a severe flu season, not as bad as SARS or MERS. Chossudovsky further spreads this narrative of contradiction by quoting a linked post from Patriot Fire Net which states that Fauci made it sound like millions in the U.S. would die and then shows a headline from The Hill about the number being only as many as 200,000.

He describes Fauci, “He certainly does not inform Americans in a cautious way. He does not reassure Americans. His authoritative statements often have no factual backing.”

The statement reads like an opinion as the post doesn’t give concrete examples or justifications for his choice of words.

The “Western media,” as Chossudovsky calls it (May 2), is the villain. The term indicates the media is controlled by the Western influence bloc as a propaganda tool.

Chossudovsky accuses the media of escalating the 2009 pandemic with daily coverage, while keeping quiet when it came to “the issue of fraud and disinformation.”

Chossudovsky (2020, May 23) posted about Fauci and Trump’s mediated debate over the potential antiviral, chloroquine.

Chossudovsky asserts that Fauci wants to keep the U.S. economy closed and is playing a “blame game” with Donald Trump, burying evidence that chloroquine and its derivatives are valid treatments for coronaviruses.

Fauci is incompetent, Chossudovsky intimates. He lies about the severity of the novel coronavirus’ health effects, about chloroquine’s validity as a treatment and about the need for a vaccine.

Fauci is also in a conflict of interest, Chossudovsky says, because he is working “on behalf of Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation.”

Chossudovsky, in a post about COVID-19 and racism (2020, June 10) talked about a German document which he said confirms the pandemic is a “‘Global False Alarm’,” using the name of the report. Factcheckers (Carballo-Carbajal, 2020) found it was not an official document; it was released on official letterhead without authorization by a government employee and individuals who were skeptical of the government’s handling of the health situation. Chossudovsky says the report was censored by the media.

Case Inflation Narrative – COVID-19 Infections and Death Rates Are Fraudulently Inflated

Chossudovsky (2020, May 12) said that predictions of hundreds of thousands of people dying are “boldface lies” while real scientific assessments of the health impacts of COVID-19 are being suppressed. Chossudovsky says there are suspicious contradictions in the mainstream narrative: “While COVID-19 constitutes a serious health issue, why is it the object of a Worldwide fear campaign?”

A “serious health issue” is acknowledged but quickly minimized as the attention shifts to a statistic that 80% of positive cases have only mild illness. Like so, Chossudovsky acknowledges but immediately backgrounds the “danger to health aspect” of COVID-19 (unless chloroquine and vaccines are involved), leaving space to be filled instead by aspects related to socio-economic danger.

Chossudovsky works to bolster the core narrative (2020, May 2) by looking at the U.S., criticizing the CDC for reporting “‘presumed cases’” as “‘confirmed cases.’” He implies that because health clinics get paid more for COVID-19-related admissions, there is an incentive to misdiagnose.

An article by conservative-leaning alternative news site, justthenews.com, is then taken as an example of double-counting in Virginia where the counting system was switched to record reinfection of the same person as multiple cases. The article quoted claims a sharp uptick in case numbers could delay the state’s re-opening. However, the article in question was fact-checked by USA Today (Stanglin, 2020) which found that it was partly false: while testing went up sharply following the change, the percentage of positive cases continued a downward trend. The fact-check did not refute one of the main concerns that cases could be counted twice even if it was part of the same infection. That criticism seems reasonable. However, the hypothesis of its effects turned out to be wrong in the short term and not likely to change. USA Today reasonably argues that Virginia traded a system in which repeat infections could not be counted for a better system that represented a truer number of tests.

This is an interesting example where a hypothesis, with no data to back it up can still be considered false even though no facts were asserted. The consequences of the false news classification are detrimental to the news site’s reputation, but then, speculation that is not data-driven and is inflammatory in nature is an important characteristic which perhaps should be kept in check. But then again, would a mainstream news source feel the need to issue a correction over a similar hypothesis that turned out to be untrue?

Ethics aside, Chossudovsky quoted those hypotheses in full as is his writing style, building his conspiracy narrative in a matrix around the quotes. He reminds readers that data is “‘fake’” and “timely” in delaying the reopening of the Virginia economy.

He concludes his narrative with a rhetorical Latin legal interrogative and a projection which ties back to the greater conspiracy narrative of malfeasant economic manipulation, “Cui bono. [sic] More people unemployed. More companies on the verge of bankruptcy.” “Cui bono” is used to imply culpability of those who benefit from a crime.

Chossudovsky (2020, May 22) quotes The Daily Telegraph’s article about tens of thousands of double-counted COVID-19 cases in the U.K. when officials admitted their data system did not combine positive saliva and nasal swab tests from the same case.

Chossudovsky discounts the possibility of the behavior being a system flaw or incompetence, ascribing it to a conspiracy. Instead the narrative told is that it was a deliberate way of inflating numbers to sustain “the corona fear campaign.” As usual, the author relies heavily on other news organization’s reporting, with large sections of text transposed for commentary. A Daily Telegraph report was quoted saying 350,000 more cases existed than the number of people tested. A link to figures was not provided. Chossudovsky says this is proof that the Boris Johnson government is “massaging” the data to delay reopening the British economy.

In the same post he repeats the narrative that authorities blew swine flu out of proportion by falsifying tests in order to enable mass vaccinations, implying that the same thing is happening with COVID-19.”

In a later post, in a commentary introduction to an excerpted third party article, Chossudovsky (2020, May 27) talks about insufficient healthcare conditions in nursing homes and geriatric wards in Quebec and that “that mortality has nothing to do with COVID-19.”

He then denounces the “outright manipulation” of cause-of-death statistics in Quebec. The reasons he gives are that either an antibody test plus a respiratory tract specimen are used (which he claims do not provide unequivocal proof), or that people are categorized as positive without a test or a doctor’s diagnosis.

COVID-19, Chossudovsky said, is then marked as a “‘cause of death’” even when the death would have happened with or without the infection (e.g. the terminally ill). He argues a significant skewing in statistics results in national and worldwide COVID-19 cause of death data.

Chossudovsky says these inflations of data are lies meant to fuel alarmism in order to maintain lockdown, and again accuses media and politicians of not doing their jobs.

The rest of the post is a transposition of the second half of a post on Friends of Science Calgary, a non-profit blog which exists to argue manmade carbon dioxide is not an important driver of global warming. The first half of the source mentions the pandemic’s role in pushing for “‘green’” initiatives and depopulation (Kay, 2020).

Chossudovsky attempts to support his narrative that improper care at geriatric wards, not COVID-19 is the cause of death. He uses data from the Friends of Science Calgary blog stating that 60% of COVID-19-related deaths in Canada were in Quebec, and 75% of those were in nursing homes. However, this data ends up disproving his narrative because the numbers also show a drastic increase in deaths matching the infection data.

In the June article, Chossudovsky (2020, June 10) lays down another brick, quoting an Italian politician, Vittorio Sgarbi, who misinterpreted official cause-of-death report data and announced that 96.3% had died of other health conditions. In fact, the statistic was of comorbidities, or health conditions the deceased also had (Benedictus, 2020).

Furthermore, Chossudovsky immediately follows the previous misconstrued allegation with a warning from Minnesota Senator Scott Jensen who had spoken in a FOX News interview about guidelines encouraging doctors to report deaths as COVID-19-related even if they were not sure. Chossudovsky uses this opportunity to repeat that there was a suspicious financial incentive for the medical center the patients had died at if the center reported them as COVID-19 cases, calling this a “bribe.”

Chloroquine Narrative – Cheap Chloroquine Was Buried as a Coronavirus Cure in Favor of Expensive Alternatives

Chossudovsky (2020, May 23) quotes coverage by The New York Times and CNN and criticized their omissions of CDC studies from 2002 and 2005 which showed a promising effect of chloroquine against SARS-CoV-1.

“Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread,” Chossudovsky repeats with bold emphasis two times. (This, statement is the title of the 2005 study and is used again in a June 10 post and again in a July 13 post.)

He claims the CDC endorsed the drug, ad nauseam. The CDC never endorsed the family of drugs as a cure, rather, only as a drug of interest tested on primate cells in-vitro, still requiring trials in humans.

Previous Global Research coverage is linked in the post with the title, “Cover Up: Fauci Approved Chloroquine, Hydroxychloroquine 15 Years Ago to Cure Coronaviruses; ‘Nobody Needed to Die.’”

“‘No proven drug’: ‘Not Enough Known’. Nonsensical and irresponsible statements,” Chossudovsky declares with bold emphasis. He uses this as a punchline, among others, in a June 10 post also.

An analysis conducted by STAT and Applied XL of data from studies collected on June 24 confirmed the CDC’s skepticism of the over-politicized drug. Only remdesivir and the steroid dexamethasone (often used in conjunction with hydroxychloroquine, muddying the results) did prove significantly effective in some COVID-19 case studies so far (Herper, Riglin, 2020).

Chossudovsky says remdesivir was introduced as an expensive alternative to treat SARS-CoV-2 which fits his greater health scam narrative. Remdesivir shortens hospital stays for severely ill patients by about four days as a recent study Chossudovsky addresses in a July 13 post, but at the cost of about $2,300 to $3,000 per treatment course depending on whether insurance is public or private, according to Gilead (O’Day, 2020)

What does not fit with the scam narrative as much is dexamethasone, stated by the STAT report to be cheap to manufacture and which was shown to reduce the death rate of COVID-19 patients on ventilators by one third.

Dexamethasone could cause a significant reversal in the chloroquine cover-up narrative and is never mentioned anywhere on Global Research as of July 20, 2020.

To conclude the May 23 post, Chossudovsky places screenshots of inconclusive Chinese lab studies, some of which propose dosages for COVID-19 patients in an attempt to convince the reader of the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine. In one study remdesivir also is mentioned—but no comment is given.

Chossudovsky (2020, June 10) doubled down on the chloroquine narrative, repeating misleading statements about proven efficacy. What’s new is commentary on studies which The Lancet and The New England Journal have retracted. Chossudovsky’s commentary was based on a post by Alliance for Human Research Protection which was re-posted on Global Research.

What Chossudovsky relayed was that the Lancet study was in part funded by Brigham Health which also has a contract with Gilead Sciences, the developers of remdesivir. Thus, a potential conflict of interest adds fuel to the narrative among other circumstantial evidence, telling or not as it may be to readers. He expands this narrative in a July addition (Chossudovsky, 2020, July 13), pointing out that Brigham Health funded a more relevant study about remdesivir. Chossudovsky says this study showed mixed results, and pointed out that a different, Gilead-funded study on remdesivir had very few tests subjects, but more than that many researchers (many of which he says were paid by Gilead).

The dataset of the Lancet study was of poor quality and could not be verified by independent third-party reviewers who queried Surgisphere, the company that compiled the data for both studies.

According to the STAT report (Herper, Riglin, 2020), it will require much larger randomized controlled studies to have the final word on chloroquine, but many studies although none are perfect have found a lack of significant chloroquine effectiveness in a variety of cases, while side effects are common.

As usual, Chossudovsky quoted material to critique and vast swaths of third-party material to do much of the leg work for him, subsequently applying emphases, as necessary.

Finally, Chossudovsky discusses a remdesivir study funded by the NIAID and others which spurred the drug into adoption after its preliminary results were released, on the same day as the invalidated Lancet paper. Chossudovsky includes the word “preliminary” 13 times, of which 6 mentions were part of the report title. Repetition drives home the inconclusiveness of the drug’s effects.

Racism Narrative – The “Corona” Conspiracy and Racism Are Both Part of Neoliberal Oppression

Chossudovsky (2020, June 10) also piggy-backs onto the fight against systemic racism which re-emerged after the death of George Floyd, bringing it and the fight against the coronavirus scam under the same umbrella of the fight against neoliberalism and its machinations of economic and social oppression.

After going over a few examples Chossudovsky chose in order to elucidate the co-opting of politicians and scientists discussed above, he tied the narrative back to the anti-racism campaign. He wondered why the campaign had not been more vocal about such issues.

“Confinement is ‘racist,’” he said, saying that it is a social engineering which denies people’s right to employment and brings down all aspects of life, impoverishing people. A more apt statement might be that putting people out of work affects the lower classes the most.

He says that the protests and the riots serve the interests of the financial elites. He says another reason they support the riots  later, when he points out that McGeorge Bundy, a former U.S. national security adviser and Ford Foundation president, once said the foundation’s goal was to make the world safe for capitalism by relieving social tensions with safety valves for the angry while solidifying governmental stability. He points out the Ford Foundation supports BLM financially. This implies that the Ford foundation wants people to riot to relieve tension, but doesn’t want to enact meaningful change. Chossudovsky also doesn’t fail to mention elite financier George Soros’ contributions to BLM.

Chossudovsky criticizes Black Lives Matter’s #WhatMatters2020 campaign for not addressing “African-American” victimhood. Not victimhood of the health effects of the pandemic itself, but of the fear campaign and forced confinement, “an instrument of ‘economic injustice’” or neoliberalism.

Chossudovsky repeats over and over the narrative which boils down to: the people orchestrating the lockdown create poverty, destroy people’s lives and are part of the racist neoliberal “Empire,” including the usual suspects or villains, Wall Street, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.

Financial Narrative – COVID-19 is a Cover for a Carefully Engineered Financial Crisis

In another post, Chossudovsky (2020, May 15) says a conspiracy to redistribute wealth at a global scale is at hand which he calls “’Dirty Economic Medicine.’” It would, for one, lead to a stimulus effort promoting “Green Bonds,” a supposed plan by rich financiers redirecting pension and mutual funds into environmental projects.

Adding to this, the author criticizes that an overabundance of caution will do more harm than good in developing countries like India where, he argues, families will not be able to afford living when infant mortality is a large problem to begin with.

In the last part of the May 15 post, Chossudovsky says the International Monetary Fund is committing usury masquerading as a helping hand toward low- and middle-income countries in a spiraling debt cycle, and that a “failing American Empire” shares with the IMF the objective of pressuring developing countries into political submission. In the E.U., further debt-driven recovery would lead to a “’Thirdworldisation’” of member states, forced to lose welfare systems and have their social services privatized.

While this “’Neoliberal Solution’” rooted in economic theory is painted as the villain more explicitly, it is worth noting that the U.S. is indicated as the top of the old-world pyramid, with the IMF and European financial institutions perhaps just ancillary to the U.S.’ plans. The U.S. is the head of the snake in this narrative.

Chossudovsky (2020, June 10) bolsters this socio-economic-financial narrative by appealing to anti-racism. But according to him, the anti-racist movement is compromised, so a new financially independent grassroots movement needs to rise to “break the lie” which protects the “destabilization agenda.” As discussed in the narrative thread below, this agenda is possible, Chossudovsky says, because powerful forces stabilize groups on all sides until they are not a threat to the master capitalistic domination plan.

The narrative is built up further in a later post (Chossudovsky, 2020, June 18) which was built on material from May 1 but which was not published under Chossudovsky’s name on the date indicated. The post goes over some of the usual talking points after an introduction with a famous Eisenhower quote about the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. Twice throughout the post, Chossudovsky includes images of sheep. The first is edited to show the sheep wearing face masks. He denounces the shutdowns as an act of economic warfare, an “unspoken crime against humanity” involving “a Worldwide process of economic, social and political restructuring.”

He then describes three stages: One, the trade war against China; two, the financial crash redistributing wealth in the process; and three, the lockdown “supported by social engineering … instrumental in restructuring the global economy.”

The villainous elements of the financial establishment control politicians, and “totalitarian measures are being imposed.” Corrupt governments and politicians are then used in an analogy about sheepdogs by inserting equivalents from the narrative into an instructional, “How to Teach Your Dog to Herd.” Reward-based training methods are equated to bribes, personal gain, political support and accession to high office, which then lead, Chossudovsky says, to their own belief in the lies, the consensus. Pictured is a sheepdog herding a flock.

Before ending the post, Chossudovsky includes an out-of-context YouTube clip of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asserting, (COVID-19?) is not about retribution but a live exercise. Trump mumbles in the back, “you should have told us.” Chossudovsky says the words will go down in history, but really does not mean anything significant and is not properly contextualized.

Chossudovsky then closes with an explanation that everything is part of a conspiracy integrated into U.S. and NATO military and intelligence planning intent upon weakening China, Russia, Iran and the E.U. and ends his conclusion with a David Rockefeller quote where he defends his agenda of integrating global political and economic structure into one world.

China Trade Narrative – The Trade war With China, Inflamed by COVID-19, Will Backfire on the U.S.

This data-driven narrative (Chossudovsky, 2020, June 14) explains that the Trump administration is trying to derail the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, “predicated on Eurasian economic integration … viewed by Washington as an encroachment on US hegemonic interests.” His emphasis.

Chossudovsky says the irony is in that U.S. aggression toward China, which threatens its post “WWII hegemony,” will end badly for the U.S. because its industrial base was shifted to China decades ago. He talks about 5G to point out the U.S.’ rejection of Chinese technological infrastructure opportunities for political purposes, that is, in a last-ditch effort to hold on to technological dominance.

Furthermore, Chossudovsky argues, limiting imports from China is going to negatively impair the U.S. gross domestic product index, and in the meantime, Chinese exports have increased elsewhere.

Blaming China for COVID-19 without a shred of evidence, Chossudovsky says, is just another log in the fire. He notes a quote from recently nominated U.S. Department of National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe where he says that with respect to COVID-19, 5G and cybersecurity issues, all roads lead to China.