While journalists hang out in Jerusalem, reporting on Israel's 'genocide' in Gaza, REAL genocides are happening elsewhere. But it's no fun going to those places, and nobody cares anyway." (Karen Hunt, 'Break Free Media' 21-02-2025)

Break Free Media

70 Christians beheaded by Islamic State and the World is Silent

I was supposed to take the day off, but I just couldn’t. There’s too much to say! I have completely lost my voice, so I can’t record this essay. I’m really sorry as I’m often told how much people enjoy listening to my essays, especially those with poor eyesight. I apologize for not being able to read this one…

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a year ago · 58 likes · 24 comments · Karen Hunt aka KH Mezek

It is not the silence itself that is earth-shattering. It is the discretion to be silent about this, but not of other’s suffering."

"I will never understand why the image of a terrified mother clutching her babies flanked by frenzied gunmen in plain clothes did not inspire global movements to demand their immediate release. Perhaps if they had we might not be here now." (Rosa Doherty, Jewish Chronicle, 21 February, 2025).

"“The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys — they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.” (IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, 21-02-2025).

https://www.thejc.com/opinion/if-the-bodies-of-babies-cant-make-the-world-care-about-jewish-lives-nothing-can-lk15clju

Some years ago, I found this touching handwritten poem among some papers of my father, in a file along with other notes made by his Granny and great Granny. I assume it was written or copied out by one of them, or by someone else in the family.

The transcription is given below. Any parent - especially the mother who gave them birth - whose child has gone to the grave before them, will empathise with the sentiments expressed in this very personal poem.

My Gathered Lily

My lovely little Lily, thou wert gathered very soon,

In the fresh and dewy morning, not in the glare of noon;

The Saviour sent His angels, to bear thee hence, my own,

And they’ll plant thee in that garden, where decay is never known.

How peacefully, how sweetly, ebbed thy little life away,

Oh blessed for ever be the God, who heard thy mother pray;

She did not wish to keep thee in this world of sin and strife,

But she wished that thou without a pang might yield thy little life.

She watched thee, how she watched thee, thro’ that anxious night and day,

And only turned her eyes from thee, to look to heaven and pray!

“Deal gently with my darling!” Was still her fervent cry,

And–“Trust me with thy little one”, seemed still the Lord’s reply.

My Lily, Oh! My lily! I saw thee hour by hour,

Still drooping nearer to the earth, my pale and precious flower!

And as I marked the glazing eye and felt the cheek grow cold–

The mingled thoughts that filled my heart, they never can be told.

‘Twas in thy mother’s arms, my own, thou didst resign thy breath,

And she will bless her God for that, till she too smiles in death!

Oh! tenderly indeed, my babe, the Saviour dealt with us,

When He in pitying love disarmed, the king of terrors thus.

One long drawn sigh thy mother heard, from thy unconscious breast,

And then she saw thy eyelids close, and knew thou wert at rest;

She pressed her lips upon thy cheek, how icy cold it felt!

And turning from thy chamber then, she went apart and knelt.

And often, often, ere it came, that last, sad, solemn day,

Beside thy cradle coffin she would sit, and gaze and pray;

And never, never from her heart, can thy sweet image fade,

So pure, so white, so still, so cold as if of marble made.

And when at length the day was come,-the solemn parting day,

That saw thee from thy earthly home, my loved one, borne away,

Still, still, my God was with me, and I was not seen to weep,

When they laid thee in the quiet tomb, where thy father’s kindred sleep.

And years have passed away since then, and many a joy and care,

Have filled by turns thy mother’s heart, in which thou had’st no share;

But still within that heart she keeps one sacred spot for thee,

And thine my Lily, thine alone, that spot shall ever be.

And often when I kneel in prayer, I thank my Saviour yet,

For all his tender love to thee which I can ne’er forget;

And when I pray for those I love, still left on earth with me,

I ask my God to deal with them as gently as with thee.

Author unknown. 

The screenshot with highlighted text (below), is from the abstract of the above mentioned research paper recently published in “NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY” reveals the disturbing news that lipid nanoparticles DAMAGE the heart":

screenshot:

READ Dr David Livermore’s summary here: https://dailysceptic.org/2025/01/19/new-research-paper-contains-evidence-that-the-mrna-covid-vaccines-damages-human-heart-cells/

READ THE RESEARCH PAPER HERE

(Image source: Hamas/X [Twitter])

It Wasn't a Deal – It Was a Crime - article by Alan M. Dershowitz

“The decision by the Israeli government to make significant concessions to the Hamas kidnappers should never be called a "deal." It was an extortion. Would you call it a deal if somebody kidnapped your child and you "agreed" to pay ransom to get her back? Of course not. The kidnapping was a crime. And the extortionate demand was an additional crime.”

(Alan M. Dershowitz) READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

My father was present at El Alamein. He seldom spoke of his wartime experiences, but I remember him becoming emotional whenever he heard the pipe tune ‘My Home’, because that was one of the tunes played by the pipers of the 51st Highland division El Alamein as they led the troops into Battle on the night of 23rd October 1942. He knew many of those brave men would never come home. He later regretted his involvement as a Christian in military service, and after the war, prayed that God would give him a second chance to conscientiously object. He subsequently got his wish.

The photos I have posted below are of a leaflet he wrote several years before he died.

[Article by Henry Getley: Alamein 1942, the turn of the tide]

Here is the text of dad’s gospel leaflet:

As Liaison Officer in an Anti-tank Regiment during fierce mountain warfare in Italy, I was sent to the Brigadier’s Command Vehicle and arrived just in time to hear him speaking with an Infantry Commander on the radio telephone. The Commander was requesting permission to “dig in,” as his men were exhausted.

“No! You must keep going.” said the Brigadier. The Commander tried again, “But sir, my men are exhausted …” and he started to list the difficulties. Then the Brigadier emphatically ended the conversation with “You must reach your objective – even if you only get there with one man! Everything depends on you!“

I’ve often wondered how many of those soldiers ever reached their objective.

When Jesus Christ left Heaven, His great purpose was to save sinners. His final objective – the cross of Calvary. The night before He died, He went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane. The fierce counter-attack of the Devil was about to begin. Even worse, “the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God” was soon to fall on Jesus, the only sinless man. Three times He prayed there, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup [the awful experience of the cross] be taken from me…” (Mat. 26:39). And three times in effect, He got the same answer as the Infantry Commander: “Everything depends on you.” The eternal future of millions depended on Him.

As infantry get close to the enemy, the casualties mount up. Between Gethsemane and Calvary, Jesus underwent the cruel crossfire of mocking, spitting, scourging and being crowned with thorns. Yet from the cross He prayed “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34) Was He not exhausted? Had He not suffered enough? But He must reach the objective; He must endure the wrath of God for sinners. Everything depended on Him. On the cross He became the God-forsaken Man. But praise God, He did it! Victoriously He shouted, “It is finished!” (John 19:30).

Jesus rose from the dead and because of Calvary, He offers salvation from the judgement of Almighty God if you will believe on him.

Speak to Him now in quiet prayer, and say, “Thank you Lord Jesus for dying for a sinner like me.”

John Holmes Johnson

When we walk with the Lord

In the light of His word,

What a glory He sheds on our way!

While we do His good will,

He abides with us still,

And with all who will trust and obey.

Not a shadow can rise, not a cloud in the skies,

But his smile quickly drives it away.

Not a doubt, not a fear, not a sigh, not a tear,

Can abide while we trust and obey.

Trust and obey, for there's no other way

To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.

Men and women of faith are characterized by the path that they choose in life. And that path is governed by their adherence to the will and the word of God, as it's revealed to them by God.

Now we live in a nation which over the last hundred years or so has rapidly departed from the God of the Bible. The latest example is just this last week from the Church of England where the clergy in Birmingham were advised to be careful not to give offence by singing Christmas carols that draw attention to the fact that Jesus is the true Messiah.

So that's the state of the nation today. They're throwing out Christianity. They don't want it. I want to remind us today that it wasn't always so. There was a time when there was some truth in the notion that we live in a Christian country. Where our government and those in high place, including our royal family and the majority of the population in general, at least paid lip service to the absolute truth of the Bible, even if all of them didn't sincerely believe in the Bible and the God of the Bible.

And I was reading just this morning before I came out, a blog post by a writer called Dr. Campbell Campbell-Jack—a Scottish, he's an ex Church of Scotland minister I think or a Free Church minister. (He lives in Stirling)—but he was writing and saying that people today are dangerously ignorant about their own heritage. And he said:

“just as a fish cannot see the water in which it swims, so westerners cannot see and value their Christian heritage and its benefits.”

I thought that was very good.

King George the sixth, the father of the late Queen Elizabeth the second, made his first Christmas broadcast to the nation on the 25th of December 1939, just four months after the outbreak of the second world war. And at the end of his address to the nation, he read part of a poem by a lady called Minnie Louise Haskins. He read the preamble to that poem and it goes like this:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year

Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown

And he replied go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.

And King George stopped there, (there's more, I'm going to read the rest of the poem later.) But he added these words, he said:

“May that Almighty hand guide and uphold us all”.

He was a man of sincere faith in God and I believe that his daughter Queen Elizabeth was too.

So Minnie Louise Haskins wrote this poem. Who was she? She was a member of the congregational church and she taught in Sunday school for many years. She studied at the University College in Bristol and she worked as a volunteer for the Wesleyan Methodist mission, and in 1907 she went out to India, to Madras, to work in what was called the Zinana mission to women. And in 1912 to raise funds for their mission to the women in India, she published a small volume of poems, and one of the poems was a poem called “God Knows”, the poem in which the preamble that we've just read that the King George the 6th read in 1939, December 1939.

That poem meant so much to Queen Elizabeth, that after her father died, she had the words of the preamble that he read engraved on stone plaques and fixed to the gates of the King George the 6th memorial chapel in Windsor Castle where the King was interred. The Queen Mother was also buried there.

But I want to just take us to the scriptures now and talk about some of these men of faith. Men of faith —of course there are many women of faith, we know that. But I want to talk particularly about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

So Genesis chapter 17:1 -

“And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, ninety-nine, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him ‘I am God Almighty, walk before me and be thou perfect’”.

You be perfect. Abram's obedience and his faithfulness to the call of God had a lasting effect on his family for generations to come. And the Bible records how Abram's grandson Jacob blessed Joseph and Joseph's sons. And Jacob said in Genesis 48: 15 - 16, let me just read that, Genesis 48:15—

“And he blessed Joseph and said, the God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God which hath fed me all my life long unto this day, the angel which hath redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads and let my name be named on them and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth.”

The particular phrase which I want to fasten here on is “The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk”, — ‘before whom’—

When Abraham was ninety-nine, Abram his name was at that time, God appeared to him and said walk before me, walk before me. And Jacob repeated that word, the God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk.

Now the word before in the Hebrew is the Hebrew word for face. So the meaning implicit in this phrase walk before me is that Abraham and Isaac's walk, their journey through life was to be lived in the presence of God. God wanted them to do that, that's why he appeared to Abraham and said to him, “walk before me and you be perfect”—Perfect in the sense of having the moral integrity to do what was right in God's eyes and to be blameless in his words and in his actions. He was to live in the knowledge that God was watching, God was watching him and that God was actively directing his footsteps. Just as a shepherd would direct or lead the sheep in the Holy Land we know that the shepherd goes in front of the sheep. But in this country they go behind the sheep and they get the dogs to help them.

But there's the thought, walk before me, he's the good shepherd. Jesus said “I am the good shepherd” and he's watching over us and he wants us to look to him for guidance in our life.

Jesus said “I am the light of the world”.

King George the sixth said “put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be better to you than a light, than light and safer than a known way.”

Jesus says

“I am the light of the world. He that follows me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life.”

And in Psalm 119 it says

“your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path”.

So those who choose to walk by faith, to walk before God in the light of his word, they'll be blessed with God's favour. They'll experience God actively working on their behalf for their benefit in life.

King David one of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob's descendants, he was a man of faith just like them. And he followed in their footsteps in as much as they walked before God according to his will and word. And David endeavoured to do that in his life although he was a failing man just like you and I. But God blessed him and David wrote in Psalm 65:11, let's just turn to it.

Psalm 65:11, here's what David the Psalmist wrote.

“You crown the year with your goodness and your paths drop fatness.You crown the year with your goodness”.

We've come to the end of another year and we can look back and we can say God has crowned this year with his goodness. He’s blessed us throughout the year. But one of the commentators that I read about this word, “you crown the year with your goodness”—he said, you can read it as you have crowned, ‘you have crowned the year’ and it can also mean encompass,—you have encompassed the year with your goodness. So that suggests the thought that God has surrounded us with his goodness. He's hedged us about and protected us and blessed us. He's redeemed us from all evil. He's delivered us from things and people that would harm us. He's surrounded us with his goodness in the year that's passed.

And so as we come to the threshold of a new year, we look back and we acknowledge God's goodness in so many ways. But we also look forward with confidence that no matter what 2025 may have in store for us, based on our experience of God's goodness to us in the past and God's promises in his word, we have confidence that God's goodness and mercy will encompass us and surround us in 2025. David wrote at the end of Psalm 23:

"Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

Before I read the poem, I'm going to read another verse that came to me as I was thinking about things this morning.

And it's found in Isaiah 54, just at the end of Isaiah 54:17.

"No weapon that is formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise against you in judgment you shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness which is of me, says the Lord”.

“No weapon that's formed against you shall prosper."

That's a precious verse to me, and it was and is.

Now in closing we'll just read the whole of the poem that King George VI read part of in 1939. It's called “God Knows”.

“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, 'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.' And he replied, 'Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.' So I went forth, and finding the hand of God, trod gladly into the night, and he led me toward the hills and the breaking of day in the low east.

So heart be still:

What need our little life

Our human life to know,

If God hath comprehension?

In all the dizzy strife

Of things both high and low,

God hideth His intention.

God knows. His will

Is best. The stretch of years

Which wind ahead, so dim

To our imperfect vision,

Are clear to God. Our fears

Are premature; In Him,

All time hath full provision.

Then rest: until

God moves to lift the veil

From our impatient eyes,

When, as the sweeter features

Of Life’s stern face we hail,

Fair beyond all surmise

God’s thought around His creatures

Our mind shall fill.'

(Minnie Louise Haskins 1875-1957)

We'll ask God's blessing.

O God, we give thanks for your goodness to us in this year that has passed, and we thank you that you have surrounded us with your care and kindness and protection, and we are confident that you will continue to bless us as we endeavour, by the help of the Holy Spirit, to walk before you, to walk before your face, to live lives that are pleasing to you in the light of your word. And so we are glad to put our hand in your hand and go confidently into this new year. Bless us, we pray, for we ask all and give thanks in the precious name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Now shall we sing the words of hymn 380.

O Master, let me walk with you in lowly paths of service free. Tell me thy secret, help me bear the strain of toil, the fret of care. Teach me thy patience still with thee in closer dearer company, in work that keeps faith sweet and strong, in trust that triumphs over wrong.

The whole hymn, 380.

O Master, let me walk with Thee

In lowly paths of service free.

Tell me Thy secret, help me bear

The strain of toil, the fret of care.

Help me the slow of heart to move

By some clear winning word of love.

Teach me the wayward feet to stay,

And guide them in the homeward way.

Teach me Thy patience still with Thee

In closer dearer company,

In work that keeps faith sweet and strong,

In trust that triumphs over wrong.

In hope that sends a shining ray

Far down the future's broadening way,

In peace that only Thou cans’t give.

With Thee, O Master, let me live.

This talk by Steve Seddon, was recorded at West Point Hall 82 Albert Road, Levenshulme, Manchester in December 2024.

TRANSCRIPT:

“... and it's that which I'd like to share with us.

Hope is a kind of curious thing because it's very different in the Bible compared to hope that we kind of speak about on a daily basis. And I looked at many definitions to try and find one that was interesting. The one that warmed to me most was just one word, optimism. And that's how we think of hope, I think, pretty much every day.

And we've got a little illustration. You see in otherwise harsh ground, barren ground, you see a shoot amazingly, emerging. And it speaks of hope. And it's about an optimistic outlook, a positive outlook for the future. And that's really important, isn't it? Because we live in a world that there's plenty of things to be miserable about. And it's good to be optimistic. But the Bible doesn't describe hope in those terms.

And I just want to issue a challenge at this point.

What do you hope for and what is your hope based on? Because there's this statement I've heard a number of times. It's "blind optimism". And it's about having a hope that is baseless. It's just, well, "I hope so!" And you know, one of the most tragic things is that there's that blind optimism in many people's lives to do the most important thing in life. And that is what happens after life. And I'd like us all to consider that.

What's my hope after life and what is it based on? Is it blind optimism or is it something more solid than that? And I put it to you that the Bible hope that we're going to be showing together is not blind optimism. It's not even optimism. It's certainty. And it's not an expectation that something may happen. It's a guarantee that something will happen. And I wanted to share at the beginning one of my favourite verses in recent years. And I find it really interesting when you read the Bible and you interact with Christians and a verse keeps cropping up. And this one is, this is one of those. And it says,

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Spirit." [Romans 15:13].

What a brilliant verse. It's a prayer, actually. "May the God of hope," - you know, that's who the Christian God is. He's the God of hope. And the prayer is that he might fill us with joy and peace as we trust in him.

I wanted to try and cleverly make an acrostic of hope. I miserably failed. I just couldn't do it. There were some very limp attempts on Google which I chose not to do. So we've come up with something a little more sophisticated.

But we've got these other companions of hope, let's call them that, in this verse. And it's joy and it's peace and it's trust. And what links these things together in this verse? It's a curious thing. Is there something that is missing from the verse that makes them all make sense? And I put it to you.

But if we go back a few verses, just three verses or so, we come across this brilliant word, "promise." [Romans 15:8]

And it says, "Christ has come," that's the Lord Jesus Christ has come,

"to confirm the promises made, to glorify God for his mercy ... May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."

And here's the thing. Christian hope, as well as being a guarantee, not an optimism, is based on promises. And for me that makes all the difference. If your expectation is founded on a promise, it changes the whole thing.

So let's think about that most important part of human life. It's death. It's what happens next.

Blind optimism is a tragedy. Hope, Christian hope, based on promises, just changes the whole scenario. I wanted to try and illustrate it by a promise that was made to a man in a very, very dire situation.

And it's the Lord Jesus Christ being taken to be crucified. So this is a really solemn part of the Christian message.

And it says,

"As they," that's the soldiers, "led him," that's Jesus, "as they led him away, they seized Simon from Cyrene, who was on his way in from the country, and put the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus. Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed when they came to the place called the Skull.There they crucified him along with the criminals, one on his right, the other on his left. The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, "He saved others. Let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One." The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar and said, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself." All the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him. "Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us." But the other criminal rebuked him. "Don't you fear God," he said, "since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly. We are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong." Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." Jesus answered him, "I tell you the truth ..."

Here's the promise:

"... Today you will be with me in paradise." [Luke 23:26-43].

You know, one of the amazing things about this story is it puts to rest without question the notion that we can earn a place in heaven by our good works. And, you know, that often I think that sense, it is fairly logical, isn't it, that if we are as good as we can be then somehow that will be rewarded. For many people who have that optimism, it's based on this sense that if I do good then I'll be fine. Here was a man who was sentenced to death and he had no time to do anything. His life was characterised by wickedness, by his own confession. He was receiving what his deeds deserved. But he recognised that next to him on that middle cross was someone who was very different. And he just appealed literally on his deathbed, so to speak, that the Lord Jesus Christ who he recognised was, I believe, the Son of God. He could see that. He wasn't the only man on the day, the centurion, but also recognised because of the dignity of what was going on, and what the Lord Jesus has said from the cross, that here indeed was the Son of God. So he made that appeal. "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."

I just appeal to all of us to make that appeal. If we're struggling with hope, maybe our hearts are stirred about whether our hope is blind optimism or whether it's founded on something, then appeal to God, to the Lord Jesus Christ to help you with that as this dying man did. And then Jesus issued that brilliant promise, "Today you'll be with me in paradise." I think it's the Christian message really in a nutshell.

There was repentance there. There was a recognition that the guy needs a Saviour, and that's part of the Christian message too, that we need the Lord Jesus to be our Saviour. And having recognised that, we also recognise we can't do anything about it ourselves.

And then we appeal and he makes that promise. You know, it's put up in this very famous verse from the Bible that I want to make no apology for defaulting to something that is perhaps the obvious, especially for those of us who are familiar with God's Word. It is the most quoted verse I think, but it's got that promise in it.

I wanted to highlight it. It says,

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes on him"

- and here is the promise -

"shall not perish, but have eternal life." [John 3:16].

And I just make that statement from God's Word to us this afternoon. It has that power associated with it. But you know, there's another dimension.

"For God so loved the world," and we introduce love into this dynamic that's going on. So we have God's love, and it gives us hope, and it gives us peace, and it gives us joy, and it involves our trust. Trust is another word for faith, and they're all bound together by the promises of God.

There's a brilliant verse in Psalm 119, another favourite of mine, and you have to read it in the NIV version. It says,

"Your promises are thoroughly tested, and your servant loves them." [Psalm 119:140].

So when God makes a promise, time has proven that his promises are fulfilled.

That's my message today. It's hope from a Christian Bible perspective, not blind optimism, not just optimism, but indeed it's a certainty, and it's a certainty based on the promises of God, which he's made, founded on his love for us. And it's just for us to appeal, recognising that we need God to be our Saviour.

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope."

That's a curious expression. How can you overflow with hope by the power of the Spirit?

I think it has to do with dispelling any doubt, and isn't that where we want to be as we get to difficulties in our life, particularly in anticipation - as I get older, I know you suddenly become aware of your own mortality. It's probably something we don't really want to talk about, but it's a fact. And as we get to terms with our own mortality, then don't we want to be overflowing with hope? No doubt as to what is for us beyond this life, and of course its eternal life.

What a hope that we have. Thank you.”

==========

If you live in the Manchester area, feel free to come along to any of the following regular Services:

Sunday: The Remembrance (Worship Meeting) 10.00am – 11.00am

Sunday Morning Service with Bible Teaching: 11.30am – 12noon

Tuesday:Little Fishes Toddler Group 10.00am – 11:45am

Ladies’ Bible Study (fortnightly) 12.30pm – 2.00pm

Tuesday Club (7-14yrs) 6.00pm – 7.30pm

Bible-based ‘Thought for the Week’ & Prayer 8.00pm – 9.00pm

Wednesday Warm Space 10.30am – 12.30pm Charity Cafe (last Wednesday of the month) 10.30am – 1.00pm.

West Point Hall 82 Albert Road, Levenshulme, Manchester.

I want to read five scriptures and see if we can tie them up a little. The first is in the book of Colossians. If you don’t want to turn it, it doesn’t matter, but if you do, Colossians 1:15. And they’re all speaking about the Lord Jesus. So Colossians 1:15.

The background to Colossians by the way is, Colossians was in Turkey. It was linked with two other churches, Laodicea and Hierapolis. And it would seem that one of the founding members, if you like, was someone called Epaphras. We don’t know for definite, but it seems as if he was there at the beginning.

But anyway, this verse says of the Lord Jesus,

"who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation."

Back into John’s Gospel, chapter 1. John’s Gospel, chapter 1:18, John 1:18, a well-known verse.

"No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him."

So the first in Colossians was "who is the image of the invisible God", the Lord Jesus. And here it says of him who is in the bosom of the Father. And then over to Hebrews 1. Further back in the Bible. Hebrews 1. And this time verse 3.

"who being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high."

And then back a little to Philippians 2 ... Philippians 2:6 -

"who being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God".

So that’s, who is the image of the invisible God in Colossians, who is in the bosom of the Father in John’s Gospel, and here who being originally in the form of God, and then, lastly Acts 10. And this time verse 36, say it. And then it says,

"The word which he sent,"

this was God sending to the children of Israel,

"preaching good tidings of the Gospel of peace by Jesus Christ," and it says "he" in the translation, but how good is this: "Who is Lord of all."

So I want to say something today about the fact that Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord, and he’s Lord of all. And behind that, just to bring in the factor of why we’re here this morning, why we’ve come to remember the Lord Jesus, why we make the effort to get ourselves up and out, and to remember him. He is the image of the invisible God. That’s a Greek word that’s spelled E-I-K-O-N - eikon. And it means something that is derived from something else. So in other words, all that God is, and he is therefore one God, but there are three persons in the Godhead. All the Lord Jesus, he is the physical representation of the invisible God. All that God is, “who is the image of the invisible God”, and then it says he’s “the firstborn of all creation”. That’s nothing to do with being born first. That’s not what firstborn means in the Bible. It’s a word called prototokos, and it’s to do with the fact that he is before everything else. He stands as the first of anything and the first of everything. He is the firstborn. It’s a title of the Lord Jesus, a title of his deity. He’s the firstborn of all creation. So, what about that? Well, there’s a context to that, of what he is in his essence. It says,

“Who delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his love.”

Now, that’s God, it’s speaking of God doing that, but it’s the Lord Jesus who carried that out. He has delivered us through his death on Calvary’s Cross. He’s taken us out of the thraldom of darkness, spiritual darkness, and he’s brought us into the sphere and the ambience of spiritual light. He’s translated us into a kingdom that’s called “the kingdom of the Son of God’s love”. It’s a wonderful thing. Then, he not only delivered us, but the Lord Jesus redeemed us. He bought us. He paid a price to reconcile us back to God. And it says just before,

“who is the image of the invisible God, in whom we have our redemption”.

So, he’s redeemed us. And then it says, “The forgiveness of our sins.” So, he’s delivered us, he’s redeemed us, he forgave us of all our sins and of all the wrong that’s in our nature and in our life. But even more than that, he’s reconciled us to God. And that’s later on down that chapter. It says this, Paul is writing to these saints in the church of Colossae in Turkey. And he says,

“And you, has he reconciled, who were alienated and enemies in your mind by evil works, He's reconciled in the body of his flesh through death.”

So, the Lord Jesus had to come into humanity to take a human body so that he could do the work of reconciliation and bring sinners, you and me and everyone else, reconciled to God. So, he’s delivered us, he’s redeemed us, he forgave us, and he’s reconciled us. This is the person of the Lord Jesus that we remember and have remembered today.

And we were just listening to a program on the way here. It’s a lady called Dr. Nikki Fox from Hertfordshire in England. She’s head of science at NASA at the Great Space Centre in America. And she was talking about her experience. She says, as a wee girl of eight months, her father lifted her out of her cot to see the first man who was walking on the moon, Neil Armstrong. And ever since she was small, she had a great interest in space technology. And now she’s the head of science at NASA. And she says, “It thrills us.” She says, “I’m flooded with tears when I see rockets going off.” Because she says, “We’ve spent maybe 20 years to get that rocket into space. And all the pressures,” she says, “in the job of hoping this will work and that will work, the technology that was involved, the cutting-edge technology, in most cases with each one.” And she says, “You know, to see it all.” And you wonder - I don’t know where she stands Christianity-wise - but Colossians tells us,

“In him,” the Lord Jesus, “all things were created. Things in the heavens, things upon earth, things visible, things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things have been created through him and unto him.”

I summarize that in three letters. BTF:

B

all things were brought into existence BY him. In him were all things created.

T

Number two, all things have been created THROUGH him. He's the agency. He's the mediator of everything that's in this world.

F

And then the third thing is, FOR him.

By Him, through Him, for Him.

And then it says, “In him all things consist.” That means this table here, why does it hold together mind you, particles of dust, and is built into a substantial element, and it holds up. It says, “In him all things are held together.” That's why this world exists, because of Christ, who's done all these things. And then later on in that same chapter it says,

“And it was the good pleasure of the Father that in him should all the fullness of the Godhead dwell.”

All that God is, essentially, intrinsically, all that God is, it’s seen in Christ, in his life here, in his body. He’s God and man, God-man. And there’s a fullness of the deity, of all that God is, in the person, history of the Lord Jesus. Absolutely wonderful. That’s why we come here. That’s why we remember him.

And then we come back into John’s Gospel, as we know that’s the Gospel of the Son of God, and the focus is very much so on the Lord Jesus. Tells us so much about him. Tells us that he’s the Word “in the beginning.” Now, there’s no definite article before “the beginning” in the Greek language. It’s “in beginning”. It’s not things are beginning, he is a beginning. It’s "in” beginning. He’s already there. And he’s going to do something. It’s not that "in the beginning” was a point in time, when he did that - there was a point in time - but there’s no beginning. He is without beginning. And it says, “in beginning, the Word was with God”. Now, the preposition that’s used there, as we know, as Jo knows, it’s eis - E-I-S, and it means that everything that was connected with the Lord Jesus in his pre-eternal existence was all linked with God the Father and God the Spirit. “In beginning was the Word”. Now, that’s logos. That means intelligence. And it means an intelligence that comes through revelation from God. “In beginning was the Word.” That’s Christ, again. “And the Word was with God”, so he was with the Father and the Spirit:

“and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.”

So John is quite clear, so he’s the One. But more than that, it says also of him, as we read in John 1, 14, 18,

“No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father...”

Now, that preposition “IN” there, is amazing because it's directing us to this. It's the thought of the Lord Jesus: never was he ever NOT in the bosom of the Father. Even when he suffered on the cross, and he was forsaken: “My God, my God” - he didn't use “my Father, my Father”. That would have broken the Father's heart.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The Lord was still in the bosom of the Father. He never, ever was out of it. And it’s a verse like when we’re away from home. It’s like me going home. When I go in the door, Joan’s maybe not there, she’s upstairs, but I know she’s at home. And even if I’m away from home, she’s in my bosom. The word bosom is like a special place. It means....something that’s set apart. There’s something about the word bosom that has to do with the very centre point of the heart. And so, when I’m away from home, she is still in my heart, in my bosom. And that was the Lord Jesus. All his life here, even on the cross, in the deepest aspect of his intensive sufferings, he was always in the bosom of the Father. Never anywhere else.

“No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.”

So, he’s there, in the beginning. He’s in the bosom of the Father. He is the Lamb of God. Remember John the Baptist with two of his disciples at the time, when he saw Jesus walking.

“Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

He knew that he was the Saviour. And then a day later, he saw him again as he walked, and he says,

“Behold the Lamb of God.”

So, he is the Word. He is the only begotten, not born, only begotten, in the sense he’s always been there, without any birth, his pre-existence. And he is also the Lamb of God. And do you remember Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, when he went and came across Christ, he says, "Peter, we found the Messiah." The word means anointed. It has to do with his sovereignty, his kingship. He says, “We found the Messiah.” And then when the Lord Jesus saw the disciple, Nathaniel, and said, “I saw you under the fig tree long before I had come and spoken to you.” And Nathaniel got up. And in a moment, it’s like the thief on the cross who believed in the very eleventh hour of his life, the last hour, the last moment of his life.

Here was someone as soon as he saw and listened to Jesus saying, “I saw you under the fig tree.” He [Nathaniel] says, “You are, you are the Son of God. You are the King of Israel.” That was divine revelation, and it happened instantaneously. Amazing. So the Lord Jesus is all that.

So; when you look at it in John’s Gospel, chapter 1, you see, you think of the Lord Jesus. “He was in the world. The world was made by him. The world” generally, “knew him not.” Really didn’t want to know him. And it says also in the Book of Hebrews, and we’ll refer to that in a moment, “When he bringeth the firstborn into the world,” which is the inhabited earth, the world, the meaning there in the original language is,"When again he bringeth his firstborn into the world, let all the angels of God worship him."

Now … there’s difference of view on it: is it referring to his first coming, (his incarnation) - or - referring to his next coming to the earth, to reign during the millennial period? We leave that to whatever you think.

Let’s go to Hebrews where it tells us this of the Lord Jesus,

“who is the effulgence of his glory, the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made purification for sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.”

And that just encapsulates, if you like, everything about the Lord Jesus. He is the effulgence of Godhead’s glory. The word means, it’s like the radiating of light, it’s light being emitted from a source, and that light is absolutely brilliant. And that’s what the Lord Jesus is, in his person, in his humanity, he’s showing the effulgence of Godhead glory. And he’s “the very image of his substance” so that’s a different word from "who being in the image of the invisible God”. This is the word charaktér, it’s spelled with a K in the Greek, ...., but this is to do with the character of Christ in his being, in his humanity. He became something that he had never been before, and yet he remained what he had ever been. He took humanity, but he did not divest himself of his deity. He did it for the external glory, that’s a different matter. The external glory, he left that aside to come into this world, but he always remained, even though he took humanity, he remained in his essential deity.

So, Hebrews tells us amazing things. Number one, he’s the light of deity, he’s the effulgence of his glory, he’s the very image of his substance, or his character, that’s to do with the Godhead, and then he has power, and then he has dealt with sin, “when he had made purification for sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty and high”. This is the Saviour. You know, it says later on in that same chapter, whoever the writer to the Hebrews was, this makes, talks about that too, but anyway, it’s inspired by the Spirit of God, and it says, you know, “you have laid down, Lord …

"you’ have laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands, but they are going to perish, and they’ll wax old as a garment, and as a vesture, they’ll be rolled up, and they shall be changed,"

there’ll be a change, “but you remain, you remain, and your years shall not fail.” And imagine using our sense of time and motion in the context of God, who has no beginning and who has no ending, “your years” the writer says, “shall never end, - never fail.”

“You are the same, and your years shall never fail.”

So that's true of the Lord Jesus. And then that chapter also tells us this, that

“God has spoken at the end of these days in his Son, whom he appointed, heir of all things, through him also, he made the ages.”

The Lord Jesus - that's why we come to remember him. That’s why we make the effort to try and be here, because of him. So, who is the image of the invisible God? Who is in the bosom of the Father? Who is the effulgence of his glory? Philippians we read from, where it says of him, the Lord Jesus, “Have this mind in you”, writing to the people of Philippi, who were in Greece, of course, ... “Have this mind in you, which was also Christ Jesus. Who being [originally] in the form of God”, though that word has more to do with his glory, is to do with the outward glory of Christ - is always God, but

“who being in the form of God, counted it not a thing to be grasped that, to be on an equality with God.”

He didn’t make an issue, and didn’t self-advertise or self-promote who he was and where he came from - Of course, he spoke about it, he did, but in the sense, this is him, divesting himself of that outward glory, and it says he took the form of a servant. It’s a change here. Took the form of transformation, it took the form of a servant, and then it says, being made in the likeness of men. Now it doesn’t say, because it can’t say, being made in the image of men. The Lord Jesus was never made in the image of men. He is the image of the invisible God, but here the likeness has to do with resemblance. He’s like us, but he’s different.

“Being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient, even unto death, yes, the death of the cross.”

The death of the cross. So what Philippians centres on, is the taking of Christ’s humanity, the divesting of the external glory, not the internal glory of his person, and he’s coming into this world, and he stoops more and more. He becomes a servant, never a servant of men. He was a servant of Jehovah. The servant of Jehovah. But he served, there’s no question. He ministered. He did that which was service, but it was all God’s - what Jo was thinking about this morning and speaking about in his thanksgiving - all to do with doing the will of God. And then the answer to that is exaltation, subjugation, confession.

“Wherefore God has highly exalted him, and given to him the name that is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every tongue should confess, every knee shall bow to the glory of God the Father.”

Wonderful words. The answer of Christ's humiliation and humility is now exaltation and glory.

So we come to the last chapter, the last reference in Acts 10, where it says, those lovely words, we were thinking about Israel this morning - Neville was mentioning that - and we know it says - God sent this word to the children of Israel: “preaching peace” - “preaching peace by Jesus Christ.” So Peter is giving them ... when he’s saying this, and he’s saying it’s the gospel that has been brought. Firstly for the Jew, then for the Gentile nations. Principally for the Jew. That’s why Christ came for the Jewish nation, as part of the Jewish nation. And God is sending this word by his Son, preaching good tidings of the gospel of peace by Jesus Christ. He’s Jesus Christ. Then Peter speaks of Jesus of Nazareth, and that’s him as the man.

“How that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and he went about doing good, healing all that were oppressed, for God was with him.”

And all that Lord Jesus was doing was in conjunction with the Father and the Spirit too. And here he is. And then Peter goes on to say in his warning, and he says, “And God has ordained that he will be the judge of the quick the dead.” Now the quick are those who have been made spiritually alive, because when we get saved, we are asked to serve the Lord, and then one day believers will have to answer at the judgment seat of Christ, the bema of Christ. But the dead are those who are spiritually dead, who have not responded to the word of the gospel. And then he ends, and he says, “to him,” this is Christ, “all the prophets bear witness that through his name, everyone who believes in him shall receive remission of sins.” And that’s true today. The person who accepts Christ and who believes that he’s the Son of God and that he’s the Saviour of their souls, they receive the remission of sins. All to do with this person, the Lord Jesus, whom we’ve remembered today. Why we’re here. Why we wanted to be here. Why we got up out of bed early and make a move. All to do with him, “who is the image of the invisible God, who is the bosom of the Father, who holds all things by the word of his power.”

And then what I omitted in there, who in that last chapter of Acts 10 [v. 36] it says,

“He is Lord of all.”

He is Lord of all. Jesus is Lord. That’s [the Greek word] kurios. That’s someone who’s the master, who’s the proprietor, and that’s what he wants to be of our lives as far and as much as we can let him do that, and it’s all to his glory. So thanks very much for listening.

I recently had the privilege of paying tribute to the life of my dear friend Martin Notman who lived with his wife Evelyn in the Fife town of Cowdenbeath, Scotland. He died around 7.00am on Tuesday 28th May 2024, in the Queen Margaret Hospital, Dunfermline.

He was buried in Beath Cemetery on Monday 17th June 2024. Ian Lithgow, one of Martin’s lifelong friends, took the service at the graveside and, after we had laid Martin’s body to rest, we drove to Garvock House Hotel, Dunfermline, where I gave the address below.

Evelyn bravely began the tribute to Martin, by introducing the following rendering of “Scars in Heaven” by American group “Casting Crowns”, courtesy of YouTube. She alluded to the many scars Martin had on his body due to numerous operations and treatment, and how much this song had meant to her in the weeks before he died:

Note: When Martin asked me to take his funeral service, he was particularly desirous that I should preach the gospel to the friends who would attend. I was very glad to do this for him.

Here is the recording and the transcript of my address.

It’s a very touching song, very touching when you think of what Martin went through.

Now, I think it’s already been said, but Evelyn did ask me to thank all her friends and neighbours for coming here today and for their support, and especially to David and Carol for being by her side in these last few weeks especially. You’ll forgive me if I'm a bit hoarse. I'll keep drinking the water!

Now, it’s not possible to do justice to the life of anyone, let alone someone like Martin Notman in twenty minutes to half an hour, but we can only really give a sketch. So, I’m going to put what I'm going to say under five headings.

MARTIN’S LIFE - MARTIN’S CHARACTER - THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS - THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING - Why did God allow Martin to suffer so long? I want to ask that question, I might not be able to answer it. And last of all, I want to end on A NOTE OF TRIUMPH.

So, first of all,

1. MARTIN’S LIFE

Martin Notman was the youngest of seven children. He was born in the border town of Innerleithen, and he was born there on 22nd of July 1947. After his mum became unwell, Martin came to live with his aunt and uncle, Jean and David McClelland in Cowdenbeath. And when he left school, he got a four-year apprenticeship with the National Coal Board, and at the end of that (a four-year electrical fitters apprenticeship). After that, he went down the mines near Alloa. That's where he started work. But he hated going down the mines, he hated working in the mines. And so he left that job and got another job at the Rosyth dockyards, where he worked for an air conditioning firm.

Now, the story of how Martin and Evelyn met is quite something. Evelyn and her friend, I think Evelyn was about seventeen, they decided to go from Methil, where she lived, into Kirkcaldy, to the bowling alley in Kirkcaldy. And after they’d been there, they were waiting at the bus stop for the bus home. And this car drew up, and inside the car was—in the driver's seat—a young fellow called Scott from Cowdenbeath, and in the passenger seat, Martin Notman, who was Scott’s friend—and they'd come down for a night, an evening out. Martin was sitting, eating a bag of chips. When Evelyn saw Martin—well first of all, Scott, the driver, said to the two girls, “Would you like a lift home? Are you going somewhere? D’you want a lift?”—this would be maybe ten, half ten at night. Anyhow, her friend said “No, we’re not taking a lift”. But when Evelyn saw Martin, she thought he looked quite dishy! And so there was a bit of debate between her and her friend about whether they should go. And Martin got so impatient, he threw the bag of chips out of the car and he said, “Would you make up your mind?” So Evelyn got in the car and her friend followed her. And whatever transpired between Kirkcaldy and Methil, when Evelyn got out of the car, went up the driveway—this was around eleven o'clock at night—her mother was standing waiting for her at the door, and she said to her mum, “Wave to that man, because that's the man I’m going to marry.” She knew, she just knew!

So they went steady for a couple of years and then they married on 22nd October 1969. So, October this year would have been their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.

So they settled in Cowdenbeath—and just one year and two months later—a crisis—a great crisis occurred in the Notman household. (It wasn't the birth of David, because he'd already been born!) Martin, around Christmastime 1970, became very, very unwell.

They didn’t know what it was to begin with, but he deteriorated so fast he had to be rushed into Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and he sank into a coma. He was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Good Pasture Syndrome, first identified by an American doctor in 1919 I think. So, there was little hope that he would recover, but to everyone’s surprise he regained consciousness and the doctor who was attending at the time was a Christian and he was surprised, but, the medical team decided that the only hope was to remove Martin's kidneys, because this autoimmune disease attacks the kidneys and then the lungs and Martin was already beginning to be affected in his lungs. So to arrest the progress of the condition they removed his kidneys, which meant he had to be on a dialysis machine until a transplant became available.

So he was on that dialysis on and off for ten months, and six months of those ten months in 1971 he was in hospital. And during that time Alec Renfrew from Edinburgh used to come in and pray for Martin's recovery. And it was during Martin’s illness at that time that he put his trust completely in the Lord Jesus Christ as his Saviour, because he knew he was in a critical condition and he put his trust in Jesus.

So, at the beginning of October ‘71 Evelyn was advised to have Christmas early, because they didn’t think that Martin was going to last till Christmas. They went down to the Co-op to buy some toys for David, who was just a baby at the time, and Martin collapsed. And Evelyn had to take him into the car and take him home.

But later that day, on the 23rd of October 1971 the phone rang. “Could I speak to Martin Notman?” they said to Evelyn. He was so weak that he had to crawl to the phone in the days when the phones were attached to wires, no wireless phones in those days. And they said, could you come in immediately? We’ve got a kidney for you. And that transformed Martin’s life. After a five hour operation in the Western General in Edinburgh, he survived and got better. And that was over fifty-two and a half years ago.

So, God gave him another fifty-two and a half years that he might not have had otherwise. And he’s only one of a handful of kidney transplant patients in the world to have survived that long. So it’s a record, it really is a record. Martin had no doubt that his good health lasted so long because of God's goodness to him.

But there’s also no doubt that Martin remained in good health for so long because of Evelyn’s care and attention over all those years. Meticulous, taking care over all the medications that he had to take. And when he was in the hospital in these last three months, some of the nurses had their noses ‘put out of joint’ metaphorically, because Evelyn knew more than they did about what medications Martin was supposed to have. Your day of reward is coming Evelyn.

Martin and Evelyn also appreciated the care that one of the consultants who was there for the majority of his health care over that time, A Mr. Murat Akyol, who was a Greek consultant, Renal consultant. And when Mr. Akyol retired, he sent Martin a lovely letter—and he retired to his vineyard in Turkey. And since then, the consultant, Lorna Henderson, took over and Martin and Evelyn were both very appreciative of all the care that they had from the consultants in the NHS.

But two years ago, Martin took prostate cancer and had to have his prostate removed. And they had to do a very careful operation to avoid injuring the kidney. But from that time, he went down the hill. So that was just a potted history of his life.

But coming on to

2. MARTIN’S CHARACTER

Martin was good with his hands. He was good with car engines. He looked after his own cars and some other people’s too. But he wasn't just good with the mechanics of things. He was very careful about the detailing, what the professionals call detailing. And Martin could make the car sparkle inside and out every inch. That’s the kind of man he was. He was what the Bible calls “a workman that needs not to be ashamed”. He made several lecterns and wooden collection boxes for various halls. The hall in Buckhaven, the table that we use on a Sunday morning. He made that table. He made the lectern and he made the collection box. Lovely, creative craftsmanship. That was Martin. But it wasn’t just in these practical things that Martin was “a workman that needs not to be ashamed”.

He was a man who took care in the things of God. And he was an avid student of the Bible. He used to submit various, very good articles to our Bible Studies magazine in the Churches of God. And he had an expert knowledge of Bible prophecy. Of course, he was born less than a year before Israel became a nation in 1948. So he was always interested in what was happening in the Middle East. He was a man who “looked for and earnestly desired the coming of the day of God” as it says in Peter's epistle. Martin was a powerful preacher. He spoke with authority and power, spiritual power (which I feel is lacking in some of the preachers we hear today). But he was a man of absolute integrity. He didn’t sugarcoat the truth. He preached from the Bible - what the Bible tells us about the depravity of human nature. That we’re all sinners in the sight of God, inherited sin from Adam and Eve, our first parents. And unless we avail ourselves of God’s grace, we're going to end up in a lost eternity. Martin didn’t miss the mark.

But he also held out the invitation of the Saviour who died on the cross, who Ian was speaking to us about at the graveside. He told us that

“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him should not perish [that's eternally] but have eternal life”.

That was Martin.

His thanksgivings on a Sunday morning were informed by his knowledge of the Old Testament scriptures. He had a great love and appreciation of the tabernacle symbolism and how it spoke of the beauties of Christ. And he was able to bring those things out in his thanksgiving on a Lord’s Day morning, in the New Testament counterpart to the Old Covenant, the spiritual house of God.

But I hasten to add, Martin was not a narrow minded man. He was very proud of David and Carol’s work among the young in Kelty. And they’ve led young people to the Saviour there. And Martin was proud of that. And he rejoiced when he heard about the Gospel tent campaigns in Cowdenbeath and Levenmouth where his friends in the Munro family from Ballingry preached the Gospel to our fellow men and women, ‘holding out the word of life’. He rejoiced when he heard of these things.

But he was faithful to the things that God had revealed to him in the scriptures. It says in 1 Corinthians 4, “it is required of stewards that a man be found faithful”. It’s not gift, not ability, but faithfulness that counts with God. Faithfulness in his things. And so Martin was a faithful steward.

But he was also a man who was waiting and watching. On Tuesday 28th May this year, the day that Martin died, the text on our Golden Bells calendar was from Titus 2:13. It says,

“We wait for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.”

And there was a wee comment underneath the verse about a fisherman, I presume in the north of Scotland somewhere. And when he came off the boat after a week at sea, the wives of the other fishermen were waiting on the quayside, but Angus’ wife wasn’t there. And he walked up the village, he went in the house and his wife said, “I’ve been waiting for you Angus.” And he said, “Aye, but Willie’s wife was watching for him.” Willie’s wife was watching.

Martin was like that, he was watching for the Saviour. One of Evelyn’s neighbours said to her recently, “Martin was a lovely man. Everyone thought he was a lovely man”. Well, Martin wasn’t a saint, not the way that people idolise the celebrities nowadays - or, God forbid, beatify them or canonize them.

But Martin would be the first to tell you of his shortcomings compared to that lovely man whom he followed. Because Martin was a follower, a disciple of the loveliest man who ever lived, the Lord Jesus Christ, the man of Calvary.

I was going to say Martin was the first person I heard saying this little ditty:

“To dwell above with saints we love—

Won’t that be glory?

To dwell below with saints we know—

Well that’s another story!”

He was just, you know, he recognised that even though a person has put their faith in Christ, they still have that old nature that they’re carrying about with them. As Paul said in Romans, Like a dead body, you’re carrying it about with you. You’ve got a new nature, but you’ve got that old nature. And that’s us, that’s Christians. There’s none of us perfect. But the difference between a Christian and someone who's not a Christian is they’ve put their trust in the Saviour who died for them on the cross. And only because of His blood shed on the cross will they be in heaven one day because of God’s grace.

So in the things that matter, in the things that are eternal, and in spite of a life of suffering—and most of us here, if not all of us—have no idea what Martin went through these last fifty odd years. But he was a faithful disciple, a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. And God knew his man, and God knew that Martin, like Job in the Old Testament, was a man who would say,

“Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”

Martin was waiting and watching for his Saviour because Jesus promised to return. He said in John chapter 14:

“If I go, I will come again.”

“I go to prepare a place for you,” he said to his disciples—and “I’m coming back”.

And first of all, He’s coming to the air, as Ian referred to—it’s on the back of our hymn sheet here, 1 Thessalonians 4:16,

“For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.”

The dead in Christ, listen to that— that’s sweet — Martin, and all the others who’ve trusted in Jesus, who’ve died, they’ll be the first to rise, to be raised from the dead in a new body that cannot sin, an immortal body that will live forever with Christ in glory.

But then, after the seven-year reign of the Antichrist, who’s coming on this earth, and you can see the signs coming—Jesus is coming back to the Mount of Olives, He’s coming back to rule as “King of Kings and Lord of Lords”, and He’ll rule from Jerusalem; as “Prince of Peace”. This world needs the Prince of Peace, doesn’t it?

So I want to come to

3. THE MINISTRY OF ANGELS

I’m just going to read 1 Peter 1. I read this to Martin when I was with him in the hospital just a few weeks ago.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy, begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fades not away, reserved in heaven for you.”

I read those words to Martin when he was in the hospital.

Over 2,000 years ago, when the Lord was here on earth, He told a story, a true story, about two men who had died. One was a rich man, the other was a poor man, a beggar, who was laid at the gate of the rich man, and the beggar died.

And do you know what it says? It says:

“the angels came and carried him away into Abraham’s bosom”.

So the Lord Jesus revealed something about what happens after death to Old Testament saints. The word “saints” just means a sanctified person, a person who has put their trust in God and has devoted themselves to following God’s will in their life. That’s a saint. That was a saint in the Old Testament, and he [the beggar] was carried there. But under the New Covenant, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that the angels have a service to do for those “who die in the Lord”, as the scripture says. Martin died believing in Jesus, “died in the Lord”. And I think on the basis of what it says in Hebrews, it says about the angels in Hebrews 1:

“Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to do service on behalf of those who will inherit salvation?”

So I don’t think it’s too much of a leap of faith to believe that the angels were involved there, and that in the Queen Margaret Hospital, even though, Evelyn and David and Carol, you couldn’t get to the hospital in time—the angels were there. I’m sure of it. And they carried him, not to Abraham’s bosom, but to the presence of his Saviour who died and who rose again: “the first fruits of them that are fallen asleep”. The body’s asleep in the dust of the earth, but the soul—the person—goes to be with Christ if they’ve put their trust in Him.

The Bible says:

“In your presence is fullness of joy.”

So Martin has exchanged “the spirit of heaviness” —because he suffered from depression in his life—he’s exchanged “the spirit of heaviness for the garment of praise”, as it says in Isaiah.

So we come to

4. THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING

Why did God allow Martin to suffer so long? Apart from the rather glib answers that we might give to that question, such as, “Because of original sin, we all suffer from the effects of sin in our bodies, in our lives.” And that’s true because in Romans Paul tells us, that “the whole creation groans in travail and pain until now”. That’s common to us all, but Martin suffered more than most. Why?

We're forced to admit that we don’t have all the answers. It’s a mystery why some of God’s saints are allowed to suffer and others get an easier life of it. One of the answers is, “God knows His man”. God knew His man. That’s just one answer.

But it won’t be fully answered until we get to the glory, ‘and God unrolls the canvas’, as the little poem says. I know Evelyn knows it very well.

“Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly,

Shall God unroll the canvas and unveil / explain the reason why;

The dark threads are as needful in the weaver’s skillful hand

As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned.”

So without doubt, Martin is in a place of peace and rest and comfort. And he’s in the place where “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes”. It says in Paul’s letter to Timothy, the second letter to Timothy, he says to Timothy, “If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him.” Now he was talking in the context of people suffering the reproach of Christ. And Martin suffered reproach for his belief in Jesus, but he also suffered pain and suffering in his body. And the scars that we heard about in the song are testament to a life of suffering. But whatever reward God has in store, it will be worth it.

I want to end on

5. A NOTE OF TRIUMPH

I said that Martin was waiting and watching for his Lord. And he often used to say to me when I went up to visit him when he was in better days, he would say, “How long do you think it is before the Lord's coming back?” —”How long?” And I had to agree with him that it was very near. It’s very near. Especially given the things that are happening in the world right now and how the whole world is turning against God’s ancient people Israel.

But God has His purposes in Israel. They’re going to go through a time of what’s called “Jacob's Trouble” in what’s called “the Great Tribulation” under the Antichrist, who Martin knew about. But Martin also knew that, and he pointed this out more than once to me, that the accelerating moral landslide which we see in the world around us is another indication of the imminence of the Lord’s return. Because if the emergence of “The Beast”—the Antichrist—the one who’s against God and all that he stands for—if his emergence is imminent, then by the same token—the return of the King of Kings must be very near.

And Jesus said when he was here on earth,

“When these things begin to happen, look up, for your redemption draws near.”

And so any day now, our Lord is going to “descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet sound of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we that are left that are trusting in Christ - we’ll be "caught up” - (as Bob Armstrong said once, in a giant airlift!) - into heaven “to be with the Lord forever”, it says in 1 Thessalonians 4: “forever with the Lord”.

So if we’re going to be with him forever, we’re coming back with him to the Mount of Olives when he returns to this earth at the end of those seven years of terrorism and destruction that’s going to come on this world. So I just want to say to anyone here—to appeal to you, if you haven’t got the assurance of eternal life that Martin had, I just want to invite you to put your trust in his Saviour today.

I want to read the words of John 5 to you, because this is a promise that the Lord Jesus made. John 5:24 says:

“Truly, truly I say to you, he that hears my word and believes him that sent me has eternal life, and comes not into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.”

Now in a few moments we’re going to sing the second hymn on our hymn sheet. But before that I want to just close the meeting, this part of the proceedings in prayer.

Our gracious God and loving Father in heaven, we give thanks for Martin’s life and we thank you for your love toward each one of us in sending the Lord Jesus, your beloved Son, to bear our sins in his own body on the cross, that cruel tree. He has scars in his hands and his feet because He loved us so much. And because of Him we can say today about Martin, ‘Goodbye’ is not ‘Forever’. We will meet again in a better place. And so we look forward to that day with growing anticipation and we give thanks for all your mercy and grace toward us. And now, we give thanks for the refreshment provided by the hotel and we ask your blessing upon our conversation in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

So I think that’s everything. We’ll just be upstanding and sing the last hymn, “Amen, One Lasting Long, Amen.”

Amen, one lasting, long Amen -

Blest anthem of eternal days;

The fulness of the rapturous song

To Christ the Saviour’s endless praise.

Amen, one lasting, long Amen -

Heaven’s blissful cadence, deep and loud,

While every heart before the throne

In holy, solemn awe is bowed.

Amen, Amen, it rolls along,

Re-echoing from the throne again;

Be ours to mingle with the throng

In that eternal, loud Amen.

[Note: this was one of Martin’s favourite hymns. He often gave it out at the end of our weekly Remembrance of the Lord Jesus in the church of God in Buckhaven.]

All the posts tagged with ‘FLIP SIDE ARCHIVE’, were written between November 2020 and 2023. I originally published them elsewhere, but transferred them here, as a more appropriate home for them. My motivation for putting these posts out there, was to try and show anyone whose mind was not completely closed, that many eminently well qualified professionals had serious misgivings about the declaration of a worldwide ‘pandemic’ and even more so, about the safety of the rush to inject the population with the experimental mRNA ‘vaccines’ (so called).

Several posts linked to YouTube videos or articles which were subsequently censored by the sinister, unregulated and unaccountable ‘fact checkers’ employed by the social media companies. I updated some of those links but had to delete some of the original posts where the link to the original information had been ‘disappeared’ by the aforementioned agencies.

I hope my ‘Flip Side’ archive may serve as a useful reminder and a historical documentation of the madness into which our government and others plunged us, from which we have not yet recovered. If, on reflecting on these events and the expert opinion represented in my posts, some have learned to be more wary of what ‘officialdom’ tells them to do, then my actions in highlighting the truth and pointing out the lies we’ve been told will not be in vain. However, for me, the whole sorry saga only reminds us we must always carefully examine and test what those in power would have us believe. James Russell Lowell’s memorable lines are very apt:

“Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne,—

Yet that scaffold sways the future,

and, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow,

keeping watch above his own.”

(The Present Crisis’ – James Russell Lowell 1819 – 1891)

A timely reminder that Israel is central to God's future purposes of Grace, no matter what their enemies say or do.

Barabbas

"Give us Barabbas!" We'd rather have him,

Than a sinless Messiah, lost souls to redeem;

"Give us Barabbas!", that murderous man,

And away with the Sovereign, Omnipotent One.

“Give you Barabbas?” the governor said,

“Give you Barabbas? – shed innocent blood?

You surely don't want this terrorist knave,

When the arm of the Lord is stretched out to save?"

Yes "Give us Barabbas!", we'd rather have bad,

His blood and his death be a curse on our head,

“We will not have this man”, said proud Isra-el,

“Away with your Jesus – we’ll all go to Hell!"

When besieged in Jerus’lem, with their backs to the wall,

Heavens King will respond to their desperate call;

Not "Give us Barabbas!” but “Save Lord, we pray!"

And He'll swoop to their rescue in glorious array.

Then the mercy of God will be seen in great glory,

When Jesus returns to finish earth’s story;

And the hearts of His People will break when they see,

The hands of the Saviour they nailed to a tree.

(Jo Johnson)

Painful words. Painful that is, to those who honestly own up to the truth that the same darkness that was in the hearts of those who rejected and crucified the Messiah, is to be found in their own hearts. ‘All we like sheep have gone astray ... By oppression and judgment he was taken away ... for the transgression of my people was he stricken.' (Isaiah 53:6-8)

I wrote ‘Barabbas’ some years ago and posted the verses on Facebook Notes, which I don't think is an option anymore. It popped up unexpectedly on my timeline the other day when a family friend reposted it. Reading it over again, fairly made me stand back and look at the recent sickening events of 7th October in Israel from a Biblical perspective. First, let me say unequivocally, I believe Israel’s leaders have a moral imperative to do all they can to rescue their citizens from those who glory in such horrifying wickedness. Israel is fighting implacable enemies and has no choice but to defend themselves against those whose avowed intention is to annihilate the state of Israel and murder every Jew they find. All this in a world that shockingly, can find no sympathy for Israel’s just cause and instead of calling out the genocidal intent of the terrorist rulers of Gaza, they level that ludicrous charge against Israel. In doing so they ‘call black white, and good evil’. I am sick to my stomach as I think of the casualties of war - the terrible price which cannot be avoided if Israel is to prevent further unprovoked atrocities against defenceless citizens. Babies heads cut off. Girls raped and murdered. Boys abducted. Festival-goers machine-gunned. Hostages kept underground for months on end, in filthy, degrading, abusive conditions. These are dark days and they're about to get darker. Much darker.

Consider again, the awful choice made nearly 2000 years ago, when the leaders of the Jewish nation asked Pontius Pilate - ( representing Gentile power) - to give them Barabbas instead of Jesus.

When my friend re-posted the poem, I wrote the following comment:

Indeed, ‘the LORD has a controversy with the nations’ (Jer. 25:31) for their treatment of the Righteous One.

He also ‘has a controversy with his people, and he will plead with Israel.’ (Micah 6:2).

I believe we are fast approaching the end times, foretold by the prophet Hosea, long before both Jew and Gentile rejected and crucified the Saviour:

‘I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me earnestly. Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he has torn, and he will heal us; he has smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: on the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live before him.’ (Hosea 5:15 - 6:2)

I see the sobering events unfolding in Israel as a prelude to the next chapter in God's purposes. ‘Righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne.’ (Ps. 97:2) But it will get worse before it gets better, as my brother James has written about so cogently in his book ‘Messiah Promised'‘

The return of Israel's Messiah, and our Saviour, can't come soon enough for this sad war-torn world!

At the end of my comment (see below), I shared a link to ‘MESSIAH PROMISED’, written and published by my brother, James Johnson.

What momentous times we are living through. The recent, unprovoked and savage butchery of innocent, defenceless men, women and children by Hamas, not to mention their further heinous crimes, which includes not only the capture of civilian hostages but also the celebration of these wicked acts by many of the population of Gaza and the wider Muslim world - these evil actions have catapulted the world with unstoppable velocity towards the time of the end foretold in the inerrant Word of God.

Israel and the Jewish diaspora, are fighting for their very existence as never before. Their young men and women are rallying to the defence of the nation, ready to lay down their lives while the youth of ‘the Western world’ go on with their frivolous 'woke' obsessions, oblivious to the fact that a seismic change has just taken place, and will soon affect every one of them, like it or not.

Aside from the imminence of Christ's return to the air for His church, the only thing that gives me hope in the increasingly perilous times in which we live, is the certainty of Bible prophecy. My brother rightly draws attention in his book to the fact that, because so many of the prophetic writings about the Jewish and Christian Messiah have already been fulfilled, we can be supremely confident that God is watching over His word to ensure the completion of His purposes of judgement and of grace, for the future of the world.

Incidentally, some students of Bible prophecy think the scripture I quoted above from the end of Hosea chapter 5 and the beginning of chapter 6, (“After two days will he revive us: on the third day he will raise us up”) refers to the 2000 years between the crucifixion and the start of the millennial reign of Christ.

An old friend, a man in his nineties, who Simeon-like, is ‘looking for the consolation of Israel’ recently shared this thought with me:

Counting back biblical genealogies, it is possible to determine four ‘days’ (i.e., 4000 years) of earth's history prior to the cross. Hosea's two days takes us to six 'days' (6000 years).

If the 2000 years since Christ's death expires around 2033, and marks the start of the third ‘day’ of Hosea ch. 6 (the millennial reign of the Messiah on earth and the seven thousandth year of earth’s history, earth’s ‘sabbath’ rest), then we are less than ten years away from that glorious day.

It follows therefore, that Daniel's 70th ‘week’ of seven years must take place before that date. (My brother discusses this at more length in his book). For the born-again believer on the Lord Jesus Christ, the thrilling conclusion to the above reasoning is, that the ‘rapture’ - the return of Christ to the air for the church which is His body (1 Thessalonians 4:14-17), cannot take place later than 2026. Yes, I know there has been much unwise speculation about this in the past, by various misguided groups! This leads me to present the above thesis suggestively rather than dogmatically; but, if these calculations and my understanding of scripture are correct, then the return of Christ to the air must be imminent.

I quote the following extract from my brother James’ book ‘Messiah Promised’ chapter nine, entitled Messiah King, (written several months before the events of October 7th):

"Considering the violence and chaos prevailing in the Middle East today there is no question that only major change will bring lasting peace. There will be no real peace in the Middle East until the Prince of Peace returns. Isaiah foretells the peace that Jesus Christ will bring to the Holy Land and to the world:

“Of the increase of his government and of peace, there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore.” (Isaiah 9:7).

“From this time forth,” refers to the return of Christ to earth—to establish the rule of God over all creation. An early clue to the coming reign of Christ is given in Genesis when Jacob spoke about the sceptre belonging to the tribe of Judah. A sceptre is associated with kingly rule and before Jacob died, he prophesied:

“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples” (Genesis 49:10).

Putting together the expressions ‘the sceptre’ and ‘until Shiloh come’, conveys the meaning ‘until he comes whose right it is to rule’—and refers to the promised Messiah. This throws light on why David was anointed as king of Israel—for the sceptre was taken from Saul (of the tribe of Benjamin) and given to David (of the tribe of Judah). Old Testament prophecies consistently affirm that the royal line remains with the house of David. Thus Isaiah foresees the promised Messiah upon the throne of David benignly ruling the nations. Isaiah’s prophecy directs our attention to the future reign of Christ which awaits fulfilment. The fact that many detailed Messianic prophecies have already been fulfilled provides the Christian with assurance that all the remaining Messianic prophecies will also be fulfilled in due time. Not least of these is Micah’s prophecy—that Israel’s ruler will come from Bethlehem and from the tribe of Judah:

“one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.” ((Micah 5:2 ).

The first part of Micah’s prophecy was fulfilled when Jesus was born in Bethlehem and the second part awaits fulfilment when the Lord will return as king to the Mount of Olives and rule the world from Jerusalem. Then the Lord’s Prayer, “your kingdom come”, will be wonderfully answered—because the peoples of earth will not learn war any more but instead “shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isaiah 2:3-4)." (James Johnson, ‘Messiah Promised’ Holmes Books, 2023.)

How thankful I am, that nothing takes God by surprise. As He said to the prophet Jeremiah, ‘I watch over my word to perform it.’ (Jer. 1:12) Those who trust in God and in the Saviour He provided, can look beyond the unavoidable carnage and suffering of war, to the day when Jesus of Nazareth, the One whom both Jew and Gentile rejected in favour of Barabbas the terrorist, will return to establish His worldwide kingdom of peace and righteous judgement.

‘they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken’. (Micah 4:4).

How anyone can condemn Israel for defending themselves is beyond me. And how anyone can defend or condone the monstrous and deliberate atrocities inflicted on defenceless men, women and children by the savage and evil cowards of Hamas, is appalling and truly indefensible.

Be assured, the God of Israel is taking note. Those who commit such wickednesses against their fellow men will not go unpunished. Even if they escape the formidable response of the Israeli Defence Forces to the unprovoked massacre and unspeakable horrors of 7th October, they will not escape the judgement of God.

Jesus said: "Be not afraid of them which kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom you shall fear: Fear him, which after he has killed has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, Fear him." (Luke 12:4-5)

"Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account." (Hebrews 4:13)

Every one of us, terrorist or not, will one day stand before our Creator to give account of ourselves to Him. "He is coming to judge the earth. He shall judge the world with righteousness, And the peoples with His truth." (Psalm 96:13)

God "has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.” (Acts 17:31)

He’s right - people in Britain are afraid to stand up to terrorist sympathisers. What he says is true - if a society doesn't have the collective will to deal with trouble on the periphery, it will only embolden the troublemakers to bring their destruction and misery to the centre. What he said reminded me of something one of the tutors said on the PGCE Art teacher training course which I took at Liverpool Polytechnic more than forty years ago. He was answering a question from one of my fellow students, about the problem of vandalism in certain inner city schools - in particular about how to respond when pupils with no sense of respect for their environment repeatedly rip down, deface or destroy artwork displays on the corridor walls. He said ‘You just keep putting the artwork back on the walls, until it becomes an accepted part of the school environment.’ Well, that was a rather more passive approach to dealing with troublemakers than I would have liked, but it was a starting point. At least he was enunciating the fundamental principle that you don’t lie down to people whose behaviour is unacceptable. You address the problem. You don’t allow a minority of lawless individuals to spoil everything for the majority.

I fear, as several concerned observers in recent years have often said, that generally speaking, British society has lost it’s moral compass. Until recently, the laws of the United Kingdom were firmly based on the ten commandments. The majority of citizens accepted and valued those laws and, crucially, expected them to be enforced by the authorities. Increasingly however, we have seen the politicisation of the police towards ‘woke’ agendas, the introduction of laws which blur the boundaries between male and female and indoctrinate and subvert the minds of children with ideas which run contrary to God’s good laws. At the highest levels of authority in this land, there has been a steady drift away from the absolute moral standards of the Bible towards the ever shifting sands of ‘cultural relativity’ - the mad notion that morality is not fixed but malleable according to the prevailing views of society at any given moment.

Those who stand for traditional, Biblical morality are increasingly seen as irrelevant, anachronistic and a hindrance to so-called progress. How relevant are the words of the Psalmist: “If the foundations [of a godly society] are destroyed, What can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3 The Amplified Bible). The only thing law-abiding citizens can do in the face of such chilling hatred and lawlessness, is—on the one hand, to stand up for what’s right, no matter how many may shout us down—and on the other, to cry to God for divine intervention in the midst of this increasing spiritual darkness.

Transcript of Tucker Carlson interview with Dr Aseem Malhotra

TUCKER CARLSON: Welcome to “Tucker Carlson Today.” So in the US, we don’t talk a lot about vaccines. That debate seems to have kind of ended, but the data continue to pour in. And some of them are very troubling, and it’s hard to make sense of them. In this country, there have been a few prominent physicians to weigh in on the topic of what we’re seeing, but not enough to break through the media blockade against anyone who questions received wisdom on the matter of vaccines. But in the UK, something really interesting has happened. One of that country’s top cardiologists, and best known cardiologists, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, went from promoting the vaccine on television to questioning the physical effects on healthy people of the vaccine. And that change came after his own father passed away unexpectedly. So this is an incredibly interesting story that has implications, probably, for every person watching this. And so we are honoured to have that doctor join us now. Dr. Malhotra, thank you very much.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Thank you, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: So can you just give us – root us in your story for just a moment. Where are you from? What have you spent the last 25 years doing, et cetera?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, so I grew up in Manchester, England. And I went to medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland. And then for the last 14 years or so, I’ve been practicing cardiology, and worked as a cardiologist in London. And in that time – over, say, the last 10 years, I’ve done a lot of research on looking into the causes of how heart disease develops, and shifting the paradigm the understanding of heart disease to focus a lot in lifestyle. But in that process, Tucker, I have realized that a lot of the information that doctors receive when it comes to clinical decision making has been corrupted by vested interests – in particular, big pharma, in this particular discussion. But interestingly, at the very beginning of the …

TUCKER CARLSON: So you – I’m sorry to interrupt – first of all, it’s interesting to hear a practicing physician say that. And I should also tell our viewers that you’ve been involved in discussions about public health in Great Britain, not even just about cardiology, but obesity and lifestyle, as you said. So you’ve looked at this carefully. When did you conclude that pharma or these organized interests were affecting medical decisions?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I qualified as a doctor in 2001, so I’ve been a practicing doctor for over 20 years. And what I noticed working in the National Health Service, Tucker, over many years, was more and more people were coming in with chronic diseases, multiple conditions. They weren’t getting better. At the same time, we’re hearing global news from the WHO in 2004, about obesity being a global pandemic. And I tried to then understand what was going on. And for me, certainly, about 10, 12 years ago, I looked at the situation and thought, if we don’t get on top of this, our health care systems are going to collapse. We’re already under a lot of pressure. So I started to investigate what was going on. And for me as a cardiologist, my primary interest was in heart disease. And despite all of modern– so-called modern science, we had never really made big inroads into tackling heart disease, or certainly, eradicating it. So my original research was to look into the heart disease issue. And in that process, I learned very quickly that the original paradigm around high cholesterol and the prescription of statin drugs, which is one of the most lucrative drugs in history of medicine, was based upon very flawed science.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait a second– this is off topic, but I’m interested. I thought statin drugs fixed heart disease.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Well, it’s a really good question. So when one looks at statins, you need to understand what your benefit is. So people are under the impression they’re a miracle drug. That’s the way to prevent heart disease.

TUCKER CARLSON: That was my impression, yeah.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: What I did was looked at the data and broke it down in a way that is easily understandable for people. So for example, Tucker, most people taking statins– and it’s estimated almost a billion people are prescribed statins globally now. It’s a huge industry. Most people who take statins are taking it for prevention of heart attacks.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: But even when you look at that data, which is mostly industry sponsored data, so let’s just– if we accept that as gospel truth, although it’s probably biased– for an individual taking a statin, their benefit in preventing a heart attack, Tucker, is about 1%, one in 100. So if you came to me, and you said, Doc, I’m thinking about taking a statin. I don’t have heart disease, but I think it might prevent one, I will say, Tucker, OK, let’s discuss it. And then I will tell you this information, and then help you make an informed decision. You might look at that and think, 1%, that doesn’t sound that great. I think I’ll try something else, like lifestyle, or diet, or whatever. So that’s what I published on. And over the years–

TUCKER CARLSON: 1%?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it’s only about 1% benefit. If you’ve had a heart attack, it’s about one in 40 in preventing a further heart attack over a five-year period, and one in 83 in prolonging your life. So what I wanted to do is cut through the misinformation, so we have informed discussions with patients.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I hope there are no downsides to statin drugs if people are taking them.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Nothing serious, but things that interfere with the quality of life. And of course, a lot of what we do as doctors is to relieve suffering and people’s quality of life. So maybe– it varies, estimates from 10% to maybe 40% of people at some point taking a statin will have symptoms which are most common, like fatigue, muscle aches, that interferes with the quality of their life. And that’s when you have the discussion with– say, listen, I want you to know that this is a benefit for you potentially, but if you stop the statin, and say, I don’t know, decide to eat real food, and do a bit of exercise, and get better sleep, you’re probably going to be in a much better position in preventing heart attack, because 80% of heart disease, Tucker, is purely lifestyle and environment related.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that is not at all the story I was told at all. That’s interesting. So that’d be a whole different fascinating segment– but so watching that, coming to that conclusion, is that what convinced you that maybe our perceptions are shaped by the drug companies?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, if the most prescribed drug, and thought to be one of the most effective drugs in the history of medicine, was actually not that great – the benefits are marginal – it got me to investigate further into the whole of the medical industrial complex. And then a few things happened at the same time. The British Medical Journal in 2012 launched a campaign called Too Much Medicine. And JAMA Internal Medicine in this country also launched a similar campaign called Less is More. Just to give you a broad picture on this, Tucker – so, for the viewers – it’s estimated that prescribed medications, where your doctor prescribes for you, because of side effects, is the third most common cause of death globally after heart disease and cancer. So when one looks at our health care system …

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes, absolutely. That was actually an analysis done by one of the co-founders of the prestigious Cochrane Collaboration, Peter Gaucher. So once I understood all these things, I then thought– well, hold on a minute. Why are patients not getting informed consent? What’s at the root of the problem? And the way I bring it back, in a very simple, elegant way of describing it, is something called the evidence based medicine triad. So as doctors, as health care practitioners, we want to improve our patient outcomes, yes? That means treat illness, manage risks, and relieve suffering. And to do that, there’s a nice triad that was put together by the father of the evidence based medicine movement, David Sackett, in 1996. And it basically means you use your clinical expertise, your experience, the best available evidence, and last, but not least, Tucker, taking into consideration patient individual preferences and values. That’s informed consent. Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out if there is something wrong with any of those three components, all of them, you’re not going to get the best outcomes.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Evidence based medicine, unfortunately, has become an illusion, because it’s been hijacked by commercial interests. So if one looks at the best available evidence – and I cite somebody who I would probably call a Stephen Hawking-like figure of medicine, John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford. He is the most cited medical scientist in the world. And he basically published a paper not so long ago essentially suggesting that most medical research is at the very least misleading, if not false. And the reason for that is the drug companies, who actually determine a lot of the research that doctors make clinical decisions on, have biased and corrupted the information– which, what that means is you have an exaggerated view of the benefits and the safety of those medications. Now, how do we bring this back to the vaccine? In January 2021, just after the original rollout of the vaccine around the world, I helped out in a vaccine centre. So I’m in my early 40s. I’m not particularly high risk. And I was one of the first to take two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, because I helped out in a vaccine centre and they had the leftovers. And then about a month later, a well-known film director in the UK – she’s known over here as well, called Gurinder Chadha. She’s behind the movies like “Bend it like Beckham,” “Blinded by the Light,” on Bruce Springsteen. She’s a friend of mine. And she contacted me, and she was receiving all these blogs and bits of information, essentially suggesting there was a problem with the vaccine. But most of it, and I still believe this to be true, sounded like complete nonsense – microchips in the vaccine, you know, depopulation agenda, all that kind of thing. And I said, listen – you know, she was overweight and middle aged. And I said, listen, vaccines – and I’ve probably been one of the most strongest advocates of exposing pharmaceutical industry corruption, if you like, over the last 10 years in the UK and maybe even around the world. For me, Tucker, despite that information, vaccines – and this I still believe this to be the case – traditional vaccines are some of the safest pharmacological interventions in the history of medicine. We talked about it earlier. You’ve had vaccines. I’ve had many vaccines.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve had many vaccines. All my children have had many vaccines. And I still believe this to be true. Yeah, I’m not against vaccines.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: So I went on “Good Morning Britain” on February 2021, because she tweeted out that I had convinced her to take the vaccine. And I said, listen, let’s understand where the vaccine hesitancy is coming from. On one side, there are rational reasons – drug industry corruption over the years, people are not trusting of the drug industry. But the irrational reasons are the ones I’ve discussed already. And I said, let’s understand that vaccines are still one of the safest. Tucker, I couldn’t fathom the possibility, although I was a little bit skeptical about the benefit, and we’re going to come onto that in a minute. I couldn’t fathom the possibility that a vaccine could do any damage whatsoever, any significant damage to the body. Then, the situation evolved, and what happened was extraordinary. First and foremost, a friend of mine, I won’t name him – very eminent cardiologist in the UK. I met him in April, a few months later. And he said to me – and he’s in his late 30s, and he said, Aseem, I’ve not had the vaccine. And I said, OK, I said – he said, something troubles me. I said, what is it? He said, I looked at Pfizer’s original trial that led to the approval, the randomized controlled trial that led to the approval of the vaccine, globally. He said in the supplementary appendix of that trial, you can see – and I’ve obviously verified this – there were four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group and one in the placebo. He said it could be spurious, it could be just a coincidence. But he said if this signal is real, we are going to see a real problem going forward in the next couple of years. And I want to wait and see what happens. Then, in July 2021, my father who was a retired general practitioner, honorary vice president of the British Medical Association– he himself also had been quite a strong proponent of the vaccine, you know, the rollout, et cetera. He suffered an unexplained cardiac arrest. I knew my dad very well. He was super fit, you know. He was a sportsman. He was walking 10,000 steps during lockdown. His diet was good. I knew his cardiac status was fine. And then he suffered a cardiac arrest. And I ordered a post-mortem, because it didn’t make sense to me. And the post …

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, so he was – he died from it.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: He did. He did. I mean, I was actually on the phone to him when two of his neighbours who were doctors came round. He had a cardiac arrest in front of them. And I basically went into kind of cardiology mode, because I’ve published research and looked at out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. And if it’s witnessed and you call the ambulance in time, more than 50% of cases, The patient will survive. I said, don’t worry, we’ll sort him out. And because the NHS was under so much strain, the ambulance took 30 minutes. So I was on FaceTime when they put the …

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: I saw the flat line – I just told them to stop because I knew. I mean, this is what I’ve done throughout my career. Yes. So it was obviously very …

TUCKER CARLSON: How old was your father?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: He was 73. And for me personally, Tucker, as well, it was quite devastating because he was the last surviving member of my immediate family. I lost my mom three years earlier. I lost my brother when I was young. So it was like, OK, I’m now essentially alone in terms of my immediate family. But I ordered a post-mortem, and the post-mortem findings did not make sense. What they found, Tucker, was two of his arteries were critically stenosed. They were severely narrowed. And it didn’t make sense, because I had heart scans done on him a few years earlier – routinely – everything was fine. So in my head, I thought he’s had a rapid progression of coronary artery disease. I couldn’t think of the reason why. I’ve been involved in research explaining how heart disease develops, how it progresses. And of course, things like poor diet, lack of exercise, and of course, severe psychological stress – and we’ll come on to that as well – is a big risk factor. I thought, was he really stressed? Was it because he was bereaved, because he was still struggling with the loss of my mum only a year and a half before? And that was the only explanation I could give, but it didn’t sit with me. I didn’t quite understand it. And then a few months later, I get contacted by a journalist from “The Times” newspaper, and he said, listen, Dr. Malhotra, you’re a pioneer in this field around heart disease, et cetera. We’re hearing reports in Scotland of unexplained 25% increase in heart attacks, right? And they don’t know exactly what’s going on. And at that time, Tucker, I hadn’t linked the vaccine, but I said with lockdowns, with everything that happened–and we know people’s diets got worse, even though COVID was a disease that exploited people’s poor diets and obesity, and the psychological stress, I said – I predicted anyway. Even a year before, I said we’re probably going to see a rise in heart attacks, right? Not to this massive degree, but we would probably see it. And I said, it’s probably because of those factors – diets got worse, stress is high.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And she said to me, well, we’re hearing the reports– what do you think about the vaccine, Dr. Malhotra? And I said, listen, as a good scientist, it would be unscientific of me to completely exclude that possibility. But I said it’s unlikely. Two weeks later, a couple of things happened in succession, right? And this is where the story gets very, very – almost melodramatic, if you like. One was a cardiothoracic surgeon called Steven Gundry, in the States, published an abstract in the journal “Circulation,” which is the premiere cardiac, cardiology journal of the world, one of the most premiere journals. And he- found, monitoring hundreds of his patients, that after two doses of the mRNA vaccine – Pfizer or Moderna – there were increased markers of inflammation linked to coronary artery disease, increasing the risk after just 10 weeks of someone’s risk of, say, having a heart attack of 11% in five years suddenly jump to 25% within two months. Now, just to put that in perspective Tucker, if I decided today I was going to smoke 40 cigarettes, I was going to completely stop exercising and just gorge on junk food, I couldn’t increase my risk even close to that in that …

TUCKER CARLSON: Seriously?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Absolutely. So I was like, OK, one bit of data – OK, is it replicated? Is it coincidence, whatever – as a scientist, you need to look at other signals. Then I got contacted by a cardiologist in a very prestigious British institution. I won’t name the institution to protect him. I know this person very well. He has very high integrity. I’ve worked with him for many, many years. And he said, Aseem, there’s something I’ve got to tell you, and I’m very upset about it. I said, what is it? He says – and this institution, the cardiology research had found by accident, looking at coronary imaging – so imaging of the heart, they found in vaccinated versus unvaccinated huge markers of coronary inflammation, a signal from the mRNA vaccines. They then had a meeting, and they sat around. And they said, listen – the lead researcher said, we’re not going to publish these findings because it may affect our funding from the pharmaceutical industry.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, come on.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: So this person was very upset. I then now had my dad’s situation. I had this heart …

TUCKER CARLSON: Someone said that out loud?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: In the closed meeting, they said it, yeah. In the closed meeting of those researchers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did anyone stop and say, I’m sorry, that’s immoral?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: I think people were quite upset. And lot of them were juniors – right, junior doctors and junior researchers. And of course, they don’t want to call out their boss. You can understand the situation. It’s not easy, Tucker. Of course, they should have done, absolutely. So then I went on – thought, OK. there’s a signal here. I went on GB News, so this was in October, November of 2021. And I just said, listen, we’ve got these signals. We know there’s an increase in heart attacks. And there’s more than enough evidence to call for an investigation into this. And that’s all I said. That interview went viral. In the meantime, behind the scenes, a couple of medical establishment bodies contacted me because of a number of anonymous complaints from doctors that I was bringing the medical profession into disrepute by spreading so-called anti-vax disinformation, despite this evidence being very clear. So I thought, OK …

TUCKER CARLSON: Despite the fact that you had worked in a COVID vax clinic.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. It doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, I’m also on Good Morning Britain telling people the vaccine is essentially safe, not to worry about it. So it doesn’t make sense. So I thought, OK, I dealt with that for weeks. And I wrote a kind of response. I had support from other people. And it was fine. They left me alone, and left me with a warning. So I then said, OK, what can I do here? This is around the time in the UK they also announced they were going to bring a mandate for National Health Service staff. And I knew that there was something fishy going on, because one, we’ve got a vaccine that has clearly potential harms of significance. We know that the virus had mutated by then and become milder. And certainly, Omicron, I’ll come on to in a minute, is probably no worse than a bad flu or a bad cold. So I thought, what can I do here, because there’s a big problem – and it needs to be – in my view, I thought it needs to be suspended and we need an inquiry. But it’s a very difficult mountain to move. Everybody have been – people have been indoctrinated, right? Doctors think this is completely safe and effective. So I decided that I was going to spend several months critically appraising the data and try and publish it in a medical journal. And in that time, Tucker – and what’s interesting in my role as an activist is I think there is something very cathartic and powerful about speaking the truth. When I went on GB News, two Pfizer whistleblowers contacted me and told me what was going on. I then spoke to three investigative medical journalists. And I then reached out to very eminent scientists in Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard who are not – when I say eminent, I mean eminent of integrity, people who are not directly linked to the drug industry, who could give me more of a kind of sanguine look at the data so I could verify what I was going to publish. I spent several months, went through external peer review, and then it was published a couple of months ago in a journal called “Journal of Insulin Resistance.” I chose that journal because, one, they don’t take money from industry, and we’ll come on to that in a minute– we’ll come on to that shortly, about the problems of pharma, in terms of pharma’s influence over medical decision making, and because they also allowed me to write 10,000 words. I wanted to walk people through the situation – what does the data on the vaccine tell us in absolute terms? So what’s your absolute benefit, what are the harms, right? I come onto that. And then how did we get it so wrong? Why did we get it so wrong? And what are the solutions moving forward? So when we – I then analyzed the information to look at, OK, what is the true benefit of the vaccine, Tucker, right, in preventing, say, COVID death from real world data in the UK, which you can extrapolate around the world.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And what I found was this. During the Delta wave, which was last year, more lethal than what we’ve got now, you– and I broke it down by age group, vaccinated versus unvaccinated, you had to vaccinate 230 people over the age of 80 to prevent one COVID death.

TUCKER CARLSON: Over the age of 80?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Over the age of 80. So this is the highest risk people– 523 between 70 and 80. And then it becomes into the thousands as you get younger. Now, this is during the Delta wave, which was more lethal. And by the way, Tucker, there is a caveat here. This is likely still best case scenario, because if you’re comparing – this is real world data. There’s something called healthy user bias. Many people who took the vaccine are healthier than people who are vaccine hesitant. A chap called Carl Heneghan – Professor Carl Heneghan, who is the director of the Center of Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford, he told me that he had a couple of his patients in their 80s who had terminal cancer. They chose not to have the vaccine. They end up dying from COVID. They were already high risk, anyway, if that makes sense, right? So you can’t compare a healthy 80-year-old with an unhealthy – or someone who’s vulnerable, another 80-year-old, right? But this is the real world data I was looking at. So again, likely best case scenario. What about Omicron? We looked at data from earlier this year during the wave of Omicron in the UK, from January onwards, for three months. Wait for this. If you’re over 80, for Omicron, you have to vaccinate 7,300 people to prevent one COVID death. And then it just goes into – it becomes ridiculous. The younger you get, the more people you have to vaccinate. So the question then is, what are the harms, and on what quality of evidence? On the best quality evidence, something called randomized controlled trial data, a number of scientists – Robert Kaplan from Stanford, Peter Doshi, the associate editor of The BMJ, Joseph Fraiman – lead author, I’ve spoken to – works in New York, and he’s involved in research in one of the ERs there. They were able to get access to Pfizer and Moderna’s original trials and new data. So let’s just put this in perspective. These are the trials that led to the approval of the vaccines in the first place, based upon this data that was done by Pfizer and Moderna. They found that the risk of having a serious adverse event from the original trials – disability, life changing event, hospitalization, was higher than being hospitalized with COVID – so serious adverse event from the vaccine, there was a higher risk in the original trials of it causing a problem than it was– than you were to be harmed by COVID.

TUCKER CARLSON: So in other words, in layman’s terms, it’s more dangerous to take the vaccine than not.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: For most people, that’s what we’ve concluded. That’s what I’ve concluded. That’s how it appears. And that rate, Tucker, is at least one in 800, because this is from Pfizer Moderna’s own trials– one serious adverse event per 800 people.

TUCKER CARLSON: So can I just ask a very bitter question? We’ve had those trial data since the beginning, correct?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: We have.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Yes. So why – we’re moving on two years now.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So why am I just hearing this for the first time?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Because it’s not getting publicized. So they publish this data in the peer reviewed journal “Vaccine.” So this is good quality – this is the highest quality level of data you can ever have. And then you back it up with VAERS in this country, Yellow Card System in UK. I’ve looked at that. This is unprecedented, right? And just historically, Tucker, just to put things in perspective, in 1976, the swine flu vaccine was suspended because it was found to cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological condition, in 1 in 100,000 people. The rotavirus vaccine in 1999 was suspended because it caused a form of bowel obstruction in kids in one in 10,000. We’ve got a serious adverse event rate of at least one in 800, and now since that’s evolved, when I looked at this research in the UK, we’ve had a massive increase in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. Israel were able to find that there was a link between the mRNA vaccines and a 25% increase in cardiac arrest and heart attacks in people aged between 16 and 40, that was associated with the vaccine but not with COVID. So it’s a no brainer. So I came out and I published these findings. And I said, for me, it needs to be suspended pending an inquiry. Nobody should be taking, in my view, this vaccine. The question is, how did this all happen? And the only way to really explain it is to take a step back. I’m a root cause guy, right? So you talk about the evidence based medicine triad, you look at best available evidence. You go back, right? So what are clear hard facts to try and understand this? One is drug companies have a fiduciary legal obligation to produce profit for their shareholders. They do not have a legal obligation to give you the best treatment, right? But the real scandals are these– regulators fail to prevent misconduct by industry.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And that doctors, academic institutions, and medical journals collude with industry for financial gain. Let’s talk about the regulators. You may come back to me and say …

TUCKER CARLSON: To the detriment of public health.

I mean, that’s the shocking part. It’s not just – you know, if you and I are working our scam or whatever, and we’re getting rich but we’re not killing people, you know, OK. But people are dying. Like, what?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: I know. So how do we explain it? Well, first of all, as you may know, the FDA gets 65% of their funding from pharma, huge conflict of interest. In the UK, our regulator, the MHRA, gets 86% of their funding from pharma. So that’s a big problem. And what normally happens is these trials, where – so Pfizer designed the trial, they did their own analysis. They hold on to what we call the raw data, which is often tens of thousands of pages, on information on every patient involved in the trial, what was happening to them. Did they really check side effects properly, et cetera? They then give summary results to the regulator, who then approves it, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: But may I just ask a dumb question? Why wouldn’t the regulator, since he’s making a decision for a country of 340 million people, demand all the data?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: So they get the data, but they probably don’t spend time analyzing it properly. And I think also the problem is, as well, is financial conflicts of interest, Tucker. So we know, for example, in the FDA between 2006 and 2009, nine of the 10 FDA commissioners went on when they left the FDA to get very lucrative jobs with the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a revolving door. I think this is a combination of financial conflicts of interest – and to be honest, Tucker, downright incompetence as well, right? Because this data is very clear. They should have suspended this – to be perfectly honest with you, with what I’ve seen now, I think there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that Pfizer probably knew, but they don’t really care, because they’re a profit making machine, if you like. But it probably should never have been rolled out in the first place. So how do we …

TUCKER CARLSON: So why isn’t the veterinarian who runs Pfizer, Albert Bourla, why hasn’t he been punished for this? I don’t understand.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: So, OK, so let’s look at the history of punishments for pharma, and what they’ve done over the years. So we know that between 2009 and 2014, most of the top 10 drug companies, including Pfizer, paid fines totaling about $14 billion, most of it in the US, for fraud, right, illegal marketing of drugs, hiding data and harms. One of the most egregious examples was the Vioxx scandal. This was Merck, a drug that was marketed as an anti-inflammatory in 1999, supposedly better than ibuprofen in terms of causing less stomach problems, right? And what they found – ultimately, it was pulled, and – because it was causing harm. It doubled the risk of heart attacks. It’s estimated it caused, probably, the deaths of 60,000 Americans, which is equivalent, I understand, to the amount of Americans that died in Vietnam. I mean, it’s not a small number.

TUCKER CARLSON: 59,000 died in Vietnam, so it’s more than were killed over 11 years of the Vietnam War.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Just with one drug that – now, this is the thing. What’s very interesting is they were fined. Merck were fined in 2011, following an investigation, $950 million. But when one looks at the amount of money they made from the marketing of the drug and all of what they spent, they probably made $1 billion in profit, despite this drug – the fact that this drug caused heart attacks, and that Merck scientists knew. So when the investigation occurred, looking at all the litigation behind the drug, the chief scientist of Merck in an internal email, in 2000, in March 2000, essentially said, it’s unfortunate about the cardiovascular effects of this drug, but we will do well and the drug will do well. Now, how do you explain that behavior, Tucker? I am going to say something which may sound very controversial, but is evidence based. So when one looks at the entity, the legal entity that is the corporation, the eminent forensic psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, who was behind the original international definition of psychopath, in a book and a documentary by law professor Joel Bakan, he says that these corporations, like pharma, for example, they often in the way that they conduct their business behave like a psychopathic entity, like psychopaths. So what does that mean – callous disconcern for the safety of others, conning others for profit, deceitfulness, you know, they fulfill that criteria. So with everything I know, taking a step back, trying to understand – hold on a minute, why (certainly, the US and many other countries around the world) – do they mandate, are they pushing the vaccine on kids? I think this is the downstream effect – my hypothesis is this – of a psychopathic entity that has had increasing, unchecked, visible and invisible power over our lives, over the last three decades.

TUCKER CARLSON: I believe that.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And I think the only way to address this problem is to tackle it at the root, which is – for example, my solutions are these, some very straightforward, simple ones. Although drug industry can be involved in developing drugs, they shouldn’t be allowed to then test them and hold onto the raw data. The regulators shouldn’t be funded by industry.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And politicians should not be taking money for campaign donations from big pharma. One of the primary purposes of government, let’s just go back to the basics, is to protect their citizens from external aggressors, but also to protect their citizens from disease and to serve the interests of the people. And they are not doing that if they are taking money from an entity.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, if the FDA gets the majority of its budget from the drug companies, that’s just insane. The FDA is the regulatory body that oversees the drug companies. How can that be?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: So one of the reasons this problem persists is because people don’t really understand these system failures. I, a few months ago, during a meeting organized by the British Medical Association, gave a talk. And this was before I published my findings. And the chairman of the British Medical Association was there. He was shocked and gobsmacked when I told him that the MHRA in our country gets 86% of its funding from pharma. He didn’t know that. So a lot of the people who are making decisions and even pushing – who have been pushing the vaccine – don’t understand the system failures that exist already. And one way of describing it is doctors, the general public, and patients don’t know what’s happening, and they don’t even know that they don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: And yet there is enough noise on the periphery about the vaccine that any adult with curiosity has to have asked himself at least once, what is that? Are these people crazy? Like, what are they talking about? The vaccine has problems. Physicians are paid to be curious. Science is curiosity, of course. And I have to say, with respect to you as a doctor, but I am so distressed by the willingness of smart, well-educated people in the medical profession to go along with this in the face of mounting evidence that they’re wrong. Like, what is that?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: So I think – yeah, it’s a great question. So how do we combat this? There are two psychological phenomenons I think are worth mentioning. One is fear – so imagine the beginning of the pandemic. People were very scared, understandably. It was – let’s not deny that the original strain, especially for the elderly and vulnerable people, it was devastating.

TUCKER CARLSON: And the lack of knowledge about it. You didn’t know. It just happened.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: But fear clouds critical thinking. That’s correct. The second phenomenon combating this problem now is something called willful blindness, so it’s human beings turning a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, to avoid conflict, reduce anxiety, and to protect prestige. How do we combat that? It has to be with cold, hard facts. And it has to be done, I would say, in a compassionate but courageous way. I have sat with journalists, some of whom who were very strong proponents of even suggesting maybe we should pin down unvaccinated and inject them with the vaccine. And in an hour of a conversation, talking, walking them through it– and also, because I had the vaccine, I think that people are maybe more likely to listen to me. That’s the way we have to do it. And we have to make …

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re obviously, I would say, an acute analyst of systems. Like, you think systems to some extent determine outcomes. I think you’re absolutely right, and you’re good at analyzing it. We seem to have a system where prestige, something that every person wants – you just mentioned it as a motivator of human behaviour -is tied to agreeing with the group. In science, that’s death. That’s the end of science.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: We have to attach prestige to free inquiry. How did that happen?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it’s a really good point, actually. I’m glad you mentioned that, Tucker, because I thought about – so Anthony Fauci, throughout the pandemic, especially in relation to the vaccine, kept using this term “trust the science.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Now that’s one of the most unscientific statements I’ve ever heard.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. I kept thinking that.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Because medicine, first of all, is not an exact science It’s an applied science, not like physics or chemistry.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And the evidence changes. We’re taught, for example, that 50% of what you learn in medical school will turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation. The trouble is nobody can tell you which half, so you have to learn to learn on your own. So that didn’t make any sense. So maybe Anthony Fauci doesn’t – from my perspective, what I’ve seen – doesn’t seem to have a basic understanding of evidence based medicine, from what I’ve seen that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Seems that way to me too.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: But in reality, and I don’t mean that he was deliberately doing this – but in reality, from what we’ve discussed already, “trust the science” in effect was saying trust the psychopath.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. I mean, it’s a kind of witchcraft – “trust the science” – what does that even mean? But that suggests a systemic failure. So if that guy’s at the head of the system that we’ve assembled to combat COVID, and you don’t have thousands of clinical physicians saying, wait – no, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong, and we did not have thousands saying that. We didn’t have dozens saying that. That’s a huge problem. Is this a med school problem?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: No, it’s – I think a little bit is a med school problem. I think one of the issues – I mean, I campaigned with the British Medical Journal, the Medical Colleges in the UK in 2015, when I realized that we had an overmedicated population, and the medical profession themselves needed to do something about it. And I wrote a paper, co-authored it with some of the top doctors in the UK, in the BMJ, and it was basically the Medical Royal Colleges’ campaign to wind back the harms of too much medicine. And part of that recommendation, Tucker, was actually helping through medical school to teach – for doctors to learn how to critically appraise data, but also even the stuff I told you about statins. Most doctors don’t have conversations with patients that way about the 1%. But actually, it’s already there, established in the literature, that when you practice ethical, evidence based medicine, you must use transparent communication of risks and benefit …

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: For informed consent, because if you don’t do that, you’re not going to get the best outcomes for patients. And of course, for me, I’m a very strong proponent of individual preferences and values.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: One patient might come to me and say, listen, I’d like to take a pill on that data. And the other person may say something different. And you support them in that decision making process. We’ve lost that completely throughout the pandemic. And it’s time to reform the system.

TUCKER CARLSON: And ethical – I mean, look, ethical medicine, from an outsider’s perspective, requires informed consent. It can’t – you can’t have ethical medicine without that, correct?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: But that whole concept seemed to evaporate.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Completely. Completely.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what the hell?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: So we need to – so the first – so what we need to do is make people aware of the problem, right, and spell it out to them. And hopefully, I think the American population, when they hear this – people are going to get upset and angry. But I think they need to just ask those questions of their doctors. And doctors also need to understand this as well. You know, it’s our job to keep up to date with the evidence. But when the evidence changes, to maintain trust, we must change with that evidence. It’s really important. I had to do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: To maintain trust – so I wonder. I always wonder this. I had a doctor to my house for a cocktail party on Friday night. I didn’t say this, but I kept thinking, do you understand the degree to which confidence in doctors has been undermined by the last two years? Do you think doctors understand that? Among people like me, who are very pro doctor – just always respected.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: But still, doctors are still one of the most respected professions.

TUCKER CARLSON: For sure. And everyone wants to respect doctors. I have loved the doctors who treated me. But watching this over the past two years, I mean, it’s making people very skeptical.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: But since the 80s, certainly in the US – Tucker, I’ve looked at this information, this data. Trust in doctors has declined as the system has become more commercialized and marketized. And one of the reasons for that is when you bring commercial interests – commercial interests shouldn’t even be part of the doctor-patient conversation, right, because often doctors are ordering tests and treatments because they’re getting reimbursed financially. And that completely is at odds with ethical, evidence based medicine.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: There’s an asymmetry of information. The doctor knows a lot more than the patient, the patient trusts the doctor, but the doctor either consciously or unconsciously is engaging in medical practice that is financially rewarding them rather than putting the patient interests first. In the UK, one of the reasons I’m a very strong proponent of the National Health Service is we know that quality of care, if it’s done properly and ethically, I never had to think about a financial incentive when I was managing a patient. I said, what is the best course of action for this patient? I know in the US, it’s different. And it’s very interesting. The US spends $3.5 trillion dollars, you know, 18% of its GDP on health care, but has one of the worst health outcomes in the Western world, in terms of their population, in the world. And one of the reasons for that is there’s a very clear – there’s a great graph. In states throughout the United States where there is more healthcare spending, there’s an inverse – it’s inversely proportional to quality of care and patient outcomes. So what I’m saying is, and I’m going to writing about this soon …

TUCKER CARLSON: Why is that?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: You can improve quality by reducing cost, just by informed consent. And the reason for that is when you look at data and information where doctors and patients engage in true informed consent, where the information that’s given to them in the way I described, for example, with statins, most people, most patients decide to go conservative. They’ll have less surgery and they’ll take less drugs. And when you look at the outcomes, they’re no worse. If anything, they’re better. And the patients are more empowered.

TUCKER CARLSON: The drug thing – one of the reasons I was not surprised by the medical community’s response to the vax is that it was consistent with what I have seen over the past 20 years, which is a big change, where doctors will prescribe any drug – well, in the US – for basically – there’s a lot of drug prescribing going on in this country. It’s very obvious. The data illustrate how widespread it is. What is that?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, I think it’s – I call it a pandemic of misinformed doctors, and misinformed and unwittingly harmed patients. So the clinical decision making that doctors are using to prescribe is essentially being influenced in a negative way by a number of factors. So we’ve talked about them, but I’ll just go through them again– biased funding of research, research that’s funded because it’s likely to be profitable, not beneficial for patients, bias reporting in medical journals, bias reporting in the media, biased patient pamphlets. Defensive medicine, commercial conflicts of interest, and last but not least, an inability of doctors to understand and communicate health statistics. So it may – it’s not rocket science, breaking down information in a way that patients can understand. But what happens is doctors make decisions in a very black and white fashion. They read a medical journal. They look at the conclusions, this drug’s beneficial. OK, take this pill. Take this statin pill, it’s going to save your life. Actually, the reality is it’s probably most likely not going to save your life, but you have to tell patients that it’s a 1% benefit, right? And that doesn’t happen. So we need to completely transform the way we practice medicine. And again, Tucker, we haven’t mentioned it yet, but the other side of it is all the lifestyle diseases that we haven’t dealt with, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: You look at obesity– even with COVID, 90% of the deaths globally happened in countries where more than half the population were overweight or obese. We see it in the UK. We had 175,000 deaths. Only 10% of those deaths were purely because of COVID. People had all these other chronic conditions.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is that why Africa dodged the death rates?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s very interesting. Yeah, it may well be– may be a big factor. So if we get people’s lifestyles better, Tucker, we would never have – in fact, if we’d sorted it out years ago when we knew there was a big problem. And a lot of this is about food industry and food addiction, and engineering foods are going to be hyper palatable, and all the marketing that goes with it – one of the ways I look at, for example, in a very simple terms, a good kind of low hanging fruit, I tell my patients avoid ultra processed foods, right? Half of the calories in the British diet, and more than half of the calories in the US diet, come from ultra processed foods – what does that mean? Industrial produced products, packaged foods – very simple definition, if it has five or more ingredients, if you can read five or more ingredients on the packet, it’s ultra processed, don’t eat it. What’s happened is these combination of ingredients – the sugars, the refined carbs, some of these unhealthy oils, they’re combined together to be made hyper palatable, probably addictive to some degree.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, of course they are.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And addictions are opposite of free will.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course they are, yes.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And then it drives over consumption. So how – where can we learn from history about how we tackle that? America, the United States, was one of the pioneers in the world of tobacco control, right? I remember coming over to visit my cousins in California in the ’80s, and we – you know, you had public smoking bans before we had them in the UK, right? Many years later, we had – and when you look from a cardiologist perspective, many people may not be aware of this, 50% of the decline in death rates from heart disease since the ’70s and ’80s happened purely because of reduction in consumption of cigarettes. But how did that happen? From regulations introduced to protect their citizens – right, it wasn’t – I’m not for banning things, because that doesn’t work right. You know what happened with Prohibition and alcohol in America.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it did work. It dropped cirrhosis rates dramatically.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Oh, really, OK; well …

TUCKER CARLSON: It did, dramatically, and drunk driving. But whatever, it’s a trade off.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: But basically, we call it the three A’s in public health – you address the acceptability, the affordability, and the availability of these unhealthy products, essentially, right? So it was taxation of cigarettes had the biggest impact in reducing– so we raise the price. Public smoking bans, for example, banning of tobacco advertising – doesn’t happen now. If we apply the same principles to ultra processed foods, Tucker, I promise you we would see – because dietary changes have a very rapid effect on people’s health markers. I manage patients like this all the time. People reverse their heart disease risk factors within just a few weeks of literally changing their diet, eating real food, food that they can enjoy, but cutting out the sugars and the ultra processed stuff. We would see, on a population level, the obesity rates decline within a few years.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that, I guess, is – I have so many questions for you and so little time left. But let me just ask one. Since we knew from early in the COVID – whatever we’re calling it, pandemic – that obesity was correlated with bad outcomes, the fatter you were, the more likely you were to die, you would think that public health authorities would start talking about obesity, which is, of course, a pre-existing problem here. But there’s no mention of that. They closed the gyms. They put gym owners in jail who tried to open their gyms, on the basis of no evidence – what were we watching? Now, you said at he outset you had a friend, a filmmaker, who suggested this was part of a population control effort, which seems crazy to me. I don’t believe that. On the other hand, how do you explain that? If public health authorities are encouraging people to do things that will get them killed, like, what is going on?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s called the corporate capture of public health, Tucker. One of the most influential people in the pandemic, and I don’t think in a good way, is Bill Gates.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and they – Bill Gates influences many governments around the world. He funds media outlets. He funds the WHO through his foundation. He has a lot of influence on them. They are heavily invested stocks in McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and the pharmaceutical industry.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes, absolutely. This is in my paper that I published recently. I talk about that. So a lot of people who are controlling the decision making have huge conflicts of interest, and they didn’t – you’re absolutely right. I was very prominent in the UK. I highlighted on Good Morning Britain in 2020 that Boris Johnson, our prime minister, who you may remember, got admitted to hospital with COVID …

TUCKER CARLSON: Very well.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: probably got admitted to hospital because of his weight. Then Matt Hancock, the Secretary of Health, asked me to advise him what needs to be done. But I was a lone voice. I hammered it as much as I could, trying to get it in mainstream media. But it was like one or two days’ news versus a barrage of stay at home, lockdowns, protect the NHS, and save lives. They should have said stay at home, eat real food, and save lives – because actually, we probably would have saved many more people very quickly if we had had consistent public health messaging on a daily basis of avoiding these sorts of foods that were associated with poor COVID outcomes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did Johnson ever come around on the vaccine -very smart person, Boris Johnson, but he became, from my perspective, a kind of mindless advocate for mandatory jabs. Did he change his view, do you think?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, I don’t know Boris directly, what he thinks. I have a lot of interaction with members of Parliament myself, both from sides on the left and the right. I was in the British Parliament a month ago, actually presenting data to a number of Conservative Party MPs who were gobsmacked when I presented the data. They are now advocates, saying there’s a problem. One of them even went, later on – he was David Cameron’s former speechwriter when he was prime minister. He’s called Danny Kruger. And he said – and he’s a very, I found him to be a very measured person. And he got up in a debate in Westminster and said, I’m ashamed that I supported mandating the vaccine. The information has changed. There is a problem, right? So I think, to answer your question – I actually, I think – Tucker, I believe in the goodness of human beings. I think most people want to do the right thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: People want the truth and they hate to see injustice. And what we’ve seen through the pandemic is that people have lost access to the truth, and therefore, they can’t see the injustice that would then change the system for the better. And that’s what – through this platform, for example. I know you have a huge reach. And I want every American citizen to just to stop and think about how things have played out, and do they really think that governments are doing the best for their population? Because it’s very obvious that they’re not doing that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. And unfortunately, I’m sure the UK is different, but in this country it became a partisan question almost immediately. And one side was on one side, the other was on the other side. And when that happens, at least in the United States, it’s impossible to have a conversation. I don’t believe this is inherently political. I’ve never understood why it became political. Do you have any idea why?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, it’s strange. I mean, I was in the States. I come to the States quite a lot. I have friends all over the United States. i have relatives in California and Indiana, doctors. And I remember when I started mentioning, before I published – I said, listen, I think there’s a problem with the vaccine. They said, Aseem, you can’t say that. They’re going to say you’re right wing, or you’re a Republican, or you’re a Trump supporter. I said, hold on a minute.

TUCKER CARLSON: We got the vaccine from Trump. I mean, it didn’t make sense. I said, politicizing medical discussion is an exercise in intellectual bankruptcy, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you. I couldn’t agree more. I could not agree – and just for the record, whatever you think of Donald Trump, he is still defending the vaccine. So like, I don’t see how this works. And I don’t – it’s so not political inherently, the fact it was made political instantly suggests there were other agendas at work that I don’t understand.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, and I think to be honest, I think that if the data is presented to these people, if they see what’s happened, and they understand the roots of the problem and how they were deceived, then they won’t be able to unthink it. I think President Trump, if he knew the information that I know, he would come out and say, listen, we did what we thought was right at the time. The information has changed. We need to stop. There’s a problem here. And we need to reform the system so that these medical institutions and the government are actually working for the people, not against them.

TUCKER CARLSON: So we had – “Amen!” – we had a couple of people in this country with impressive resumes, who were widely respected, who piped up early and suggested that what you have just proven to be true might be true. And in a pretty measured – Dr. Peter McCullough was one of them, Bobby Kennedy was another. I don’t know what McCullough thinks politically. Kennedy is a Democrat, of course, obviously. And they – basically, their lives were destroyed. I mean, for real, as you know. I mean, they paid a cost that was just – would have been unimaginable two years ago, really shocking what happened to them. What happened to you when you said this in the UK?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: It’s interesting. I had a number of cardiologists from different London teaching hospitals relaying information to me saying, well done.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Two cardiology departments have information I’ve got from people there said that they said that we’re not going to have any more boosters or vaccines. It made sense to them. So I got all this behind the scenes congratulations. But they were afraid to speak out. So for me, that just confirms the situation. It’s not easy, Tucker. Let’s put it this way. This is, you know, I follow and I like a lot of the work that Jordan – I know you’ve interviewed Jordan Peterson.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: And I’ve kind of done this throughout my career. It’s – for me, it’s about doing the right things about scientific integrity. It’s about putting my patients first. But that involves not being afraid to speak the truth. But when you speak the truth, you have to let go of the outcome, because even if it’s going to give you a problem in the short term, a lot of people are afraid – by letting the issue sort of grow, the elephant get bigger and bigger and bigger, it’s only going to be a much bigger problem further down the line unless you speak the truth. So for me, I knew that I was going to get push back. And I think that in public health advocacy, as soon as your work threatens an industry or an ideological cabal, you’re going to be attacked, sometimes relentlessly and viciously. And I’ve had that. I was one of the first people in the UK, certainly, to highlight the harms of sugar, right? And I remember being called a quack, and I had all sorts stuff behind the scenes …

TUCKER CARLSON: You were called a quack?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, calls for retraction of a paper I wrote in the BMJ about statins being overprescribed. So I’ve been through all of this. So you have to grow thick skin. And I’ve been smeared. And you can go on the internet, and you’ll find those sorts of things. But for me, it’s about doing the right thing. And it’s not easy, but someone has to do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: When you tell the truth, you have to let go of the outcome.

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yes.

TUCKER: I think that’s – so I want to end by – I was going to bring this up earlier, but then I thought you’re such a rational thinker. I wanted you to make the whole case. But you did make an emotional appeal which I felt was very affecting, and you put this on Twitter. And I want to put it on the screen for our viewers, and it’s about your dad. And it says – we’re going to have it right there.

“Good bye, Papa. I promise you with all my heart I will ensure that your premature passing will not be in vain, and that we achieve justice for those who have suffered unnecessarily from an mRNA jab that should likely never have been approved, and certainly not without informed consent, period.”

And you’ve got three very sad pictures of your father’s service. Do you think about your dad as you do this?

ASEEM MALHOTRA: Yeah, I mean, I learnt a lot from my dad. He was a very moral person. He was a very compassionate human, so was my mom. So I think like all of us, we are shaped by our parents.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. And I feel lucky. Although they went prematurely, both of them, I learnt a lot from them. And they gave me the strength to carry on and continue to do what was – something almost drilled into me as a kid, is that your primary service is to the community. You put the community first. And of course, as a doctor, that’s why most of us go into medicine, because we want to actually help our patients and relieve suffering. So they gave me – both gave me a lot of strength. And yeah, I do miss him, but I learnt a lot from him. And I will carry his wisdom forward.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amen. I appreciate your spending all this time with us.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

In the search for the truth about the cause of so many adverse reactions from the mRNA “vaccines” (so-called), Italian microbiologist Dr. Stefano Scoglio (BSc PhD), may well have identified something that many have overlooked. His postulation that rather than toxicity being caused by the laboratory produced spike protein, the real damage is being done by the messenger RNA and the synthetic lipid nanoparticles, “where the surface has been coated with polyethylene glycol (PEG)”. In the context of injecting these agents into the human body, he calls them “the most toxic material existing today on earth.” Dr. Scoglio was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2018. He is one of the co-authors of the book “Virus Mania”, published in 2021. The transcript (below) of his interview with German journalist Torsten Engelbrecht is well worth reading. (The link to the video interview is given below the transcript):

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

(reproduced here by kind permission of off-Guardian.org)

THAT mRNA “VACCINES” CAUSE CELLS TO PRODUCE SPIKE PROTEINS IS A FAIRY TALE

Torsten Engelbrecht: Everybody seems to agree that the mRNA injections work by teaching our cells to make spike proteins. The only dispute is whether these spike proteins produced are harmless or harmful. But in your opinion, it is not the spike proteins that do these health damages. In fact, you say that the idea that spike proteins are produced is a kind of a chimera. What evidence is there to support your thesis?

Stefano Scoglio: This is scientifically evident already from the fact that it’s impossible for mRNA to enter the cell and produce anything. Anybody who talks about spike proteins and embraces the story diffused by the pharmaceutical companies just accepts that as given. But nobody is reading the damned scientific literature.

In my book Apandemia: Dalla Falsa Scienza alla più Grande Truffa della Storia (“No Pandemic: From False Science to the Greatest Scam in History”, cover see below), I report all the scientific literature up to 2021. That is at the same time that the Corona “vaccines” were released.

TE: Why, then, is it impossible for mRNA to enter the cell and cause it to produce spike proteins?

SS: The first thing the researchers in the field state is that the living cell is a “formidable barrier”, very difficult if not impossible to penetrate. And then they list 5 factors that prevent the mRNA to enter cells, getting into the ribosomes where the spike protein is supposed to be produced:

First: As soon as the genic material is injected, it is attacked by specific enzymes called extra-cellular ribonucleases, which degrade any foreign genetic material. Pharmaceutical companies claim that the lipid nanoparticles are supposed to protect the mRNA from the enzymatic attack: But nobody knows how much protection is offered. As the Pfizer “vaccine” injects 30 micrograms of mRNA, let’s say that about half, 15 micrograms, survive.

Second: At this point, the mRNA/lipids blend has to enter the cell, supposedly through endocytosis, i.e. the cell is forming an external pouch that brings in the material. But, the researchers state, often instead of endocytosis the cell produces exocytosis, that is the pouch is used to keep the foreign material outside: Let’s say that half enters and so we now have 7.5 micrograms inside the cell.

Third: At this point enters the endosomes/lysosome system: all scientists in the field know that this enzymatic endocellular system attacks, degrades and eliminate at least 98 percent of any foreign material entering the cells. We are now down to 0.15 micrograms, that 150 nanograms, an infinitesimal quantity.

Fourth: If this were the end, you could at least claim that a very minuscule dose would enter the ribosomes. But alas, the ribonuclease enzymes are also inside the cell, they are called endocellular ribonucleases, and they would dispose very quickly of the minuscule amount of mRNA.

Finally, the researchers mention a fifth element, the most important, the one that makes all the processes described so far completely useless and unnecessary. And that also explains why this material is so toxic without needing to introduce any spike protein. They indicate that these “vaccines” are so highly immunogenic. Indeed, they use this word immunogenic.

Immunogenic means able to irritate the immune system so much that it reacts very violently. So immunogenic means highly toxic. In fact, they describe the mRNA and synthetic lipids as “self-adjuvants.”

Whereas in other vaccines such as the ones for children, you have to introduce aluminum, for instance, to make the immune system respond. But here, you don’t need to add anything because this material is as toxic as aluminum or worse. It’s so highly toxic that as soon as you inject it the immune system attacks it and then it explodes into millions of nano-particles in the body.

This is actually what has been proven afterwards. Because the only study that has evaluated the biodistribution of the Pfizer Corona “vaccine” is a Japanese study done by the government in co-operation with Pfizer.

Pfizer tried to secrete this study, but it was released through a Freedom of Information Act, in short FOIA, request.

And in this study they found that in the mice into which they injected the material, especially the lipids were found unaltered, unmodified, unchanged. That means, if they had entered the cells, they would’ve been metabolized and you wouldn’t have found them in the same way you have injected them. That means they have not entered into any cell, but they diffused in all organs of the body, and particularly liver, spleen, female ovary and kidneys.

TE: But even Robert Malone, for example, considered the inventor of the mRNA technology or gene injections, sees the danger in the spike proteins.

Or let’s take the US cardiologist Peter McCullough – just like Malone a widely known critic of the Covid policy and gene injections – who recently published a study together with other researchers concluding that not only the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is a neurotoxin, but the mRNA “vaccines” are also capable of delivering the protein to the brain, increasing the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. So how can it be possible that even these known critical scientists talk “bullshit”?

SS: I would say that 99 percent of the scientists today talk bullshit essentially because they adopt a methodology that is bullshit methodology that has been there for a long time. Only nobody questions it.

Robert Malone might have been the inventor in the 1980s, which is 40 years ago, but hasn’t worked on mRNA for decades. You don’t find any article of him in the last 10, 15 or 20 years. So it’s not really an authority in what’s been going on with that. But apart from that, the point is how do they find the spike protein in the body?

Isolating a protein from the blood is a simple task. The methodology has been known since the 1980s. There are technologies, machines that you can buy and isolate proteins from the body. So we have hundreds of millions of people injected with the Corona “vaccines.”

So how much spike protein should be in the world? Like tons of spike proteins that you could actually be taken from the blood and be isolated. Did they ever do that? No!

When they say that there’s spike protein, the only way they do it is through antibody tests. And the way the antibody test is being applied is a fraud. I can also explain why it’s a fraud.

They take the blood and the serum of a patient who let’s say has been vaccinated. Then they test it through this ELISA antibody test and they put it in touch with a spike protein in this case. But it’s a spike protein made in the laboratory. It’s an artificial one, they call it recombinant spike protein. It’s a synthetic spike protein.

Now, the problem with antibodies is that they’re really not specific. In other words: If we want antibodies to be specific, we should have like thousand or even tens of thousands of different antibodies, one for each disease. Instead, we only have five immunoglobulins, i.e. antibodies, and only two are tested: IgG and IgM. So how could you show that they are specific?

What you’re supposed to do is you take this serum from a patient, which has a lot of antibodies because this person has been vaccinated, which means he or she has been injected with a very toxic material. And the immune system has reacted by generating a lot of antibodies. So you take this serum with a lot of antibodies.

Then you wanna do a proper test to see if it’s specific. You take it and you put it in touch with the spike protein, with aluminum, with the original mRNA, i.e. with different toxins – and if it only responds to the spike protein you could see that it’s specific. But has is this test ever done? No, it has never been done.

Instead, they take the material with the immunoglobulins, they put it in touch with the synthetic spike protein. And it reacts because it reacts to any toxin, so it’ll react also to the synthetic spike protein. And then they say: “Ah, that means there are specific antibodies for the spike protein. That means the body’s full of spike protein.” But it’s a fraud.

TE: However, a recent study shows that the spike protein from the Covid gene injections remained in a person’s tissue and immune cells for months after injection.

The study examined blood samples from 50 vaccinated individuals who continue to suffer from persistent symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, or headaches for weeks or months after “vaccination”. These samples were compared with blood samples from 35 vaccinated individuals who had no such symptoms. And the researchers found significantly elevated levels of the spike protein in the blood immune cells of those who suffered from symptoms after vaccination. So doesn’t that counter your view?

SS: That’s explainable. They compared people who were sick and people who were not sick. And of course, the people who were not sick did not produce a lot of immunoglobulins, that is antibodies. Whereas the sick people intoxicated by the “vaccines” produced a lot of antibodies. And they kept doing the antibody test. So in fact, they did not find the spike protein.

The challenge to be mastered consists of two things, though I know, of course, they would never accept it. First, isolate a spike protein as such from a “vaccinated” person. It’s possible to do it. There are machines to do it. Why don’t you do it? Why don’t you take the blood and isolate the spike protein as such – and why do you do it indirectly through an antibody test instead?

The second thing is: If you wanna be a proper scientist using the antibody test and if you wanna show that it’s specific for this spike protein, then test it together with other toxins and see if it is actually specific to that or if it responds to all the five toxins, which is exactly what will happen because antibodies are universal.

And not only that. Antibodies are so efficient that they actually are able to attack any antigen, any foreign antigen, any toxin in less than an nanosecond. So they don’t even need to memorize anything because they’re so fast in getting anything new that arrives in less than a nanosecond which is an in unimaginable short period of time.

So all necessary things are there if you really wanna prove what is being claimed, i.e. that there is spike protein. So first, just isolate it physically from the blood. Two, if you do the antibody test, do it with the control by testing other toxins as well. Otherwise, it’s all fraud.

And to conclude: The problem with mRNA and synthetic lipid nanoparticles, like the ones where the surface has been coated with polyethylene glycol (PEG), is that there’s a huge literature showing that they’re the most toxic material existing today on earth. They are inflammatory, they generate edema in all the membranes. They generate blood clots. They generate autoimmune reactions and lipodystrophy, i.e. a change of the subcutaneous fat tissue.

There’s a huge list of what toxicologically they can do to the body. So anything that happens after “vaccination” doesn’t need at all a spike protein as a cause. mRNA and synthetic lipids are more than sufficient to explain these health damages.

TE: But someone showed me a laboratory report claiming to have found a SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. On the test result it says “the Anti-SARS-CoV-2 S test measures the adaptive humoral immune response against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.” So what do you think about that?

SS: That’s exactly what I’m saying. They do not measure the spike protein itself. They measure the humoral immune response. In other words, again, antibodies, immunoglobulins, that’s what they test. They all do that indirectly.

That’s what humoral and humeral immune response means, it’s antibody tests essentially. So it goes back to what I said before. Nobody finds the spike protein as such. While, other proteins like the C-reactive proteine is tested directly. So why don’t they do it with the spike protein?

And just to add one comment. My position is more radical than whatever is proposed by the people who promote the idea of the spike protein. Because if I’m right – and I think I’m right because all the literature shows that – these injections cannot even be called “vaccines.” They’re just toxic bombs. Because if they’re not able to produce any viral antigen, that means they don’t perform as vaccines. So they’re not vaccines, they’re, again, just toxic bombs.

The criticism is much more radical and goes to the fact that they knew that because as I said, all the literature up to the time when they released the „vaccines“ shows what I said, that they are not capable of entering the cell. So when Pfizer and Moderna released the “vaccines” they knew very well that no spike protein would be produced and they would only intoxicate people.

TE: Are you alone with your view? Or is there at least a certain number of people thinking the same way you do and expressing it also?

SS: I think I’m pretty alone. This is actually my first international interview in this area. There are some people I know in Italy, some researchers who agree with me, but of course, we are a minority.

TE: What about the other experts saying that SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses have not been proven, like Andrew Kaufman, Samantha Bailey, and so on?

SS: I haven’t talked to them about this. Maybe this interview will be a way of getting in touch with them and involving them in this debate. But I think I’ll try at least to translate into English the section of my book that talks about this.

So there will be also the bibliographical indications of the scientific studies that I’m quoting about this showing that it’s not just my idea, that this is based on the literature.

I have no interest in doing that differently. If there was production of spike proteins, I would probably join the group that says: “Well, the spike protein is toxic and generates harms.” But the thing is: When I went to look at the literature, and that’s what I do, I found that this is just a fairy tale.

TE: And the spike protein itself, does it exist in nature in your view, or is it definitely only an artificial lab or in vitro product?

SS: It is an artificial laboratory product, absolutely. Also because the virus doesn’t exist. And the virus doesn’t exist because it has never been proven to exist, has never been isolated. We have made almost 250 FOIA requests around the world asking “can you show me the documentation about the isolation and therefore of the identification and therefore of the existence of the virus?” – and we got the same answer 250 times: “We do not have it.”

TE: But regarding the virus, it is said that it has not been proven, but the particles claimed to be viruses are real. And they may be particles being produced by the body itself. So the particles claimed to be spike proteins, what are they then?

SS: It’s a spike protein produced in the laboratory which doesn’t exist in nature because the spike protein is supposed to be a part of the virus that has never been isolated and therefore doesn’t exist. So in nature, there’s no toxic spike protein, it has never been found, never been isolated, never been found in the blood.

As I said before, I repeat: All they do is that they take a synthetic lab made, lab created protein that is toxic and they put it in touch with the antibodies and say that the antibodies are specific, which is just fraud, as I said before. And then they claim that therefore there must be spike protein in the body. But if the virus has not been proven to exist, there is no spike protein of the virus, either. And that’s actually the case because the only spike protein existing is the one made in the lab.

In fact, sometimes I advance a challenge to the people, who support this thesis. When I then confront them with my criticism, they react by saying, “Oh, but there’s a lot of studies showing that the spike protein is toxic.” Then I say, “just go and read them!” The truth is that there are only studies on the recombinant spike protein, on the protein made on the laboratory.

So again, the challenge is to find this spike protein directly in the blood. If this has been done, then we talk. But such a thing has not been done yet. There’s not a single study of this kind. It’s only indirect through antibodies and an artificial spike protein. It’s always the recombinant protein made in the lab, mainly in Chinese labs.

TE: Regarding the lipid nanoparticles that you say are the actual toxic component, fact checkers of the German television network ARD reported that a study showed that these lipid nanoparticles in fact caused inflammation in mice, but that the nanoparticles studied are not identical to the ones used by BionTech and Moderna in their mRNA “vaccines.“ And therefore, as an expert named Gregor Fuhrmann, quoted by the ARD, said, one should be cautious about drawing conclusions about other vaccines.

Also, the study was on mice, so the results cannot be directly transferred to humans, as Fuhrmann who is a full professor of pharmaceutical biology at the university Nurnberg-Erlangen adds. Moreover, local inflammation may well be desirable in a vaccination.

SS: I could agree with professor Fuhrmann, but then we would have to close toxicology. In other words, toxicology should be closed tomorrow because toxicological studies are always done on animals. Why don’t they do it on humans? Why don’t inject poison on humans to test it?

Well, they’ve done it with the Corona “vaccines.” But, in terms of toxicological studies, the standard is animal studies because the idea is that if something is toxic to the body of an animal, it may be toxic to a human, too. There are parameters like the safety reduction standard. So when you use a dose on a mice, then you reduce that by a factor of 10 because of inter species variation.

These are mechanisms to transfer the effect on an animal to that on a human. That’s the standard of toxicology. If you don’t accept that, then toxicology should close tomorrow.

And the other thing is: I would ask this Mr. Fuhrmann: If the toxicological studies on animals are not valid – which, as mentioned, would actually mean that toxicology has to be closed tomorrow – why would the study that Pfizer did on the new omicron “vaccine” and which has been done on eight mice should be valid?

In fact, that shouldn’t be valid, either. Moreover, it is not just the lipid nanoparticles that are toxic, the mRNA is toxic in itself as well. In fact it is more toxic than the lipids.

TE: So what, in your view, is the hardest evidence that the lipid nanoparticles are toxic?

SS: There are a lot of studies in literature showing that PEG and the other lipid nanoparticles are toxic. It’s in the literature, done on mice or other animals because you don’t do toxicological studies on humans by definition.

TE: recently, a globally unique study has been published showing that the toxic components, mainly metal elements such as cesium, barium, titanium, and aluminum, are contained in all samples of of covid gene injections from AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna. And another ingredient of concern mentioned by critics of these gene injections is graphene oxide.

But the European Medical Association EMA writes us that “it has not seen any credible evidence from its evaluations or from ongoing testing that any Covid-19 vaccine is contaminated with graphene oxide, which is not a recognized excipient in medicines.“ What is your knowledge about graphene oxide?

SS: I don’t exclude that besides this two very toxic components that are declared, i.e. synthetic mRNA and synthetic lipid nanoparticles, that there may be something else.

We had the Japanese government sent back 4 million doses of Moderna because they found particles of steel in the vaccine, though this may be also due to contamination. So it’s possible that there’s something else.

But other toxic components are not necessary to explain the toxicity, as I said, because synthetic mRNA and synthetic lipids are enough to explain all the toxic results of these “vaccines.” But there may be something else, may be some other metals.

As to graphene oxide, I tend to be suspicious in the sense that I believe that so far there’s no credible evidence of the presence of it. I’ve seen studies by a few researchers like the ones from Spain or other researchers doing dark field microscopy. And dark field microscope is a very good tool. I use it, too.

In fact, I’m a certified dark field microscopist among other things. And in fact, you can see the blood that is like rotten. You can see these images of blood really reduced and with a lot of blood clots and a lot of dark material. It looks really bad after you have been vaccinated with these “vaccines.”

But the thing is, that in the studies from the Spanish researchers and from the ones from Italy that I saw dark particles have been found that look like graphene oxide, that resemble graphene oxide. But this is not a conclusive finding. These results from Spain are saying that they tested the presence of graphene oxide also with a vibrational methodology and that the vibration of this thing seemed to correspond graphene oxide as a whole.

But here we’re entering a field that is not really solidly scientific anymore. And why do we need to get into this very shaky ground so that we are more liable to being accused of being charlatans or anything like that? We don’t need that.

If you really wanna work on graphene oxide, take the blood, take the particles that are dark and test them chemically to find if it’s graphene oxide or not. You cannot come up by saying “Oh, it looks like graphene oxide,” and then everybody is saying, “Oh, there’s graphene oxide in the vaccine.” This is not the way it should work. It’s not a serious way of proceeding.

TE: There are also fears that “vaccinated” people are contagious. Biomedical expert Philippe Van Welbergen, for example, recently claimed that unvaccinated have graphene and nanoparticles in their blood that are transmitted by people who have received the gene injections against Covid. Are fears that“vaccinated” people are contagious justified?

SS: No, they’re not contagious because for one thing, since there’s no production of spike protein, how can they be contagious to anybody else? And again, there’s no proof that there’s graphene oxide in these Covid injections. And all these stories about the graphene being a transmitter and so forth are all in the stage of storytelling, but there’s not really anything substantial that has come out yet. Furthermore, I personally I don’t believe in the contagion theory in general.

TE: But Van Welbergen is also referring to the nanoparticles. So, again, can something toxic from the “vaccines” transmit from the vaccinated person to another person?

SS: No. In fact, all the scientific literature explains that these nanoparticles, they’re deposited. An example is the mentioned Japanese biodistribution study that showed that lipid nanoparticles are deposited in all the organs and that it’s very difficult for the body on its own to take them out of the organs and the tissues where they are stuck. So they cannot be transmitted to anyone.

In fact, I’ve seen people getting sick after getting close to a “vaccinated” person. But who are these people? People who listen to people who are saying that the “vaccinated” people are contagious. They get into paranoia and two days later they’re sick. Why? It’s the mind.

Thank you, Stefano, for this conversation.

Thank you very much.

(The interview first appeared on Transition News.)

Here’s the ‘Off Guardian’ website link, where you can watch the video interview:

https://off-guardian.org/2022/11/07/that-mrna-vaccines-cause-cells-to-produce-spike-proteins-is-a-fairy-tale/

Ivor Cummins’ summarises the problem of “mass formation” (the theory proposed by Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Ghent University) at the recent Portugal Pandemic Congress.

LISTEN HERE

Ivor is one of the few who consistently debunked the official Covid 19 narrative based on the data. He blogs on his website ‘The Fat Emperor‘ where he also runs his health and wellbeing business.