Scientists in Denmark and Sweden registered underwater explosions near the Nord Stream pipelines on Monday, when several major leaks were reported. Sabotage is now believed to be behind the damage.
“There is no doubt that these were explosions,” seismologist Bjorn Lund of Sweden’s National Seismology Centre (SNSN) told public broadcaster SVT on Tuesday.
The Danish military released aerial footage of the leaks, showing large spots and visible bubbling in the water. Nord Stream 1 suffered two leaks northeast of the Danish island of Bornholm, while Nord Stream 2 was damaged south of Dueodde, a beach located at the island’s southernmost tip, the military noted.
Earlier in the day, Moscow said it has been looking into the reasons behind the leaks, suggesting the pipelines were targeted in an act of sabotage. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that currently “no option can be ruled out” on the causes of the incident.
The Nord Stream 1 pipeline was completed in 2011. Construction work on Nord Stream 2 began in 2018, and suffered numerous delays due to political pressure and sanctions from the US. The pipeline was finished and pressurized in September 2021, but never actually got online.
Two days before the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, the German government put its certification on indefinite hold, and has repeatedly rejected any suggestions, both domestic and from Moscow, to open the pipeline.
A few hours ago (Monday night), the pressure in Nord Stream 2, the undersea gas line connecting Russia and Germany, plummeted and began leaking gas bubbles into the Baltic sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. Less than an hour ago reports of pressure drops in ***BOTH*** Nord Stream lines 1 & 2 ! ! ! The photo above was taken by military helicopter over one of the rupture sites, showing gas bubbling to the surface of the sea.
The Baltic Sea pipeline which had never been put into operation seems to have been DESTROYED.
The leak was noticed for the first time, Monday night (European time). A spokeswoman for the gas network operator, GASCADE, confirms that pipeline sensors registered a massive drop in pressure in the pipeline, and sounded alarms.
According to the Nordstream 2 operators, the pressure dropped from 105 bars to 7 bars.
German media is reporting that a leak in the newly built pipeline is most likely the result of sabotage.
After it became clear that Russia was planning to enter Ukraine militarily, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stopped the project.
Whether an accident is behind the pipeline rupture or sabotage is unclear for the time being. However, an accident on the ultra-modern line is unlikely.
TIMING POINTS TO SUSPECTS
The timing of the incident, during a European supply crisis, and after serious setbacks for Russia in the Ukraine war, suggests sabotage.
Most recently, the German AfD and Left Party had campaigned to open the pipeline to mitigate the gas price crisis in Germany.
The relatively shallow depth of the Baltic Sea at the location of the leak means that the damaged pipeline will be readily accessible by submersible and possibly even divers.
Over the coming days and weeks, we should expect to see a forensic investigation into the failure to determine the cause.
However the dramatic drop in pressure to only 7 bar (~60 m of water) suggests that the pipeline may have filled with seawater. If that’s the case, it may be that the pipeline will require such extensive repairs that restoring it to operability is cost prohibitive.
Prior to any investigation, Western media is likely to push the theory that Russia is behind this sabotage. Which makes little sense since there is no reason for Russia to destroy their own infrastructure they both spent billions constructing and have complete control over.
Who most clearly benefits from such a disaster? Since the same time last year, the US has more than doubled the volumes of gas it is sending to Europe.
In this context, it is readily apparent that the US has been motivated not only to spark and maintain the conflict between Russia and Ukraine but also in subordinating Europe to temporarily buoy its own flailing economy.
At the center of the conflict is Nord Stream 2, the newly built natural gas pipeline connecting Russia and Germany. The significant economic integration that is set to occur between Russia and Europe’s biggest economy represents a direct threat to US hegemony.
Prior to this leak, the only thing preventing flow through the pipeline was a regulatory block placed in February by German Chancellor Scholz at the behest of the US. Earlier today, protests demanding the pipeline be opened erupted in Germany. The timing is simply incredible.
If a pipeline is closed simply due to a regulatory block, the only impediment to opening the valves is political. But if a pipeline is destroyed, there is no need to worry about a change in Chancellor.
This relentless pursuit of monopoly control over Europe’s energy supply is the most clear demonstration of how Europe is being imperialized by the U.S. Thus it is no coincidence that, in the absence of communist leadership, Europe is seeing a rise in fascist governments as a result.
We’re going to have to wait for the investigation, but if you wanted to sabotage a new undersea pipeline while making it appear as an accident, one way to do it would be to trigger a very small submarine landslide.
Lance Cpl. Catherine Arnett, 24, of Fort Worth, Texas, was charged with two counts under article 87 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, missing troop movements on May 27 and May 14, and one count under article 92, disobeying a direct order on May 7.
Arnett was not charged with refusing the vaccine, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing spokesman Maj. Rob Martins told Stars and Stripes in July. The court-martial came from her refusal “to board multiple flights to complete the separation process which occurred after she refused the COVID-19-vaccine,” he wrote.
Arnett said she would not board those flights because the orders stemmed from the 2021 Defense Department mandate on COVID-19 vaccination, which she considers unlawful.
Her court-martial was placed on an indefinite delay on Aug. 22 after her lawyer cited a federal judge’s Aug. 18 order that temporarily bars the Corps from punishing or discharging Marines who refused the vaccine on religious grounds.
A status hearing for Arnett’s case was scheduled for Tuesday, but the aircraft wing’s commander, Maj. Gen. Eric Austin, decided on Wednesday to dismiss it.
“In weighing the considerations for both the Marine Corps and the Marine, within the context of the most recent injunction for COVID-19 vaccine refusal cases, the commanding general has decided to dismiss [Arnett’s] COVID-19 related charges,” Martins, the wing spokesman, said in an email Monday.
Arnett was unavailable to comment on the dismissal on Tuesday.
The Marine said she refused the COVID-19 vaccines because they are tested or produced using stem cell lines that descend from fetuses aborted in the 1970s and ’80s. Her request as a Catholic for a religious exemption, she said, was denied by the Marine Corps and again on appeal.
A new study by James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D. and Dr. Russell Blaylock supports the conclusions of a study by Dr. Paul Thomas, published in November 2020 and later retracted after an anonymous reader expressed concerns.
In November 2020, a study that carefully examined 10 years’ worth of data from a pediatric practice in Oregon run by Dr. Paul Thomas was published. Five days following the publication of the study, Thomas’ license was suspended.
A month after that, the journal decided to inform the authors that an anonymous reader had expressed some concerns about the study.
This single reader’s comments that involved bad guesswork led ultimately to the journal’s decision to retract the paper, leaving the authors stunned.
The authors knew that the reader’s concerns had already been addressed during peer review, and expected the journal to rule in favor of not retracting the paper. The journal editorial board knew this, too.
The concern centered primarily on the question of whether the large differences in the number of medical visits required for attention to specific health conditions like anemia, gastroenteritis, asthma, ear infections and many others, were due to parents who did not vaccinate not showing up to their well-baby and well-child visits.
Because Thomas’ license was suspended, he had to focus on his case and try to keep his life from falling apart; the medical board kept postponing the hearing, and no hearing had occurred.
In fact, no hearing has been held to date.
James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D. suggested to Thomas that perhaps the medical board had overreached by applying a penalty without due process, a fact that Thomas then shared with his lawyer.
When his lawyer wrote the medical board pointing out that Thomas had suffered a penalty without due process, they offered to reinstate his license, pending the outcome of a hearing, on the condition that he do no more research.
This clearly shows the agenda of the medical board was not to ensure that the children in the practice were receiving good pediatric medical care.
It is now clear that the singular priority of the medical board was to shut down Thomas’ practice of abiding by informed consent — as required by Oregon state law for all medical procedures — and to prevent him from sharing any additional findings from the 10 years of data that had been collected from his practice.
New study supports earlier conclusions by Thomas
Today, the study is revived by a second study, this time conducted by Lyons-Weiler and his medical collaborator, Dr. Russell Blaylock.
In this second study, the following questions were addressed:
Which group of patients adhered to the regular well-child visit better, the vaccinated patients or those who had refused vaccines?
In groups of patients matched for health check visitation usage, which adverse health outcomes following vaccination differed between vaccinated patients and those who refused vaccines?
After adjusting for healthcare visitations and age, do vaccines still significantly affect overall adverse health conditions in a manner independent of their interaction with healthcare visitations and age?
Did older patients in the practice who stopped vaccinating experience a decrease in the adverse health outcomes that have been attributed to vaccines?
The study results, which are found in the paper entitled “Revisiting Excess Diagnoses of Illnesses and Conditions in Children Whose Parents Provide Informed Permission to Vaccinate Them” show that the anonymous reader’s concerns were unfounded; the unvaccinated families made their well-child visits with greater frequency than the vaccinated families.
The answer to the second question is “results vary,” but this may be due to smaller sample sizes reducing power (see the study for details).
The study split the patients into high, medium and low health care visitation usage blocks, and many of the adverse health effects are seen increased in the vaccinated group of patients within these blocks (blocks are groups of patients matched on health care visitation usage).
For the third question, the scientists found that after defining a model that included healthcare visit utilization and age, vaccines were still a significant factor that increased adverse health outcomes, many of which had previously been associated with vaccines.
Moreover, the authors also determined that vaccines were still significant following consideration of the interaction term between vaccination status and the other model factors.
Importantly, had the study authors not considered the interaction term, the results would have seemed to imply that vaccination was negatively predictive of adverse health outcomes.
In the model in which vaccines, health care visits per age and the interaction term was considered, the number of vaccines was a positive significant predictor of overall adverse health.
Interaction terms are usually ignored by studies that “adjust for” variables. Adding covariates into the model without considering the interaction term with the main effect — vaccines — can mask a significant effect on the rates of post-vaccination health issues, providing a misleading result.
It’s worth noting that breastfeeding — another correlate of lifestyle measures — had no significant singular or interaction effects.
Blaylock posed the final question to Lyons-Weiler, who conducted the data analysis.
When older children were studied, and those who had the most vaccines were compared to those to those of the same age who had fewer vaccines, a clear pattern emerged for most of the adverse health outcomes: the risk of having a higher adverse health outcome was higher in the most-vaccinated older children compared to the least-vaccinated older children to a degree that was larger than that expected given any variation between the two groups in healthcare visit utilization.
The age-matched effects of vaccine cessation. High Relative Risk values denote increased risk of a given health outcome in patients receiving more vaccines in the older age group (>1,500 days of age). The black bar shows the Relative Risk of HCV between these groups as a baseline.
The relative risk of adverse health outcomes in older children who continued to vaccinate compared to those who ceased vaccination in Thomas’ practice.
Combined, all of these results mean that the method developed by Lyons-Weiler to consider the number of office visits needed for adverse health outcomes represents a robust, reliable and rigorous advance in methodology for the study of adverse health outcomes following medical exposures, including vaccines.
The method, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits,” had already been shown to be more powerful.
Lyons-Weiler reports that this is necessarily so because the measure contains more information than mere rates of diagnosis.
The RIOV measure has a higher dynamic range than odds ratios and relative risks based on diagnosis only. Studies that focus on the rates of diagnosis are using a subset of RIOV but are only limiting their count of office visits to that for the initial diagnosis.
The authors estimated that vaccination increases the need for visits to the doctor for vaccine-related health outcomes at a rate of 2.56 to 4.98 new chronic-illness-related visits per unit increase in vaccination per year.
“That translates into far more chronic illness in vaccinating children than in those not vaccinating, a disease burden that is not considered in risk: benefit considerations when it comes to vaccine policies and laws,” said Lyons-Weiler.
The CDC continues to erase distinctions by COVID-19 vaccination status in public health guidance as ongoing global research — including its own — documents the mediocre performance of COVID vaccines and their unexpectedly high rates of lasting harm in some groups.
Vaccination status is no longer used “to inform source control, screening testing, or post-exposure recommendations” for healthcare personnel, the Friday update to their CDC guidance says.
The agency “[c]larified” that healthcare facilities, including nursing homes, have discretion on whether to screen-test asymptomatic personnel. It also now says asymptomatic patients “in general” do not require “empiric use of Transmission-Based Precautions” after exposure to an infected person.
The CDC is finally acknowledging that vaxx status has zero to do with transmission.
Families have been destroyed, some members refusing to see others who aren’t “fully vaccinated.” Aunties who’ve not met nieces & nephews. Grandmas who haven’t met grandchildren. Thanks @CDCgovpic.twitter.com/Dj5u440fS2
A CDC study of 12-29 year-olds with heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination, published last week in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, found that 1 in 6 still had not “fully recovered” at least 90 days after myocarditis onset, including 1 in 100 who hadn’t improved at all.
Myocarditis has increased so markedly among youth since vaccines were authorized for them that an Ivy League-affiliated hospital started running TV ads this month for its treatment in children. New York-Presbyterian marked the ad’s Sept. 6 YouTube video private less than two weeks later, following criticism that it was trying to “normalize” a vaccine-induced condition.
The CDC’s COVID-19 Response Team found more than 800 myocarditis reports to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System from Jan. 12 to Nov. 5, 2021 that matched the parameters for age and time since onset.
Excluding those without phone numbers or who couldn’t be reached, they studied 393 individuals whose healthcare providers, mostly cardiologists, completed a survey. The median age was 17 and overwhelmingly male. The team deemed four in five patients “fully or probably fully” recovered (320).
On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs, as a symptom of their capitalist greed. He accused
“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”
This is Petro’s first trip to the United States since he was inaugurated in August. He was received on Sunday night September 18 by hundreds of supporters in Queens, NY who manifested their support to his administration’s commitment to working for peace and ensuring the wellbeing of the Colombian people.
Below is a full transcription of his speech on September 20, 2022 to the United Nations General Assembly.
I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.
There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.
My country is not only beautiful, it is also violent.
How can beauty be conjugated with death, how can the biodiversity of life erupt with the dances of death and horror? Who is guilty of breaking the enchantment with terror? Who or what is responsible for drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and interest? Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and as a people?
My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon jungle, the ChocóWar jungle, the waters, the Andes mountain ranges, and the oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is emanated and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of these CO2 absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth. At any cost, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, sacred plant of the Incas. [It is in] a paradoxical crossroads.
The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.
For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.
In the face of incessant media badgering to rush out and take the latest version of experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shot — the “bivalent” booster, the vast majority of Americans are saying “nope” and continuing on with their lives. Three weeks into the all-out push to have every American over 12 years old take the new shot (giving these new booster shots to younger children is up next), it appears that less than two percent of eligible Americans have done so.
The growing resistance to the coronavirus shots pushers’ propaganda gives one hope for America. With each new experimental coronavirus shot Americans are being urged to take, the percentage who acquiesce declines. The line that the shots are needed, safe, and effective has proven a farce on all counts. And the latest shot rushed into distribution has taken the previous shots’ mockery of the process for ensuring safety and efficacy to the next level. The truth is out there; increasingly Americans are seeing past the media hype and finding it.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will withdraw its interim registration review decision for the weedkiller glyphosate, after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion saying the EPA had violated the law by ignoring important studies on the chemical’s impact on human health.
U.S. regulators on Sept. 23 said they would withdraw all remaining portions of the interim registration review decision for the weedkiller glyphosate.
The move comes after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion saying the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had violated the law in its assessment of glyphosate, which is the world’s most widely used weedkiller and the active ingredient in Roundup and numerous other herbicide products.
The court found that the EPA had ignored important studies in its human health safety assessment of the chemical and had also violated the Endangered Species Act.
The EPA’s withdrawal comes before an Oct. 1 deadline under which the agency was supposed to have completed its assessment.
The EPA had asked the court to extend its deadline but the court denied the request.
In its June 17 opinion, the 9th Circuit said the agency’s 2020 assessment of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, was flawed in many ways.
The federal appeals court ruled the EPA failed to follow established guidelines for determining cancer risk, ignored important studies, and discounted expert advice from a scientific advisory panel.
The EPA applied “inconsistent reasoning” in finding that the chemical does not pose “any reasonable risk to man or the environment,” the panel determined.
The court vacated the human health portion of the EPA’s glyphosate assessment and said the agency needed to apply “further consideration” to evidence. The 9th Circuit also said the agency violated the Endangered Species Act in its assessment.
“EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same,” the EPA said in a statement announcing its withdrawal of the glyphosate decision.
“In accordance with the court’s decision, the Agency intends to revisit and better explain its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate and to consider whether to do so for other aspects of its human health analysis.”
For the ecological portion of its review, the EPA said it intends to consider what risk mitigation measures may be necessary based on the Endangered Species Act consultation for glyphosate and will prepare an analysis of how the weedkiller affects monarch butterfly habitat.
The EPA said that pesticide products containing glyphosate will not be affected by the withdrawal decision.
Monsanto owner Bayer AG has been seeking to put an end to thousands of lawsuits filed by U.S. Roundup users who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma and allege their exposure to the weedkiller is to blame for their cancers.
Monsanto introduced glyphosate weedkillers in 1974 and pushed the chemical to such widespread use that it is considered the world’s most widely used herbicide.
Bayer denies there is any cancer connection to glyphosate and Roundup, and has repeatedly cited the EPA’s assurances of glyphosate safety as a key part of its litigation defense.
The company has also said that the backing of the EPA and similar support from other regulators in other countries are more valid than a 2015 assessment by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which found that glyphosate was “probably” carcinogenic to humans.
The IARC finding was based on a review of years of independent, peer-reviewed, published scientific studies. The reviews by the EPA and other regulators focused more heavily on unpublished and non-peer-reviewed studies submitted to regulators by Monsanto and other companies involved in making and selling the chemical.
Human health advocates have long been frustrated by what they see as the EPA’s flagrant disregard for substantial evidence of cancer risk, seen in human and animal studies.
Internal Monsanto documents, obtained through Roundup litigation discovery and Freedom of Information Act requests, have demonstrated the company deployed multiple strategies to manipulate scientific literature and regulators, including the EPA.
Moreover, the internal corporate documents show Monsanto has long been aware of research showing a connection between the weedkiller and cancer, but has sought to bury such research and/or attack and censor scientists who insist there is evidence of cancer risk.
A federal court in Texas is giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention until Friday to release the first batch of data on adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination collected by the agency via its V-safe app.
A federal court in Texas is giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) until Friday to release the first batch of data on adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination collected by the agency via its V-safe app.
The order by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas-Austin Division follows a series of lawsuits filed by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), an Austin-based nonprofit “focused on the scientific integrity of vaccines and [the] pharmaceutical industry.”
According to ICAN, the court order requires the CDC to release the first batch of 19 months’ worth of data collected from millions of participants who reported adverse events related to COVID-19 vaccination via the V-safe app between Dec. 14, 2020, and July 31, 2022.
In all, the CDC will be required to release more than 137 million health V-safe entries.
The CDC describes V-safe as a smartphone app that “provides personalized and confidential check-ins via text messages and web surveys,” enabling users to “quickly and easily share with CDC how you, or your dependent, feel after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.”
According to the CDC, “This information helps CDC monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in near real time,” adding that the purpose of the V-safe app “is to rapidly characterize the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines when given outside a clinical trial setting.”
Public will ‘see for themselves the actual self-reported data’
The data collected via the V-safe app is “collected, managed, and housed on a secure server by Oracle,” with only the CDC having “access to the individualized survey data.”
Oracle’s access is limited to “aggregate deidentified data for reporting.”
This distinction led to the main thrust of ICAN’s lawsuits against the CDC. ICAN argued that “based on the CDC’s own documentation, the data submitted to V-safe is already available in deidentified form (with no personal health information) and could be immediately released to the public.”
ICAN submitted three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the deidentified data collected via V-safe, “in the same form in which Oracle can currently access it.”
However, ICAN said, the CDC “had apparently not read its own documentation regarding V-safe” and refused ICAN’s requests, claiming “information in the app is not deidentified.”
Even when ICAN clarified its FOIA request to specifically ask for “all data deidentified after [emphasis original] it was submitted to the V-safe app,” the CDC “administratively closed this request stating it was duplicative of the original request.”
ICAN responded by suing the CDC in federal court in December 2021, via its attorney, Aaron Siri, for the release of this data.
Following a new FOIA request by ICAN in April 2022, for the release of “all data submitted to V-safe since January 1, 2020,” and the CDC’s subsequent refusal, ICAN filed a second lawsuit in May 2022.
ICAN said these successive refusals on the part of the CDC came “despite the CDC’s ability to immediately release this deidentified data pursuant to its own protocol,” based on the claim that “the information in the app is not deidentified.”
ICAN commented on the significance of the ruling, stating in a press release:
“This is a huge win for ICAN and for the American public, who will finally start to be able to see for themselves the actual self-reported nationwide data about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.”
Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, called the ruling an “absolutely huge development.”
“This is an absolutely huge development and I’ll be waiting with anticipation as the V-safe data are released.
“With CDC’s reluctance to release this information, one can only imagine that it will not reflect well on the whole COVID-19 vaccination program, especially given irregularities seen with VAERS [the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] reporting and the shifting narrative of the CDC regarding COVID-19 guidance.”
Hooker has faced similar obstacles to those encountered by ICAN when requesting data from the CDC. He said he “submitted a FOIA for the V-safe pregnancy data early in the process and was denied.”
“I’m glad that Aaron [Siri] and ICAN stuck with it,” Hooker said. “I can only think of the lives that could have been spared if the CDC would have been forthcoming with this information in the first place.”
The data collected via the V-safe app is distinct from the data submitted to VAERS. ICAN described the distinction:
“The FDA and CDC have admitted their existing safety monitoring program, VAERS, was incapable of determining causation and therefore unreliable.
“The CDC has therefore deployed a new safety monitoring system for COVID-19 vaccines called V-safe, and now claims that these ‘vaccines are being administered under the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history.’”
Vegetable producers across northern and western Europe are considering halting operations, thus further threatening food supplies, as a result of the energy crisis hitting the continent, Reuters reported this week.
According to the report, skyrocketing power and gas prices are the biggest cost facing vegetable farmers employing greenhouse cultivation. Two French farmers renewing their electricity contracts for 2023 told the media outlet they were being quoted prices more than ten times higher than in 2021.
“In the coming weeks I will plan the season but I don’t know what to do,” said Benjamin Simonot-De Vos, who grows cucumbers, tomatoes and strawberries south of Paris. “If it stays like this there’s no point starting another year. It’s not sustainable.”
Johannes Gross, deputy sales manager at the German cooperative Reichenau-Gemüse, told Reuters : “We face an overall increased production cost of around 30%. Some colleagues are thinking about leaving their greenhouses empty to keep the costs as low as possible. Nobody knows what will happen next year.”
The soaring costs of fertilizer, packaging and transport have also been adding to the pain. Even in countries with abundant sun, such as Spain, fruit and vegetable farmers are grappling with a 25% jump in fertilizer costs.
As farmers across the EU warn of shortages, supermarkets may switch to sourcing more goods from warmer countries such as Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt, the report says.
The Most Revolutionary Act 