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Galileo vs the Vatican

Dec 182022
 
 December 18, 2022  Posted by at 12:25 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  20 Responses »


Edgar Degas In front of the mirror 1889

 

 

This piece came to me in an unusual way. A British friend sent it, after his wife sent it to him. He said: “Well written piece! Pulled from Jean‘s friend on Facebook!”. All I really know is the author’s name is Janet Daley, and she’s in all likelihood British. I like how she points out the correlation between what the church allowed people to think and know and express in the Middle Ages+, and what we are allowed by government and media and industry to think and know and express today.

And then makes the link between the past 3 years of covid info, and climate change “science”. Going forward, you will find out how much Fauci declaring himself “The Science” has hurt the entire climate campaign. And maybe that’s not so bad. Let’s talk about these things. There doesn’t appear to be much sense in “saving the Planet” if the only way to do that is to kill your economy and society.

It would have been better is she had included the same “conglomerate”‘s control over the Ukraine issue, but we can’t have everything. Hey, I would include the Trump “RussiaRussiaRussia” campaign, but that might be a step too far for many. Maybe we need to explain this one step, one topic, at a time. For the Automatic Earth, it all has meant censorship, and lots of lost ad revenue, but also more readers, and their donations, because, luckily, there are still people left who, in Janet’s words: Argue. Question. Disagree. This light ain’t dying.

 

 

Janet Daley:

Governments have learnt that fear works – and that is truly terrifying


We have returned to the world of Galileo vs the Vatican. Scientific dissidents are again silenced and ostracised for their opinions

 

As the year in which life officially returned to normal comes to an end, we must ask an uncomfortable question. What on earth just happened? We have lived through a period of what would once have been the unthinkable suspension of basic freedoms: interventions by the state into personal life that even most totalitarian governments would not have dared to impose. And we, along with most (not all) of the democratic societies of the West, accepted it. Before that era slips into the fog of convenient forgetfulness, it is absolutely imperative that we – the country as a whole – hold a thorough post hoc examination, because our governing classes have certainly learnt something they will remember.

The critical lesson that has been indelibly absorbed by people in power, and those who advise them, is that fear works. There is, it turns out, almost nothing that a population (even one as brave and insouciant as Britain’s) will not give up if they are systematically, relentlessly frightened.

The Covid phenomenon has provided an invaluable training session in public mind-control techniques: the formula was refined – with the assistance of sophisticated advertising and opinion-forming advice – to an astonishingly successful blend of mass anxiety (your life is in danger) and moral coercion (you are putting other people’s lives in danger). But it was not just the endless repetition of that message that accomplished the almost universal, and quite unexpected, compliance. It was the comprehensive suppression of dissent even when it came from expert sources – and the prohibition on argument even when it was accompanied by counter-evidence – that really did the trick. Now the prescription is readily available for any governing elite hoping to initiate a policy likely to meet with strong public resistance. First tell people that they, or their children and grandchildren, will die if they do not comply. Then prohibit any mitigating argument or critique of this prediction.

If the laws of the land do not permit you to stamp out all such deviant opinions, you can simply orchestrate an avalanche of opprobrium and disrepute on those who express them so that their professional reputations are undermined. But that is yesterday’s battle. Covid – as a historic event – is over. Let’s talk about how the Fear programme, now an accepted part of the armoury of democratic politics, is likely to work in the present and future. As it happens, there is what looks like a remarkably similar model of anxiety-plus-moral-blackmail being applied to the matter of climate change. Note: these observations have no bearing on whether or not there is a true “climate crisis”. What I want to consider is how the policies that are being formulated to address it are being framed.

We find ourselves back in the Middle Ages when scientists were forbidden to contradict authority

Words are terribly important here. There seems to be an alarming similarity between the language in which the climate campaign is being conducted and the one used to sell the authoritarian Covid lockdowns. There is, for example, a curious anthropomorphising of the threat in both cases. The virus was depicted regularly by both politicians and their medical officials as a sentient adversary with an “agenda” (that word was, believe it or not, actually used) to destroy human lives. It was likened to a wartime enemy – except that it was more sinister because it was “invisible”. This was not strictly true, of course: it was an organism clearly visible under a microscope as was demonstrated repeatedly in scary images widely reproduced in the media. Now, the Planet (the word is usually capitalised as if it were a proper name) is being described as if it too was a conscious being whose innocent life was being threatened by the thoughtless rapaciousness of human beings. So we – and our inclinations – are once again the potential danger.

None of this nonsense has anything to do with science. It is the language of horror movies or particularly gruesome fairy tales designed to frighten children into good behaviour. The great offence that is being committed by these machinations, in fact, is against scientific endeavour itself, which relies on disagreement and open debate to progress. Somehow, we have found ourselves back in the Middle Ages when scientists were forbidden to contradict the inviolable truth of authority. Who would have thought that, centuries after the Enlightenment, we would return to Galileo vs the Vatican? This is not intended to imply that religious belief is always the enemy of scientific rationality. I personally believe that human intelligence is the greatest of God’s gifts and that the traducing of it is truly sinful as well as utterly irresponsible. As it happened, there was one more affirmation of the irreplaceable importance of intellect and inventiveness just last week with the successful experiment in nuclear fusion, which may, literally, save the future of all those who inhabit the earth (if, in fact, it is genuinely in danger).

What intelligence and innovation rely on above all is criticism and disputation. That is the nature of the thing. It should be what education is for. We cannot, must not, stop fighting for the right to disagree. It is appalling that it has become necessary to legislate to enforce this freedom on academic institutions that were once dedicated to free discussion. The imperatives that must be taught to the young have not changed since Plato’s day. Argue. Question. Disagree. Expose received ideas to rigorous interrogation. Express doubt when you are unpersuaded. Seek truth through endless dialogue. Certainly some mistakes will be made in the name of liberty, but they can only be corrected if we do not, literally, lose our minds in the name of safety. The lines by Dylan Thomas, which were intended to be about physical death, could just as easily be applied to the death of Reason:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

 

 

 

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After the Storm

Jan 112022
 
 January 11, 2022  Posted by at 4:24 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  22 Responses »


Giovanni Strazza The Veiled Virgin 1850s
(Hard to believe this sculpture is made of -Carrera- marble)

 

 

With Omicron taking over at lightning speed, and what we know about it from South Africa and Denmark, it would seem that we can relax. It’s reported to be 100x less deadly than Alpha/Delta, and perhaps less deadly than the common flu. If you’ve had Alpha/Delta, you can still get Omicron, but an Omicron infection appears to make you immune to Alpha/Delta.

As far as we can see, nobody’s dying from Omicron, intubations are rare at best, and positive tests, even if they do end up in hospital, are mostly released as fast as they came in. It’s simply over. It’ll take another few weeks for this to become impossible to ignore, but it’s already there. A number of voices have called for treating it like the flu; Spain appears to have made that its official policy.

It’s over. And media, politicians and “experts” will need to jockey for position. They will not apologize for all the fear induced, or the human rights broken, they will make you believe that their new position is perfectly in line with what they’ve done over the past two years, and all that has changed is “The Science”.

The WHO hasn’t given up yet, and is giving it its last best according to today’s headlines:
“WHO Gives Grim Prediction On Omicron Spread”,
“WHO: More Than Half of Europeans Will Get Omicron”.
Half of Europeans will be “infected” with a “virus” that is 100x less virulent than Alpha/Delta, so who cares? They’ll catch the flu too. But the media will label them: “Covid cases”, making no difference between “variants”. And making you afraid of something you have no reason to be afraid of.

The best example I saw was in a local Greek paper -in English- that not just called every positive test a “case”, a widely accepted piece of nonsense, they labeled 31,000 positive testing kids “patients”. You go from a disputable “positive test” to a “case” to “patients”. How many of these kids needed medical attention? Maybe 100?

At least half of what people think they know about the past two years of their lives has been based on the distortion of language. And that distortion continues as the jockeying for position takes off. It works something like this, as illustrated by a tweet from the UK yesterday:

“MSM this morning:
• BBC: Cut self isolation period
• Guardian: End Mass Jabs
• The Times: End Free Tests
• Daily Mail: Scotland Against Lockdown
• Telegraph: Dodgy Covid Data
• Evening Standard: Covid is endemic


Can you see what’s happening? They’re moving to the winning side.”

 

 

The greatest proponents for all of these ruinous Covid measures… will be rewriting their own history..
https://twitter.com/i/status/1480295361549946880

 

This from CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky is almost verbatim the Great Barrington Declaration, mocked by the NIH’s Fauci and Collins for being written by “fringe epidemiologists”.

 

 

More Walensky: “US May See ‘Precipitous Decline’ In Omicron Cases”.

Also Walensky: “..the overwhelming number of deaths over 75% occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with”. She said that in a video I posted January 9, that has now been pulled from YouTube. What it all adds up to so far is that the CDC secretly admits the number people who actually died FROM Covid has been exaggerated by a factor of between 10 and 100%.

And that the CDC, as Omicron cases skyrocket, prepares you for a ‘Precipitous Decline’ in these cases. Just so they can say: “I told you so” in a few weeks. It’s not only the worst comedy we have for you, it’s also the only one.

 

CNN has a lot of rewriting to do too, and they’ve started (it took them, and their team of experts, only 2 years to figure this out:)

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1480682158238752770

 

 

Sadly, the spread of Covid may be over, having been “tranquillized” by Omicron, but the story is not. People are, and will be, talking about a return to normal, but there is no normal to return to. Not after two years. Take a child, anywhere between 0 and 7 years old. Anywhere in that age range, two years of their lives have been deeply disrupted, by school closings, other lockdowns, and maybe most by face masks. They’ve never had normal interaction with smiles, and other facial expressions, exactly when that is elementary to their development.

Restrictions have led many people into depressions, suicides, and less severe hence less detectable mental consequences. How many of them will never return to “normal”? We don’t know, but the numbers will be huge. We cannot return to normal, there’s nothing left to return to, we will have to build a new normal.

And we should build that on the rejection of governments trampling on our rights and freedoms, on rejecting media that censor those who don’t share their one-dimensional “The Science” clickbait message, and on rejecting “The Science” itself, as incorporated by the likes of Tony Fauci. And Pfizer. If we don’t, our normal will be 1984.

The media is slowly admitting they overcounted any threats to your health, only one in ten of positive tests was a “case”, as in required a doctor, not all of them, but now they try to make you believe that you should lock up with an N95 mask because of a “variant” that is only a threat for one in 100 positive tests, if that.

 

 

What remains, however, is another threat. That of the consequences of mRNA “vaccines”, and even more, that of boosters. Carefully silenced by the media, but very real. The US VAERS system, which registers adverse events to vaccines, reported its 1 millionth case a few days ago, and some 20,000 deaths. This is just the US, and it registers only between 1% and 10% of what actually goes on. Health personnel are by law required to report to it, but they don’t, and nobody challenges them on it.

The EU has a system like that too, EudraVigilance, with the exact same issues. You set up a system with a legal mandate, and then let it slowly evaporate if that suits your purpose. It seems reasonable to presume total global deaths from the vaccines are at about 500,000 now. But those are just the people that drop dead immediately -like football players-, or within weeks.

More concerning is the effect of unleashing spike proteins with “vaccines”, and more with “boosters”, into organs all over the body of millions upon millions of so far reasonably healthy looking people. They can last for at least many months, and spread way beyond the site of injection. That is the real danger, and we won’t know how severe it is for a long time, because it has never been tested.

An interview Geert Vanden Bossche did with Dutch outlet OverNu (Google translate) provides one vision of where we’re headed. Geert is the guy who has warned for almost two years that mass vaccination into a pandemic is the worst idea ever.

 

 

The World after Omicron | The Beginning of the End

“Omicron will infect almost everyone,” says Vanden Bossche. “This will initially lead to a drastic increase in the number of sick people, especially among the vaccinated. Because their vaccinated antibodies can do little against Omicron, but at the same time will interfere with their innate immune system, I expect that the vaccinated will become seriously ill more often than the unvaccinated.”

The virologist sees the wave of contamination from Omicron as a blessing in disguise. The collective upgrade of the innate antibodies will lead to herd immunity, which will bring the transmission of the virus under control, and the Omicron wave will rapidly decrease in strength. “Actually, Omicron is a kind of natural vaccine,” says Vanden Bossche. “Omicron could be the last chance to get out of this crisis unscathed.”

However, the booster programs that have started worldwide imply that governments are not seizing the opportunity. Vanden Bossche fears those programs will have the opposite effect. To start with, they are once again exposing the population to the as yet little known side effects of the vaccines. Although the vaccines will cause a temporary increase in antibodies, those antibodies are still intended for the corona variant from two years ago. They won’t be able to stop the chance of infection with Omicron and the transmission of Omicron, but they will increase the pressure on the virus to change.

“These booster vaccinations will only cause even more problems,” Vanden Bossche concludes. Those problems will extend beyond the emergence of virus variants that will enter cells via a different domain of the spike protein. In those variants, the vaccinal antibodies will not attack the new binding domain. The vaccinal antibodies will also no longer prevent the virus from entering cells. The vaccinated antibodies that have become ineffective will sit like a cap around the virus. As a result, not only will the innate antibodies no longer recognize the virus, but the virus will also be able to slip into host cells even more easily, without having to take the usual route.

The scientific term for this type of phenomenon is antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). ADE is a notorious phenomenon, which has surfaced in studies into the possibilities of making vaccines against SARS-CoV-1, dengue and RSV. The major danger of ADE is the acceleration of the onset of the disease symptoms. They develop so quickly that the help of the body’s own immune system or medical treatment can come too late. In this way, ADE would make the successor to Omicron an extremely formidable pathogen. If nature really is ill-disposed towards humanity, the phenomenon may even start playing with an omicron vaccine a few months after mass vaccinations, although Vanden Bossche does not dare to put his hand into the fire.

Vanden Bossche cannot predict exactly what the clinical picture of an infection with the post-Omicron virus will look like in vaccinated people. He fears that older people with underlying chronic diseases will no longer be the main target of post-Omicron, but that the occurrence of ADE will mainly affect children. After all, their innate antibodies are still little ‘trained’ by previous exposure to coronaviruses, which means that they will quickly be outcompeted by vaccinated antibodies. The chance of death from infection with the original coronavirus from Wuhan was a fraction of one percent, according to calculations by John Ioannides. “If the scenarios we are now talking about come true, we may be talking about percentages,” says Vanden Bossche. “Or maybe even tens of percents.”

If that pitch-black scenario materializes, the unvaccinated with well-functioning immune systems will be significantly more likely to escape than the vaccinated. That is certainly the case if those unvaccinated have recently come into contact with coronaviruses. But also unvaccinated people can still fall victim to the social disruption that such a disaster scenario will cause. In retrospect, historians will no doubt determine that a grossly wrong approach to the pandemic, followed by the collapse of all infrastructures and the outbreak of chaos, caused countless more victims than the original Wuhan virus itself could ever have caused.

“Of course I hope it doesn’t come to that”, Vanden Bossche sighs. “I hope we will be wise enough to stop mass vaccinations in time. I hope that we will still take measures that curb both the infection pressure and the disease at an early stage. But should those hopes fail, global catastrophe is the only logical outcome. There will be regions that will escape this coming catastrophe, but our regions are not one of them. “I see a gloomy outlook for Western countries, from the US to the EU, and from Israel to Australia,” says Vanden Bossche. “For Western culture, this could well mean the end.”

Africa probably still has the best chances, Vanden Bossche suspects. “I don’t mean the North African countries, nor South Africa, but the countries in between, where only a small percentage of the population has been vaccinated.” The virologist is aware that it sounds unlikely, as we have learned to associate Africa with hunger, bloody civil wars and corruption. “It is indeed ironic. Yet I suspect that if the rest of the planet continues on its path, Africa will be humanity’s last hope.”

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 13 2021

Dec 132021
 
 December 13, 2021  Posted by at 10:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  133 Responses »


Frans Masereel Montmartre 1925

 

• Another Reason Not To Jab The Children: Omicron (Malone)
• Will Omicron Kill Christmas? (O.)
• UK Booster Rollout To Increase To 1m A Day To Battle Omicron ‘Tidal Wave’ (G.)
• Pfizer Jab Is Only 22.5% Effective Against Omicron (ZH)
• Fauci: Americans May ‘Just Have To Deal With’ More Covid Boosters (Fox)
• Hospitalizations, Mortality Cut In Half With Ivermectin In Brazilian City (ZH)
• 2022 Trends, Predictions, Collapse, Covid & Wars – Gerald Celente (USAW)
• Four States Enlist National Guard To Battle Health Care Staffing Crisis (JTN)
• A $40 Million Gates Foundation Grant vs A Half Million Human Lives (WT)
• Twitter To Ban Users Who Repeatly Claim Vaxxed People Can Spread Covid (RTN)
• China Banking Assets Are $52 Trillion, Up By $40 Trillion Since 2008 (Peters)

 

 

It is scary to see that the only thing that holds our societies together at this point is fear.
People can no longer think.

• In the entire world there are still no deaths reported from Omicron
• US: 110 total Omicron infections (UK has more)
• 1 person in US infected with Omicron hospitalized (may well be for something different)

But: UK prediction from scientists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine:
• Best case: 175,000 hospital admissions and 24,700 deaths from Omicron by the end of April.
• Worst case: 74,800 deaths and 492,000 hospital admissions

“Pfizer Jab Is Only 22.5% Effective Against Omicron”: South Africa study.
So obviously the UK wants 1 million jabs per day. And Fauci wants more.

 

 

 

 

Two top soccer players, Napoli midfielder Piotr Zielinski and Man United defender Viktor Lindelof both left their game Sunday due to chest pain/breathing problems.

 

 

Ardern fund

 

 

The media: Omicron is vaccine resistant.
Also the media: We may need to lock down again because of all the unvaccinated.

 

 

“This is madness promoted by frightened psychotic chickens and Globalists with a pro-totalitarian bias. Just stop. Now.”

• Another Reason Not To Jab The Children: Omicron (Malone)

The data are clear. Officials have reported110 Omicron cases as of Saturday in the USA. Of the 66 people for whom vaccination status has been reported, 52 were fully vaccinated and many of those had been boosted. What we don’t know is whether or not those people who have already had COVID-19 actually caught Omicron, but it was so mild that they weren’t aware of it or if prior infection conferred complete immunity. What we do know is that 78% of the people in the USA/CDC report who have contracted Omicron were vaccinated. These data also directly contradict the public relations “data” press release from Pfizer that the third jab would protect against Omicron. Clinical data ALWAYS trumps lab test data.


This appears to be yet another case illustrating that Fauci/Biden parrot the Big Pharma narrative whenever possible rather than doing the job that we are paying them to do – independently analyze “The Science” and act with integrity and objectivity to protect American citizens rather than American Big Business and Big Investment firms. There have been NO DEATHS reported anywhere in the world with Omicron, including in the USA. Now there will be, because older people, people with high co-morbidities will catch Omicron and will die. People die from the common cold too. We can expect this – do not be swayed by the fear-porn that is sure to come when these deaths happen. Hospital rates in areas with a high percent of the Omicron variant are experiencing a drop off in hospitalizations. Due to low vaccination rates in some countries, this strongly implies that vaccination status is irrelevant with Omicron. Omicron is a more mild disease, more similar in symptoms to the common cold. [..] Assuming that Omicron is now the dominant variant in Botswana, lets look at the death rate in that country: It has literally gone to zero over the past month.

Omicron is 10 times more infectious than the original variant and two times more infectious than Delta. Omicron will become the predominant strain in the USA very shortly. So, whether vaccinated or not, Omicron is more mild and will spread throughout the land. Let me write that again, all evidence shows that Omicron is much more mild and vaccinated or unvaccinated will catch this variant. Now, let’s talk children. For all the reasons listed above, it is clear that vaccinating children now is a very bad idea. 146 million people in the USA have had SARS-CoV-2 , that is about 45% of the total population. This means 45% of children have had SARS-CoV-2, that is the virus – because children rarely get severe disease from the virus. It is the severe disease that is COVID-19. COVID-19 is the severe disease caused by the virus. Historically, children get infected by the virus.

Now that Omicron will become dominant very quickly and we know that there is a very good chance that natural infection confers better protection against Omicron and that for everyone this new variant is mild, why would we want to mandate vaccination for our healthy children? Remember, this is what we know already before Omicron emerged: • 1 in 2700 male adolescents will get pericarditis/myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine and the event rate appears to be even higher for Moderna. • 1 in 2200 will get some sort of neurological event from the vaccine (based on the curious case of Pfizer clinical trial participant Maddie de Gary). • That the adverse events in children are much higher than originally reported in the phase 3 clinical trials. • That the long term sides effects for this vaccine are unknown. • That after vaccination, there is a 3-4 week period of immunosuppression, where children (and adults) are susceptible to latent viral infections and other viruses.

Now smash these facts together with what we know about Omicron. The evidence becomes overwhelming. Not only are mandates a bad idea, but vaccinating children and young adults is too. This is madness promoted by frightened psychotic chickens and Globalists with a pro-totalitarian bias. Just stop. Now.

Read more …

No, but the fear of it will.

• Will Omicron Kill Christmas? (O.)

Two competing forces will determine Omicron’s impact on the nation over the next few weeks. The power of booster jabs to give last-minute protection against Covid-19 will be pitted against the new variant’s ability to elude existing immunity. The outcome will decide whether our festive season is going to be muted or miserable. If enough arms are jabbed with booster vaccines, while Omicron turns out to have poor powers to evade immunity, then there is hope hospital cases will be contained and the NHS will be protected. Severe restrictions in the new year – including the prospect of lockdowns – could be avoided. But if Omicron is found to evade existing immunity quite easily, while booster campaigns provide poor overall protection, then the country faces a very grim winter with strict restrictions needed for some time.

According to a study by scientists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the first scenario – poor Omicron escape from immunity matched by effective booster jab protection – would trigger a wave of infection that could lead to 175,000 hospital admissions and 24,700 deaths by the end of April. Closure of some entertainment venues and restrictions on indoor hospitality would be enough to control case numbers. By contrast, the most pessimistic scenario – high immune escape from vaccines and low effectiveness of booster jabs – would see 74,800 deaths while there would be 492,000 hospital admissions, a figure twice as high as the peak seen in January 2021. Far stricter restrictions, including lockdowns, would then have to be considered.

“These results suggest that Omicron has the potential to cause substantial surges in cases, hospital admissions and deaths in populations with high levels of immunity, including England,” the team state in their paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. Nicholas Davies, co-leader of the study team, described Omicron’s threat to the UK as “worrying”. Presented with evidence like this, many scientists have warned that urgent action should now be taken to hold back infections while booster campaigns are accelerated and given time to take effect. “Cases are doubling every two to three days which means there is a real risk the curve is going to get very steep around Christmas and New Year,” said the vaccine expert Peter English.

“That means panic measures could be brought in at the last minute and disrupt people’s festive plans. I am also desperately sad for my colleagues in clinical practice who face a January that is going to be worse than anything we’ve seen so far and at a time when they are now exhausted.”

Read more …

“Boris Johnson is gambling..”

• UK Booster Rollout To Increase To 1m A Day To Battle Omicron ‘Tidal Wave’ (G.)

Boris Johnson is gambling on an unprecedented ramping up of vaccinations, rolling out 1m booster jabs a day to stem an incoming “tidal wave of Omicron” and avoid imposing further restrictions. The army will be deployed across the country to help rapidly accelerate the vaccine programme and GPs will be told to cancel appointments to dedicate resources to offering vaccines to every UK adult by the end of December. In a televised address to the nation on Sunday night, the prime minister said he was “afraid we are now facing an emergency in our battle with the new variant, Omicron, and we must urgently reinforce our wall of vaccine protection to keep our friends and loved ones safe.”

Johnson, who is facing a major test of his authority this week as MPs rebel against new Covid restrictions, called the target “a national mission unlike anything we have done before in the vaccination programme”. It means vaccinating around 1 million people a day, up from 530,000 on Saturday. The UK record is 844,000 in March. All over-18s will be eligible from Monday, and NHS booking will open to that age group from Wednesday. Until now eligibility has been limited to over-40s. Jabs will be available on Christmas Day, though demand is expected to be low.

On Sunday the Covid alert level was raised from 3 to 4, indicating substantial pressure on the NHS, after a further 1,239 UK cases of Omicron were confirmed, nearly double the number reported the previous day. Omicron is expected to become Britain’s dominant variant within days, and Johnson warned it could “overwhelm the NHS and lead to very many deaths”. Announcing the booster offensive, Johnson said: “We know from bitter experience how these exponential curves develop. No one should be in any doubt: there is a tidal wave of Omicron coming.” He said two doses of vaccine were not enough, but scientists were confident that three would make a huge difference. On Friday UK data suggested that three jabs provide 70-75% protection against infection with Omicron, while two doses given three or more months ago give 30% to 40% or less.

Read more …

Throw it away.

• Pfizer Jab Is Only 22.5% Effective Against Omicron (ZH)

A few days ago, researchers in South Africa shared data from a preliminary study showing that the Pfizer vaccine is less effective at blocking the omicron variant than earlier variants like beta and delta. Now, the team is telling us exactly how much less effective the vaccine is. According to the same data gleaned from the blood plasma taken from 12 patients who tested positive for omicron, the team found that a two-shot course of Pfizer’s vaccine has just 22.5% efficacy against symptomatic infection with the omicron variant, though it can thwart severe disease, according to laboratory experiments in South Africa, according to Bloomberg.

The data comes courtesy of a team of researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban. Though data has been pouring out about omicron, and sometimes individual studies reach opposing findings, the general consensus is that omicron will be able to more easily evade protection afforded from the first generation of vaccines – however, the scientists say that people will still be protected against severe disease and death. But it matters less anyway, since any patient – even an unvaccinated one – has less to fear from omicron. The reason being is that it’s believed to cause a more mild, “flu-like” infection. As we’ve said before, when you hear politicians like Joe Biden talking about an omicron takeover as if it were already a certainty (only a couple thousand cases have been confirmed around the world, if that), it’s because they wish it were true.

The same is true for the CEOs of Moderna and Pfizer, who have been out sharing FUD about omicron with the news media on an almost non-stop rotation. They say their companies can have a new batch of vaccines available in 90-100 days. It’s almost as if they’ve been waiting for the opportunity, and if you look back at their comments, it’s clear that they have. Still, in the US, the CDC has confirmed that only 1 of 43 patients infected with the variant has been hospitalized.

Read more …

Tony Fauci is more deadly than Tony Soprano.

• Fauci: Americans May ‘Just Have To Deal With’ More Covid Boosters (Fox)

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said that Americans will “just have to deal with” the prospect of getting more coronavirus booster shots. Fauci made the statement on Sunday morning and said that the level of protection that the current coronavirus booster shots give to individuals will have to be monitored closely over the next several months. “If it becomes necessary to get yet another boost, then we’ll just have to deal with it when that occurs,” Fauci said. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director also said that he’s “hoping” that a third mRNA shot will give longer-lasting protection. “


I’m hoping from an immunological standpoint that that third shot of an mRNA and the second shot of a J&J will give a much greater durability of protection than just the six months or so that we’re seeing right now,” Dr. Fauci said. He added that it’s possible that the booster shot could “dramatically” increase the level of protection. “It’s tough to tell because the third shot of an mRNA could not only do what we absolutely know it does, is it dramatically increased the level of protection. But from an immunological standpoint, it could very well increase the durability of protection by things that you can’t readily measure by the level of antibodies that you might have a maturation of the immune system that would prolong the durability,” Dr. Fauci said.

Read more …

“..it was found effective 70% of the time as an early treatment, and just 39% of the time as a late treatment.”

Better than the vaccines with Omicron.

• Hospitalizations, Mortality Cut In Half With Ivermectin In Brazilian City (ZH)

Early on in the pandemic, before the vaccines were available, the Southern Brazilian city of Itajai offered Ivermectin as a prophylaxis against the disease. Between July and December of 2020, roughly 220,000 people were offered a dose of 0.2mg/kg/day (roughly 18mg for a 200lb person) as an optional treatment for 2 days, once every two weeks. 133,051 people took them up on it, while 87,466 did not. After analyzing the data, a team of researchers spanning several Brazilian institutes, the University of Toronto, and Columbia’s EAFIT concluded in a December pre-print study that hospitalization and mortality rates were cut in half over the seven month period among the Ivermectin group.

The authors adjusted for relevant confounding variables, including age, sex, medical history, previous diseases, and other conditions. The analysis contradicts an October report by Business Insider which claims, based on a Brazilian ICU doctor’s anecdotal evidence, that the experiment was a failure. Study limitations: The authors note, “Being a retrospective observational analysis, it is uncertain whether results would be reproducible in a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trial, but likely, since groups of ivermectin users and non-users had similar demographic characteristics, and rates were adjusted for the relevant confounding variables.”


We’re sure the ‘fact checkers’ are already hard at work trying to debunk the pre-print, however they may also want to take a look at ivmmeta.com – a real-time meta analysis of 70 studies which found that Ivermectin works as a prophylaxis 83% of the time. In peer-reviewed studies, it was found effective 70% of the time as an early treatment, and just 39% of the time as a late treatment. As we noted during the whole ‘horse paste’ controversy: Ivermectin This widely prescribed anti-parasitic which is also used in horses has shown meaningful efficacy worldwide in the treatment of mild and moderate cases of Covid-19, plus as a prophylactic. India’s Uttar Pradesh province, with a population of over 200 million, says that widespread early use of Ivermectin ‘helped keep positivity [and] deaths low.’

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“The only way this war will be won is if people unify under one umbrella and don’t leave.”

• 2022 Trends, Predictions, Collapse, Covid & Wars – Gerald Celente (USAW)

Gerald Celente, a renowned trends researcher, is back this time to talk about what he is sees coming in 2022. There is the never ending Covid, Vax Wars, military wars, economic upheaval, and even new predictions on the future of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Ron DeSantis. We start with what needs to be done to defeat the tyranny of the vax war on the global population. Celente says, “Vax War,’ look at the protests going on in Austria. Look at the protests going on in Germany, Italy, in France and the UK. . . . The only way this war will be won is if people unify under one umbrella and don’t leave.”

On the economy, Celente warns, “How about that bankster, that Fed Head Powell? He said inflation was going to be ‘temporary.’ Oh no, it’s going to be ‘transitory.’ They were shooting out that BS one after another, and we said from the beginning, inflation is real and it’s going to keep going. Guess what? It’s not the supply chains–it’s all the cheap money they keep dumping into the system to artificially prop it up.” Celente predicts, “The Fed is going to have to raise interest rates,” to stop what he is calling 1980’s style inflation. And he warns, “The higher interest rates go up, the further the economy is going to go down, and that’s what they are not talking about.”

Celente says get ready for what he is calling “Dragflation.” Meaning, the economy is going to drag lower as inflation surges higher. Celente also predicts that if the Fed Funds Interest Rate, which is now at .25%, “goes to 1.5%, the entire economy could collapse.” Celente is predicting new political parties that are anti-immigration and anti-establishment to form next year. Celente also gives what his assessment of Donald J. Trump, Hillary Clinton and Ron DeSantis are for the year 2022 and beyond. Celente also makes a bold prediction on the so-called CV19 mandates that should make the unvaxed feel more secure. The negative effects of vaccines are going to stay in the news, but Celente expects the mainstream media (MSM) to do everything possible to cover up the deaths and injuries caused by the CV19 injections. Will the numbers be overpowering to the MSM?

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Mandate fall-out.

• Four States Enlist National Guard To Battle Health Care Staffing Crisis (JTN)

Four states – Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire and New York – are deploying the National Guard to battle the COVID-19 healthcare staffing shortage. The staffing shortage rose sharply following the implementation of a vaccine mandate. Vaccination rates in New York, New Hampshire and Maine are some of the highest in the nation. More than 80% of people in these states have received at least one dose. In New York, thousands of healthcare workers were placed on unpaid leave after refusing to get the shot. The Guard, under the direction of Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) will send about 120 medical workers to 12 long-term care facilities, according to the Epoch Times. About 75 Guard members from Maine were deployed by Gov. Janet Mills (D). Over the past week, the largest hospital in Maine has not had any available critical care beds.


The New York Times reports that cases in Maine reached their pandemic peak recently. In New Hampshire, about 70 National Guard members are providing medical support across the state. “If unfortunately during the winter months, the hospitalization rates continue to increase, we’ll be more than happy to provide additional resources,” National Guard Maj. Gen. David Mikolaities said according to Epoch Times. Indiana called in the Guard last week to 13 facilities throughout the state following a request from Indiana University Health. The facility fired about 125 people who refused to comply with the school’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The Hoosier State has a vaccination rate of 56.7 percent of residents having received at least one dose.

Maine

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Someone needs to sue him.

• A $40 Million Gates Foundation Grant vs A Half Million Human Lives (WT)

In a stunning admission, virologist Dr. Andrew Hill acknowledged in a zoom call that publication of his study could lead to the deaths of at least a half million people. In defending his reversal on the effectiveness of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, he discussed his “difficult situation” and said, “I’ve got this role where I’m supposed to produce this paper and we’re in a very difficult, delicate balance.” The incident is recounted in Robert Kennedy Jr’s New York Times Bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the global war on Democracy and Public Health. Andrew Hill, PhD, is a senior visiting Research Fellow in Pharmacology at Liverpool University. He is also an advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation.

As a researcher for the WHO evaluating ivermectin, Hill wielded enormous influence over international guidance for the drug’s use. Hill had previously authored a analysis of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 that found the drug overwhelmingly effective. On Jan. 6 of 2021, Hill testified enthusiastically before the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidlelines Panel in support of ivermectin’s use. Within a month, however, Hill found himself in what he describes as a “tricky situation.” Under pressure from his funding sponsors, Hill then published an unfavorable study. Ironically, he used the same sources as in the original study. Only the conclusions had changed.

Shortly before he published, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Director of the Evidence-based Medicine Consultancy in Bath, England, and one of the world’s leading medical research analysts, contacted Hill via Zoom and recorded the call (transcript below). Lawrie had learned of his new position and reached out to try to rectify the situation. In a remarkable exchange, Hill admitted his manipulated study would likely delay the uptake of ivermectin in the UK and United States, but said he hoped his doing so would only set the lifesaving drug’s acceptance back by about “six weeks,” after which he was willing to give his support for its use. Hill affirmed that the rate of death at that time was 15,000 people per day. At the 80 percent recovery rate using the drug, which Hill and Lawrie discussed earlier in the call, the number of preventable deaths incurred by such a delay would be staggering — as many as 504,000.

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But that’s what the science says?!

• Twitter To Ban Users Who Repeatly Claim Vaxxed People Can Spread Covid (RTN)

Twitter has quietly updated its “COVID-19 misleading information policy” to impose new sanctions on tweets about vaccines, PCR tests, and health authorities. These sanctions include removing and labeling tweets. Both types of sanctions also result in Twitter users accruing strikes on their account which can lead to a permanent suspension. While the top of Twitter’s COVID-19 misleading information policy page currently states “Overview November 2021,” a December 2 archive of the page shows that the page was updated and the “Overview November 2021” text was added after December 2. One of the most notable changes to this “COVID-19 misleading information policy” we noticed is related to claims about whether vaccinated people can spread the coronavirus.

The policy now states that Twitter will label tweets with “corrective information” and give users a strike if they: • Claim that “the vaccines will cause you to be sick, spread the virus, or would be more harmful than getting COVID-19”. • Post what Twitter describes as “false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus (or symptoms, or immunity) to unvaccinated people”. This means Twitter users could now be sanctioned for sharing or discussing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) admission that “vaccinated people can still become infected and have the potential to spread the virus to others.”

Another change is that Twitter will start giving a strike to and labeling the tweets of users that use research and statistical findings to “make claims contrary to health authorities,” if it decides that their claims “misrepresent research or statistical findings pertaining to the severity of the disease, prevalence of the virus, or effectiveness of widely accepted preventative measures, treatments, or vaccines.” Previously, Twitter would sanction what it deemed to be “false or misleading” information about research findings but there was no provision about contradicting health authorities.

In addition to this, Twitter will give users two strikes and remove their tweets if they claim that “vaccines approved by health agencies (such as Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine in the United States) did not actually receive full approval/authorization, and therefore that the vaccines are untested, ‘experimental’ or somehow unsafe.” This appears to be a reference to criticism of a footnote in the Federal Drug Administration (FDA’s) “full authorization” documents for the Pfizer-BioNTech (Comirnaty) vaccine which revealed that the FDA had extended the emergency-use authorization for the same vaccine. Furthermore, users that claim that vaccines are part of a “global surveillance” effort will have their tweets removed and be given two strikes. The introduction of this provision follows vaccine-related surveillance tech, such as vaccine passports, being introduced in many countries.

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The Refrigeration Mode.

• China Banking Assets Are $52 Trillion, Up By $40 Trillion Since 2008 (Peters)

“China’s rapid industrialization and hunger for global market share kept deflationary pressure on durable goods prices for thirty years, helping to keep consumer price inflation and interest rates lower in the West. And the beauty of the Magic Money Tree was that China could insulate its highly cyclical industry from any default cycle. It monetized bad debt and preserved unprotected, deflationary capacity. The stock of money ballooned. Banking assets are now around $52 trillion. They’ve grown by about $40 trillion since 2008. They’re now twice the size of the US banking system and China’s banks have added the equivalent of the US banking systems in just eight years. This is what hyper MMT looks like.”

“The net result is that western monetary policy and China’s mercantile model fed off one another to give us this Alice in Wonderland ‘through-the-looking-glass’ transformation of massive monetary growth into a deflationary mechanism: The Refrigeration Mode. Both sides got what they wanted: China leapfrogging industrial development, and the US got low inflation in the great moderation. But it had side effects. A massive monetary overhang in China, hyper financialization in the US. These extremes are now biting back on the system through the political economy.” “The Deflationary D’s may still be with us (debt, demographics, disruption, digitization), but the system dynamic is becoming inflationary and there are some new supply side shocks that aren’t deflationary for a change.

“Both sides are in (re)flux. On the macro policy side, we are seeing powerful social reactions to the extremes produced by The Refrigeration Mode. These extremes are feeding into the political economy. Whether it’s the ‘Tax the Rich’ dress at the Met Gala, politicians and celebrities at climate change marches around the world, or bipartisan support for China containment, the challenge to the status quo is clear and present. The COVID crisis merely poured petrol on it.” “It means fiscal policy is back in the driver’s seat – just as central banks put an inflationary bias into their reaction functions. Future bailouts are coming via Main Street, as much as Wall Street. And when monetary and fiscal policy combine, policy becomes more directly inflationary in CPI terms, not simply in asset price terms.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

Georgia

 

 

Germany distances

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

Debt Rattle December 6 2021

Dec 062021
 
 December 6, 2021  Posted by at 9:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  63 Responses »


Joseph Mallord William Turner Sunrise over Plain, with Figures 1830

 

• Omicron Made €9bn In Week For Top Pfizer And Moderna Shareholders (BN.ie)
• We May Be Sterilizing an Entire Generation – Toxicologist (Mercola)
• A Pandemic of Fear ‘Manufactured’ by Authorities – Risch (ET)
• How Pfizer Silences World Governments in Vaccine Negotiations (C.org)
• In A Word: Bull**** (Denninger)
• Unvaccinated Canadians Can Be Banned From Grocery Stores In New Brunswick (TNC)
• Fauci Downplays Severity Of Omicron Strain (ZH)
• FDA In Talks To Streamline Approval Of Omicron-specific Vaccine (JTN)
• Lawyer For Dying Patient Who Recovered On Ivermectin Urges New Thinking (JTN)
• Michael Saylor: “Bitcoin Is The Oxygen Mask” (ZH)
• Russia Is Primed For A Persian Gulf Security ‘Makeover’ (Escobar)
• Santa To Replace ‘Naughty Or Nice’ List With ‘Vaxxed Or Unvaxxed’ List (BBee)

 

 

Reports of “extremely rare” events are not rare at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

South African president

 

 

“Lovely – and all this ill-gotten gain and filthy lucre will be reinvested back into political lobbying, revolving doors and thus more insanity.”

• Omicron Made €9bn In Week For Top Pfizer And Moderna Shareholders (BN.ie)

The discovery of the Omicron coronavirus variant caused the wealth of eight top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders to skyrocket by a combined €9 billion ($10.31 billion) in one week, according to campaigners. The campaigners from Global Justice Now said pharmaceutical executives are “making a killing from a crisis they helped to create”, with vaccine inequality helping to create the conditions for the Omicron variant to emerge. Moderna’s shares skyrocketed after the announcement of the variant and settled at $310.61 per share on December 1st, up 13.61 per cent from the previous Wednesday. Pfizer’s shares rose by 7.41 per cent from $50.91 per share to $54.68 per share. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel personally became more than $824 million richer in the week after the announcement of the variant, Global Justice Now said.

With the value of his shares rising from $6,052,522,978 to $6,876,528,630, he sold off 10,000 shares for $319 each on November 26th, the day after the variant was announced, cashing out $3.19 million. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla meanwhile made $339,236 in the week after the announcement of the variant, campaigners said, with his smaller portfolio rising from $4,581,035 to $4,920,270. Institutional investors also saw increased wealth, with Blackrock Inc’s Moderna and Pfizer shares increasing by more than $2.5 billion in the week after the announcement. Vanguard Group made a combined $2.7 billion; Moderna shareholders Baillie Gifford & Co increased by $1.6 billion; Morgan Stanley increased by $447 million; Flagship pioneering increased by $654 million; Pfizer investors State Street went up $1 billion; and Capital World gained $909 million.

Tim Bierley, pharma campaigner at Global Justice Now, said pharmaceutical companies “knew that grotesque levels of vaccine inequality would create prime conditions for new variants to emerge.” “They let Covid-19 spread unabated in low and middle-income countries. And now the same pharma execs and shareholders are making a killing from a crisis they helped to create. It’s utterly obscene,” he said.

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“..sperm can take up foreign mRNA, convert it into DNA, and release it as little pellets (plasmids) in the medium around the fertilized egg.”

• We May Be Sterilizing an Entire Generation – Toxicologist (Mercola)

Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist and toxicologist and director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services LLC. April 23, 2021, she delivered a three-minute public comment to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Her expertise is analysis of pharmacological dose-responses, mechanistic biology and complex toxicity dynamics. In her ACIP comment, Lindsay described how she aided the development of a contraceptive vaccine in the 1990s that ended up causing unintended autoimmune destruction and sterility in animals which, despite careful pre-analysis, had not been predicted.

She explains: “We were developing what was meant to be a temporary contraceptive vaccine, which was very attractive because it prevented fertilization rather than preventing implantation — or it should have; that was the idea. Unfortunately, even though quite a bit of analysis was done in different animal models to make sure that it did not have an autoimmune action, it did end up having an autoimmune action and caused complete ovarian destruction. Now it’s used in that manner [for permanent sterilization] in dogs, cats and other animals. So, that’s a cautionary tale of how animal studies can help us avoid mistakes in humans when they’re used properly, and when proper animal studies are done.”

We May Be Sterilizing an Entire Generation At the time, she called for an immediate halt to COVID-19 mRNA and DNA vaccines due to safety concerns on multiple fronts. In particular, she noted there is credible concern that they will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may “impair fertility and reproductive outcomes.” Not a single study has disproven this hypothesis, she noted. Another theory of how these injections might impair fertility can be found in a 2006 study, which showed sperm can take up foreign mRNA, convert it into DNA, and release it as little pellets (plasmids) in the medium around the fertilized egg.

The embryo then takes up these plasmids and carries them (sustains and clones them into many of the daughter cells) throughout its life, even passing them on to future generations. It’s possible that the pseudo-exosomes that are the mRNA contents would be perfect for supplying the sperm with mRNA for the spike protein. So, potentially, a vaccinated woman who gets pregnant with an embryo that can (via the sperms’ plasmids) synthesize the spike protein according to the instructions in the vaccine, would have an immune capacity to attack that embryo because of the “foreign” protein it displays on its cells. This then would cause a miscarriage. “We could potentially be sterilizing an entire generation,” Lindsey warned. The fact that there have been live births following COVID-19 vaccination is not proof that these injections do not have a reproductive effect, she said. Lindsay also pointed out that reports of menstrual irregularities and vaginal hemorrhaging in women who have received the injections number in the thousands, and this too hints at reproductive effects.

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Twitter label: “Misleading. Learn about emerging treatments for COVID-19 from health experts.”

However, “Risch has authored over 300 original peer-reviewed publications and was formerly a member of the board of editors for the American Journal of Epidemiology.” [..] ..an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health..”

• A Pandemic of Fear ‘Manufactured’ by Authorities – Risch (ET)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of fear, manufactured by individuals who were in the nominal positions of authority as the virus began to spread across the globe last year, according to Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch. In an appearance on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program, Risch, an epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, argued that by and large, what has characterized the entire CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic has been a “degree of fear and people’s response to the fear.” “Overall, I’d say that we’ve had a pandemic of fear. And fear has affected almost everybody, whereas the infection has affected relatively few,” said Risch.

“By and large, it’s been a very selected pandemic, and predictable. It was very distinguished between young versus old, healthy versus chronic disease people. So we quickly learned who was at risk for the pandemic and who wasn’t,” he added. “However, the fear was manufactured for everybody. And that’s what’s characterized the whole pandemic is that degree of fear and people’s response to the fear.” Risch has authored over 300 original peer-reviewed publications and was formerly a member of the board of editors for the American Journal of Epidemiology. The epidemiology professor suggested that individuals who held the nominal positions of authority during the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 initially spread a much worse picture of the “dire nature” of the virus than was warranted.

That included the message that everybody was at risk, everybody could die from contracting the virus, everybody needed to find protection, everybody needed to stay in their homes and not socialize with others to protect themselves, and in this way protect society, Risch explained. “People were quite afraid of that message, as anybody would be…with the government, with authorities, with scientists, scientific people, with medical people in authority in the public health institutions, all saying the same message starting in about, February, March of last year. And so we all kind of believe this,” he said.

In the first two months of the pandemic, stringent lockdowns and mask mandates were implemented to curb the transmission of COVID-19 in the United States and across the globe. Risch said that the types of messages issued by authorities led to widespread heightened anxiety levels. “All of our anxiety levels were raised, and we all made decisions to curtail, to various degrees, our exposures to other people, some more than others, but I think everybody had levels of anxiety that really affected how they carry out their life at that time,” he said.

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Demand opening the contracts in your own country. Stop pussy footing around.

• How Pfizer Silences World Governments in Vaccine Negotiations (C.org)

A new Public Citizen report has revealed the extent to which Pfizer bullies governments in COVID-19 vaccine negotiations, including barring governments from discussing the agreements without Pfizer’s approval, retaining unilateral control to make key decisions and even securing an intellectual property waiver for itself. “Pfizer is taking advantage of countries’ desperation,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “Most of us have sacrificed during the pandemic; staying distant to protect family and friends. Pfizer went the other way, using its control of scarce vaccines to win special privileges, from people that have little choice.”In February, Pfizer was accused of bullying governments in a story published by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Public Citizen has identified several Pfizer contracts, including with Brazil, Colombia, the European Commission and the U.S., that offer a glimpse into how the world’s second largest pharmaceutical corporation has gained the power to throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits all during the worst public health crisis in a century.The report outlines how Pfizer consistently utilizes six tactics to leverage power against governments worldwide. First, Pfizer silences governments through the use of nondisclosure provisions in many of its contracts. Brazil, for example, is prohibited from making “any public announcement concerning the existence… or terms” of the contract or commenting on its relationship with Pfizer without Pfizer’s prior written consent. Second, Pfizer can disallow governments from accepting additional donations of the Pfizer vaccine.

Third, Pfizer exempts itself from liability for intellectual property infringements, shifting the financial risk of Pfizer’s actions to government purchasers – despite Pfizer’s opposition to similar exemptions for manufacturers proposed at the World Trade Organization. Fourth, it gives the power to secret private arbitrators, not public courts, to decide issues on contract disputes. Fifth, Pfizer requires some countries to waive sovereign immunity, so it can go after state assets in case of a dispute. Finally, Pfizer gives itself sole power when it comes to making key decisions, including how vaccine deliveries will be prioritized if there is a supply shortage.

“Behind closed doors, Pfizer wields its power to extract a series of concerning concessions from governments,” said Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher at Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program and author of the report. “The global community cannot allow pharmaceutical corporations to keep calling the shots.”Pfizer’s dominance over sovereign countries poses fundamental challenges to the global pandemic response. The U.S. government, and specifically the Biden administration, should use its considerable leverage to call on Pfizer to renegotiate its existing contracts and pursue fairer practices.

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“There was plenty of reason to believe the spike protein, alone, was dangerous even without the rest of the virus and this was known prior to mass-distribution of the jabs.”

• In A Word: Bull**** (Denninger)

There is no reason to believe we can successfully, on a long-term basis, vaccinate against a coronavirus since we never have before in either man or beast. There is no reason to believe attempting to vaccinate against coronaviruses is safe because in many other instances it was proved to be not, and in some it resulted in fatality of many or all the animals under test upon rechallenge. One specific instance of wildly-enhanced disease occurred in cats, which is a species that we know can become infected by this virus. There is no reason to believe that deliberately inducing the presence of binding antibodies in a person to this virus, which we knew the vaccines did before the EUAs were issued, would be safe on a durable basis.

In fact we had every reason to believe that would be unsafe simply based on what that sort of antibody does on a biological basis. You would in fact be crazily homicidal to deliberately infuse only binding antibodies to this or any other virus into a person. There was plenty of reason to believe the spike protein, alone, was dangerous even without the rest of the virus and this was known prior to mass-distribution of the jabs. While getting infected certainly could lead to trouble in this regard infection is not certain where vaccination, once you do it, is. Further, the dosing for the vaccines is set to produce much higher levels of spike protein (and thus antibodies) in the body than does natural infection, so any such risk from the spike would be logically expected to be higher from vaccination than natural infection.

As regards children there is not now and never has been an argument for giving them a Covid-19 vaccine. They do not require or benefit from any protection that it might afford on a statistical basis and since we know there are dangers, many of which we have no way to quantify and will not be able to do so for ten or more years it is a rank violation of logic and the Hippocratic Oath, never mind gross negligence and malpractice, to administer or permit to be administered same to kids.

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Lock the door and throw away the key.

• Unvaccinated Canadians Can Be Banned From Grocery Stores In New Brunswick (TNC)

Beginning Saturday, people in New Brunswick who do not show proof of full vaccination can be barred from entering grocery stores to buy food. The measure was announced as part of the province’s “winter action plan,” which allows any business, including grocery stores, the option of barring unvaccinated individuals. According to Health Minister Dorothy Shephard, it comes as the province sees a “very concerning” rise in COVID infections over the last two weeks, particularly among unvaccinated Canadians. The province reported 97 cases and 2 deaths since Thursday. The new restriction belongs to the first level of a three-level escalating alert system.


“The measures are not difficult,” Shephard said, adding “the power to keep us in level one is in our hands.” In a guide published by the federal government, Public Safety Canada names food as one of ten critical sectors of infrastructure, calling its preparation and delivery an Essential Service and Function. While provinces have been free to manage their own restrictions and lockdowns during the pandemic, grocery stores across the country have until now remained open to everyone. The announcement comes a day after Shephard warned New Brunswickers against making Christmas travel plans.

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The double barrel: induce enough panic, and then soothe it a little.

• Fauci Downplays Severity Of Omicron Strain (ZH)

[..] with almost two weeks since the first appearance of the Omicron variant and with a distinct lack of any evidence that the new strain is more dangerous, or results in a greater number of more acute hospitalizations than the Delta or other variants, the narrative by the “scientific establishment” – which has burned through most if not all of its credibility in the past year by constantly ‘moving the goal posts’ to serve various political agendas – appears to be changing once again, and earlier today none other than the chief health propaganda shaman of the Biden admin, Anthony Fauci, indicated that “the U.S. was encouraged by reports from South African officals that the rapid spread of omicron hadn’t yet resulted in a spike in hospitalizations in that country, an indication that the strain could be less virulent.”

“Though it’s too early to really make any definitive statements about it thus far, it does not look like there’s a great degree of severity to it,” Fauci said on Sunday in a CNN interview. He added that more review is needed to confirm that Omicron causes less illness than other variants, such as Delta, “but thus far, the signals are a bit encouraging.” Of course, making a blanket “all clear” determination would have made a mockery of all the fearmongering that was unleashed just last week, and so Fauci cautioned that it was too soon to make any “definitive statements” about the variant and encouraged Americans to get vaccinations and booster shots, adding that “you got to hold judgment until we get more experience.” Fauci’s comments came as the Biden administration reported that Omicron had spread to 16 US states.

The new variant’s many mutations suggest that it might not be effectively treated with some Covid-19 therapeutics and that it could evade the immunity provided by current vaccines, CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky said on Sunday in an ABC News interview. Despite the concerns over jab efficacy, Fauci said getting more Americans to take vaccine booster shots will be “really critical in addressing whether or not we’re going to be able to handle this.” As with Delta, boosters will elevate immunity levels to help prevent infections, or at least reduce the severity of illnesses caused by the variant, he said as it becomes apparent that the narrative is now shifting to using Omicron as a talking point for widespread use of booster shots.

“The vaccines that we are distributing now in the United States and throughout the world are directed against the original, ancestral or Wuhan strain,” Fauci told Jake Tapper, who unlike his pal Chris Cuomo, has yet to be fired. He added that “we feel certain that there will be some degree, and maybe a considerable degree, of protection against the Omicron variant if, in fact, it starts to take hold in a dominant way in this country.”

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Streamline has a positive vibe to it. Testing is so yesterday.

• FDA In Talks To Streamline Approval Of Omicron-specific Vaccine (JTN)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky confirmed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is “already in conversations” to streamline authorization of a new COVID-19 vaccine specifically for the new omicron variant. The Hill reports that ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked Walensky on Sunday, “Is there any world where you can see that moving much faster given we’ve already been through this?” The CDC director responded: “Much of that I would have to defer to the FDA, but they’re already in conversations about streamlining the authorization of this, of an omicron-specific vaccine, partially because much of the vaccine is actually exactly the same, and, really, it would just be that mRNA code that would have to change.


“FDA will move swiftly, and CDC will move swiftly right thereafter,” she said. Omicron was listed as a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization shortly after Thanksgiving. Symptoms of omicron have been described as “extremely mild” by a South African doctor who helped discover the variant.

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We all do. But where’s the profit?

• Lawyer For Dying Patient Who Recovered On Ivermectin Urges New Thinking (JTN)

An Illinois lawyer who helped a dying COVID patient win court-ordered treatment with ivermectin and survive says the episode reveals a deep need for American health professions to rethink their approach to a pandemic that has persisted nearly two full years. “There are obviously remedies that we’re not looking at,” attorney Kristin Erickson told Just the News. “And we need to think outside of the current standard of care that hospitals are giving. And if it’s not working, let’s look at outcomes and not finances.” Erickson represented 71-year-old Sun Ng of Naperville, Ill., who was on a ventilator for weeks and dying with COVID-19 when his lawyer won a court order Nov. 8 to force the hospital to treat him with ivermectin, an anti-parasitic and anti-inflammatory drug long used widely in the United States to treat disease like Lupus.

Within days. Ng recovered and is now back home walking and enjoying life, Erickson said. “After one day, he was able to do a breathing test he couldn’t do for 22 days,” she said in an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “After three days, he was off the vent for two hours. And then by the fifth day, he was off it entirely. So the hospital tried to file for, you know, a physician report, after he was off the vent, saying that ivermectin is not the reason he’s better. But clearly it is.” There are numerous studies — Erickson said she located 66 studies globally — that show ivermectin is effective in fighting and warding off the virus, and it is used in places like India and Bangladesh but not in the United States. Even the National Institutes of Health’s Web site recently showcased one such study conducted by foreign researchers.

“I think the fact that it is so cheap, you know, and not money-making, could be the reason that we don’t use, we don’t want to back it,” Erickson said. “We don’t want the studies here in the United States.” Erickson said the phones at her office and the New York group that assisted Ng have been ringing off the hook and the courts are likely to be inundated for similar interventions for other patients after what happened in the Ng case. “I don’t know what people’s motivations are,” she said. “Certainly ours here is to help people get what they need. I know there’s a lot of good-hearted people out there who want to save people, even in the hospital setting. Physicians and nurses, they want to do the right thing. But if hospitals aren’t allowing it, that creates a barrier for people who are hospitalized.”

Read more …

Feel lucky?

• Michael Saylor: “Bitcoin Is The Oxygen Mask” (ZH)

[..] the bitcoin advocate notes that “money is that shared ledger of who owes what to whom,” explaining the difference between “weak money and strong money” in terms of being able to manufacture glass beads and dump them on Africa-past (glass beads are weak money) analogizing to the dollar (being able to ‘manufacture’ dollars and dump them on the world). Because of the inflationary impact on goods of this ‘manufacturing’ of dollars, you’re never going to catch up because you are being paid the currency: “the only way you can actually stay ahead is to grow your cashflows faster than the rate of monetary inflation… and that’s why the rate of expansion of the money supply is so critical.” Saylor makes the prescient point that while CPI dominates inflation discussions, “the government gets to pick what’s in that basket of goods and how it is weighted.”

The last decade has seen monetary inflation rise at around 14% per year… and the S&P has risen around 14% per year. The best inflation rate for an investor, Saylor explains, or for anyone who wants to stay wealthy or be wealthy – if you’re concerned about maintaining your economic purchasing power – “it’s the monetary inflation rate – the rate at which the supply of money is expanding.” Then Saylor takes us on a journey: “…the currency is to the economy what your blood is to your body… and economic energy or money is to the currency what oxygen is to your blood.” “So, common sense says that, if I keep sucking the oxygen out of the room, you’re going either suffocate or freeze to death…” “…and if I keep sucking the economic energy out of the currency, the economy collapses… and in the extreme you get ripped back to stone-age barter.”

“…when the money doesn’t work anymore, I have trade you cigarettes for bullets… and the problem with that is the economy becomes a million times less efficient.” “…how many countries in the world have a collapsed currency…66 of the dollarized [ZH: have an inflation problem]… there’s about 130 floating currencies and all of them are weaker than the dollar.” “The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency and the US dollar is expanding… it was expanding 10% a year for a decade… it’s now expanding at 14% a year and expanded 34% over the past 12 months…” [..] “…thus the dollar is weakening… it’s like the oxygen is getting sucked out of the room…”

Saylor turns to Tucker and asks “..if I told you the oxygen is getting sucked out of the room… but there’s an oxygen mask dropped out of the ceiling over there, what would you do?” Tucker exclaims “I’d run for it!” Saylor replies “yeah, put the oxygen mask on…” concluding his analogy by explaining that “Bitcoin is the oxygen mask.”

Read more …

“..Chalous alone could supply as much as 52 percent of natural gas needs of the whole EU for the next 20 years..”

• Russia Is Primed For A Persian Gulf Security ‘Makeover’ (Escobar)

Russia and Iran are forging a strengthened strategic partnership, not only geopolitical but also geoeconomic, fully aligned to the Russian-conceptualized Greater Eurasian Partnership – and also demonstrated by Moscow’s support for Iran’s recent ascension to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the only West Asian state to be admitted thus far. Furthermore, three years ago Iran launched its own regional security framework proposal for the region called HOPE (the Hormuz Peace Endeavor) with the intent to convene all eight littoral states of the Persian Gulf (including Iraq) to address and resolve the vital issues of cooperation, security, and freedom of navigation. The Iranian plan didn’t get far off the ground. While Iran suffers from adversarial relations with some of its intended audience, Russia carries none of that baggage.

And that brings us to the essential Pipelineistan angle, which in the Russia–Iran case revolves around the new, multi-trillion dollar Chalous gas field in the Caspian Sea. A recent sensationalist take painted Chalous as enabling Russia to “secure control over the European energy market.” That’s hardly the story. Chalous, in fact, will enable Iran – with Russian input – to become a major gas exporter to Europe, something that Brussels evidently relishes. The head of Iran’s KEPCO, Ali Osouli, expects a “new gas hub to be formed in the north to let the country supply 20 percent of Europe’s gas needs.” According to Russia’s Transneft, Chalous alone could supply as much as 52 percent of natural gas needs of the whole EU for the next 20 years.

Chalous is quite something: a twin-field site, separated by roughly nine kilometers, the second-largest natural gas block in the Caspian Sea, just behind Alborz. It may hold gas reserves equivalent to one-fourth of the immense South Pars gas field, placing it as the 10th largest gas reserves in the world. Chalous happens to be a graphic case of Russia-Iran-China (RIC) geoeconomic cooperation. Proverbial western speculative spin rushed to proclaim the 20-year gas deal as a setback for Iran. The final breakdown, not fully confirmed, is 40 percent for Gazprom and Transneft, 28 percent for China’s CNPC and CNOOC, and 25 percent for Iran’s KEPCO. Moscow sources confirm Gazprom will manage the whole project. Transneft will be in charge of transportation, CNPC is involved in financing and banking facilities, and CNOOC will be in charge of infrastructure and engineering. The whole Chalous site has been estimated to be worth a staggering $5.4 trillion.

Read more …

“We don’t really give out coal anymore due to climate change,” Toymaker noted.

• Santa To Replace ‘Naughty Or Nice’ List With ‘Vaxxed Or Unvaxxed’ List (BBee)

In a major break with hundreds of years of Christmas tradition, Santa Claus will not be using his famous “Naughty or Nice” list this year. Instead, Father Christmas will be keeping a list of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. “With the pandemic entering its second Christmas season, Santa felt the traditional ‘Naughty or Nice’ list needed an update,” said North Pole spokes-elf Trudy Toymaker. “This year, he’ll be keeping track of all the good little children who get vaccinated, as well as the evil unvaccinated kids who want their family and friends to die.” Vaccinated children will receive lots of toys and goodies from Santa, while the unvaccinated kids will get skunked this Christmas. “We don’t really give out coal anymore due to climate change,” Toymaker noted.


“Instead, the unvaccinated kids will receive a box of masks, some hand sanitizer, and a pre-filled postcard to report their conspiracy-theorist parents to child services and the FBI.” Toymaker said thousands of Elves on Shelves have been dispatched to pediatrician’s offices around the country to keep track of which children are getting vaccinated. Santa’s tech team also plans to hack into children’s electronic medical records later this month to make sure nobody is missed. In addition to the new vaccine requirements, Santa is asking families to include a $20 bill with his traditional plate of milk and cookies this year. “This will help Santa offset rising costs due to inflation and elf labor shortages,” Toymaker said.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brussels Sunday

 

 

Cyprus

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 9 2021

Aug 092021
 
 August 9, 2021  Posted by at 8:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  111 Responses »


René Magritte The evening gown 1954

 

• A Hypothesis (Greer)
• Fauci Warns Of ‘Worse Variant’ That ‘Could Impact The Vaccinated’ (RT)
• 14 Israelis Have Caught COVID-19 Even After Booster Shot (ZH)
• Covid Booster Shots Coming “Soon”, Fauci Tells CNN (ZH)
• What Changes The Unvaccinated Minds? Fear. (CNN)
• Majority of American Physicians Decline COVID Shots (AAPS)
• Prophylactic Role of Ivermectin in SARS-CoV-2 Infection (Cureus)
• Information Security Expert On Revealed Pfizer Agreements (Aflds)
• Covid-19 Survivors May Possess Wide-ranging Resistance To The Disease (Emory)
• A Massive Black Hole With 34 Billion Times The Mass of Our Sun (SA)
• Spanish Village Seeks Unesco World Heritage Status For Outdoor Chats
• 2500 Year Old Ancient Olive Tree Burned Down in Evia Fires in Greece (GR)

 

 

 

 

Ouch!

 

 

Iceland gives up on immunity through vaccination. Smart.


 

 

UK, Israel, US saw an early surge in vaccinations. 6 months later, they have a surge in infections.

 

 

Greer has the bleakest vision yet. It makes being vaccinated look like a crazy gamble.

Oh, and remember: ADE is not a wild hypothesis, it has been observed in numerous animal trials over the years.

• A Hypothesis (Greer)

Stage Nine: Things Get Serious

All of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t getting it. All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that it was because too many people were sick you could count on being shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of what the fatality rate will be.

This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect.

Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle

As ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be. Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will believe them one more time.

Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame

When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke.

Read more …

“There’s a tenet that everybody knows in virology: a virus will not mutate unless you allow it to replicate..”

Another tenet says it’s unlikely to mutate very much unless you give it a reason to. Like a non-sterilizing vaccine.

Oh, and Tony, the vaccines allow it to replicate, remember?

• Fauci Warns Of ‘Worse Variant’ That ‘Could Impact The Vaccinated’ (RT)

In his latest bid to promote Covid-19 jabs, White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci upped his pandemic warnings and cautioned vaccinated individuals about an even “worse variant” that could come after Delta. Those who remain unvaccinated, Fauci claimed in a Sunday interview with MSNBC, are responsible for the coronavirus mutating. This has led to the Delta variant, which health officials have continuously warned is partly behind the mass rise in cases and could lead to another surge in the fall. “There’s a tenet that everybody knows in virology: a virus will not mutate unless you allow it to replicate,” Fauci said. “Fortunately for us, the vaccines do quite well against Delta, particularly in protecting you from severe disease.”

“But if you give the virus the chance to continue to change, you’re leading to a vulnerability that we might get a worse variant, and then that will impact not only the unvaccinated, that will impact the vaccinated because that variant could evade the protection of the vaccine.” Despite aggressive efforts from Joe Biden’s administration to promote vaccines, rates have been lagging as coronavirus cases have been on the rise recently. Some cities, such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas, have found themselves facing reinstated mask mandates in response to the new cases. New York City also became the first this month to announce that proof of vaccination will be required at certain venues, gyms, and restaurants.

While Fauci does not see a federal mandate being imposed, he did say he believes that once the FDA gives full approval to the vaccines, which he predicts will be sometime later this month, it will make it easier for private businesses to begin mandating vaccinations, something Fauci has endorsed in the past. The infectious disease expert had previously predicted a “flood” of vaccine mandates earlier in the week when discussing the impending approval. “The time has come [when] we’ve got to go the extra step to get people vaccinated.”

Read more …

Good thing they’re cheaper by the dozen.

• 14 Israelis Have Caught COVID-19 Even After Booster Shot (ZH)

The population of Israel has been looked upon of late as a global guinea pig of sorts given it was the first country out of the gate to implement a large-scale booster shot program for people 60 and up who’ve already been vaccinated with two rounds of the COVID-19 shot. This was announced only at the end of July, and the early data is beginning to trickle in. Israel is considered to have among the world’s highest vaccination rates, with 5.3 million of its citizens having been inoculated with two doses, with weeks ago headlines declaring it had reached ‘herd immunity’ – only for the headlines to give way to reports of the alarming rapid rise of breakthrough cases.

And now it appears that even the much touted COVID booster shot could be failing to protect: “Internal Health Ministry data shows that 14 Israelis have been infected with COVID-19 a week after receiving a booster shot, Channel 12 news reports,” The Times of Israel writes Sunday. Already over the weekend Israeli media is reporting that “serious cases” have hit a four month high, with over 324 patients hospitalized, many of them in critical condition. It was only a little over a week ago that elderly Israelis began receiving the third shot, and so “early results” and observations have only now begun to come in, and it’s not looking good. The Times of Israel continues in its breaking report:

The network says 11 of those infected are over the age of 60 — two of whom have now been hospitalized — while the other three got their third dose because they are immunocompromised.= If confirmed in larger samples, the figures could cast doubt on the effectiveness of the booster shot, which Israel has started administering before major health bodies around the world have approved it. Channel 12 noted that the confirmed new infections were revealed based on tests performed one week after the group had received the third shot. Three of the above are being described as “younger patients”. This comes as the CDC and FDA have begun discussions on pushing forward with offering booster shots in the US – possibly as early as September, according to some reports.

[..] Anthony Fauci, has already begun making the pitch for a third shot “reasonably soon” while making the rounds on the big Sunday shows… “We need to look at them in a different light,” Fauci said of boosters on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday, according to Bloomberg. “We would certainly be boosting those people before we boost the general population that’s been vaccinated, and we should be doing that reasonably soon.” He began by noting the booster would first be made available for the immunocompromised and elderly (just like in Israel). “As soon as they see that level of durability of protection goes down, then you will see the recommendation to vaccinate those individuals,” Fauci added.

Read more …

Something I’ve been pondering:

“Fauci said the Delta variant presents the additional problem that vaccinated people can also transmit the virus to someone else.”

Whichever variant you have has been transferred to you from someone. The only “active ingredient” we know of related to the vaccines is spike proteins.

Does Alpha prevent their propagation, but Delta does not? How does that work?

• Covid Booster Shots Coming “Soon”, Fauci Tells CNN (ZH)

As for the kind of data the CDC will be looking for, Fauci said that the CDC has been tracking the level of durability of protection for the elderly, those in nursing homes and young people, month by month. “As soon as they see that level of durability of protection goes down, then you will see the recommendation to vaccinate those individuals.” Speaking one day after Barack Obama’ epic birthday bash (despite it being shrunk for just the closest family and friends), Fauci said that health officials don’t take breakthrough infections “lightly,” warning that the delta variant which is more contagious and is fueling the surge of U.S. cases to more than 100,000 a day, will produce “more” breakthrough cases. Luckily, everyone inside the Barack Birthday Bash tent is exempt from such risks.


And speaking of furiously moving goalposts, Fauci said the Delta variant presents the additional problem that vaccinated people can also transmit the virus to someone else. That has led to the CDC revising its mask guidelines recently. But, he stressed: “The vaccines are still doing what you originally want them to do — to keep you out of the hospital to prevent you from getting seriously ill.” Actually, what the CDC “originally” wanted the vaccines to do, was to prevent those who were jabbed from infecting others. Only later did we learn that too was a fabrication. Finally, Fauci reminded viewers that all Covid-19 vaccines remains experimental although he assured his pals at CNN that a full approval could arrive “within the next few weeks.”

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Scare them into submission. Then get ’em a shrink.

“Of course, there will always be people who won’t get vaccinated no matter what. About half of America’s unvaccinated adult population say they’ll never get a vaccine.”

Wait, doesn’t that invalidate the entire concept?

• What Changes The Unvaccinated Minds? Fear. (CNN)

So what does work to get more people to take the vaccine? One answer seems clear in the polling and in the real world: fear. Fear of getting the virus and of losing freedoms looks like it motivates people to get vaccinated. You can see this well in the latest trends in vaccination and case counts. As of Friday morning, more people have taken the vaccine in the last week than have since June. This has happened as case counts and hospitalizations have been rising nationally. Zoom in on the places where cases are the highest: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. With the exception of Florida, all have had some of the lowest vaccination rates since vaccines were made available. Over the last week, however, all five states rank in the top five for number of people per capita getting vaccinated throughout the entire country.

The correlation here is clear enough, and the polling buffers the idea of a real connection. The jump in vaccinations is happening as concern about the virus is rising once again. In Monmouth University polling, for example, concern that someone in your family would catch the virus jumped 11 points from June to late July. The Axios/Ipsos poll showed a similar trend with concern about the virus jumping in early August to its highest level since April. When we examine Ipsos’ last two polls more closely, the connection between fear of the virus and likelihood of the unvaccinated getting shots becomes clear enough. Among those who are extremely or very concerned about the virus, about 39% of the unvaccinated say they’re likely to get the vaccine. This drops to about 30% who are somewhat concerned.

It declines to only about 12% with those who are not very concerned about the virus, and a mere 5% of those who are not concerned at all about the vaccine. Kaiser Family Foundation polling confirms this trend. Of those who are open to getting the vaccine but aren’t sure (i.e. the wait and see group), 45% are concerned they could get seriously ill from coronavirus. This drops to just 8% among those who say they will definitely not get the vaccine. These findings also comport with what I showed last week: The vaccinated are most likely to fear the virus most. Protecting themselves from getting sick or fear of getting sick was the No. 1 and 2 reasons respondents who are vaccinated said they got the vaccine in a June Kaiser poll. Fear, not surprisingly, is a powerful emotion. For those who don’t fear the virus, fear of losing their job may be the answer to getting them vaccinated.

Ipsos showed this past week that 33% of unvaccinated adults said an employer requiring them to get the shot would make them likely to get one. That may seem low, but it was actually the highest rated action of any tested to see if the unvaccinated would likely get a vaccine. The only thing that came close was when respondents were told that they would get a bonus or raise (26%). [..] Of course, there will always be people who won’t get vaccinated no matter what. About half of America’s unvaccinated adult population say they’ll never get a vaccine. The key is to convince the other half who aren’t vaccinated yet to get it. Fear does seem to be working with them.

Read more …

June 16. They’re just not scared enough yet… Maybe they don’t watch CNN?

• Majority of American Physicians Decline COVID Shots (AAPS)

Of the 700 physicians responding to an internet survey by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), nearly 60 percent said they were not “fully vaccinated” against COVID. This contrasts with the claim by the American Medical Association that 96 percent of practicing physicians are fully vaccinated. This was based on 300 respondents. Neither survey represents a random sample of all American physicians, but the AAPS survey shows that physician support for the mass injection campaign is far from unanimous. “It is wrong to call a person who declines a shot an ‘anti-vaxxer,’” states AAPS executive director Jane Orient, M.D.

“Virtually no physicians are ‘anti-antibiotics’ or ‘anti-surgery,’ whereas all are opposed to treatments that they think are unnecessary, more likely to harm than to benefit an individual patient, or inadequately tested.” The AAPS survey also showed that 54 percent of physician respondents were aware of patients suffering a “significant adverse reaction.” Of the unvaccinated physicians, 80 percent said “I believe risk of shots exceeds risk of disease,” and 30% said “I already had COVID.” Other reasons for declining the shot included unknown long-term effects, use of aborted fetal tissue, “it’s experimental,” availability of effective early treatment, and reports of deaths and blood clots.

Of 560 practicing physicians, 56 percent said they offered early treatment for COVID. Nonphysicians were also invited to participate in the survey. Of some 5,300 total participants, 2,548 volunteered comments about associated adverse effects of which they were aware. These included death, amputation, paralysis, stillbirth, menstrual irregularities, blindness, seizures, and heart issues. “Causality is not proven. However, many of these episodes might have resulted in a huge product liability or malpractice award if they had occurred after a new drug,” stated Dr. Orient. “Purveyors of these COVID products are protected against lawsuits.”

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India. “..reduced the risk of COVID-19 infection by 83%..”

• Prophylactic Role of Ivermectin in SARS-CoV-2 Infection (Cureus)

Introduction
Healthcare workers (HCWs) are vulnerable to getting infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Preventing HCWs from getting infected is a priority to maintain healthcare services. The therapeutic and preventive role of ivermectin in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is being investigated. Based on promising results of in vitro studies of oral ivermectin, this study was conducted with the aim to demonstrate the prophylactic role of oral ivermectin in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection among HCWs at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Bhubaneswar.

Methods
A prospective cohort study was conducted at AIIMS Bhubaneswar, which has been providing both COVID and non-COVID care since March 2020. All employees and students of the institute who provided written informed consent participated in the study. The uptake of two doses of oral ivermectin (300 ºg/kg/dose at a gap of 72 hours) was considered as exposure. The primary outcome of the study was COVID-19 infection in the following month of ivermectin consumption, diagnosed as per Government of India testing criteria (real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction [RT-PCR]) guidelines. The log-binomial model was used to estimate adjusted relative risk (ARR), and the Kaplan-Meier failure plot was used to estimate the probability of COVID-19 infection with follow-up time.

Results
Of 3892 employees, 3532 (90.8%) participated in the study. The ivermectin uptake was 62.5% and 5.3% for two doses and single dose, respectively. Participants who took ivermectin prophylaxis had a lower risk of getting symptoms suggestive of SARS-CoV-2 infection (6% vs 15%). HCWs who had taken two doses of oral ivermectin had a significantly lower risk of contracting COVID-19 infection during the following month (ARR 0.17; 95% CI, 0.12-0.23). Females had a lower risk of contracting COVID-19 than males (ARR 0.70; 95% CI, 0.52-0.93). The absolute risk reduction of SARS-CoV-2 infection was 9.7%. Only 1.8% of the participants reported adverse events, which were mild and self-limiting.

Conclusion
Two doses of oral ivermectin (300 µg/kg/dose given 72 hours apart) as chemoprophylaxis among HCWs reduced the risk of COVID-19 infection by 83% in the following month. Safe, effective, and low-cost chemoprophylaxis has relevance in the containment of pandemic alongside vaccine.

Read more …

More ouch.

• Information Security Expert On Revealed Pfizer Agreements (Aflds)

“If you were wondering why Ivermectin was suppressed, it is because the agreement that countries had with Pfizer does not allow them to escape their contract, which states that even if a drug will be found to treat COVID-19, the contract cannot be voided.”

Unredacted contracts for the experimental biological agent known as the “COVID-19 vaccine” between the Pfizer corporation and various governments continue to be revealed. Information security expert Ehden Biber told America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) Frontline News that the first document to recently emerge was discovered by Albanian newspaper Gogo.al. Biber then was able to locate the digitally-signed Brazilian contract, and at least two others, one with the European Commission, and the other with the Dominican Republic. AFLDS Chief Science Officer Dr. Michael Yeadon responded to the revelations after perusing the Albania contract, saying it “looks genuine.”

He continued: “I know the basic anatomy of these agreements and nothing is missing that I’d expect to be present, and I’ve seen no clues that suggests it’s fake.” Yeadon noted what he found “the most stunning revelation,” citing the clause that stipulates “if there are any laws or regulations in your country under which Pfizer could be prosecuted, you agree to CHANGE THE LAW OR REGULATION to close that off.” (emphasis his) In a Twitter thread that has since been removed except the first tweet in the thread, Biber explained the significance of the revealed agreements: “Because the cost of developing contracts is very high and time consuming (legal review cycles), Pfizer, like all corporations, develop a standardized agreement template and use these agreements with relatively minor adjustments in different countries.

“These agreements are confidential, but luckily one country did not protect the contract document well enough, so I managed to get a hold of a copy. “As you are about to see, there is a good reason why Pfizer was fighting to hide the details of these contracts.”

Read more …

No vaccines needed, just anti-virals.

• Covid-19 Survivors May Possess Wide-ranging Resistance To The Disease (Emory)

Recovered COVID-19 patients retain broad and effective longer-term immunity to the disease, suggests a recent Emory University study, which is the most comprehensive of its kind so far. The findings have implications for expanding understanding about human immune memory as well as future vaccine development for coronaviruses. The longitudinal study, published recently on Cell Reports Medicine, looked at 254 patients with mostly mild to moderate symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection over a period for more than eight months (250 days) and found that their immune response to the virus remained durable and strong.

Emory Vaccine Center director Rafi Ahmed, PhD, and a lead author on the paper, says the findings are reassuring, especially given early reports during the pandemic that protective neutralizing antibodies did not last in COVID-19 patients. “The study serves as a framework to define and predict long-lived immunity to SARS-CoV-2 after natural infection. We also saw indications in this phase that natural immunity could continue to persist,” Ahmed says. The research team will continue to evaluate this cohort over the next few years. Researchers found that not only did the immune response increase with disease severity, but also with each decade of age regardless of disease severity, suggesting that there are additional unknown factors influencing age-related differences in COVID-19 responses.

In following the patients for months, researchers got a more nuanced view of how the immune system responds to COVID-19 infection. The picture that emerges indicates that the body’s defense shield not only produces an array of neutralizing antibodies but activates certain T and B cells to establish immune memory, offering more sustained defenses against reinfection. “We saw that antibody responses, especially IgG antibodies, were not only durable in the vast majority of patients but decayed at a slower rate than previously estimated, which suggests that patients are generating longer-lived plasma cells that can neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.”

Ahmed says investigators were surprised to see that convalescent participants also displayed increased immunity against common human coronaviruses as well as SARS-CoV-1, a close relative of the current coronavirus. The study suggests that patients who survived COVID-19 are likely to also possess protective immunity even against some SARS-CoV-2 variants. “Vaccines that target other parts of the virus rather than just the spike protein may be more helpful in containing infection as SARS-CoV-2 variants overtake the prevailing strains,” says Ahmed. “This could pave the way for us to design vaccines that address multiple coronaviruses.”

Read more …

If it eats 1/34 billionth of its mass each day, it’s not all that hungry?!

• A Massive Black Hole With 34 Billion Times The Mass of Our Sun (SA)

Scientists have recently reported discovering what they believe is the most massive black hole ever discovered in the early Universe. It is 34 billion times the mass of our Sun, and it eats the equivalent of one Sun every day. The research led by the National University of Australia (ANU) has revealed how massive the fastest-growing black hole in the Universe really is, as well as how much matter it is able to suck in. The black hole, known as ‘J2157’, was discovered by the same research team in 2018. The study detailing the humongous black hole’s characteristics has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.


According to Dr. Christopher Onken and his colleagues, this object is 34 billion times the Sun’s mass and gobbles up the equivalent of one Sun every day. That’s billion with a b. For other comparisons, the monstrous black hole has a mass of approximately 8,000 times the mass of Sagittarius A*, the black hole located at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. “If the Milky Way’s black hole wanted to get fat, it would have to swallow two-thirds of all the stars in our galaxy,” explains Onken.

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Love it.

• Spanish Village Seeks Unesco World Heritage Status For Outdoor Chats

It’s a nightly summer ritual across much of Spain: as the sweltering heat of the day eases off, chairs are hauled out to the street for an alfresco chat. Now an enterprising village in southern Spain is seeking to have the tradition recognised by the United Nations as a cultural treasure. The aim is to protect the centuries-old custom from the encroaching threat of social media and television, said José Carlos Sánchez, the mayor of Algar, a town of about 1,400 people. “It’s the opposite of social media,” he told the Guardian. “This is about face-to-face conversations.” Sánchez recently applied to have the custom added to Unesco’s list of intangible cultural heritage, hoping it will be able to earn a spot in a catalogue that ranges from the art of Neapolitan pizza making to sauna culture in Finland and a grass mowing competition in Bosnia and Herzegovina.


It’s a novel way to think about the impromptu, often banal gatherings that have long provided a respite from the heat, he conceded. But each time extended families and neighbours in the pueblo blanco – or white town – take to their front steps, he sees it as an effort to safeguard the tradition. “But it’s not what it was,” said Sánchez. “So we want to return to having everyone outside of their doors alfresco instead of scrolling through Facebook or watching television inside their homes.” Sánchez, who regularly spends balmy summer evenings on the doorstep of his 82-year-old mother’s house, is quick to list off the many benefits of what is known as charlas al fresco, from the energy savings gleaned from turning off the air conditioning for a few hours to the sense of community forged as neighbours share in the day’s gossip or comment on the latest news stories.

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” The tree was large, with a trunk so wide ten people could fit along its diameter. The tree was fertile with olives all the way until it fell victim to the wildfire.”

• 2500 Year Old Ancient Olive Tree Burned Down in Evia Fires in Greece (GR)

A 2,500 year old ancient olive tree on the island of Evia was destroyed today in the ongoing wildfires consuming the region. The ancient tree was located in the olive grove of Rovia, and was such an enduring symbol of the landscape that the ancient geographer and philosopher Strabo featured it in his writings. The tree was large, with a trunk so wide ten people could fit along its diameter. The tree was fertile with olives all the way until it fell victim to the wildfire. The tragic loss of the Evian tree was posted to Twitter by Apostolis Panagiotou, and the evocative image quickly gained over a thousand likes, with many Greeks leaving responses mourning the impact of the fires.


Apostolis Panagiotou

The destruction of the treasured tree is just one of many losses experienced by the Greek people in Evia during the course of the wildfires. In a statement that showcases the desperation and pain of the people of northern Evia, Giannis Kontzias, the mayor of Istiaia – Aidipsos, said that what the people are seeing now is ”the completion of a holocaust.” ”Truth be told, we could have saved much more,” he says. ”I’ve been up on the mountain from Wednesday at 2:30 PM making dramatic calls for more aircraft in the front that we managed to keep back for 30 hours.” Kontzias described the dramatic turn of events when the wind changed direction and brought the fire to the northwest of Evia.


”The wind turned the fire towards the Municipality of Istiaia Aidipsos, multiplying the fronts,” he explains. ”I’m making a dramatic appeal (to the Greek authorities) to bring aircraft.” ”Very few of them arrived yesterday, but they were inadequate. Today, only seven of them are operating particularly near Artemisio,” the devastated mayor explains. ”One after the other our villages fall. One municipal unit after the other is being destroyed completely. What’s saved has been saved by volunteers and the soul of the residents of this land,” Kontizas noted. ”They remained the last ones to save something from their homes, something from which we’ll be able to hold onto in order to stay and live in this land.”

Evia

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Debt Rattle August 6 2021

Aug 062021
 
 August 6, 2021  Posted by at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  124 Responses »


Félix Vallotton The balloon 1899

 

• Worse Disease Progression After Covid Vaccination? (Ziegler)
• Antibody-Dependent Enhancement and SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines and Therapies (Nature)
• Dangers of COVID-19 Vaccine Associated Enhanced Disease (Goldstein)
• “The Most Dangerous Vaccine” – Until Now, Of Course (Denninger)
• Attorney Renz: MORE Than 45,000 Americans Have Died From Covid-19 Vaccines (DE)
• 20,595 Dead, 1.9 Million Injured in EU Database of Adverse Reactions (GR)
• Project Fear: MSM Is Doing The Government’s Covid Propaganda Work (RT)
• Pfizer To Require US Workers Receive Covid-19 Vaccine Or Regular Tests (R.)
• “Vaccine Hesitancy” Is A Class Issue (Tracey)
• French Constitutional Court Backs Macron’s Covid Pass (B’s)
• Rand Paul: Mask Mandates And Lockdowns From Petty Tyrants? No, not again (RPI)
• “Authorities Are Viewing Their Own People as an Enemy” (SN)

 

 

Israel

 

 

 

 

New Zealand
https://twitter.com/i/status/1421600041014284291

 

 

https://www.achgut.com/artikel/schlechtere_krankheitsverlauefe_nach_covid_impfung

Google translation from Germany.

• Worse Disease Progression After Covid Vaccination? (Ziegler)

How does ADE work? The latest publication from Pfizer, which presents the follow-up to the approval study, also proves that the vaccines are at least not effective against the severe courses of COVID . It shows no effectiveness of the vaccination against death and no relevant absolute effectiveness against severe courses (we will report on this separately). But why ADE? Because an increased viral load in the nasal epithelium in vaccinated people looks like ADE after six months. How come? Infection-enhancing antibodies ( ADEs ) bind antibodies that are formed against the vaccine after being vaccinated to bind to the virus when it is infected later. But instead of neutralizing it, the antibodies increase the uptake (endocytosis) of the virus by the types of cells that the virus can infect.

There are different molecular mechanisms for this; the antibodies act like a catalyst that accelerates the biochemical reaction, here the endocytosis of the virus-receptor complex in the cell. The phenomenon is known from vaccines against RSV (respiratory syncitial virus) and the dengue virus. It was also in the development of vaccines against the closely related with SARS-CoV-2 Coronaviridae MERS and SARS-CoV-1 observed and contributed to the unsuccessful clinical development of vaccines against these viruses. ADE is very dangerous because the syndrome can cause vaccinees who would have survived an infection naturally without vaccination to become very seriously ill or even die, even though they would have hardly developed any symptoms without vaccination.

Malone rightly points out that ADE can occur 6 to 9 months after vaccination, especially in the case of an unfortunate composition of the antibodies in the phase of titer decline. What is happening there? The antibodies promote the uptake of the virus into the cells. This accelerates virus production and the viral load in the body increases exponentially faster than without ADE, since accelerated endocytosis is a factor in the exponent of the viral replication function. Although the immune system can still form new antibodies against the whole virus even under ADE, the virus now has a massive advantage over the immune system of an unvaccinated person, which does not develop ADE.

[..] Malone’s warnings about ADE seem realistic, given the signs he’s observing. How dangerous would ADE be in relation to the autoimmune diseases that we are already seeing in vaccinees? Based on the current data, I assume that 1 per thousand to 1 or 2 percent of those vaccinated will develop or die from autoimmune diseases caused by the vaccination in the course of 12 to 24 months after the vaccination (including the previous death rate). With ADE, significantly more vaccinees could become seriously ill, the rate could also be in the double-digit percentage range as with RSV – nobody can predict that. What should be done in view of the data situation? One should stop the vaccination campaign and first observe what happens to the vaccinated with the help of prospective cohort studies. All vaccinated persons under the age of 70 who do not die from an apparent cause of death must be examined by pathologists or coroners by autopsy. Autopsies should also be performed in suspected cases of elderly vaccinated persons. Because the Hippocratic oath applies to all people treated by a doctor.

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Published: 09 September 2020

• Antibody-Dependent Enhancement and SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines and Therapies (Nature)

ADE has been documented to occur through two distinct mechanisms in viral infections: by enhanced antibody-mediated virus uptake into Fc gamma receptor IIa (FcɣRIIa)-expressing phagocytic cells leading to increased viral infection and replication, or by excessive antibody Fc-mediated effector functions or immune complex formation causing enhanced inflammation and immunopathology (Fig. 1, Box 1). Both ADE pathways can occur when non-neutralizing antibodies or antibodies at sub-neutralizing levels bind to viral antigens without blocking or clearing infection. ADE can be measured in several ways, including in vitro assays (which are most common for the first mechanism involving Fc≥RIIa-mediated enhancement of infection in phagocytes), immunopathology or lung pathology.

ADE via FcɣRIIa-mediated endocytosis into phagocytic cells can be observed in vitro and has been extensively studied for macrophage-tropic viruses, including dengue virus in humans16 and FIPV in cats. In this mechanism, non-neutralizing antibodies bind to the viral surface and traffic virions directly to macrophages, which then internalize the virions and become productively infected. Since many antibodies against different dengue serotypes are cross-reactive but non-neutralizing, secondary infections with heterologous strains can result in increased viral replication and more severe disease, leading to major safety risks as reported in a recent dengue vaccine trial. In other vaccine studies, cats immunized against the FIPV S protein or passively infused with anti-FIPV antibodies had lower survival rates when challenged with FIPV compared to control groups. Non-neutralizing antibodies, or antibodies at sub-neutralizing levels, enhanced entry into alveolar and peritoneal macrophages18, which were thought to disseminate infection and worsen disease outcome.


In the second described ADE mechanism that is best exemplified by respiratory pathogens, Fc-mediated antibody effector functions can enhance respiratory disease by initiating a powerful immune cascade that results in observable lung pathology. Fc-mediated activation of local and circulating innate immune cells such as monocytes, macrophages, neutrophils, dendritic cells and natural killer cells can lead to dysregulated immune activation despite their potential effectiveness at clearing virus-infected cells and debris. For non-macrophage tropic respiratory viruses such as RSV and measles, non-neutralizing antibodies have been shown to induce ADE and ERD by forming immune complexes that deposit into airway tissues and activate cytokine and complement pathways, resulting in inflammation, airway obstruction and, in severe cases, leading to acute respiratory distress syndrome.


a, For macrophage-tropic viruses such as dengue virus and FIPV, non-neutralizing or sub-neutralizing antibodies cause increased viral infection of monocytes or macrophages via Fc≥RIIa-mediated endocytosis, resulting in more severe disease. b, For non-macrophage-tropic respiratory viruses such as RSV and measles, non-neutralizing antibodies can form immune complexes with viral antigens inside airway tissues, resulting in the secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines, immune cell recruitment and activation of the complement cascade within lung tissue. The ensuing inflammation can lead to airway obstruction and can cause acute respiratory distress syndrome in severe cases. COVID-19 immunopathology studies are still ongoing and the latest available data suggest that human macrophage infection by SARS-CoV-2 is unproductive. Existing evidence suggests that immune complex formation, complement deposition and local immune activation present the most likely ADE mechanisms in COVID-19 immunopathology. Figure created using BioRender.com.

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July 6 2021

• Dangers of COVID-19 Vaccine Associated Enhanced Disease (Goldstein)

Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) is an immune system phenomenon, when neutralizing antibodies bind to a virus, but instead of or in addition to neutralizing it, help it to enter cells. The term is also used when these antibodies, not finding targets on the virus, damage the healthy cells (Hellerstein 2020). ADE might happen when the quantity (titer) or quality (matching epitopes presented by the virus) is low. ADE caused by vaccines is called VAED. In the respiratory diseases, it is sometimes called VAERD (vaccine associated enhancement of respiratory disease)…. The current COVID-19 vaccines, used in the US and most Western countries, are mRNA and viral vector vaccines, targeting only the spike protein of SARS-COV-2. For the purposes of this paper, “COVID-19 vaccines” only refer to these mRNA & viral vector vaccines, unless otherwise specified.

For SARS-COV-2, the selection of the spike (S-protein) as the only antigen was an especially bad choice, because anti-spike coronavirus vaccines are known to be especially prone to cause ADE. T-cells, rather than antibodies, provide long term immunity and do not cause ADE, but only about a quarter of T-cells associated with SARS-COV-2 target its spike, compared with half to two thirds in previous coronaviruses. Many (although not all) attempts at vaccines against other coronaviruses have failed because they caused ADE in animal models. This was the case with the experimental vaccines against SARS and MERS. The same thing happened during the attempt to develop a vaccine against FIPV, a coronavirus disease in cats. On a remarkable side note, Remdesivir was tried for FIPV in cats and failed. It was then tried on humans for COVID-19 and also failed, but still received a EUA…


[..] Children 12-15 are expected to be impacted especially hard by the COVID-19 vaccines, due to higher reactivity of their immune systems. A Pfizer study has shown 1.76 higher antibody titers in this age group compared with 16–25 year-olds (FDA re-Amendment 2021). Some research suggests that the COVID-19 vaccines could possibly interfere with the development of immunity to common cold coronaviruses. This risk is totally unjustified. Very few persons <18 develop severe COVID-19, and 84% of them have obesity or other known chronic conditions. Suspected ADE from COVID-19 vaccines, especially spike protein-based ones, was explicitly linked to the Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C). A recent study suggests interference of the COVID-19 vaccines with the immune reaction to common cold coronaviruses. Some 12-year-olds, who have not developed natural immunity to all four common cold coronaviruses, might be unable to develop it because of the original antigenic sin with the anti-spike vaccine.

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“..the data out of NYC shows that even if you’re old — 80+ — if you do not have those conditions Covid-19 is no significant threat. But the jabs are…”

• “The Most Dangerous Vaccine” – Until Now, Of Course (Denninger)

“The Most Dangerous Vaccine” Well, it was the most-dangerous vaccine. It was for Smallpox. That vaccine is very effective (unlike the Covid jabs which, on the data, are an abject failure as the virus is evolving around them and their protection wanes in months) and Smallpox kills about 30% of the people who get it with very little variation based on age (that is, 300,000 per million persons) while Covid-19 kills anywhere from 20-90,000 per million depending on your age.” Now think about this: “We know if we immunize a million people, that there will be 15 people that will suffer severe, permanent adverse outcomes and one person who may die from the vaccine,” says Dr. Paul Offit, one of the country’s top infectious disease specialists, and he knows all about vaccines that prevent those diseases. In his lab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he studies and creates new vaccines. There’s nothing new about the smallpox vaccine.”

This risk is much lower than the Covid shots which have associated more than 10,000 deaths so far out of ~170 million Americans immunized, or approximately fifty times the smallpox vaccine mortality rate. Was the smallpox vaccine worth it? Absolutely. Should it be mandated? No, but it should be made widely available. Yes, it might screw you. But if you get the disease, and it could happen in a biological attack, there is a one in three risk of death. Covid, among young and healthy people, has managed to kill under a hundred across the entire population; perhaps 50% of whom have already had it with many not knowing they had it. In most people Covid-19 produces only a mild or moderate flu-like illness. Yeah, it makes you feel like crap for a couple of days.

And just like smallpox, if you get it and survive you get broad immunity that, on the science, continues to improve for a few months afterward and which remains effective even if the virus mutates, which it will and does. If you’re old and especially if you’re fat and diabetic then Covid can be much more serious. But even then it’s a tiny fraction of the impact of smallpox. I remind you that being fat and Type II diabetic is a choice, and one that you had the last 18 months to do something about. Literally anyone could have dropped 50+ lbs over the last year and a half and the data out of NYC shows that even if you’re old — 80+ — if you do not have those conditions Covid-19 is no significant threat. But the jabs are.

Not only do they not work very well, as seen with all these “breakthrough” infections (which is a lie, by the way: Those are vaccine failures) but in addition the data is that over six months time or so the protection wanes and there is some data that OAS may be showing up. OAS, or original antigenic sin, occurs when your immune system has been “primed” to respond to something (e.g. Covid-19) via either infection or a vaccine but when challenged with the actual infection it produces an incorrect and thus ineffective response. That is what we’re seeing in Israel, Iceland and elsewhere.

But what’s much worse is that we do not know if the risk from the jabs is individual and “one and done”; that is, if you take the jab and get no nasty side effects you won’t if you need boosters every six months, whether the risk is disconnected from the number of jabs, or much worse, the risk is multiplicative or even exponential with additional inoculations. We don’t know because we didn’t look. For some people who are at the upper end of that risk range — the old and medically frail — the jabs might be worth it even with all these unknowns. But for younger, healthy people? No.

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He has a whistleblower inside the CMS?

• Attorney Renz: MORE Than 45,000 Americans Have Died From Covid-19 Vaccines (DE)

Attorney Thomas Renz revealed on Truth For Health’s Stop The Shot live conference that the original figure of 45,000 people who have allegedly died from the Covid-19 vaccines within three days of vaccination is too low. Renz said that VAERS data from whistleblowers is currently being analysed and appears to show that the original statistic he revealed last month at an event hosted by Awakened America is only a fraction of the real number of deaths. The attorney said that the true number of deaths is likely “immensely higher” and is being hidden by the government. According to attorney Renz, the public is not being given access to all of the death and injury data from the 11 to 12 vaccine injury reporting systems.

Renz said: “Any public policy being made without independent study of this data will lead to poor and or dangerous policies being made for we the people.” Attorney Renz said that once the data has been analysed, he will release the information over the next few weeks. Previously, Renz stated at the Awaken America event last month that a whistleblower – referred to as Jane Doe – informed him that there are around 11 VAERS systems reporting adverse reactions and deaths across the US, and one system alone has allegedly has reported the shocking 45,000 deaths from the Covid jabs. Renz and his law firm, along with America’s Frontline Doctors, are currently suing the federal government for covering up the true number of deaths from the Covid-19 vaccines and for approving the jabs for use on children.


[..] Various hospital whistleblowers have come forward and revealed to Thomas Renz and his team that hospitals are seeing fully vaccinated breakthrough cases at an “astounding rate.” Renz said that numerous whistleblowers have stated that they are seeing fully vaccinated individuals in ICUs at a rate anywhere from 40% to 100%. “People who are fully vaccinated are accounting for 40% or more of admissions for Covid and Covid related illness. 40% or more, that is pretty amazing considering the government’s telling us you won’t ever be admitted and you’ll be safe if you get this vaccine.” Renz said that one hospital whistleblower revealed that there have been several periods where, in her hospital, 100% of the ICU patients were comprised of breakthrough cases. The attorney said that these Covid breakthrough cases are “exactly what we are seeing in the UK and Israel” and is proof that the Covid jab “is not safe or effective.”

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With 1-10% reported.

• 20,595 Dead, 1.9 Million Injured in EU Database of Adverse Reactions (GR)

The European Union database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, and they are now reporting 20,595 fatalities, and 1,960,607 injuries, following COVID-19 injections. A Health Impact News subscriber from Europe reminded us that this database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries. The total number of countries in Europe is much higher, almost twice as many, numbering around 50. (There are some differences of opinion as to which countries are technically part of Europe.) So as high as these numbers are, they do NOT reflect all of Europe. The actual number in Europe who are reported dead or injured due to COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here.

The EudraVigilance database reports that through July 31, 2021 there are 20,595 deaths and 1,960,607 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE MODERNA (CX-024414)
COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE PFIZER-BIONTECH
COVID-19 VACCINE ASTRAZENECA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19)
COVID-19 VACCINE JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S)
From the total of injuries recorded, half of them (968,870) are serious injuries.


“Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly/birth defect.” A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. This subscriber has volunteered to do this, and it is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results. Since we have started publishing this, others from Europe have also calculated the numbers and confirmed the totals.*

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“The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.”

• Project Fear: MSM Is Doing The Government’s Covid Propaganda Work (RT)

The news stories of young, perfectly healthy – unvaccinated – people dying are relentless, while those recording the deaths of people who have died after being vaccinated are ignored. It has taken some doing, and not everyone was on board initially, thanks largely to some unexpected reactions with the AstraZeneca jab, but public health officials across the globe, with the help of the mainstream media, have now stoked up Project Fear in an effort scare people into complying with vaccine demands. Of course, there are already overreaching businesses using the threat of ‘No jab, no job’, but this is something different.

As far back as March last year, the UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) considered a paper looking at ways to make people stick to social distancing rules that suggested: “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.” It’s clear which way the vote went on that when it came to “All those in favour?” because hard-hitting emotional messaging has been the weapon of choice throughout the pandemic. From social distancing, to hugging your granny, to refusing the vaccine, public health officials have wielded the fear factor in each instance and it’s worked… until now.


Because the end is in sight and so a vast majority of those who remain unvaccinated are thinking, ‘Well, I’ve made it this far’ and are sticking to their guns. And frankly, it’s hard to disagree. Unless the government legislates that vaccination is mandatory (which would be a draconian step too far even for it), then it’s difficult to imagine how to stoke up the fear to such an extent that everyone finally falls into line. Or should that even be the plan? After all, in the UK at least, democracy and personal freedom are the names of the game, and if you don’t feel like following the official Covid advice, then you don’t have to. Of course, there might be serious consequences to flying solo, but that’s up to each individual. Their body, their choice.

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When your own employees don’t want it.

• Pfizer To Require US Workers Receive Covid-19 Vaccine Or Regular Tests (R.)

Pfizer Inc, the U.S. drugmaker that developed a COVID-19 vaccine with German partner BioNTech , said on Wednesday it will require all its U.S. employees and contractors to become vaccinated against COVID-19 or participate in weekly COVID-19 testing. Pfizer spokesperson Pamela Eisele said the company was taking the initiative in order to “to protect the health and safety of our colleagues and the communities we serve.” Employees with medical conditions or religious objections can seek accommodations. Outside of the United States, Pfizer will strongly encourage employees who are able be vaccinated in their countries to do so, Eisele said.


At the end of 2020, Pfizer had around 29,400 U.S-based employees. With U.S. coronavirus cases rising sharply again due to the highly transmissible Delta variant, companies like Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) and Walt Disney Inc (DIS.N) have started putting vaccine mandates in place for their employees. read more As of Tuesday, 70.1% of U.S. adults had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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An email sent to Mike Tracey.

• “Vaccine Hesitancy” Is A Class Issue (Tracey)

I am what is called a [REDACTED] for [FORTUNE 500 COMPANY] working in the supply chain domain; this includes manufacturing, logistics, and distribution. If you share any of this information, please do not share my job title, name, or company. My job is to work with high-level company executives to understand their overall corporate strategy ($300k+ annual types), then with low-level distribution center and factory workers ($12-$15 an hour types) to understand their day-to-day jobs — and then deliver complex, multi-dimensional technology solutions that execute on those strategic goals while making life easier for floor workers. I really cut across income levels every day.

[..] I have noticed, with absolute clarity, a stark divide in vaccination behavior. I hop around between my home in [REDACTED] to our facilities in the South, Midwest, and on the West Coast. I can tell you that at each site, the picture is the exact same. [FORTUNE 500 COMPANY] has a program where you can shed the standard COVID protocols if you provide the company with your proof of vaccination. Without fail, corporate management and executives are vaccinated at near 100% rates. Likewise without fail, hourly laborers (who are almost all white in the Midwest, almost all black in the South, and all mixed up on the West Coast) are vaccinated between 5% and 15% — and vaccinations are concentrated almost entirely in the old folks.

I have heard over and over that this is a political phenomenon. “Vaccine hesitancy is a problem of white Republicans, of course!” But in reality, I don’t believe it has anything to do with race or political alignment — and everything to do with social class. I read somewhere recently a tweet from someone who seemed insightful, who said that the centers of power in this country have so heavily relied on propaganda and psyops that the hierarchies that run those centers of power have themselves begun to select for people that are most likely to buy into the propaganda. As a result, you don’t have an evil ruling class — just a delusional one that is entirely bought into its own narrative. The people who do not move up the ladder — though they may be competent and capable — are restricted by the fact that they do not buy the narrative.

If this is true, I think it makes absolute sense. The people who are most likely to be “company men” — the people whose entire lives are defined by their status in a Fortune 500 organization, who are the most married to the corporate narrative, and who are the most likely to be absent critical thought (as all executives are — once you get to VP, you stop thinking your own thoughts and instead think only your shareholders’ or board’s thoughts) are the ones who are, almost universally, vaccinated. The people who do not live in that world are, almost universally, not. I have not seen one person break it down this way. I bet if you spent a week or two digging into the research on this, you’d see just how true it was in all of the numbers available to you.

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And breaks the back of the Republic.

• French Constitutional Court Backs Macron’s Covid Pass (B’s)

France’s top constitutional authority on Thursday approved a Covid pass that limits access to cafes, restaurants and inter-city trains and planes to people who have been vaccinated or tested negative for the virus. The controversial pass, which will become ubiquitous from Monday, drew several hundred protesters outside the Council of State in Paris. “All this undermines fundamental freedoms… Freedom is, first of all, the choice to be vaccinated or not,” said Marie Jose Libeiro, 48. “We are falling into an authoritarian state.” But the Constitutional Court said the restrictions put forward by President Emmanuel Macron and approved by parliament last month represented a “balanced trade-off” between public health concerns and personal freedom.

Prime Minister Jean Castex welcomed the court ruling, saying it “will allow the full deployment of our battle strategy against Covid-19”. The biggest change concerns restaurants which will now have to turn away patrons who fail to produce the health pass. “There will be a cost, in terms of time spent checking the pass, and in terms of sales because we will lose customers,” Herve Becam, vice president of the UMIH hotels and restaurants association, told AFP. Cyril Wafik, manager of the Indiana Cafe in central Paris, said the pass presented yet another challenge for many restaurant owners who were already having trouble getting customers to wear masks. “We’re not police, that’s not our job,” he told AFP. “This will affect our relationship with our customers.”


Visitors to some shopping centres and department stores will also need the pass, as will visitors to hospitals or care homes and people seeking non-urgent medical care. But the absence of a health pass must not be an obstacle to patients receiving treatment, the court ruled. Health workers and others whose job requires them to be in contact with people at risk of Covid must now get vaccinated by law. But the court rejected as “disproportionate” the government’s wish to force people with Covid infections into isolation for 10 days. The court’s judges also struck down another provision included in the health law that brought in the Covid pass, which would allow employers to dismiss people on fixed-term or temporary contracts if they don’t have a pass.

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“Children are falling behind in school, and are being harmed physically and psychologically by the tactics you have used to keep them from the classroom last year. We won’t allow it again.”

• Rand Paul: Mask Mandates And Lockdowns From Petty Tyrants? No, not again (RPI)

Resist. They can’t arrest us all. They can’t keep all your kids home from school. They can’t keep every government building closed – although I’ve got a long list of ones they should. We don’t have to accept the mandates, lockdowns, and harmful policies of the petty tyrants and feckless bureaucrats. We can simply say no, not again. Speaker Nancy Pelosi — you will not arrest or stop me or anyone on my staff from doing our jobs. We have all either had COVID, had the vaccine, or been offered the vaccine. We will make our own health choices. We will not show you a passport, we will not wear a mask, we will not be forced into random screening and testing so you can continue your drunk with power rein over the Capitol. President Biden — we will not accept your agencies’ mandates or your reported moves toward a lockdown. No one should follow the CDC’s anti-science mask mandates.

And if you want to shutdown federal agencies again — some of which aren’t even back to work fully — I will stop every bill coming through the Senate with an amendment to cut their funding if they don’t come to work. No more. Local bureaucrats and union bosses — we will not allow you to do more harm to our children again this year. Children are not at any more risk from COVID than they are for the seasonal flu. Every adult who works in schools has either had the vaccine or had their chance to. There is no reason for mask mandates, part time schools, or any lockdown measures. Children are falling behind in school, and are being harmed physically and psychologically by the tactics you have used to keep them from the classroom last year. We won’t allow it again.

If a school system attempts to keep the children from full-time, in-person school, I will hold up every bill with two amendments. One to defund them, and another to allow parents the choice of where the money goes for their child’s education. Do I sound fed up to you? That’s because I am. I’m not a career politician. I’ve practiced medicine for 33 years. I graduated from Duke Medical School, worked in emergency rooms, studied immunology and virology, and ultimately chose to become a surgeon. I have been telling everyone for a year now that Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health officials were NOT following science, and I’ve been proven right time and time again. But I’m not the only one who is fed up. I can’t go anywhere these days — from work, to events, to airports and Ubers, restaurants and stores, without people coming up to me thanking me for standing up for them.

For standing up for actual science. For standing up for freedom. For standing against mandates, lockdowns, and bureaucratic power grabs. I think the tide has turned, and more and more people are willing to stand up. I see stories from across the country of parents standing up to teacher unions and school boards. I see members of Congress refusing to comply with Petty Tyrant Pelosi. We are at a moment of truth and a crossroads. Will we allow these people to use fear and propaganda to do further harm to our society, economy, and children? Or will we stand together and say, absolutely not. Not this time. I choose freedom.

Read more …

And enjoying it.

• “Authorities Are Viewing Their Own People as an Enemy” (SN)

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer responded to police brutality dished out to anti-lockdown protesters in Germany last weekend by warning, “Authorities are increasingly viewing their own people as an enemy.”
As we highlighted earlier in the week, Melzer, a professor of international law, made a request for eyewitnesses after footage emerged of numerous examples of people being manhandled and beaten by police in Berlin merely for expressing their right to assemble. One clip showed a female anti-lockdown protester in Berlin being grabbed by the throat and brutally thrown to the ground by riot police, while another showed a young boy being struck in the face as he tried to come to the aid of his mother.

The response to Melzer’s request was overwhelming, with over a hundred reports of violence flooding in, leaving him with the task of “calling for clarification as well as punishment and reparation for rule violations,” reports Berliner Zeitung. The professor says there is clearly enough evidence “for an official intervention on my part with the federal government.” However, it was Melzer’s comments on the wider perspective of the crackdown that stirred the most interest. After seeing similar scenes during anti-lockdown protests in European cities across the continent, as well as “police operations in demonstrations worldwide,” Melzer came to a sobering conclusion. “Something fundamental is going wrong. In all regions of the world, the authorities are apparently increasingly viewing their own people as an enemy,” he stated.


Melzer went on to assert that it is totally unethical for police to engage in violence against the citizenry unless it is in clear self-defense. “It is absolutely unacceptable when the police take action against defenseless demonstrators because of mere administrative offenses or civil disobedience with sometimes life-threatening violence,” he said. The professor also noted the utter stupidity of police inflicting violence on demonstrators while claiming to do so in the name of “health protection.” “If the police do not clearly communicate that they see themselves as friends and helpers, but rather treat their own population as an enemy, then a dangerous spiral has been set in motion: namely that the next thing is that the population will also regard the police as an enemy,” concluded Melzer.

Read more …

 

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This is not just any girl. This is the daughter of Billy Evans, killed in the 4-2 attack at the Capitol.
He is the only Capitol Police officer killed in over 20 years.

 

 

Very high vaccination rate

 

 

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The Great Big Delta Scare

Jul 042021
 
 July 4, 2021  Posted by at 4:07 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Edward John Poynter Erato, Muse of Poetry 1870

 

 

 

Why the Delta scare? As a virus mutates, it becomes more contagious and less lethal. And then eventually it mostly disappears. Many voices claim that Delta will be with us for a very long time, but we should be so lucky. It’s way more likely that it will soon be followed by a next variant that will in turn become dominant. And more contagious and less lethal.

And no, that’s not because of unvaccinated people, or at least there’s no logic in that. If most people are not vaccinated, the virus has no reason to mutate. If many people are, it does. So this CNN piece is suspect. Vaccinated people are potential variant factories, just as much, if and when the vaccines used don’t stop them from being infectious, as the present vaccines don’t, far as we know.

Unvaccinated People Are “Variant Factories,” Infectious Diseases Expert

Unvaccinated people do more than merely risk their own health. They’re also a risk to everyone if they become infected with coronavirus, infectious disease specialists say. That’s because the only source of new coronavirus variants is the body of an infected person. “Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN Friday. “The more unvaccinated people there are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply,” Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said. “When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road.”

“Even more serious”? Well, yes, it can become more contagious, but then it loses lethality. Maybe that’s what we want. Maybe we want a virus that everyone can be infected by, and build resistance to, without serious consequences. Maybe that’s even what we should aim for. And also, maybe that’s what we already have, with survival rates of 99.99% among most people.

And maybe, just maybe, a one-dimensional “solution” in the shape of an experimental vaccine is the worst response of all. Because it doesn’t protect from anything other than more severe disease, while unleashing potential adverse effects for decades to come in the inoculated. Maybe one dimension simply doesn’t cut it. Maybe we should not refuse to prevent people from becoming infected, or to treat them in the early stages of the disease.

Maybe the traumatic effects of lockdowns and facemasks should be part of “benefits and risks” models. And maybe we should start trying vitamin D, ivermectin and HCQ on a very large scale. No research, you say? There’s more research for those approaches than for the vaccines. But it’s largely been halted in the west to maintain the viability of the one-dimension “solution”; the medical Siamese twin of the Trusted News Initiative, one might say. Of which The Atlantic is also a valued member, look at this gem:

 

The 3 Simple Rules That Underscore the Danger of Delta

2. The variants are pummeling unvaccinated people.

Vaccinated people are safer than ever despite the variants. But unvaccinated people are in more danger than ever because of the variants. Even though they’ll gain some protection from the immunity of others, they also tend to cluster socially and geographically, seeding outbreaks even within highly vaccinated communities.

The U.K., where half the population is fully vaccinated, “can be a cautionary tale,” Hanage told me. Since Delta’s ascendancy, the country’s cases have increased sixfold. Long-COVID cases will likely follow. Hospitalizations have almost doubled. That’s not a sign that the vaccines are failing. It is a sign that even highly vaccinated countries host plenty of vulnerable people.

[..] And new variants are still emerging. Lambda, the latest to be recognized by the WHO, is dominant in Peru and spreading rapidly in South America. Many nations that excelled at protecting their citizens are now facing a triple threat: They controlled COVID-19 so well that they have little natural immunity; they don’t have access to vaccines; and they’re besieged by Delta.

First, the vaccines don’t confer immunity on the jabbed, there is no evidence of that. Second, a large majority of healthy people have an immune system strong enough to fight off the infection, even without ever being infected. So to suggest that unvaccinated people might “gain some protection from the immunity of” the vaccinated is simply nonsense.

As for “Delta’s ascendancy”, yes, cases are rising in the UK and Israel, two highly vaccinated countries. Not that anyone would acknowledge a possible connection there: it’s all despite the vaccines, not because of them. But as the graph below shows, while cases there are up a lot, hospitalization and deaths are not over the past month. They barely register.

On January 20, the UK had 1,823 deaths. Today, they had 15.

 

 

I even enlarged the hospitalizations a bit, or you wouldn’t see anything.

 

“Hospitalizations have almost doubled”, says The Atlantic. Yeah, but they’re still very low, as are deaths. And perhaps that’s not all that surprising, because the Delta variant doesn’t appear to be the big killer that everyone wants to close their borders and restaurants for again. There’s no conclusive evidence, it’s too early, but this is what we know today.

 

Rand Paul Cites 0.08% Delta Variant Death Rate Among Unvaccinated

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul is telling Twitter followers to not let the ‘fearmongers’ win, amid growing concerns about the newest delta variant of the coronavirus. Paul, who is a doctor with a degree in medicine from Duke University, cited a study of the strain that shows only a 0.08% death rate among unvaccinated people. “Don’t let the fearmongers win. New public England study of delta variant shows 44 deaths out of 53,822 (.08%) in unvaccinated group. Hmmm,” he tweeted Tuesday to his 3.2 million followers. The variant, which has caused virus outbreaks in Australia and other countries, has resulted in officials reimposing recently lifted health-safety orders including mask-wearing.

In another graph, the Delta variant Case Fatality Rate in the UK even appears 8 times higher among the fully vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Maybe the press should pay a little more attention to that, instead of the Great Big Delta Scare. All they do today is sell fear and vaccines, but that will backfire, promise.

 

 

And what goes for the press is also valid for politicians and their “experts”: there will come a day that people realize you could have focused on prophylactics and early treatment, but chose not to. And that this cost a lot of lives and other misery. What are you going to do then? Apologize?

 

 

Let’s not miss this from the past week: strong immune systems kill the virus before antibodies are formed. Which means an antibody test won’t show anything, but a PCR test will come back positive because there are dead virus bits. And everyone will cry: vaccinate! vaccinate!

Maybe it’s finally time for some real science, instead of clickbait and fear and gene therapy.

Pre-existing polymerase-specific T cells expand in abortive seronegative SARS-CoV-2 infection

Individuals with likely exposure to the highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 do not necessarily develop PCR or antibody positivity, suggesting some may clear sub-clinical infection before seroconversion. T cells can contribute to the rapid clearance of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronavirus infections1–5 . We hypothesised that pre-existing memory T cell responses, with cross-protective potential against SARS-CoV-26–12, would expand in vivo to mediate rapid viral control, potentially aborting infection.

We studied T cells against the replication transcription complex (RTC) of SARS-CoV-2 since this is transcribed first in the viral life cycle13–15 and should be highly conserved. We measured SARS-CoV-2-reactive T cells in a cohort of intensively monitored healthcare workers (HCW) who remained repeatedly negative by PCR, antibody binding, and neutralisation for SARS-CoV-2 (exposed seronegative, ES).

16-weeks postrecruitment, ES had memory T cells that were stronger and more multispecific than an unexposed pre-pandemic cohort, and more frequently directed against the RTC than the structural protein-dominated responses seen post-detectable infection (matched concurrent cohort). The postulate that HCW with the strongest RTC-specific T cells had an abortive infection was supported by a low-level increase in IFI27 transcript, a robust early innate signature of SARS-CoV-2 infection16.

We showed that the RNA-polymerase within RTC was the largest region of high sequence conservation across human seasonal coronaviruses (HCoV) and was preferentially targeted by T cells from UK and Singapore pre-pandemic cohorts and from ES. RTC epitope-specific T cells capable of cross-recognising HCoV variants were identified in ES. Longitudinal samples from ES and an additional validation cohort, showed pre-existing RNA-polymerase-specific T cells expanded in vivo following SARS-CoV-2 exposure, becoming enriched in the memory response of those with abortive compared to overt infection. In summary, we provide evidence of abortive seronegative SARS-CoV-2 infection with expansion of cross-reactive RTC-specific T cells, highlighting these highly conserved proteins as targets for future vaccines against endemic and emerging Coronaviridae.

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle June 28 2021

Jun 282021
 
 June 28, 2021  Posted by at 9:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  84 Responses »


John French Sloan East Entrance, City Hall, Philadelphia 1901

 

• Coronavirus Appears Uniquely Designed To Attack Humans (DT.au)
• Thousands Of Flights Cancelled As Vaccinated Pilots Fall Ill Or Die (CH)
• Why Most People Who Now Die With Covid In England Have Been Vaccinated (G.)
• FDA Adds Warning About Heart Inflammation To COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines (ET)
• White House Struggles To Increase Vaccinations As Delta Variant Surges (Pol.)
• Greek Experts Urge Public To Get A Move On With Vaccines (K.)
• Greek PM To Present Benefits For Fully Vaccinated Citizens (K.)
• New York Prosecutors Set Deadline For Trump On Legal Action (R.)
• Key Witness in US Case Against Assange Changes His Story (Lauria)
• They’re Wrong About Inflation (Jim Rickards)

 

 

The best vaccine in the market RIGHT NOW is the Delta. Mild side effects and natural immunity, with 200 thousand years of satisfied customers.

 

 

Mike “Mish” Shedlock @MishGEA: “It seems like fearmongers have forgotten (or simply don’t care) that daily deaths in the USA have gone from 4,464 on January 12 to 92 today. The continuing message is to spread fear.”

 

 

Morgan Stanley estimates a $100 billion profit for Pfizer over the next five years from the Covid vaccine.

 

 

 

 

Takeaway: whatever it was, it sure wasn’t bats.

• Coronavirus Appears Uniquely Designed To Attack Humans (DT.au)

A team of Australian researchers have published a scientific paper proving that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus appears to be best adapted to attack human cells, raising even more questions about the pandemic’s origins. The scientists from Flinders University and La Trobe used powerful computers to model the protein receptors in a number of animal species to see how the coronavirus’s spike protein attached itself to them. The theory was that if the coronavirus attached itself readily to an animal like a bat or a pangolin, it would have likely been the species that the bug used to make its leap into the human population. However, the modelling found that the coronavirus’s spike protein was best suited to attacking protein receptors in humans.


“The computer modelling found the virus’s ability to bind to the bat ACE2 protein was poor relative to its ability to bind human cells,” said Flinders University epidemiologist and vaccine researcher Professor Nikolai Petrovsky. “This argues against the virus being transmitted directly from bats to humans. “Hence, if the virus has a natural source, it could only have come to humans via an intermediary species which has yet to be found,” he said. While the researchers also found that the coronavirus could attach relatively easily to pangolins, as well as domestic animals like cats and dogs, the findings will add weight to the increasingly repeated charge that the coronavirus escaped the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology in an accident involving “gain of function” research. “Overall, putting aside the intriguing pangolin ACE2 results, our study showed that the COVID-19 virus was very well adapted to infect humans,” Prof Petrovsky said.

Read more …

“..a 580% increase in cancellations globally in the past 2 days.”

• Thousands Of Flights Cancelled As Vaccinated Pilots Fall Ill Or Die (CH)

According to a 2014 study published in the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, pilots suffer an increased risk of clotting issues due to frequent and prolonged air travel. Pilots are encouraged to be aware of the signs of deep venous thrombosis and clotting issues and take preventative measures such as compression stockings and stretching of their legs during long flights. Medical News Today published a study on June 15th, 2021 that showed an increased risk of blood clotting and low platelets in AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine recipients. Some scientists hypothesize that since the ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) in the shot causes a full body reaction, once the vaccine comes into contact with platelets inside the human body, the vaccine activates those platelets, causing them to change shape and transmit chemical signals to the immune system. Those platelets send out platelet factor 4 (PF4), which regulates blood clotting.

However, in some people, after some undetermined amount of time, at random, PF4 latches onto the vaccine, and large “complexes” form. Since those complexes are “unknown,” the human body interprets those clusters as threats. Thus, immune cells in the body mistakenly attack PF4’s, prohibiting them from preventing the problematic clots seen in some COVID-19 vaccine recipients. Pilots have an increased risk of blood clots. COVID-19 vaccine recipients have an increased risk of blood clots. Reuter’s and Fact Checkers cannot hide the fact that an increased risk on top of an increased risk is potentially a disaster, but neither has any regard for human life or the truth, as evidenced by the propaganda they’re currently creating by the minute.

Delta Airlines now requires the COVID-19 vaccine for all new employees, potentially putting Delta employees at risk of blood clots and death. American Airlines doesn’t require the vaccine but gives its employees one day off of work and $50 for getting the vaccine. No mention of the inherent risk for non air employees, let alone those who spend ample time in the clouds, is ever made by Delta or American. [..] ccording to flightaware.com, 120,000 cancellations per year is the average for global flights. An average day would see 329 cancellations. A 2 day average would see 658 cancellations. But between Friday and Saturday, 3,533 cancellations occurred. That’s a 580% increase in cancellations globally in the past 2 days.

Only 1% of adverse reactions are reported to VAERS.

Read more …

Pretzel logic. Cute try.

• Why Most People Who Now Die With Covid In England Have Been Vaccinated (G.)

A MailOnline headline on 13 June read: “Study shows 29% of the 42 people who have died after catching the new strain had BOTH vaccinations.” In Public Health England’s technical briefing on 25 June, that figure had risen to 43% (50 of 117), with the majority (60%) having received at least one dose. It could sound worrying that the majority of people dying in England with the now-dominant Delta (B.1.617.2) variant have been vaccinated. Does this mean the vaccines are ineffective? Far from it, it’s what we would expect from an effective but imperfect vaccine, a risk profile that varies hugely by age and the way the vaccines have been rolled out.

Consider the hypothetical world where absolutely everyone had received a less than perfect vaccine. Although the death rate would be low, everyone who died would have been fully vaccinated. The vaccines are not perfect. PHE estimates two-dose effectiveness against hospital admission with the Delta infections at around 94%. We can perhaps assume there is at least 95% protection against Covid-19 death, which means the lethal risk is reduced to less than a twentieth of its usual value.

But the risk of dying from Covid-19 is extraordinarily dependent on age: it halves for each six to seven year age gap. This means that someone aged 80 who is fully vaccinated essentially takes on the risk of an unvaccinated person of around 50 – much lower, but still not nothing, and so we can expect some deaths. The PHE report also reveals that nearly a third of deaths from the Delta variant are of unvaccinated people over 50, which may be surprising given high vaccine coverage; for example, OpenSAFELY estimates more than 93% among the 65-69s. But there are lower rates in deprived areas and for some ethnicities and communities with limited coverage will continue to experience more than their fair share of loss.

Read more …

The Autralian hearing is interesting.

• FDA Adds Warning About Heart Inflammation To COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines (ET)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a warning about the risk of developing heart inflammation to information about the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. The FDA announced earlier this month that it would add the warning after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had reported that more cases of heart inflammation—either myocarditis or pericarditis—were found in young adults and children after they received the vaccines, which use mRNA technology. On June 25, the agency said that it would add revisions to its patient and provider fact sheets about the “increased risks of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart) following vaccination” using the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 shots.

The Pfizer or Moderna vaccines use mRNA technology and require two doses, whereas the vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson uses an adenovirus and requires a single dose. Still, health officials have said that the risks of developing heart inflammation are outweighed by the vaccine’s benefits. “The risk of myocarditis and pericarditis appears to be very low given the number of vaccine doses that have been administered,” Janet Woodcock, the acting FDA commissioner, said in a statement last week. “The benefits of COVID-19 vaccination continue to outweigh the risks, given the risk of COVID-19 diseases and related, potentially severe, complications.”

The warning issued by the FDA says that there may be increased risks “particularly following the second dose and with [the] onset of symptoms within a few days after vaccination.” “Additionally, the Fact Sheets for Recipients and Caregivers for these vaccines note that vaccine recipients should seek medical attention right away if they have chest pain, shortness of breath, or feelings of having a fast-beating, fluttering, or pounding heart after vaccination,” the agency said. “The FDA and CDC are monitoring the reports, collecting more information, and will follow-up to assess longer-term outcomes over several months.”

Australia vaccines hearing
https://twitter.com/husserl79/status/1409405260427411457

Read more …

Curious:

“New Covid-19 infections have increased by more than 50 percent over the last two weeks in under-vaccinated states ..”

“Many of the cases are tied to the Delta variant, which the CDC says now accounts for one-fifth of new infections..”

Delta=20%, new infections=50%. What?

• White House Struggles To Increase Vaccinations As Delta Variant Surges (Pol.)

Top Biden administration health officials trying to slow the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant have largely given up on the possibility of reinstating mask and social-distancing rules in favor of a grassroots vaccine education campaign. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House Covid-19 Task Force have discussed whether to press mayors and governors in the Midwest and South, where the highly transmissible Delta variant is spreading quickly, to once again require mask mandates, according to three senior Biden health officials. But the administration ultimately concluded that many people who are not vaccinated are also those who have resisted wearing masks.

Instead, the federal government will try to convince hesitant Americans to get vaccinated by working with state officials and trusted community members to communicate the benefits of the shots, the three senior officials said. The president’s team is not confident that the new campaign will change hearts and minds, the two officials said, but it is falling back on old messaging in part because top administration officials are unsure what other tactics will work. Only about 46 percent of the U.S. population is vaccinated, and the number of doses administered has fallen by almost 300,000 per day since June 7, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The plateauing vaccination rate underscores the extent to which the White House is struggling to find new and better ways to convince Americans to get Covid-19 shots — while much of the rest of the world struggles to secure a steady supply of vaccines. And it raises questions about how the federal government will manage increasing Covid-19 cases associated with the Delta variant in the months ahead, with businesses and schools returning to normal operations.

“This is the door-to-door campaign, this is the church-to-church, this is going into the community and meeting people where they are. We’re not going to convince everybody,” said Scott Becker, CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “The Delta variant and its explosive growth — I wish there was a better way to articulate the damage that it is doing and will do in those communities, but it is going to be a tough slog.” New Covid-19 infections have increased by more than 50 percent over the last two weeks in under-vaccinated states such as Missouri and Oklahoma. Many of the cases are tied to the Delta variant, which the CDC says now accounts for one-fifth of new infections nationwide.

Read more …

Greece appears to be like Russia, and I’m sure most of Eastern Europe, countries that have had recent periods of authoritarianism, leading to mistrust of authorities and experts.

• Greek Experts Urge Public To Get A Move On With Vaccines (K.)

With the first cases of the Delta coronavirus variant appearing in Greece coinciding with the easing of restrictive measures, the country’s scientific community has called on the public to take advantage of the summer lull in infection rates to “hurry up” with their vaccinations. “We must take advantage of this gap to vaccinate those who have not yet done so,” said Athanasios Exadaktylos, president of the Panhellenic Medical Association, echoing the general consensus of the scientific community. “Right now only a third of over-55s have been vaccinated. This percentage should go up sharply, as this is the age group most at risk from the new coronavirus,” he said. Bearing in mind that the summer holidays may affect the fast pace of vaccinations (100,000 vaccinations per day), Exadaktylos noted that “perhaps the system needs to be made more flexible” so not a day is lost in the process.

Read more …

Only a third of over-55s have been vaccinated, and fewer among the younger. So businesses are supposed to volutarily ban over two thirds of potential customers? Yeah, sure.

• Greek PM To Present Benefits For Fully Vaccinated Citizens (K.)

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsorakis will present on Monday the government’s proposals for the benefits that will be offered to those who complete their vaccinations against Covid-19, in a drive to encourage inoculation in the country. Among the measures being considered are allowing the owners of cinemas, theaters, concerts, festivals and sporting events to restrict entry to their premises only for those who have a vaccination certificate. Another is allowing business owners to increase the number of people allowed indoors if they only accept fully inoculated people. Any measures will exclude access to public sector services and vanues, hospitals, supermarkets, shops, banks and transport, where there will be no distinction between vaccinated and non-vaccinated people, but where the current health restrictions for indoor spaces will continue to be observed.

Read more …

Smells like politics.

• New York Prosecutors Set Deadline For Trump On Legal Action (R.)

New York prosecutors have given lawyers for Donald Trump 24 hours to respond with any last arguments as to why criminal charges should not be filed against his family business, according to a report on Sunday. The deadline set for Monday was another strong signal that the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, are considering criminal charges against the former president’s company as an entity, according to sources quoted by the Washington Post. On Friday, it was reported that Vance could announce charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, within seven days. Any criminal charges would be the first in Vance’s probe into Trump and his business dealings.


Legal experts have said an indictment against the Trump Organization could bankrupt the company by undermining its relationships with banks and other business partners. Vance’s office has said it was investigating “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct” at the Trump Organization, including tax and insurance fraud and falsification of business records. Even if no charges were brought, Vance’s investigation could complicate any return to politics by Trump, who has lost some of his ability to communicate publicly after being permanently banned from Twitter and suspended for two years by Facebook. James’ office has been investigating whether the Trump Organization inflated the values of some properties to obtain better terms on loans, and lowered their values to obtain property tax breaks.

Read more …

“If he conspired to get these classified documents with a member of the U.S. military, that’s fundamentally different than if somebody drops on your lap … to a press person, here is classified material,” Biden said in December 2010. The Obama administration never indicted Assange.”

• Key Witness in US Case Against Assange Changes His Story (Lauria)

Given the First Amendment questions being raised about the Espionage Act case against a publisher, Stundin points out that the computer charges against Assange have taken on new significance. In weighing an indictment against Assange in 2010, the Obama administration, in the person of then Vice President Joe Biden, said it sought to prove that Assange did not merely receive stolen defense information but had participated in obtaining it. “If he conspired to get these classified documents with a member of the U.S. military, that’s fundamentally different than if somebody drops on your lap … to a press person, here is classified material,” Biden said in December 2010. The Obama administration never indicted Assange.

The central allegation in the Trump administration’s computer intrusion charge is that Assange was a “hacker” and worked with his source, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, to crack a password to steal the U.S. government documents. Thordarson played a key role in supporting the Trump administration case that Assange engaged in hacking when he was interviewed in both Iceland, and then after being flown to Washington in 2019 at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. Stundin also reports that he was given an immunity deal by U.S. authorities. The DOJ statement at the release of the superseding indictment in June 2020 said:

“The new indictment does not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019. It does, however, broaden the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged. According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks. … In addition, the broadened hacking conspiracy continues to allege that Assange conspired with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash to a classified U.S. Department of Defense computer.”

Read more …

A theme I’ve commented on 1000 times. No inflation without increasing velocity of money. Some prices may rise for different reasons, but not inflation.

• They’re Wrong About Inflation (Jim Rickards)

Since late last summer, the main driver of rates has been an inflation narrative. The narrative is straightforward: The economy is recovering. Unemployment is declining. Employers can’t find enough workers. Wages are going up to attract help. Stimulus spending is coming by the trillions of dollars. The Fed is printing money. The economy is pushing up against capacity constraints. Add it all up, and inflation is right around the corner. Therefore, rates must go up. And when rates go up, the price of gold goes down. Markets have adopted this narrative. The yield-to-maturity on the 10-year Treasury note went from 0.508% on August 4, 2020 (about when gold peaked) to 1.745% on March 31, 2021. Gold prices went from over $2,021 per ounce to $1,686 per ounce over the same period. That’s a 16.5% drop in gold prices.

What if every part of the economic narrative is wrong? The economy was bound to recover from the pandemic recession of 2020, the worst since 1946. But, it appears the recovery is now running out of steam. For the record, the economy was weak before the pandemic hit. What if that weak growth trendline is now returning to form? The unemployment rate is declining, but real unemployment is not. We still have 7.6 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic, not counting the 10 million or more prime-age workers out of the labor force as described above. It’s true that wages are going up in some service industries such as restaurants and that workers are hard for some businesses to find. (McDonald’s is now offering $35,000 per year plus benefits and training for entry-level hires).

Still, overall wage levels are not rising significantly, and slack in the labor market is producing a powerful disinflationary overhang. Money printing is practically irrelevant because the velocity (or turnover) of money is still declining. What good is new money if the banks just give it back to the Fed as excess reserves, so the money is never spent or lent? Fiscal policy and handouts are not producing stimulus because debt levels are so high (the U.S. debt-to-GDP level is now 130%, the highest ever). Americans respond with precautionary savings and deleveraging. Data shows that 75% of the government handouts have either been saved or used to pay down debt (economically the same as saving). Only 25% have been used for consumption. That’s a pathetic amount of bang-for-the-buck.

We are seeing some supply-chain disruption and capacity constraints, especially in semiconductors, which affects automobile manufacturing. Still, manufacturers have not been able to pass through those constraints in the form of higher consumer prices. Inflation remains low once base effects from last year’s deflation are stripped out. Those base effects will disappear in the third quarter when the year-over-year comparison looks at the 2020 recovery rather than the recession. Inflation is dead in the water. I know that analysis puts me in the minority, but that’s OK; I’m used to that. I was also in the minority when I predicted Brexit and that Trump would win the 2016 election. The bottom line is, the consensus is often wrong.

Read more …

 

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The Ethics of Child Vaccinations

Jun 092021
 
 June 9, 2021  Posted by at 3:02 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  18 Responses »


Willem de Kooning Woman 1969

 

 

We’ve been talking a lot lately at the Automatic Earth about programs to vaccinate children. It’s one more thing that people appear to blindly accept as necessary and beneficial to our societies. While the only consideration really should be how beneficial it is to the children themselves. Most people here, at least, seem to agree on that. But that’s just here.

The US, Germany, Canada, and soon France and Spain all have plans, some already have been rolled out, to carpet bomb the virus by going after their children, and there is no doubt many more countries will follow their example.

Since we know there is no medical reason to do so, we must ask what the ethical and legal aspects tell us. And I can’t find those. How and why can you justify injecting people against something that is no threat to them, with a substance that potentially is a much worse threat?

I dug up a graph again that I posted in April, which spells out the Covid risk for all age groups, including children:

 

 

If your chance of survival is 99.99996%, there is no risk. And you don’t need to be inoculated. That would -at best- be equivalent to keeping your kids home 24/7 because you are afraid of what might happen in traffic, or in social life with other kids, or some bogeyman. The risk is never zero, but close enough that we do not act on it, and call it common sense.

The arguments that are usually used are that 1) kids must be jabbed to protect others around them, and 2) that the vaccines have been tested and proven safe. Obviously, 1) is very curious, and never been used before, and 2) is simply a lie: vaccines need years of testing for side effects, not months, and certainly not weeks, as is now the case for the effects on children.

The “testing” is simply that if not too many people drop dead after 5 minutes, well, then it must be safe, as institutions like the European Medicines Agency solemnly declare. Completely ignoring potential long term effects, something that seems essential in mRNA “vaccines” because of their potential effects on fertility etc. We just don’t know, but we should before applying the substances. There’s a reason none of the vaccines have been approved.

As for that alleged safety, this is from the European version of the American VAERS system:

 

 

1,5 million adverse reactions, and those are just the ones that have been reported. Now, I don’t know how many people in Europe have been inoculated, but I bet you this is not a 99.99996% success story. The numbers of deaths are not, either.

So I was happy to see some actual common sense reported in a Dutch paper today (Google translated), where the Health Council in the Netherlands injects at least some nuance into the debate. For kids with underlying conditions, like severe obesity or lung- and heart problems, some protection might make sense. I still wouldn’t go with mRNA vaccines, I would use ivermectin instead, but I get the reasoning somewhat.

Health Council: Vaccinate Children From 12 Years Old With Medical Risk Against Corona

The Health Council advises the cabinet to vaccinate children from the age of 12 with a medical risk against the corona virus. Vaccinating all children in that age group, as is done in Germany, France and the US, for example, is not yet on the agenda. An opinion on this will follow in a few weeks. The current advice concerns children aged 12 to 17 who are annually invited for the flu shot and children with severe obesity. According to the Health Council, vaccination of these children provides significant health benefits, because they run a high risk of a serious course of Covid-19. According to chairman Bart-Jan Kullberg, that risk is twice as high as in healthy children.

The corona pandemic also indirectly has a major impact on children at medical risk. To avoid the risk of contamination, for example, they do not go to school or social activities. The Health Council also takes this ‘social-emotional impact’ into account. The council cannot estimate the number of children involved. “It concerns, for example, children with a heart or lung disease. There are also many small groups with a rare condition. General practitioners and paediatricians have a good picture of these groups,” says Kullberg.

An advice on vaccinating healthy children will only follow in a few weeks. The vast majority of children do not or hardly get sick after a corona infection. So far, almost 280,000 children in the Netherlands are known to have been infected. Usually they had only mild symptoms, such as a cold and cough. In the age group 0-12 years, 379 children were hospitalized. In the 13-17 age group, there have been 101 since September. A total of three children have died; all three had an underlying condition. Last month, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) gave the green light for the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children from 12 years of age. More and more countries are also vaccinating all healthy children over the age of 12 to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.

Vaccinating children from the age of 12 against the coronavirus can make a significant contribution to curbing the pandemic, OMT chairman Jaap van Dissel already suggested last weekend. According to him, it reduces the reproductive value (R) of the virus in winter by as much as this. about 15 percent. “That can be important to keep the spread low during that period as well.” In Germany, for example, teenagers will be vaccinated from next Monday, in France from mid-June and in Spain from mid-August. The US and Canada have been at it for weeks.

Vaccinating healthy children, who themselves hardly run the risk of becoming seriously ill after a corona infection, requires a ‘broader medical, epidemiological, ethical and legal consideration’, according to the Health Council. “It also depends on the phase of the pandemic,” Kullberg said. Because the number of infections is currently falling sharply and more than a million adults are now vaccinated every week, there is no reason to make that decision hastily, he says.

Now, mind you, that is the same country that admitted depriving children of their freedom, their development, and normal lives, in order to manipulate their parents. Talk about ethics. As I said a few days ago, “Holland closed schools not to protect children, but to make parents stay home. Think about how crazy that is.”

The Netherlands Used Children As A Weapon In The Fight Against Corona

Due to the Dutch corona policy to close schools and thus keep parents at home, children have been used as a means to fight the epidemic. Our cabinet receives that hard slap on the fingers today in the annual worldwide children’s rights report, the KidsRights Index. According to the makers, the Netherlands has set a very bad example internationally, by not even trying to keep schools open safely. With all the consequences that entails for the mental health of our youth. The corona guidelines from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have also been neglected. Youth has not been given any priority in Dutch policy, it sounds.

Statements by corona minister Hugo de Jonge, dated mid-December 2020, are presented as proof. Then De Jonge indeed mentioned on television as the reason why the cabinet decided to close the schools, that parents with children sitting at home will therefore start working from home more quickly. When parents take their children to school, that is another moment of contact, De Jonge explained at the time. “And we also learned from the first wave, when the schools were also closed, that the fact that primary education does not provide physical education also ensures that parents adhere better to another advice, namely: work from home as much as possible. ”, said the minister at the time.

“Children’s rights have been put in second place by the cabinet during corona time,” Marc Dullaert, founder of the international children’s rights organization KidsRights, now told this site. “They were the ankle bracelet for parents. These had to be kept at home in order to effectively fight the epidemic. At the expense of their mental health.” In the first phase, when everyone was looking for the right approach, this was understandable according to Dullaert. ,,But De Jonge’s statements came at a time when it was really no longer acceptable, in the second phase. And other countries – such as Belgium and Sweden – have done everything they can to keep the schools open, so there were alternatives on the table.”

Staying on topic, I liked this from the Conservative Woman site in Britain, with perhaps the best argument against child vaccination: “The sooner most of us are exposed to it, ideally in childhood, the sooner it will cease to be a major problem..”

Why Subject Our Children To The Risk Of Death From Vaccination?

All non-corrupted scientific commentators have known from the very start that this pandemic only ends one way: SARS-CoV-2 is going to become an endemic virus. It will always be with us. The sooner most of us are exposed to it, ideally in childhood, the sooner it will cease to be a major problem. High-risk individuals can choose to take a vaccine. Ivermectin and vitamin D can be used to prevent infection and treat confirmed cases. As we have seen, the argument that children must take vaccines so that we can achieve herd immunity is utterly false. Only those completely ignorant of virology and immunology would even attempt to make it. That brings us back to the original argument for vaccinating children against Covid: to protect them from the severe disease.

If this is the only reason to vaccinate children, there is only one calculation that parents should make: Is the risk from Covid greater than the risk from the vaccine? The present Covid vaccines being administered in the West are based on experimental technologies that are being used under emergency use authorisations (EUAs). Full safety studies will not be completed until 2023. The Covid vaccines were all created in the last year and we have no medium-term or long-term data on them. We don’t know if they will have an effect on children’s reproductive organs and fertility. We don’t know if they will produce auto-immune diseases. And we don’t know if they will lead to ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement) upon re-exposure to the virus (causing more severe illness).

We do know that the vaccines produce a range of cardiovascular and neurological events including strokes, myocarditis, pericarditis and paralysis in a significant number of people. In the small US state of Connecticut at least 18 children and young adults have come down with myocarditis, an extremely serious and sometimes fatal condition involving inflammation of the heart muscle (and they’ve only just started vaccinating children there). The Israel Ministry of Health has reported that the incidence of myocarditis for vaccine recipients is between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 6,000 in young men.

In Canada (population 38 million) only 11 children have died from Covid since the start of the pandemic. In the UK (pop 68 million) 32 children have died. It is nearly certain that all of them had one or more severe comorbidities. The fact is, most children brush off Covid without even knowing they’ve had it. For all intents and purposes, Covid poses zero risk to healthy children.

And Michael Curzon:

Child Vaccination: Who’s Selfish Now?

A number of school leaders have swung into action following the approval of the vaccination of children against Covid (a disease which almost all children aren’t at risk from) using the Pfizer vaccine (trials of which only included 1,134 children). It wasn’t very long ago that the establishment line was: if you don’t get a Covid vaccine, you are selfish. Even the Queen (disappointingly) joined in with this line [..]. But now, adult advisers to the Government suggest that children should be vaccinated not to protect children but to protect…themselves. Professor Anthony Harnden, the Deputy Chairman of the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, says:


‘I think the vast majority of benefit won’t be to children, it will be an indirect benefit to adults in terms of preventing transmission and protecting adults who haven’t been immunised, for whatever reason haven’t responded to the vaccine and therefore that presents quite a lot of ethical dilemmas as to whether you should vaccinate children to protect adults.’ He notes that children themselves are ‘in the main’ not at risk from Covid. Over half of the adult population has been fully vaccinated (with seventy-five per cent having received at least one dose of a vaccine) and Covid deaths, while still exaggerated, have flattened. There is no reason to vaccinate most children and, given the potential side effects, many not to do so. If the Government bottles it on the vaccination of children, it is they who are being selfish.

The reactions to the virus are many times more dangerous than the virus itself. Because the reactions have been amplified by fear. Time to shake it off. But for that to happen, we need politics and media to change, because they’re doing the amplifying. Problem is, fear sells.

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 17 2021

May 172021
 
 May 17, 2021  Posted by at 9:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  57 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Landscape with Couple Walking and Crescent Moon 1890

 

• Second Stage Terror Wars (Edward Curtin)
• Fear Is the Mind-Killer (Alice)
• How To Cure Type 2 Diabetes – Without Medication (G.)
• Covid-19 Testing Turns To T Cells (Nature)
• Interview with Dr Bhakdi (Schultz)
• The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill (Wired)
• War of Words Over Inflation Stirs Questions for the Fed (Judy L. Shelton)
• Druckenmiller: “There’s Been No Greater Engine Of Inequality Than The Fed” (ZH)
• ‘$40 Billion’ Robinhood App Tries To Vault SEC Hurdles (NYP)
• Italian Port Workers Refuse To Load Arms Shipment Destined For Israel (NA)

 

 

“According to the scientific data…

Vaccinating 300,000 people under 18yo is statistically likely to prevent one COVID death and likely to cause 3 vaccine-reaction deaths.”

 

 

 

 

Testing? That’s so yesterday.

 

 

Must read.

• Second Stage Terror Wars (Edward Curtin)

It is well known that the endless US war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks. The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came. It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story – the fictional 9/11 Commission Report – was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.

It is even less well known that Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia, was closely associated with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dickey Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, et al. and had served in various key intelligence positions in both the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. In 2011 President Obama named him to his President’s Intelligence Advisory Board as befits bi-partisan elite rule and coverup compensation across political parties. Perhaps it’s unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow’s removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent. Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government’s claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles.

This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002. This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations. So, based on Zelikow’s work creating a magic mountain of deception while disregarding so-called molehills, we have had twenty years of American terror wars around the world in which U.S. forces have murdered millions of innocent people. Wars that will be continuing for years to come despite rhetoric to the contrary. The rhetoric is simply propaganda to cover up the increasingly technological and space-based nature of these wars and the use of mercenaries and special forces.

Simultaneously, in a quasi-volte-face, the Biden administration has directed its resources inward toward domestic “terrorists”: that is, anyone who disagrees with its policies. This is especially aimed at those who question the COVID-19 story. Now Zelikow has been named to head a COVID Commission Planning Group based at the University of Virginia that is said to prepare the way for a National COVID Commission. The group is funded by the Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Stand Together, with more expected to join in.

Read more …

“This ideological mass psychosis is religion—not science.”

• Fear Is the Mind-Killer (Alice)

Can you imagine what master propagandist Edward Bernays would have done with access to today’s mainstream media conglomerate combined with the global surveillance infrastructure of Big Tech? And you really think that’s not happening now—with another century of psychological, neurological, and technological research under their belts? The present ability to curate reality and coerce obedience is unprecedented, far beyond what Orwell envisioned in 1984, Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, Huxley in Brave New World, and Burgess in A Clockwork Orange. A textbook example of Problem Reaction Solution, the current tsunami of worldwide hysteria is the latest and potentially most threatening example of mass control in history.

The recipe is simple. Take a naturally occurring phenomenon, say a seasonal virus, and exaggerate its threat far beyond every imagining—despite exhaustive evidence to the contrary. Suppress, silence, ostracize, and demonize every individual who dares present facts that expose the false mono-narrative. Whip up a witches’ brew of anger, envy, and, most importantly, fear, escalating emotions to a boil so as to short-circuit our faculties of reason and logic. Isolate us from one another, supplant real-world interactions with virtual feuds, label nonconformists as a threat to the group, and pump the public with a disinformation campaign designed to confuse and atomize. In essence, foster a cultlike mentality that shuts down thought to guarantee assent.

Cultivate and wield our cognitive biases—especially ingroup bias, conformity bias, and authority bias—against us in a comprehensive divide-and-conquer policy that keeps us too busy squabbling amongst each other to recognize and unite against those corralling us into a Matrix-like collective delusion that enables the powerful to extract our resources for their own gain. This ideological mass psychosis is religion—not science. If this were about science, the Media–Pharmaceutical–Big-Tech complex would not be memory-holing every dissenting voice, vilifying every thought criminal, and censoring every legitimate inquiry in quest of the truth.

Read more …

With obesity such a major factor in Covid deaths, two birds with one stone.

• How To Cure Type 2 Diabetes – Without Medication (G.)

[..] Modest words for a man whose “useful contribution to society” has given hope to the 3.9m people diagnosed with the condition in the UK and who has shown doctors a new way to fight a disease which causes 185 amputations and 700 premature deaths every week. Now, he wants to go one step further and share everything he has learned directly with the public, in a new book, Your Simple Guide to Reversing Type 2 Diabetes. It’s a 153-page paperback that takes you through the latest research on how the disease develops and explains why rapid weight loss can be so effective at reversing the condition in the early stages – which usually means during the first six years of a diagnosis.

“If people really do want to make it happen, then in the first few years of diagnosis, it’s almost universal that their health can be returned to normal,” says Taylor, who is professor of medicine and metabolism at Newcastle University. In one study, he found that nine out of 10 people with “early” type 2 diabetes were cured after losing more than 2 1/2 st (15kg). The book also explains who is at greatest risk and why some people who have a “normal” Body Mass Index (BMI) develop the disease, when many people who are more overweight – or even obese – do not. Taylor’s “Newcastle” weight loss programme is a clinically proven method of reversing early type 2 diabetes and his approach is currently being rolled out to people with the condition by the NHS. It involves cutting your calorie intake to 700-800 calories a day.

In the book, he explains how the people in his programme managed to do this – typically by consuming only slimming meal shakes and non-starchy vegetables, plus one cup of tea or coffee each day with skimmed milk – lost a life-changing amount of weight in just eight weeks. And how you can do the same, safely, at home. [..] One of Taylor’s most important new discoveries is that everyone has their own fat threshold: an individual level of tolerance for levels of fat in the body. “It’s a personal thing. It’s nothing to do with the sort of information that’s often provided about obesity, which is about average BMI and what the population is doing. The bottom line is, a person will develop type 2 diabetes when they’ve become too heavy for their own body. It doesn’t matter if their BMI is within the ‘normal’ range. They’ve crossed their personal threshold and become unhealthy.”

He is currently in the middle of research to find out whether there’s any way of discovering, via a blood test, when people are heading into this dangerous territory and their fat cells are putting out what he describes as “distress signals”. What we do know already is that our bodies start to have trouble controlling blood sugar when fat can no longer be stored safely under the skin and it spills over into the liver and then the pancreas. If these organs get clogged with fat, they stop functioning properly and that is when you develop type 2 diabetes.

Read more …

Does this address only vaccine-related T cells?

• Covid-19 Testing Turns To T Cells (Nature)

A diagnostic test based on sequencing long-lived SARS-CoV-2–specific memory T cells provides a complement to antibody testing for determining previous exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Following last month’s US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Emergency Use Authorization for Adaptive Biotechnologies’ T-Detect COVID-19 test, routine T-cell testing has entered a new era. The Adaptive test involves laboratory-based next-generation sequencing to identify T cells that recognize SARS-CoV-2 antigens. The test is not intended for the diagnosis of active infection but is a complement to antibody tests used to confirm recent or previous infections. The lab-based procedure, which has a seven- to ten-day turnaround time, is now authorized for use on samples taken from individuals at least 15 days after the onset of symptoms.

Increasing interest is focused on the role of T-cell immunity in fighting SARS-CoV-2 infection and in providing resistance to re-infection. A new analysis of T cells from people who recovered from COVID-19 has confirmed that they remain active against three of the new SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern: B1.1.7, B.351 and B.1.1.248. The study, conducted by a team from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Singapore-based biotech company ImmunoScape, will further boost confidence that the efficacy of vaccines developed against the original pandemic strain will not be overly compromised as these new variants—and others—spread more widely.

Until now, researchers have mostly relied on the use of lateral flow assay or enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) tests for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies to determine whether a person has been exposed to the virus. Understanding the neutralizing antibody response has been considered central to establishing protection against the virus. “It’s easy to test,” says Andrew Redd of NIAID, who led the recent study. Although critical, antibodies are part of a larger and incompletely understood set of humoral and cellular immune responses, which has received little attention. These include additional antibody functions, such as antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity, complement activation and phagocyte recruitment. Unravelling their contribution to SARS-CoV-2 immunity is an ongoing challenge. “There are assays to do that, it’s just complicated to do,” says Redd.

The same can be said for assaying T-cell-mediated immunity. The NIAID study relied on a complex laboratory test to identify T-cell epitopes specific to SARS-CoV-2, employing a combination of mass cytometry and combinatorial staining of peptide–major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-bound tetramers. The complexity of the assay and data generated necessarily confine the assay to use in specialist laboratories. “The data that it generates are massive. The analysis side of it is a big lift,” Redd says.

Read more …

You tell me what you think of the man.

• Interview with Dr Bhakdi (Schultz)

According to the UK Government’s figures, more than 1,100 people have died due to an adverse effect caused by one of the vaccines currently being rolled out via Emergency Use Authorisation. But Dr Bhakdi reveals that worse is yet to come, with manufacturers, he says, creating a false sense of security. “It’s so easy to manipulate the nano-particles,” he said. “All you need to do is take out one component, one lipid, and the vaccine will not be taken up by the cells any more. And then you have no side-effects. And you will have a vaccine that is well-tolerated. “That is what’s happening now with the mRNA vaccines, so the AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Sputnik will be removed from the market. So there will be a monopoly of the mRNA vaccines, which are being backed by Bill Gates.

“This plan was conceived years ago. Once this vaccine gets legally, fully approved, not approved for emergency use, but fully approved, no more risk analysis needs to be done. “Pfizer are going to submit an application for this in June. And the authorities have already released underground information that the approval will probably be given in October. When this happens, it means that every subsequent vaccine is automatically approved. They have to sign no more application, there will be no more trials, no more risk-benefit analysis. No more notification of side effects. “It’s such a nightmare. They can say, ‘well the care homes are overcrowded. India and South Africa…

“You know that with each subsequent vaccine the chances rise that you are going to kill people. That’s why they are starting to vaccinate children – they are going to show that the vaccine is tolerated by children – then they are going to use this wherever they want to. “Once that has come through, these guys have a free hand to do whatever they want, wherever they want. And no one can do anything about it. It’s so horrible. “How can people be so evil? How can people be so ignorant? It’s that combination of evil and ignorance that is making the world a living hell. And the only people who can do anything about it is us because we have to get the world around us to stand up and realise that they are being led to a living hell.

“It’s a devilish plan, satanic. But the very, very small chance we have is that they made a mistake, which was they thought that this vaccination programme would go through smoothly, as they were not aware that the adverse effects would be so severe and so widespread. “This is where they may trip if we can force them to turn back on the vaccination programme. Now there have been legal charges brought against the EU, for nullification against all the vaccines.”

Read more …

“Trapped in their group-specific jargon, the two camps on Zoom literally couldn’t understand one another.”

• The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill (Wired)

Early one morning, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.

Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person. The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks? Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day.

On the video call, tensions rose. At one point, Lidia Morawska, a revered atmospheric physicist who had arranged the meeting, tried to explain how far infectious particles of different sizes could potentially travel. One of the WHO experts abruptly cut her off, telling her she was wrong, Marr recalls. His rudeness shocked her. “You just don’t argue with Lidia about physics,” she says.

Morawska had spent more than two decades advising a different branch of the WHO on the impacts of air pollution. When it came to flecks of soot and ash belched out by smokestacks and tailpipes, the organization readily accepted the physics she was describing—that particles of many sizes can hang aloft, travel far, and be inhaled. Now, though, the WHO’s advisers seemed to be saying those same laws didn’t apply to virus-laced respiratory particles. To them, the word airborne only applied to particles smaller than 5 microns. Trapped in their group-specific jargon, the two camps on Zoom literally couldn’t understand one another.

Read more …

Trump nominated her to the Fed. Her nomination stalled on November 17, 2020, with a 47–50 vote in the Senate.

• War of Words Over Inflation Stirs Questions for the Fed (Judy L. Shelton)

Does it make sense, for a nation founded on the notion of individual liberty, equality under the law, and personal property rights, to allow a government agency to manipulate the value of the currency used by its citizens? Would it be better to have a stable monetary foundation to facilitate free-market outcomes, rather than empower the Federal Reserve to distort interest rates and dilute dollars in the service of government policy? It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. The question of whether rules-based monetary stability historically delivers better economic results in terms of increasing middle-class incomes than relying on the discretionary judgment of central bankers has been wholly analyzed and resolved.

In the 2015 Economic Report of the President issued under the Obama administration, a special section describes the period from 1948 to 1973 as the “Age of Shared Growth”—characterized by accelerating labor productivity, falling income inequality, and increased workforce participation. The report makes little mention of the fact that this period of remarkable growth, which increased living standards across all income levels, coincided with the existence of the Bretton Woods international monetary system under which the U.S. dollar was convertible into gold at a fixed price. The report does posit that if post-1973 productivity growth had continued at its pace from those previous 25 years, “incomes would have been 58% higher in 2013” and “the median household would have had an additional $30,000 in income.”

All of which should give pause to those who belittle the uneasiness felt by conservatives who fear that compromising monetary integrity not only violates founding principles but also economic rationality. And it’s not just conservatives per se, but rather an increasingly larger segment of the population expressing concerns about the wisdom of government officials and the correctness of government policies.

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Well, that’s what it’s for.

• Druckenmiller: “There’s Been No Greater Engine Of Inequality Than The Fed” (ZH)

After his status-quo-shattering appearance on CNBC this week, during which he warned that “Fed policy is endangering the dollar’s reserve status,” billionaire fund manager Stan Druckenmiller spoke to The USC Marshall Center for Investment Studies’ Student Investment Fund Annual Meeting via Zoom, and shocked the on-lookers with his frank assessment of our current perceptions and realities. After The Bank of Canada sheepishly admitted this week that “some of the monetary policy tools it is using to address the COVID-19 pandemic, such as quantitative easing (QE), could widen wealth inequality,” Druckenmiller drops the proverbial hammer on all the hedged-speak (“could”), and blasts that

“I don’t think there has been a greater engine of inequality than the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States… so hearing the Chairman [Powell] talking about visiting homeless shelters is very rich indeed…” The outspoken fund manager went on to note that “everyone wealthy that I know is making fortunes” because “this guy [Powell] is printing money like there’s no tomorrow” adding that the kids is Harlem are not benefitting from money-printing but wealthy people are, exclaiming that “…for the life of me I can’t understand why the left is so excited about money-printing when all the data shows that the people who benefit from money-printing are rich people.”

“The odds-on bet is that we’re going to have inflation,” he continues: “and inflation is going to hurt poor people, again, a lot more than rich people.” How does this all end? “The asset bubble which [Powell] is blowing up into unbelievable proportions busts before the inflation ever really manifests itself, that’s what happened in the housing bubble in 08/09. We never really got to the inflation because the asset bubble burst… not dis-similar to what happened in 1929.” And Druck reminds us all, “there is no one, no group, that will be hurt more by a bust than the poor… they will be first in line to get screwed.”

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Gasparino.

• ‘$40 Billion’ Robinhood App Tries To Vault SEC Hurdles (NYP)

It’s a lot of money for a stock-trading app that’s supposedly free. Robinhood is slated to launch an initial public offering before summer’s end that could value the Silicon Valley-based company at $40 billion or more, people close to the underwriting group say. That would make it among the biggest deals of the year – and certainly the most anticipated as the day-trading app became a cultural phenom during the pandemic. A blowout IPO would be remarkable for a company created only in 2013 and which has survived its share of controversies. Last summer, I warned that Robinhood was luring in amateurs stuck at home during the COVID lockdowns who took on day trading as a sport. They would eventually lose their shirts trading stocks on its free and easy-to-use platform, and regulators would pounce.

The party, I predicted, wouldn’t end well and it almost didn’t. Amateur traders are the lifeblood of Robinhood and its user growth, and they lost lots of money on the wrong side of bets. Then came January’s meme – stock controversy, where clearing problems stymied trading of some high-volume stocks on the app, angering customers. The company s business model came under scrutiny. Congress held hearings about the episode following the wild swings in various stocks that traded over the platform, and the IPO that was planned for March was pushed off indefinitely. But for all the noise, the clients just kept coming – and the IPO is back on. The reason is simple, company execs tell me: Robinhood is printing money. Despite the hiccups, Robinhood added some 6 million additional new customers for its crypto platform alone in the first two months of the year.

Now the app’s explosive user growth has investors clamoring for a piece of the action, people close to the deal say. And mind you, underwriters and company officials are quietly calculating their $40 billion valuation for a product that founder Vlad Tenev essentially conjured up in his dorm room.

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While the US still blocks a UN ceasefire resolution.

• Italian Port Workers Refuse To Load Arms Shipment Destined For Israel (NA)

A syndicate of port workers in the Italian city of Livorno in Tuscany on Friday protested a weapons and explosives shipment after discovering it was destined for the Israeli port of Ashdod. “The port of Livorno will not be an accomplice in the massacre of the Palestinian people,” said L’Unione Sindacale di Base (USB). The USB added that the ship contained “weapons and explosives that will serve to kill the Palestinian population, already hit by a severe attack this very night, which caused hundreds of civilian victims, including many children”. A report by The Weapon Watch, a Genoa-based NGO that monitors arms shipments in European and Meditteranean ports, informed the syndicate of the destination of the ship and its contents. The NGO urged the Italian government to consider whether it was “suspending some or all Italian military exports to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict areas.”


“The Union on Saturday will also be in the square in Livorno in solidarity with the Palestinian population and to ask for an immediate stop to the bombings on Gaza and a stop to the ‘expropriations’ Palestinian homes that have lived under military occupation for years,” the USB said in a statement. Although the shipment eventually embarked its journey to Naples, as most other port workers continued to load the ship, other Italian workers’ groups have called for increased coordination between port workers to prevent shipment of weapons that could be used to bomb Gaza. Protests took place in various Italian cities this week, following Israeli forces’ attacks against Palestinians in Jerusalem and its escalation on the blockaded Palestinian Gaza Strip.

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