Nov 092023
 


Hieronymus Bosch Adoration of the Magi c1472

 

Another Interview With Dominique De Villepin On The Conflict In Palestine (MoA)
‘Catastrophic’ Mistake for US to be Drawn Into War With Hezbollah and Iran (Sp.)
The Nothingness of a War Consciousness (Dennis Kucinich)
Russia’s Public Pivot To Palestine (Pepe Escobar)
Israel Attempt To Destroy Hamas Will Breed More Radicalisation – UN Expert (G.)
The Incredible Lightness of Barack Obama (Victor Davis Hanson)
‘Open War’ May Break Out Within Kiev Regime Leadership – Analyst (Sp.)
Ukrainian Women to Be Zelensky’s New Cannon Fodder (Sp.)
‘We Have A Plan’ – Zelensky (RT)
Ukraine Will Bring War To EU – Hungary (RT)
Wife of NY Judge In Case Against Trump Attacking Him On Social Media (PM)
US House Panel Subpoenas Hunter & James Biden (Sp.)
AstraZeneca Taken to Court Over “Defective” Covid Jab in Landmark Case (DS)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trump Tucker

 

 

Tucker Greenwald

 

 

 

 

Watters CIA

Election theft

 

 

 

 

Translated By Arnaud Bertrand, who says: “Another masterful interview on Gaza of Dominique De Villepin, former Prime Minister of France, who IMHO is the best diplomat the West has produced in decades.”

“The wounds of history are awakening.”

Another Interview With Dominique De Villepin On The Conflict In Palestine (MoA)

We are essentially dealing with a policy of vengeance from the Netanyahu government. Israel has the right to self-defense, but self-defense does not give an indiscriminate right to kill civilian populations. When you target an ambulance, you can always imagine that there was a terrorist in one of the ambulances, or not. But the result is that there are children, women who die. Every child, every woman killed, that’s more terrorists. Therefore, Israel’s objective, what Israel achieves, is exactly the opposite of what they wish. So, it is essential today to change this logic and return to a strategy that is sound. Hostages, everything must be done to secure their release. But let’s not forget: the Palestinian people are also taken hostage, by Hamas and by Israel.

And Hamas, we all know, cares little for the Palestinian people. So telling Hamas: “we will not lift the siege, we will not have a humanitarian truce until the hostages are released,” is a dialogue of the deaf. Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war to do everything so that the political solution does not come to the table. And this is where the international community, Europe, the United States, must tell Benjamin Netanyahu that this war is not acceptable. It is not acceptable because it leads us directly [to escalation] – because we can see it well, from Hamas we will move to Iran, from Iran we will move to other targets, and we then enter into the logic of a clash of civilizations. When Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu says that on one side there is the people of light and on the other the people of darkness, we can see the kind of spiral we are getting into.

All the wars that have been going on for the past twenty years are wars that begin and do not end. These are frozen conflicts. We know how to start a war; we do not know how to end it. And Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu could control Gaza, it would change nothing. There will continue to be terrorist attacks, Israelis will continue to live in fear. We must get out of this. The second reason why this is yesterday’s war is that the war against terrorism has never been won anywhere. Force is not the answer, once again. Vengeance is not the answer. The answer is justice, and that is what all the peoples of the world, all those who today watch what is happening, call for justice. Today the direction we must follow is to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from continuing his suicidal logic that will make Israel a besieged state. They can besiege Gaza, but they will be besieged. And do not think that tomorrow we will again have a pacified discourse with Saudi Arabia, with the Arab states that will normalize the situation: no! The wounds of history are awakening.

Israel’s interest is to have a responsible state at its side. And this responsible state, let’s stop splitting hairs, must clearly be the West Bank, all of the West Bank. It must be Gaza, with access between the two territories, and East Jerusalem. The problem, and this is the whole point of Benjamin Netanyahu’s escalation, is that Benjamin Netanyahu does not want it. And the policy of separation must be dignified. That is, it must confer to the Palestinians a state where they can live, a viable state, a true state, which can build itself and which will be all the more at peace… [Host: “Does that mean that the settlements in the West Bank have to be removed?”] Well, when we left Algeria, there were a million French who left Algeria. Today there are 500,000 Israelis colonizing the West Bank, and there are 200,000 in East Jerusalem. [Host: “They must leave the West Bank?”] Yes. Yes, that is history, that is responsibility, that is the price! I tell you solemnly, it is the price of security for Israel! And all those who today consider that it will never be enough are pursuing the worst policy.”

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“Netanyahu has asked three successive American presidents to either attack Iran or to join with Israel to attack Iran, and the answer has been ‘no’ three times.”

‘Catastrophic’ Mistake for US to be Drawn Into War With Hezbollah and Iran (Sp.)

In an article for Al-Mayadeen earlier this week, former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter argued that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu is trying to escalate the situation in Lebanon in order to draw the US into a multi-front war against Hezbollah and ultimately Iran. However, Ritter also argued that such a maneuver would not succeed, because Hezbollah won’t be goaded into a conflict that will put it at a disadvantage on the global stage. Ritter said if Hezbollah takes the initiative and launches a full-scale attack on Israel, “people will stop talking about Palestine. People will stop talking about Israel’s aggression, and they will now focus on a new front that will probably include Iran.”

“This is again why [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah speaks of perseverance. Perseverance means that you have to struggle through the difficult times to ensure that you are not distracted from the strategic vision,” Ritter said, adding that “Hamas is winning this fight. Israel cannot prevail. Israel cannot defeat Hamas on the ground. Israel has lost the propaganda battle globally; they have lost in the United States.” John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower about the US torture program, told Radio Sputnik’s “The Critical Hour” on Tuesday that Ritter and Nasrallah are right: the US cannot win a war against Hezbollah and should not get involved in such a fight.

“I think Scott Ritter is right. And, you know, I would remind everybody, too, if you recall a month ago, in the immediate aftermath, just in 24 or 48 hours after the Hamas attack on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu said – and he said it definitively at the time – that the Iranians were behind it all, that that Iran was supplying weapons to Hamas, that Hamas couldn’t have pulled this off by itself, this had to be an Iranian operation. And it wasn’t an Iranian operation. But that was very consistent with Netanyahu’s thinking over the past two decades,” said Kiriakou, who is also the co-host of “Political Misfits” on Radio Sputnik. “Netanyahu has asked three successive American presidents to either attack Iran or to join with Israel to attack Iran, and the answer has been ‘no’ three times. And so now he sees this as an opportunity to bring the Americans in, to either help defeat Hezbollah while the Israelis focus on Hamas, or to defeat Iran, while the Israelis focus on Hamas. Because the truth of the matter is: Israel cannot fight a two-front war. It’s just not equipped,” Kiriakou said.

“Now, we heard from Netanyahu’s office today that the IDF is – their words – ‘deep in the heart of Gaza’. Well, good luck with that. Good luck with miles and miles of tunnels, good luck finding an enemy that is intertwined with the civilian population. Good luck. That doesn’t mean that the United States should be dragged into it. We have our own problems now with Ukraine and with what seems to be an overwhelming national desire to jump in on the side of the Israelis from a distance – but that doesn’t mean that we have to send American troops to help Israel fight its war.”

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“The America that could be, our own hopes and dreams for a prosperous and secure nation, lie alongside the bodies of the men, women and children in those ruins.”

The Nothingness of a War Consciousness (Dennis Kucinich)

We are now being presented, several times a day, with media examples of the effect of extreme violence visited on the captive people of Gaza. The images are heartbreaking. The reality unbearable. Bodies of Palestinian families strewn like refuse along a road that they had trekked as a path to safety. A car turns around at a checkpoint in Gaza, its occupants are hit with a shot from behind, from a tank and everything, the car and its occupants, disappear in a puff. A Palestinian journalist mourns his colleague, who only a half hour earlier, was reporting on air. After work, he went home, a bomb hit, killing him and his 11-member family. The video of his ruined house shows several children’s party dresses that lie amidst the rubble. The human family is in the rubble.

An ambulance convoy, filled with injured Gazans, under the supervision of medical authorities, headed to the Rafah border crossing, was struck by the Israeli air force with the stated suspicion that the vehicle, which was headed away from the battle, carried Hamas fighters. War reduces all nothingness. It is as if 10,000 Palestinians and more had never existed. But they did, just as the 1,400 Israelis killed on October 7 existed. They had birthdates, names, fragile exchanges of human emotion, of love of family, private moments in everyday life that confirmed their existence. Obliterated. Nothingness. Whatever media we consume, we see only a fraction of the massive display of inhumanity occurring in Gaza, the reduction of living, breathing, feeling people to objects. This is heartless. This is soulless. This reduces all of existence to the nothingness of smoke, human smoke.

The violence it is calculated. It is rooted in power politics, in racism, in apartheid, in twisted history, opportunism disguised as vengeance, statecraft as slaughter. We in America, are paying for the extermination of our fellow humans. Our weapons are creating carnage against helpless people. Our aircraft, our ships, our troops have entered the fray, greatly outnumbered. But we are not helpless. We must demand, now, that our government take a new direction, and soon, not only for a cease fire, but a ceasing of war, the end of arms sales to fuel war, the end of 800 military bases around the world; the end of the theft of our tax dollars for killing; the end of policies that pit people against each other, the end of the destructive psychology justifying violence to maintain “strategic balance,” the end of the false justifications for sending our troops into harm’s way.

It is an unfathomable, beyond the Orwellian, to commit ethnic cleansing and call it defense, to preach democratic values while practicing apartheid, to claim wholesale theft of property a right, to take Palestinians, their homes, kill their children, destroy their family, their culture, their history and deem it the fulfillment of a prophecy ordained by God. That this genocide is being visited upon the Palestinians by the descendants of those who suffered the utterly condemnable, indelible inhumanity of the Holocaust is incomprehensible. After all, who has suffered more than the Jews during the Holocaust? Entire families wiped out in a racist elimination plan. [..] Do not assume that it is only the artifacts of the humble, daily lives of Palestinians that lay buried in bomb craters. The America that could be, our own hopes and dreams for a prosperous and secure nation, lie alongside the bodies of the men, women and children in those ruins.

Leaving Gaza

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“This is not about Gaza, but about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The State of Palestine is an integral part of that solution.”

Russia’s Public Pivot To Palestine (Pepe Escobar)

The Russian president made a direct connection between the American drive to extend “its global dictatorship” and the policy obsession with promoting non-stop chaos: “This chaos will help it contain and destabilize its rivals or, as they put it, their geopolitical opponents, among which they also rank our country, which in reality are new global growth centers and sovereign independent countries who are unwilling to kowtow and play the role of servants.” Crucially, Putin made a point to “repeat again” to both his internal and Global South audiences that, “the ruling elites of the United States and its satellites are behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East in general, the conflict in Ukraine, and many other conflicts in the world – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and so on.”

It is a vitally important point. By conflating the perpetrators of the Ukraine conflict and the war on Gaza – “the United States and its satellites” – the Russian president has effectively lumped Israel in with the western Hegemon and its agenda of “chaos.” Essentially, what this tells us is that the Russian Federation unequivocally aligns itself with the overwhelming majority of Global South/Global Majority public opinion – from the Arab world to all the lands of Islam and beyond, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Interestingly, Moscow aligns with the analyses by Iranian Leader Ayatollah Khamenei – a strategic partner of Russia – and Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, in his searing, sophisticated, Sun-Tzu tinged address this past Friday, on “the spider that is trying to entangle the entire planet and the whole world in its cobweb.”

Exhibit B on Russia’s official position, specifically on Israel-Palestine, came from Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, at a special UN General Assembly session on Palestine two days after Putin’s address. Nebenzya made it abundantly clear that Israel, as an occupying power, does not have “the right for self-defense” – a fact supported by a UN International Court consultative ruling way back in 2004. At the time, the court also established, in a 14 out of 15 judicial vote, that Israel’s construction of a massive wall in occupied Palestine, including East Jerusalem, was against international law. Nebenzya, in legal terms, nullified the endlessly evoked “right to self-defense” argument brandished by Tel Aviv and the whole NATO galaxy. The Hegemon, Tel Aviv’s protector, recently vetoed Brazil’s draft humanitarian UN Security Council just because it did not mention Israel’s “right to self-defense.”

Even as he underscored that Moscow does recognize Israel’s right to ensure its security, Nebenzya stressed this right “could be fully guaranteed only in case of a fair resolution of the Palestinian problem based on recognized UN Security Council resolutions.” The record shows that Israel does not respect any UN Security Council resolution on Palestine. Exhibit C on Russia’s stand regarding Israel/Palestine was provided by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a press conference with Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sabah Al-Sabah, two days after Nebenzya’s intervention at the UN. Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s priorities already stressed by Putin and Nebenzya: an urgent ceasefire, humanitarian corridors, and a return to the table to negotiate “an independent Palestinian state, as envisaged by the UN Security Council within the 1967 borders, which would coexist in peace and security with Israel.”

Lavrov stressed once again that several US-Israeli diversionary tactics are being employed “aimed at delaying (if not burying) the UN Security Council’s decision to establish a Palestinian state.” This, says the Russian foreign minister, implies condemning the Palestinians “to an eternal existence without rights. This will ensure neither peace nor security in the region, it will only drive the conflict deeper. And you won’t be able to drive it deep. The next ‘grapes of wrath’ will be sown, which will quickly ‘sprout.’” Lavrov’s analysis, as much as Putin’s, converges with Khamenei’s and Nasrallah’s: “This is not about Gaza, but about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The State of Palestine is an integral part of that solution.”

Russia is sowing the seeds to exercise the role of trusted mediator for all parties in Israel/Palestine – a role totally unsuitable for the Hegemon, especially after the tacit approval of the current Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It’s all here, clearly formulated by Lavrov: “It will be fundamentally important for us to know the unanimous opinion of the Arab world.” That is a message specifically targeting Sunni regimes vassalized by Washington. Then, when they get their act together, “we will support the Arab solution to this very difficult issue.”

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”They live with fear, and their major fear is not to see their mother and father any more, either because they are killed or because the children themselves get killed..”

Israel Attempt To Destroy Hamas Will Breed More Radicalisation – UN Expert (G.)

Israel’s attempt to wipe out Hamas in response to the attacks of 7 October is likely to breed only further radicalisation, besides being unlawful, the UN special rapporteur on theoccupied Palestinian territories has said. In an interview with the Guardian, Francesca Albanese also said the international community was “reaping the whirlwind” of failing to heed the concerns of those, including herself, who had criticised Israel’s “systematic repression of Palestinian human rights”. “We raised the alarm in the international community, the human rights community, but no one has really listened,” Albanese said. “Now it has reached a dangerous point of no return where the chances of peaceful coexistence have dropped vertically off a cliff. In fact, we are staring into an abyss.” Albanese, an Italian academic, has often been accused by Israel of displaying pro-Palestinian bias, a charge she denies.

She challenged Israel to consider what is in its own self-interest. “Half the infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed. 9,000 people have been killed, 3,500 of them are reported to be children, over 1,000 of them are still under the rubble. How on earth is that going to lead to peace?” She doubted it was possible to eradicate Hamas, which she described as “not just a military presence but a political reality”. “Even if it was possible to eradicate Hamas, if [Israel] was to exterminate everyone, everyone, so not just the militants, but anyone who works for Hamas including service providers, even if that was possible, but Israel’s occupation remained in place, all the grievances would continue to grow and another resistance will emerge. It’s natural, it’s almost a law of physics. History confirms that.” Her most recent report as UN special rapporteur was on children in the occupied territories, and she said she fears for the further psychological damage inflicted over the last month.

“When you see children there, a profound trauma has gone across their tiny bodies,” she said. “They can speak like adults, they speak of the rights, they speak of the world they know and the world they want. They live with fear, and their major fear is not to see their mother and father any more, either because they are killed or because the children themselves get killed. “The parents of these kids say that they’re scared because they see what it is like for them, that there are fewer alternatives to armed resistance. And it’s difficult to keep the kids away from that path because so many hopes have been destroyed. … When they resist peacefully, and use international law such as the International criminal court or the international court of justice, the international community has been deaf. People feel left with nothing and this is a huge responsibility for the international community to reflect upon.”

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X thread.

The Incredible Lightness of Barack Obama (Victor Davis Hanson)

Joe Biden is caught in a quadfecta of corruption, cognitive decline, a failed agenda, and eroding polls. Amid this apparent vacuum, an opportunistic Barack Obama — who used to be more discreet in managing his third term—is reentering the arena. Last week, he came out as the overseer of the Biden administration’s AI agenda, even as his foundation’s “Democracy Forum” was warning Americans about the need for “inclusive capitalism” and the pathologies of “material consumption”—all this from a multi-mansioned multimillionaire. Now, Obama is weighing in on the Gaza war by undercutting his third-term presidential proxy.

Yet just as he seems somewhat clueless about the contradictions of an erstwhile “community organizer” turned into a hyper-capitalist, consumption-addicted elite, so too Obama has little self-awareness about how much of Biden’s unpopularity derives from his continuation of Obama’s own agendas on the economy, border, crime, race, foreign policy, and energy. His apparent obliviousness continues with his most recent odd assertion that, “The occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is [sic] unbearable.” But Obama surely concedes that Gaza has been autonomous and free of Israelis since 2005, and governed by a “one man, one vote, once” Hamas clique since January 2006. Obama added that, “If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth, and you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean – that all of us are complicit to some degree.”

In truth, Obama’s blanket accusation is absurd. Over the last 17 years, an autonomous Hamas has managed to create both a hierarchy of billionaires ensconced in luxury Qatari hotels, and the most sophisticated subterranean tunnel city in the world—but little else except corruption, poverty, and violence for all concerned. Obama again seemed unaware of his own confession when he lectured, “nobody’s hands are clean” and “all of us are complicit”. Not quite, Barack.

Those most culpable for the current catastrophe are Obama and his team, who invited in Robert Malley to be their point man on Hamas; cooked up the “Shiite crescent” misadventure; snubbed the grass-roots Green Movement that sought to overthrow the Iranian theocracy; invited the Russians back into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus; fled Iraq and fueled the ISIS caliphate; lifted sanctions on Iran, giving it a multibillion-dollar war chest that armed to the teeth Hezbollah and Hamas; estranged the U.S. from Israel; and created the media echo chamber that empowered the disastrous Iran Deal.

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“What we can hear from what he’s saying and when he is giving some interviews, it’s seems the guy is losing his footing and he knows it.”

‘Open War’ May Break Out Within Kiev Regime Leadership – Analyst (Sp.)

The prospects of the 2024 presidential election in Ukraine taking place as intended seemed rather unlikely since the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict in February 2022, since the martial law imposed in the country around that time effectively bars elections. This week, the Kiev regime boss Volodymyr Zelensky has also announced that he thinks “the time is not right” for elections in Ukraine. Commenting on this development, independent journalist Sonja Van Den Ende suggested that Zelensky appears “freaked out all the time” as of late, seeing how his army suffers defeat after defeat on the battlefield and his Western backers seem skeptical about Kiev’s odds of winning the Ukrainian conflict. “He is desperate,” Van Den Ende said, arguing that in this situation, elections are the last thing Zelensky wants. “He doesn’t want it because he knows he will be out.”

She argued that Kiev’s inability to defeat the Russian military has become increasingly apparent today, and Ukrainian forces’ attempts to pretend otherwise by launching drone strikes against Russia’s Crimean Peninsula cannot change that. “When countries lose the war, like Hitler did, in the end they get desperate and more radicalized,” van den Ende remarked. “And I think Zelensky is more radicalized now. What we can hear from what he’s saying and when he is giving some interviews, it’s seems the guy is losing his footing and he knows it.” Meanwhile, international relations security analyst Mark Sleboda noted that the United States seems to be “pushing” for Ukraine to hold next year’s presidential election, “even though, according to Ukraine’s constitution, they should not be held” under the martial law.

“But then why is the US pushing for elections, especially since all the real opposition is banned in the country?” Sleboda inquired. According to him, there are hints that the US government wants to “switch horses”, so to speak, by replacing Zelensky with one of Kiev regime’s top generals Valery Zaluzhny, “without going through the embarrassment of another US backed coup in the country to replace the leader so quickly after the last one.” Sleboda also observed that there seems to have been a falling out between Zelensky and Zaluzhny after the latter recently told British media that the much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive turned out to be anything but a success.

Noting how one of Zaluzhny’s aides, Gennady Chistyakov, got killed by an explosion while celebrating his birthday earlier this week, Sleboda remarked that Ukrainian social media channels are just “full of speculation that this was a political hit. They also allege that this was a warning to Zaluzhny and taking one of his pieces off the board by Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Yermak who is seen as kind of a gray cardinal manipulating a lot of things within the regime.” “This seems a fairly credible version to me, considering the way they’re trying to cover this up and wash it away and the embarrassing feature of the whole thing. And that would indicate that we’re pretty much on the brink of open war between the Kiev regime’s political and military leadership,” Sleboda added.

Macgregor

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“..”a step towards equality”..

“.. It also raised the age limit for women eligible for conscription from 40 to 60…”

Ukrainian Women to Be Zelensky’s New Cannon Fodder (Sp.)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky submitted legislation to the country’s Verkhovna Rada – the parliament – extending martial law and general mobilization in the country for another 90 days starting from November 16 this Tuesday. The move comes as the Kiev regime is struggling to increase the number of troops in the nation’s army after the botched summer counteroffensive claimed the lives of over 90,000 soldiers. A general mobilization in Ukraine was announced immediately after the beginning of Russia’s special military operation on February 24, 2022. Under the law, military reservists between the ages of 18 and 60 have been eligible for conscription. In September 2023, Kiev called upon EU member states to deport alleged Ukrainian “draft dodgers” – something which European countries have largely refused to do so far – while in August, Zelensky ordered a full review of all mobilization exemptions granted by Military Medical Commissions (MMCs) starting from February 24, 2022.

It was earlier reported that those Ukrainians who did not want to fight gave hefty bribes to MMC officials to get fraudulent passes. In the course of the conflict, reports and video-evidence have emerged showing Ukrainian men being forcibly grabbed by conscription officers in various part of the country. Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) report that morale is low and that many conscripts are pushed to the frontline as “cannon fodder”, without proper training, protection or ammo. Meanwhile, a US newspaper has drawn attention to the Kiev regime’s effort to fill its soldier gap by mobilizing more Ukrainian women. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, roughly 43,000 women now serve in the nation’s armed forces which constitute a staggering 40% increase since 2021. Accordingly, the Ukrainian military canceled restrictions which prevented female recruits from serving as machine gunners, tank commanders, snipers and truck drivers. It also raised the age limit for women eligible for conscription from 40 to 60.

The newspaper noted that while the Ukrainian Army’s decision to draw more women and lift restrictions is “a step towards equality”, it “also reflects the tremendous toll” the Ukraine conflict has exacted. In fact, female recruits are no news for modern armies. Around 40,000 Russian women serve in the country’s Armed Forces. Of these, roughly 5,000 are officers, including 44 colonels. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, 1,100 Russian military servicewomen are directly involved in the special military operation in Ukraine; a third of whom have received state awards. When it comes to Israel Defense Forces (IDF), women make up 33% of soldiers and 51% of its currently serving officers. Prior to Israel’s massive operation against Gaza, which brought together around 360,000 reservists of both genders, around 10,000 women served in the IDF in permanent service.

Per the US Department of Defense, women make up 17.3% of the active-duty forces in the US Armed Forces (231,741 servicewomen) and women also constitute 21.4% of the National Guard and reserves (171,000). However, the problem with Ukrainian female recruits is not the quantitative increase in the number to fill the existing gaps, but the dire situation at the front that may quickly turn them into cannon fodder.

Read more …

Go away.

‘We Have A Plan’ – Zelensky (RT)

Ukraine has a strategy to continue its stalled counteroffensive push against Russia and will try to yield victories shortly, President Vladimir Zelensky has claimed. The president made the remarks on Wednesday as he appeared at the Reuters NEXT conference via a video link. “We have a plan. We have very concrete cities, very [concrete] directions where we go. I can’t share all the details but we have some slow steps forward on the south, also we have steps on the east,” Zelensky stated. While largely avoiding naming any exact locations where such activities are expected to happen, Zelensky promised certain “good steps near Kherson Region,”without elaborating further. Ukrainian forces have a plan for next year, but will “try” to show “battlefield results” by the end of 2023, Zelensky insisted.

“I am sure we’ll have success. It’s difficult,” he added. Zelensky’s remarks contrasted with the assessment given by his top general, Valery Zaluzhny, in an interview with The Economist published last week. The top military commander claimed the conflict between Moscow and Kiev had reached a WWI-style stalemate, with Russia having better chances given its far larger population and vast resources. This may “drag on for years” and“wear down” the country, with a“deep and beautiful breakthrough”unlikely, he warned. Zelensky has previously acknowledged the slow progress of the long-heralded counteroffensive launched by Kiev in early June.

While “some people”expected quick success, the drive ran into “certain difficulties,” Zelensky admitted. However, he somewhat shifted the blame for the lack of progress to Kiev’s Western backers, stating the country received less weaponry from abroad than it had originally hoped for. The botched counteroffensive has resulted in little to no territorial gains for the Ukrainian military, which sustained heavy personnel and material losses. According to Russian estimates, Kiev lost more than 90,000 soldiers in the push, with hundreds of military hardware pieces – including assorted Western-supplied vehicles – damaged and destroyed.

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It already has. Billions worth of it.

Ukraine Will Bring War To EU – Hungary (RT)

Conditions are simply not right for the European Union to consider membership for Ukraine, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Wednesday. His words came in response to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s enlargement proposal earlier that day in Lisbon. She had said that that the EU should commence “accession negotiations” with both Ukraine and Moldova, while upgrading the former Soviet republic of Georgia to official candidate status. “By admitting Ukraine, the EU would also get war, which obviously no one wants to happen,” Szijjarto said, according to Hungarian media. “Enlargement should serve to spread peace, not to bring war into the EU.” He said it would be “absurd” for Brussels to assess Ukraine’s progress in implementing reforms or rule of law or any other membership criteria, given the ongoing conflict.

“Right, there is a war in Ukraine, so we can see that neither media freedom nor freedom of speech is enforced, we can see that elections are not held either,”Szijjarto noted. Budapest’s standing position is that Ukraine needs to restore the rights of the Transcarpathian Hungarian community to the level they had in 2015, before Kiev’s drive to disenfranchise the Russian-speaking population. “Since, according to the European Commission, Ukraine has not met the conditions set for membership, we do not consider any further steps to be timely with regard to the accession negotiations with Ukraine,” the foreign minister concluded. According to Szijjarto, the bloc is facing serious security and economic challenges and is getting weaker, so if it’s looking to admit new members as a way of regaining strength, it should look to the Western Balkans, first and foremost Serbia, instead.

According to an EC report, the talks with Ukraine should begin once Kiev satisfies the remaining demands involving the fight against corruption, adopting an EU-compliant law on lobbying and “strengthening safeguards” for ethnic minorities. The EU has not admitted any new members since Croatia in 2013. Earlier this year, Brussels outlined a vague plan to expand by 2030, eyeing the rest of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

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“This is incredible bias,” Loomer wrote. “Less than 24 hours ago she posted tweets in which she said ‘F*CK TRUMP.’ ”

The judge must recuse himself but seems to enjoy the attention too much.

Wife of NY Judge In Case Against Trump Attacking Him On Social Media (PM)

It has been revealed that the wife of the judge overseeing the civil case against Donald Trump in New York has been attacking the former president and his lawyer on social media. Dawn Marie Engoron’s posts came just days after her husband, Arthur, expanded a gag order against Trump and his legal team in order to prevent them from speaking publicly against anyone involved in the case. Screenshots obtained by investigative journalist Laura Loomer showed that Mrs. Engoron created, liked, and shared a number of anti-Trump posts, many of which were directly related to the trial. One post included an AI-generated image of Trump bald in an orange prison jumpsuit next to one of an old lady scrawling “F*ck Trump” on a brick wall. Another was simply the latter.

In another series of posts, Mrs. Engoron took aim at Trump lawyer Alina Habba, retweeting someone who described her as someone who “doesn’t know how to act in front of a judge,” and replying to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) with a story about The View’s Whoopi Goldberg mocking Habba as a “whiny baby.”Loomer became aware of Mrs. Engoron’s online behavior after the judge’s wife posted about her interview with Rep. George Santos (R-NY), which focused largely on the trial. After being exposed, Mrs. Engoron locked her account. “This is incredible bias,” Loomer wrote. “Less than 24 hours ago she posted tweets in which she said ‘F*CK TRUMP.’

She posted photoshopped pics of President Trump in an orange jump suit, she attacked me during my Live show last night for exposing her husband, and she is openly attacking President Trump’s lawyer [Alina Habba].” Loomer’s sentiments were shared by many who called on Engoron to recuse himself or “dismiss this nonsensical case.” “Where are all of the leftists asking Justices to recuse themselves over the political leanings of their spouses?” one user asked, referring to the backlash Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas faced over his wife’s views. Engoron has already fined Trump for violating the strict gag order after the former president went after the judge’s clerk on Truth Social.

Loomer

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“The House Oversight Committee has followed the money and built a record of evidence revealing how Joe Biden knew, was involved, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes..”

US House Panel Subpoenas Hunter & James Biden (Sp.)

The US House Oversight Committee announced Wednesday that Chairman James Comer issued subpoenas for Hunter and James Biden, Rob Walker and others to appear for interviews as part of the investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings. “House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) today issued subpoenas to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, brother, James Biden, and Biden family associate, Rob Walker, to appear for depositions,” the release said. Comer also requested additional members of the Biden family and their associates appear for transcribed interviews, including the US president’s daughter-in-law Hallie Biden and sister-in-law Sara Biden, the release said.

The Kentucky lawmaker plans to send additional subpoenas and transcribed interview requests later this week. “The House Oversight Committee has followed the money and built a record of evidence revealing how Joe Biden knew, was involved, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes,” Comer said. “Now, the House Oversight Committee is going to bring in members of the Biden family and their associates to question them on this record of evidence.”In September, Comer issued subpoenas for Hunter and James Biden seeking to obtain their personal and business records. The Oversight Committee has disclosed since January that the Bidens and their associates had established more than 20 shell companies, amassing more than $24 million from sources in China and other countries.

Earlier this week, Comer said Joe Biden received a personal check for $40,000 in allegedly laundered money from China involving Hunter Biden’s companies. The latest comes after the top prosecutor in the Hunter Biden case told the House Judiciary Committee during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday that politics did not play a factor in filing charges against Hunter Biden. The meeting marked the first time a special counsel answered questions during an active probe before congressional lawmakers. Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty in October to three charges related to the possession of a firearm while he was under the influence of illicit drugs. The charges date back to gun forms from 2018.

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“Victims of VITT – a new condition identified by specialists – question the Government’s monitoring of the vaccine’s rollout and its efficacy”

AstraZeneca Taken to Court Over “Defective” Covid Jab in Landmark Case (DS)

The Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine has been branded “defective” in a multi-million pound landmark legal action that will suggest claims over its efficacy were “vastly overstated”. The Telegraph has the story. The pharmaceutical giant is being sued in the High Court in a test case by Jamie Scott, a father-of-two who suffered a significant permanent brain injury that has left him unable to work as a result of a blood clot after receiving the jab in April 2021. A second claim is being brought by the widower and two young children of 35-year-old Alpa Tailor, who died after having the jab made by AstraZeneca, the U.K.-based pharmaceutical giant. The test cases could pave the way for as many as 80 damages claims worth an estimated £80 million over a new condition known as Vaccine-induced Immune Thrombocytopenia and Thrombosis (VITT) that was identified by specialists in the wake of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine rollout. …

The vaccine, which was heralded at its launch by Boris Johnson as a “triumph for British science“, is no longer used in the U.K. The Government recommends three other vaccines for its autumn booster programme. In the months following the rollout, the serious side-effect of the AstraZeneca jab was identified by scientists. Following this, it was recommend it no longer be given to the under-40s in the U.K. because the risk of receiving the jab outweighed the serious harm posed by Covid. AstraZeneca last night told the Telegraph that patient safety was its “highest priority”, that its vaccine, called Vaxzevria, had “continuously been shown to have an acceptable safety profile”, and that regulators around the world “consistently state that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks of extremely rare potential side-effects”. It is understood AstraZeneca, in its legal response, denies causing Mr. Scott’s injuries.

Official figures from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) show at least 81 deaths in the U.K. are suspected to have been linked to the adverse reaction that caused clotting in people who also had low blood platelets. In total, almost one in five people who suffered from the condition died as a result, according to the MHRA’s own figures. … As many as 80 claimants could lodge legal cases with the High Court by the end of the year in a class action that threatens to undermine faith in the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine that was developed jointly with Oxford University. In Mr. Scott’s claim, his lawyers argue that he suffered “personal injuries and consequential losses arising out of his sustaining Vaccine Induced Immune Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia (VITT) as a result of his vaccination on April 23rd 2021, with the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccination”, which the legal claim alleges was “defective”.

They also argue that no warning of the risk of VITT was included in the product information on the date of supply of the vaccine. AstraZeneca issued press releases following clinical trials saying the vaccine – known as Vaxzevria – was between 62% and 90% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 depending on dosages, with an average of 70%. The legal claim states: “In fact, the absolute risk reduction concerning COVID-19 prevention was only 1.2%.” An absolute risk reduction measures how much the vaccine reduces an individual’s baseline risk of getting ill from Covid at a particular time. If Covid levels are low, the absolute risk reduction rate will be much lower too. This is different from a relative risk reduction, which compares the numbers of vaccinated people getting ill with those getting ill who did not receive the jab.

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CO2

 

 

 

 

Massie Kerry

 

 

 

 

Bigger boat

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Mar 192022
 


Salvador Dali Eggs on the plate (without the plate) 1932

 

Shadows Within Shadows (Jim Kunstler)
The Dominance Of The US Dollar Is Fading Right Before Our Eyes (QTR)
All That Glitters Is Not Necessarily Russian Gold (Escobar)
Dollar Dominance Is Going To Be With Us For Decades To Come (Fickling)
Ukraine Adopts WEF Proposals (Armstrong)
NATO Calls up 100s of 1000s of Troops Ready to Begin WWIII (Armstrong)
The Times Finally Admits: Hunter’s Laptop Is Real (NYP op-ed)
How Dem Officials, The Media And Big Tech Buried The Hunter Biden Story (NYP)
Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine (ZH)
Russia Blocks Ships Carrying Grain Exports (DW)
“Died Suddenly” Solved (Chesnut)
UK will HIDE Vaccinated Cases and Deaths (Chudov)
Two UK Residents Died of Blood-Clotting Disorders Linked to AstraZeneca (CHD)
CDC Removes 24% of Child COVID-19 Deaths, Thousands of Others (ET)
Fauci Says He’s Considering Stepping Down (ET)

 

 


Fresco in Prague, dedicated to the children of Ukraine

 

 

Hungry people are dangerous

 

 

 

 

Rickards

 

 

Safe and effective

 

 

“How do we propose to get these things into Ukraine? Fly the stuff in on USAF C-17 Globemaster transport planes? To what airfield, exactly?”

Shadows Within Shadows (Jim Kunstler)

The regime behind “Joe Biden” appears to relish the prospect of dragging out this crisis as long as possible, despite the fact that we have about zero national interest in the fate of Ukraine, except perhaps for our fears about the dark secrets that reside there…. Amid an all-out campaign of contrived World War Three hysteria, our country aims to send about $14-billion in aid to Ukraine post-haste, including more javelin anti-tank missiles and weapons described as “kamikaze drones,” posing some thorny questions for curious observers. How do we propose to get these things into Ukraine? Fly the stuff in on USAF C-17 Globemaster transport planes? To what airfield, exactly? And with what assurance that they can make delivery without encountering, shall we say, induced mechanical failure before landing?

Drive the weapons across the border from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, or Moldova? Do you not suppose that Russia has satellite surveillance of the limited number of road crossings along that frontier, and will be watching for truck convoys. More likely, that dollar number and the weaponry talk are fantasies intended to propitiate the roughly thirty percent of Americans whom, pollsters report, are avid for an apocalyptic nuclear showdown with Russia. Thirty percent, by the way, is the estimate by psychologists of any given population susceptible to mass formation psychosis — the transfiguration of anxiety-and-anomie-driven persons from something like harmless grasshoppers into ravaging human locusts.

That group derangement phenomenon has been managed artfully by America’s Deep State in recent years starting with the Russia Collusion hoax against the alleged monsterdom of Mr. Trump, then shifted to the frenzy around Covid-19 virus, with all its sickening rituals of obedience and submission, and now segued seamlessly to the melodrama of Vladimir Putin cast as King Kong manhandling Fay Wray as personified by Ukraine. Readers assure me that Russia is “getting its ass kicked” in that sore-beset, yawning expanse of wheat and mud that has been, one way or another, a domain of Russia longer than the USA has been nation — except the past thirty-odd years when it has been a playground for homegrown oligarch-looters, US State Department and CIA gamesters, and grift-seeking rogues such as Mr. Hunter R. Biden and the relatives of John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi.

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Three articles on the USD. I still tend to side with No. 3, I don’t see what could replace the dollar. Certainly not the yuan, not as long as Xi demands full control of it.. There’s gold, and bitcoin, and SDR, and then maybe a fiat basket of currencies. Whatever comes, it will take a long time.

The Dominance Of The US Dollar Is Fading Right Before Our Eyes (QTR)

Saudi Arabia, which is a nation of major consequence economically due to its significant oil and gas reserves, has reportedly embraced the idea of accepting Yuan instead of dollars for Chinese oil sales. Not unlike Russia and China’s plans to de-dollarize, that date back nearly a decade, the Saudis have been considering this idea for six years already. And not unlike Russia and China’s new economic tie-up, the catalyst for speeding up the process has been U.S. foreign policy: Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would dent the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia.

The talks with China over yuan-priced oil contracts have been off and on for six years but have accelerated this year as the Saudis have grown increasingly unhappy with decades-old U.S. security commitments to defend the kingdom, the people said. The consideration by Saudi Arabia is consequential. It shows that other nations, when forced to choose sides between the U.S. and its foes, don’t feel obligated to commit to the U.S. dollar, further undermining the world’s perception about the dollar’s strength. Not unlike Russia, Saudi Arabia is a country that, regardless of how much its currency may “devalue” versus a fiat basket of currencies, is still backed by finite resources. This gives the country and its currency intrinsic strength. Russia seems to understand this. In fact, just this morning, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, likely alluding to this fact, said that economic sanctions against Russia make the country “stronger”.

Saudi Arabia is now another serious name on the list of contenders who have the currency bite to back up the economic rhetoric bark of challenging the dollar. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the Saudis have “traded oil exclusively in dollars since 1974, in a deal with the Nixon administration that included security guarantees for the kingdom.” The U.S. dollar’s ties to oil have been crucial in helping prop up the currency’s demand globally. These ties have also helped drum up the psychological buy-in necessary for the world to collectively accept that “the next guy” is going to want their U.S. dollars. But given the alliance between Russia and China – and the newfound alliance between Saudi Arabia and China – it looks as though that confidence game might be coming to an end right before our very eyes.

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Love Pepe, but this does’t sound credible.

All That Glitters Is Not Necessarily Russian Gold (Escobar)

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China are starting to design a new monetary and financial system bypassing the U.S. dollar, supervised by Sergei Glazyev and intended to compete with the Bretton Woods system. Saudi Arabia – perpetrator of bombing, famine and genocide in Yemen, weaponized by U.S., UK and EU – is advancing the coming of the petroyuan. India – third largest importer of oil in the world – is about to sign a mega-contract to buy oil from Russia with a huge discount and using a ruble-rupee mechanism. Riyadh’s oil exports amount to roughly $170 billion a year. China buys 17% of it, compared to 21% for Japan, 15% for the U.S., 12% for India and roughly 10% for the EU. The U.S. and its vassals – Japan, South Korea, EU – will remain within the petrodollar sphere. India, just like China, may not.

Sanction blowback is on the offense. Even a market/casino capitalism darling such as uber-nerd Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Poznar, formerly with the NY Fed, IMF and Treasury Dept., has been forced to admit, in an analytical note: “If you think that the West can develop sanctions that will maximize the pain for Russia by minimizing the risks of financial stability and price stability for the West, then you can also trust unicorns.” Unicorns are a trademark of the massive NATOstan psyops apparatus, lavishly illustrated by the staged, completely fake “summit” in Kiev between Comedian Ze and the Prime Ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, thoroughly debunked by John Helmer and Polish sources.

Poznar, a realist, hinted in fact at the ritual burial of the financial chapter of the “rules-based international order” in place since the early Cold War years: “After the end of this war ‘money’ “will never be the same”. Especially when the Hegemon demonstrates its “rules” by encroaching on other people’s money. And that configures the central tenet of 21st century martial geopolitics as monetary/ideological. The world, especially the Global South, will have to decide whether “money” is represented by the virtual, turbo-charged casino privileged by the Americans or by real, tangible assets such as energy sources. A bipolar financial world – U.S. dollar vs. yuan – is at hand.

There’s no surefire evidence – yet. But the Kremlin may have certainly gamed that by using Russia’s foreign reserves as bait, likely to be frozen by sanctions, the end result could be the smashing of the petrodollar. After all the overwhelming majority of the Global South by now has fully understood that the backed-by-nothing U.S. dollar as “money” – according to Poznar – is absolutely untrustworthy. If that’s the case, talk about a Putin ippon from hell.

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Thread.

“..would take decades to come to fruition. And that only gets you to the point where the yuan is as important as, say, the euro or the yen.”

Dollar Dominance Is Going To Be With Us For Decades To Come (Fickling)

I regularly scoff about the wild claims about the yuan replacing the dollar as a global currency. But every time I look at the data I’m still *amazed* at just how irrelevant the yuan is: Banks *in China itself* still use the greenback for more than two-thirds of their cross-border claims. Just 14% are denominated in yuan.

As is often pointed out, the Swiss Franc and Canadian and Australian dollars are used in more FX transactions than the Chinese yuan. It’s likely the yuan is more used down than in this 2019 data, but also consider that much of those flows will be with the Hong Kong dollar.

Which however you look at it is not exactly a global monetary transaction. The key thing that I think people fail to understand about the dollar’s global importance is that it’s founded not so much on the U.S. dollar regulated by the U.S. Federal Reserve, but the eurodollar, an instrument that few people know about and fewer understand. Are eurodollars money? Well, kinda. They owe their value to the fact that they’re freely convertible with U.S. dollars, on the balance sheets of banks in the U.S. But they are created on the balance sheets of banks outside the U.S. and not subject to Federal Reserve regulation. Eurodollars were the crypto of their day — a way to create money out of sight of government regulation. Their origin was in the dollar deposits of Communist countries after World War II, which the kept in Europe so that the Fed wouldn’t be able to freeze their assets.

It’s absolutely true that the Fed’s post-2008 swap lines, and the growing use of the dollar to extend the reach of Washington’s secondary sanctions, and the action against the central bank of Russia last month, start eroding the eurodollar’s autonomy. But compare it to assets in a country like China with a closed capital account and sweeping asset forfeiture rules like China’s so-called anti-sanctions law last year, and money based on the eurodollar is still the closest thing the world has to unregulated global finance.

If China opens up its capital account, starts running up huge budget deficits to provide more of a supply of safe assets, and establishes a solid reputation for rule of law, it might start to chip away at the edges of this edifice. But any one of those conditions on its own would be an epic, extraordinary policy change, and would take decades to come to fruition. And that only gets you to the point where the yuan is as important as, say, the euro or the yen.

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WEF AND crypto?!

Ukraine Adopts WEF Proposals (Armstrong)

Zelensky has just signed into law the first steps of Schwab’s Great Reset. He announced he is introducing a Social Credit Application combining Universal Basic Income (UBI), a Digital Identity & a Vaccine Passport all within their Diia app. He also says that because so much money is coming into Ukraine as he has become an international celebrity, he has legalized cryptocurrencies in Ukraine. He will allow foreign and Ukrainian cryptocurrencies exchanges to operate legally, according to the country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. So far, he has taken in over $63 million in cryptocurrency donations.

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100,000 US troops sent to Europe to NOT start a war.

NATO Calls up 100s of 1000s of Troops Ready to Begin WWIII (Armstrong)

The pressure to start World War III is on. NATO now expects that there will be a major war with Russia and the confrontation may come even in a few weeks. The NATO Secretary-General announced an increased war alert for hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Stoltenberg issued a joint statement with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, stating that hundreds of thousands of NATO troops were placed on high alert along with 100,000 US troops. The problem with war is that BOTH sides lie and twist the facts to support their own agenda. They paint their adversary as evil to stir up the troops to go fight and risk their lives typically for fake stories and agendas.

The Press is deliberately trying to create World War III and is engaged in using photos of children hurt and others from events unrelated to Ukraine. This is all to beat the war drums to create World War III without any honest understanding of what that will mean. Despite the hatred and demonization of Putin, he has been trying to take the high road. Zelensky has been following his orders and refusing to compromise on anything. As a WEF Young Global Leader, he is showing the same authoritarian approach as Trudeau in Canada as well as Australia and New Zealand who are all on board with this Great Reset. We may see this crisis turn into a confrontation as soon as the week of April 18th going into the first week of May based upon our computer models.

But the real crisis may come in August and turn global in 2023. I am glad I spent a fair portion of my life in Europe to see all the historical monuments before these people feel the need to destroy the world over two provinces in Ukraine. I fear this time, the monuments will not survive. Pray for civilization for we have madmen leading the West into World War III all so they can Build Back Better as they did following World War II with Bretton Woods II, but this time we are facing a completely different war with biological and nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the press will NEVER tell us the truth or explain just why people are expected to lose their lives for some noble cause that is always some propaganda to support a political agenda. This time, the bombs will be wiping out American cities unlike World War I and II not to mention Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or other clandestine operations. You may not be watching it on TV but out your own window. Well, we get what we deserve. America voted for Biden, Britain for Johnson, Canada for Trudeau, and Ukraine for Zelensky. There is no peacemaker and certainly no statesman among the crop of world leaders today. To even question what is going on they cancel you now as a Putin supporter to once more not have to explain the truth. There is NEVER truth to be found in the propaganda of war for either side.

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Censoring the laptop story was for domestic consumption. But Russia, China, India watch this unfold and see a corrupt rogue state that cannot be trusted.

The Times Finally Admits: Hunter’s Laptop Is Real (NYP op-ed)

Now we’re 16 months away from the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s safely in the White House, and the Times finally decides to report on the news rather than carry the Biden campaign’s water. And they find that hey, Hunter Biden’s business interests benefited from Joe Biden’s political status to a suspicious degree. Perhaps this is a topic worthy of examination. How did the Times “authenticate” the laptop? It doesn’t say. Unlike The Post’s reporting, which detailed exactly how we got the files and where they came from, the Times does a hand wave to anonymous sources. No facts have changed since fall 2020. They knew the laptop was real from the start. They just didn’t want to say so.

There’s never any shame with these 180s. Sorry that we wrote a “fact check” that turned out to be bull! Sorry we wrote a piece claiming something wasn’t a story and you were stupid for thinking so! Twitter banned us for supposedly publishing “hacked materials” that weren’t hacked. The company’s CEO apologized, but by that point, they had accomplished what they wanted. Like the Times, they cast enough doubt to avoid making their preferred candidate look bad. Readers of the Times have discovered in March 2022 that Hunter Biden pursued business deals in Europe and Asia, and may have leveraged his father’s position as vice president to do it. Hunter also may not have properly registered with the government or declared all his income. All legitimate topics of discussion about a presidential candidate’s family, no?

Readers of The Post have known this since October 2020. We also have a much better sports section. We’ve authenticated it.

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Special counsel. It’s the only approach.

How Dem Officials, The Media And Big Tech Buried The Hunter Biden Story (NYP)

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.” But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions. These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

It was infamously snuffed out on Twitter, as was The Post’s Twitter account, because of a policy about hacked materials that only seemed to apply to this one case. Twitter didn’t bar the New York Times’s stories about Donald Trump’s tax returns, which could have come from hacked materials for all we know, and almost certainly were the product of a criminal act (leaking tax returns is against the law), but the Times never even told us how it got the returns, so we don’t know. The Post acted with transparency in explaining to readers how it got the Laptop from Hell. Moreover, nobody on Team Biden denied The Post’s report, because they knew or suspected it was true. Every news outlet in the country should have fronted the story at that point: “Biden team refuses to deny Hunter Biden laptop story.” A few months later, Hunter himself said the laptop “certainly” could be his, and the media shrugged instead of apologizing.


Even in the presidential debate where the matter came up, Joe Biden’s comments were not a denial but simply a deflection, and everybody who reported that he denied the laptop story was guilty of propagating fake news all over again. What he actually said was, “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.” Joe (who later said “Yes, yes, yes” when a reporter asked him if he “believed” the laptop was Russian disinfo — the question allowed him all the wiggle room in the world) pointedly wasn’t denying the laptop belonged to Hunter, and wasn’t denying the material on it was genuine.

He was simply referring to the now-infamous Politico whitewash of October 19, 2020, which was fake news about fake news: The headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intelligence Officials Say” didn’t even accurately relate what was in the story. Those officials simply said they were “suspicious” about Russian involvement, admitted they had no evidence for this and pointed out (this was buried in the 10th paragraph of Politico’s story), “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not.” In other words, the notorious liar James Clapper et al. (as far as I can tell, every signatory who made his opinion known about the election was a Biden supporter) were simply peeing in the dark. Their rank speculation was unworthy of being published.

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Watch Africa.

Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine (ZH)

On Friday, Jakob Kern, an emergency coordinator at the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP), warned Ukraine’s food supply chains were collapsing as Russia bombed key infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and trains. “The country’s food supply chain is falling apart. Movements of goods have slowed down due to insecurity and the reluctance of drivers,” Kern told a Geneva during a video conference from Krakow, Poland. “Inside Ukraine our job is in effect, to replace the broken commercial food supply chains,” he added, describing the rebuilding task as a “mammoth” one. Ukraine’s top agricultural export products are corn and wheat. Before the invasion, Ukraine was the second-largest supplier of grains for the European Union and one of the largest suppliers for emerging markets in Asia and Africa.

Breaking down the numbers, Ukraine produced 49.6% of global sunflower oil, 10% of global wheat, 12.6% of global barley, and 15.3% of global maize. Estimates via Black Sea research firm SovEcon show Ukraine’s 2022 corn harvest could plunge as much as 35% from 41.9 million tons last year to 27.7 million tons this year because of all the disruptions. Farmers are already reporting diesel and fertilizer shortages. Wheat harvests are also expected to decline. Some have even pointed total crop output in the country could be halved. “With global food prices at an all-time high, WFP is also concerned about the impact of the Ukraine crisis on food security globally, especially hunger hot spots,” he said, warning of “collateral hunger” in other places like Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Turkey that rely heavily on Ukraine imports.

All of this has fueled the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization to warn global food prices could rise another 8-20% from current levels due to the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, also warned today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may cause a global surge in malnutrition and famine. “For the last three years, global rates of hunger and famine have been on the rise. With the Russian invasion, we are now facing the risk of imminent famine and starvation in more places around the world,” Fakhri said in a statement.

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“Russia blames the stoppage on the high risk of mines, which it said had been laid by the Ukrainian Navy.”

Russia Blocks Ships Carrying Grain Exports (DW)

Wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia, which make up a vital part of the world’s food supply are still being blocked by Russia from leaving the Black Sea, Germany’s largest agricultural trader BayWa said this week. “Zero [grain] is currently being exported from the ports of Ukraine — nothing is leaving the country at all,” Jörg-Simon Immerz, head of the grain trading at BayWa, told dpa news agency. He added that the export activity on the Russian side is “very limited.” Immerz’s assessment was backed up by the Panamanian Maritime Authority, who said on Wednesday that the Russian Navy was preventing 200-300 ships from leaving the Black Sea — most of them were carrying grain. Other reports suggest around 100 vessels are blocked.

Noriel Arauz, the administrator for the authority, said three Panamanian-flagged ships have come under Russian fire since the invasion of Ukraine started. One of the ships sank and two others were damaged, while no one was injured. British newspaper The Guardian reported that several other ships have been struck since the invasion began on February 24, including from Bangladesh and Estonia, which killed one person. Russia blames the stoppage on the high risk of mines, which it said had been laid by the Ukrainian Navy. Questions have been raised about how much grain Ukraine will be able to produce this year due to the conflict. At the same time, Russia has vowed to retaliate against Western sanctions that have crippled its economy.

Curbs on wheat and fertilizer exports are presumed to be high on Moscow’s list, which could have further consequences for the world’s food supply and food price inflation. Russia produces close to 80 million metric tons of wheat a year and exports close to 30 million tons, while Ukraine exports about 20 to 25 million tons a year. BayWa, meanwhile, believes there is no reason to fear a wheat shortage as much more wheat is harvested in the EU than is consumed. “The EU exports about 30 million metric tons of wheat annually, and Germany is also an exporter in normal years,” Immerz said. But that is not true for all types of grain. “We rely on imports for corn,” he added.

[..] Meanwhile, a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned about the impact of the war on the food situation in Africa. Between 2018 and 2020, Russia accounted for nearly a third of wheat imports to the continent, while around 12% come from Ukraine. The UNCTAD report said up to 25 African countries, especially the least developed economies, relied on wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine.

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Thread. SUDEP- Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy.

“Died Suddenly” Solved (Chesnut)

BUILDING: MY MOST IMPORTANT FINDING TO DATE: DIED UNEXPECTEDLY SOLVED. SUDEP AND “DIED UNEXPECTEDLY” – THE SPIKE PROTEIN, FIBROSIS AND THE BRAINSTEM. PART I “A SILENT ENTRANCE”. As you recall, the original spike caused a loss of the sense of smell, the medical term is Anosmia.

The olfactory (sense of smell) system happens to be a DIRECT ROUTE TO THE BRAINSTEM. Indeed, when we look at autopsies, the Spike Protein is a very frequent “guest” in the Brainstem. Pathological immune responses or SARS-CoV-2 invasion of the brainstem is suspected. An autopsy study has isolated 32 brain sections from 16 victims of COVID-19 and found concentrated SARS-CoV-2 RNA (>5 copies/mm3) in three sections from the olfactory nerves and the brainstem’s MEDULLA. More convincingly, in another autopsy study of deceased COVID-19 patients, SARS-CoV-2 RNA and proteins (nucleocapsid or SPIKE) were detected in 50% and 40% of brainstem samples, respectively.

Similarly, another autopsy study has found SARS-CoV-2 RNA and SPIKE PROTEINS in the olfactory mucosal-neuronal junction and brainstem’s MEDULLA in 67% and 19% of samples, respectively. In sum, these autopsy studies have provided evidence for SARS-CoV-2 tropism FROM THE OLFACTORY SYSTEM INTO THE BRAINSTEM. OK. We know the Spike Protein invades the Medulla of the Brainstem. So, what does this mean? Well, those who suffer from Epilepsy are prone to sudden death. In fact, it is because of PATHOLOGIC CORRELATIONS IN THE MEDULLA that they suffer what is known as SUDEP- Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy.

Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) likely arises as a result of AUTONOMIC DYSFUNCTION around the time of a seizure. In vivo MRI studies report volume reduction in the MEDULLA and other brainstem autonomic regions. Rostro-caudal alterations of medullary volume in SUDEP localize with regions containing respiratory regulatory nuclei. They may represent seizure-related alterations, relevant to the pathophysiology of SUDEP. Now, this heretofore rare event is now becoming all too common. The “One-Two Punch” of aberrant spike protein brainstem signaling (remodeling) combined with spike protein cardiac remodeling has virtually recreated the EXACT ENVIRONMENT OF SUDEP!

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“..cases in week 7-10 among the unvaccinated barely increased by 1%, from 59,904 cases to 60,372. For the boosted, cases increased by 14%..”

UK will HIDE Vaccinated Cases and Deaths (Chudov)

The infamous UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report started as a great tool by the vaccinators to showcase incredible successes of Covid Vaxx. But, as time went on, success was no longer in the cards, and the reports displayed grimmer and grimmer failure of vaccines in the UK. As I said many times, the bad news from the UK in no way should be interpreted as the UK being somehow a bad country. To the contrary, the UK had an amazing statistical agency that (up until now) honestly reported the goings in the vaxxed world. Finally, it seems, just as Scotland did, the UK will discontinue case reports by vaccination status. They gave the lamest excuse of “ending free Covid testing” that somehow makes them unable to add up vaccinated vs unvaccinated cases? Come on.

The so called “free Covid testing” is likely ending for similarly sinister reasons, specifically because they want to downplay cases as they keep increasing in the UK. Well, these UKHSA reports were good while it lasted. The truthful cases by vaccination status reports, showing the ignominous ending of the UK vaccination campaign, will be available no more starting April. [..] Before I describe what is it that they are trying to hide, let me mention my methodology: I keep a spreadsheet that I update week by week, with counts of vaccinated vs boosted case rates and death rates. I do NOT include under-18s in my data because they are (were) overtested in schools, do not actually die of Covid, thankfully, and really are not the same population as adults.

What they are trying to hide is that the pandemic among the unvaccinated is essentially over, whereas it is just getting started among the boosted. Look at the numbers: Compared to week 6-9, cases in week 7-10 among the unvaccinated barely increased by 1%, from 59,904 cases to 60,372. For the boosted, cases increased by 14%, from 543,809 to 617,982! For the vulnerable 60-69 year old category, the boosted 60-69 year olds get sick 4.25 TIMES as much as unvaccinated 60-69 year olds. Take a minute to let that sink in. Far from being protective, boosters make 60-69 year olds four times more vulnerable to infections!

Deaths similarly show a sad picture. 90% of Covid deaths in the UK, in weeks 7-10, were among the vaccinated!

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The “potentially fatal blood-clotting issue” was not known, because it was never tested.

Two UK Residents Died of Blood-Clotting Disorders Linked to AstraZeneca (CHD)

UK coroners in two separate cases this week concluded individuals who received AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine died from blood-clotting disorders caused by the vaccine. Kim Lockwood, a 34-year-old mother from South Yorkshire, died in March 2021 of a catastrophic brain bleed nine days after getting the AstraZeneca shot. Lockwood complained of an excruciating headache eight days after getting the vaccine. Her condition quickly deteriorated and she was pronounced dead 17 hours after being admitted to the hospital. South Yorkshire Coroner Nicola Mundy, calling Lockwood “extremely unlucky,” recorded the cause of death as vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT).


Separately, a Sheffield County inquest on Monday concluded Tom Dudley, a 31-year old father of two who received the Astra-Zeneca vaccine on April 27, 2021, died of a vaccine-induced brain hemorrhage on May 14, 2021. The UK’s National Health Service on May 7, 2021, changed the guidance for the AstraZeneca vaccine, suggesting healthy individuals under 40 should avoid it due to possible blood-clotting complications. Assistant coroner Tanyka Rawden said that at the time of Dudley’s death the potentially fatal blood-clotting issue “was not a known and recognized complication of this vaccine. It seems to me that the guidelines have been changed,” she said. “They were changed very, very quickly after Tom had his vaccination.”

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After big decisions had been based on precisely those numbers.

CDC Removes 24% of Child COVID-19 Deaths, Thousands of Others (ET)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of deaths it had listed in those under 18 years old. The health agency quietly made the change on its data tracker website on March 15. “Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” the CDC says on the site. The CDC relies on states and other jurisdictions to report COVID-19 deaths and acknowledges on its website that the data is not complete. But the statistics are often cited by doctors and others when pushing for COVID-19 vaccination, including figures who believe virtually all children should be vaccinated.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, cited the tracker’s death total in November 2021 while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5- to 11-years-old. Before the change, the CDC listed 1,755 children as dying from COVID-19 along with approximately 851,000 others, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has been tracking the updates. The update saw the CDC cut 416 deaths among children and over 71,000 elsewhere, arriving at a total of just under 780,000. The CDC previously adjusted its death count in August 2021 “after the identification of a data discrepancy.”

“The update is an improvement, but it’s at least the third correction to this data, and still does not solve the issue. It just highlights that people have been using a flawed source of data when discussing kids and COVID,” Krohnert told The Epoch Times in an email. Some journalists and doctors have been citing the tracker data while others use a tally that is managed by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has been described by the agency as more reliable. The NCHS tally, which is compiled from death certificates, currently lists 921 deaths involving COVID-19 among children and some 966,000 deaths involving COVID-19 among other age groups.

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“I have said that I would stay in what I’m doing until we get out of the pandemic phase, and I think we might be there already..”

2 days after he warns of another wave….

Fauci Says He’s Considering Stepping Down (ET)

Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a new interview that he is considering stepping away from the position he’d held since 1984. Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was asked during a podcast released March 18 whether he was mulling retirement or transitioning to a less-demanding job. “I certainly am because I’ve got to do it sometime,” Fauci, 81, said. “I can’t stay at this job forever, unless my staff is going to find me slumped over my desk one day. I’d rather not do that,” he added. Fauci was appointed to his position in 1984 during the Reagan administration. Fauci’s comments came after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) failed in his effort to get support for a measure that would eliminate the NIAID and create three new institutes in its stead.

Paul, who has clashed with Fauci during multiple congressional hearings, said Fauci has become has become a “dictator-in-chief.” “No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans,” Paul, a doctor, said. Fauci and his agency had not responded to requests for comment on the measure. Paul and other Fauci critics have taken issue with how the doctor misled the public on his agency’s funding for the Chinese lab located near the first cases of COVID-19 were recorded, his support for harsh measures during the pandemic, and his admission that he lied about the effectiveness of masks because of worries there wouldn’t be enough for health care workers.

Fauci, who has also been preparing for investigations Republicans have pledged into the COVID-19 response, has called Paul a partisan whose accusations aren’t rooted in facts. Without mentioning Paul, the podcast host asked Fauci in the new interview whether he would leave his post soon, noting that besides Dr. Francis Collins, who exited from his position as director of the National Institutes of Health in late 2021, Jeffrey Zients was stepping down as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator. “I have said that I would stay in what I’m doing until we get out of the pandemic phase, and I think we might be there already,” Fauci said. “If we can stay in this, then we’re at a point where I feel that we’ve done well by this. But I don’t have any plans right now to go anywhere, but you never know.”

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

 

 

 

Feb 082022
 


Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four elements – Fire 1566

 

Wake-Up Call (Jim Kunstler)
Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations (Auth.)
Vaccination Data Update (Fenton)
Tracking Cryptic SARS-CoV-2 Lineages Detected In NYC Wastewater (Nature)
Embalmer Richard Hirschman Reveals Novel Clotting In 65% Of Cases (Kirsch)
Spike Protein As Oncogenic “Seed” (Chesnut)
Biden Officials Trying To Recalculate US Covid-19 Hospitalizations (Pol.)
Harm to AstraZeneca Jab’s Reputation ‘Probably Killed Thousands’ (G.)
Were Masks A Waste Of Time? (Unherd)
So You’ve Seen The Canadian Truckers, Right? (Denninger)
Rumble Offers Joe Rogan $100 Million for a 4-Year Censorship-Free Contract (TC)
US Senator Asks Biden To Release Leonard Peltier (LP)
EU Sounds Alarm Over Russian Gas Supply (RT)
NY Times, Washington Post Driving US to War with Russia Over Ukraine (MPN)
“Censored” NFTs Raising Funds To Help Julian Assange (CD)

 

 

 

 

The only people still afraid of covid are vaccinated against it.

 

 

Dangerous men

 

 

 

 

Armstrong Schwab Young leaders

 

 

Brand/Stelter

 

 

“It’s rumored that the Canadian military told Mr. Trudeau in plain un-Woke Canadian English to fuck-off..”

Wake-Up Call (Jim Kunstler)

[..] Justin Trudeau — arguably the most fatuous would-be tyrant in the former “Free World” — has failed to emerge from his hidey-hole for the better part of a week, perhaps afraid of his seeing his shadow like the groundhog of legend, and it begins to look as if his days as Prime Minister grow short. It’s rumored that the Canadian military told Mr. Trudeau in plain un-Woke Canadian English to fuck-off, they will not take orders to put down the trucker’s protest, and even the Mounties are wobbling, so it’s left to the Ottawa police, who threaten to arrest anyone aiding the truckers with food, water, and fuel. Wait and see how quickly that will turn to fighting in the streets. Constitutional crisis, ay?

Meanwhile, a dozen or so other members of the Western Civ Club of Nations are ditching their Covid-19 mandates and restrictions. The reason: despite the mighty forces of deliberate organized mind-fuckery and resulting mass delusion, the Covid-19 “vaccines” are finally revealed as a criminal fraud, a danger to all who submitted to them, and an insult to the age-old accrued intelligence of the human race as used-to-be represented by science, ethics, and law. And still, America’s own putative leader, the empty suit known as “Joe Biden,” had the temerity to go on TV last week and once again tell his sore-beset people to “get vaccinated… get your kids vaccinated!” Who does he think he’s speaking to? The counter-information to Tony Fauci’s criminal bullshit is flooding the zone, despite America’s sinister Intel Community attempting to control the captured and discredited legacy news media.

Just last night CBS’s 60-Minutes told its audience that our hospitals are overwhelmed by the unvaccinated with Covid, which is an outright lie. Maybe we should start asking: who are the individual producers and network executives responsible for this arrant mendacity? Would it be interesting to see them in a court of law, having to answer whether they believe their own bullshit? Or is someone telling them to sell it? Some powerful counter-information to The Official Narrative emerged last week from the US military’s own Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) when several whistleblower doctors revealed to attorney Tom Renz heretofore suppressed statistics on the shocking increase in vaccine injuries among young, otherwise able-bodied soldiers.

Read more …

Stephanie Seneff, Greg Nigh, Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos, Peter A McCullough

Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations (Auth.)

The mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were brought to market in response to the widely perceived public health crises of Covid-19. The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease had no precedent, but desperate times seemed to call for desperate measures. The mRNA vaccines utilize genetically modified mRNA encoding spike proteins. These alterations hide the mRNA from cellular defenses, promote a longer biological half-life for the proteins, and provoke higher overall spike protein production. However, both experimental and observational evidence reveals a very different immune response to the vaccines compared to the response to infection with SARS-CoV-2. As we will show, the genetic modifications introduced by the vaccine are likely the source of these differential responses.


In this paper, we present the evidence that vaccination, unlike natural infection, induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health. We explain the mechanism by which immune cells release into the circulation large quantities of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites. We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances are shown to have a potentially direct causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell’s palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, increased tumorigenesis, and DNA damage. We show evidence from adverse event reports in the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis. We believe a comprehensive risk/benefit assessment of the mRNA vaccines excludes them as positive contributors to public health, even in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Heart injury occurring in children below the age of 12

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I wrote the other day that I was seeing more reports linking the vaccines to cancer. This Twitter thread from @Parsifaler dives into that.

Spike Protein As Oncogenic “Seed” (Chesnut)

SPIKE PROTEIN AS RAS CUE BALL: THE ONCOGENIC CASCADE- SPIKE PROTEIN AS ONCOGENIC “SEED”. It is not only what it stakes claim to, but also what it removes. I can’t think of anything more carcinogenic than the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2. LOCAL RAS WORKS IN A PARACRINE FASHION. Think of the Spike Protein as a cue ball that sets off a cascade to CREATE A TUMOR MICROENVIRONMENT while SIMULTANEOUSLY inducing the EPIGENETIC MODULATIONS to COMMENCE A TUMOR. JUST LIKE A SEED, the Spike Protein (tumor) not only can “grow” itself (once it takes hold), it can also FEED ITSELF by CREATING IT’S OWN IDEAL ENVIRONMENT.


After all, is what follows not exactly what the Spike Protein does? Local RAS works synergistically and independently of systemic RAS in a paracrine fashion. Ang II mediates effects that reduce tumor perfusion and oxygenation, resulting in hypoxia and subsequent acidosis within the tumor stroma. For example, local Ang II, predominantly exists in hypoxic regions of nasopharyngeal carcinoma and breast cancer cells, where it is autocrinely produced by chymase-dependant rather than ACE dependent mechanism. In which case the action of ACEi will not be effective to inhibit tumor growth.

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“..the vaccinated – and especially the triple vaccinated are disproportionately being hospitalized with Covid.”

Vaccination Data Update (Fenton)

The letter exposes – on a small but important scale – much of what we have been saying about the misrepresentation and manipulation of data comparing vaccinated v unvaccinated.How massively exaggerated are claims about unvaccinated dominating Covid hospitalizations. The original FOI request already revealed the extent to which widespread claims that ‘the vast majority of patients with Covid are unvaccinated’ are wrong: it stated that only 14 out of the 182 patients hospitalized with Covid in Blackpool Victoria on 22 Jan 2022 were unvaccinated (i.e. over 92% were vaccinated).


How the data on the vaccinated is continually changed and manipulated. When it was pointed out that the data seemed to be suggesting that NONE of the vaccinated patients had been triple vaccinated, the hospital conceded that there had been ‘1 small error’ which just happened to be the fact that 130 of those who had been previously classified as having 2 doses, had in fact had three doses (and there was indeed there were two other genuinely small errors, namely that 162 and not 161 as previously stated had at least 2 doses, while only 13 rather than 14 were unvaccinated). So in total 93% were vaccinated and: • 7% were vaccine-free (a more accurate term than ‘unvaccinated’) • 4% had one dose •17.6% had two doses • 71.4% had 3 doses. Here is the Government’s latest data today on proportion of people vaccinated in Blackpool:

Note that this is dated 5 Feb, so the proportion of triple vaccinated on 22 Jan will have been lower that the 56.9% currently showing. Whichever way you look at it the vaccinated – and especially the triple vaccinated are disproportionately being hospitalized with Covid.

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@EthicalSkeptic: “Omicron lineages continue to show as more diverse than is possible for a recently-appeared variant.”

Tracking Cryptic SARS-CoV-2 Lineages Detected In NYC Wastewater (Nature)

Tracking SARS-CoV-2 genetic diversity is strongly indicated because diversifying selection may lead to the emergence of novel variants resistant to naturally acquired or vaccine-induced immunity. To monitor New York City (NYC) for the presence of novel variants, we deep sequence most of the receptor binding domain coding sequence of the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 isolated from the New York City wastewater. Here we report detecting increasing frequencies of novel cryptic SARS-CoV-2 lineages not recognized in GISAID’s EpiCoV database. These lineages contain mutations that had been rarely observed in clinical samples, including Q493K, Q498Y, E484A, and T572N and share many mutations with the Omicron variant of concern.


Some of these mutations expand the tropism of SARS-CoV-2 pseudoviruses by allowing infection of cells expressing the human, mouse, or rat ACE2 receptor. Finally, pseudoviruses containing the spike amino acid sequence of these lineages were resistant to different classes of receptor binding domain neutralizing monoclonal antibodies. We offer several hypotheses for the anomalous presence of these lineages, including the possibility that these lineages are derived from unsampled human COVID-19 infections or that they indicate the presence of a non-human animal reservoir.


A Schematic of SARS-CoV-2 and the amplification locations. B Distribution of SARS-COV-2 variants based on patient sequences (patient data obtained from GISAID) and wastewater surveillance. Polymorphisms detected from amplicon sequencing that were used to assign sequences to lineages are shown in the legend. The variants detected from the 14 NYC WWTPs were weighted by flowrate to generate a city-wide average distribution. C Novel lineages detected from WWTPs. Schematic highlights shared sequences identified from WWTP 10, 11, and 3 are shown. The percent of the sequences from each date that contained the indicated polymorphisms is shown below each lineage. The viral copies/L corresponding to each date are shown in Supplementary Table 3. Some sequences have additional polymorphisms not listed. WNY lineage designations are shown for sequences used for tropism and antibody neutralization analysis. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

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Autopsies, embalming, that’s where you should see what is really going on.

Embalmer Richard Hirschman Reveals Novel Clotting In 65% Of Cases (Kirsch)

Richard Hirschman has been an embalmer for over 20 years. In 2021, he started noticing very odd blood clots that he had never seen before. In Jan 2022, 65% of his cases exhibited these clots. The only rational conclusion is that the clots, which are deadly, are all associated with the COVID vaccines. Nobody from the mainstream media or medical community wants to touch this story. It’s not just Richard who is seeing this; it is everyone in the industry he’s talked to about it. They are all seeing it, but Richard is the only person in the US (so far) willing to speak out about it.


[..] Hirschman’s data is explosive because it establishes a relative proportion of people affected which we can then use to establish an absolute rate of death. So let’s say the actual rate of vaccine-caused deaths is 40% of all deaths which is less than the 65% rate that Hirschman is seeing. The CDC says around 65,000 people die a week. So that would be 26,000 people a week killed by the vaccine. He started noticing these deaths in May (they could have started sooner), so let’s just say it’s only been in the last 6 months to be conservative. 26 weeks *26,000 deaths/week=676,000 vaccine-related deaths. That’s a lot of deaths. So you see why this observation is explosive.

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Are they going to correct the umbers of the past 2 years as well?

Biden Officials Trying To Recalculate US Covid-19 Hospitalizations (Pol.)

The Biden administration is working on recalculating the number of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the U.S., according to two senior officials familiar with the matter. A task force comprised of scientists and data specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with hospitals nationwide to improve Covid-19 reporting. The group is asking hospitals to report numbers of patients who go to the facility because they have Covid-19 and separate those from individuals who go in for other reasons and test positive after being admitted, the two officials said. The administration’s goal is to get a more accurate sense of Covid-19’s impact across the country and whether the virus is causing severe disease.


Senior Biden health officials have increasingly relied on hospitalization numbers, rather than case counts, to determine how to respond to the virus as well as the efficacy of the vaccines. Lower hospitalization rates could inform the administration’s thinking on public health measures such as masking. More accurate Covid-19 numbers also could provide a better picture of the strain on hospitals and which resources they might need during surges. Recalculating the hospitalization rate will not be easy, said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research and former advisory board member of the Covid Tracking Project, a team that worked to collect and synthesize local Covid-19 data during the peak of the pandemic.

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Odd, but then, it’s the Guardian.

“I think bad behaviour from scientists and from politicians has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people – and that they cannot be proud of that..”

Harm to AstraZeneca Jab’s Reputation ‘Probably Killed Thousands’ (G.)

Scientists and politicians “probably killed hundreds of thousands of people” by damaging the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine, according to an Oxford scientist who worked on the jab. Prof John Bell said: “They have damaged the reputation of the vaccine in a way that echoes around the rest of the world.” “I think bad behaviour from scientists and from politicians has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people – and that they cannot be proud of that,” he told a BBC Two documentary When the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab was rolled out in the UK government advisers recommended under-40s should be offered an alternative due to a link to very rare blood clots. Fears over the links to blood clots also led other countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria, Iceland and Thailand, to pause their use of the vaccine.


The AstraZeneca vaccine has also not played a significant role in the booster programme. The BBC reported it accounted for only 48,000 of the more than 37m booster doses given in the UK. The AZ vaccine was celebrated as a UK success story and billed as “Britain’s gift to the world” when it was developed. It was designed to be cheap, and developers had the ambition that it should be available at low cost. Unlike the mRNA vaccines, it could be transported at low cost and stored at fridge temperature. Nearly half of the adult population in the UK received two doses of the vaccine. The AZ vaccine’s approval in the UK coincided with Britain’s separation from the EU. “I don’t think it made relations with Europe any easier that it was promoted as the British vaccine,” Bell told the documentary, AstraZeneca: A Vaccine for the World, to be broadcast on the BBC on Tuesday at 9pm.

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“The most disastrous failing of the experts has been their lack of curiosity about the actual results of the policies they have staked their reputations on.”

Were Masks A Waste Of Time? (Unherd)

The most disastrous failing of the experts has been their lack of curiosity about the actual results of the policies they have staked their reputations on. Mask mandates have been, in Miller’s phrase, “a population-wide experiment”, but few within the US scientific and medical establishment have seemed interested in parsing the resulting data, leaving that task to outsiders like Miller. Astonishingly, there have been just two randomised controlled trials on masking published since the pandemic began. One found no significant effect at all, while the other found a small effect of 11% for surgical masks and no significant effect for cloth ones. The first was largely ignored or dismissed, while the second was optimistically glossed as proving that masks work.

Moreover, even the most bullish case for the technical efficacy of at least some higher-quality masks does not constitute a case for mask mandates, a distinction that most commentary elides. The only way to measure the efficacy of mandates is to look at their actual track record. This is what Miller has done, and the result, he argues, is clear: “mask mandates have demonstrated very little impact, if any, on case curves throughout the United States and in many other international locations.” Miller is justifiably derisive about the experts who have oversold dubious policies at every turn, but the ironic implication of his book is that much of the expert guidance from prior to 2020 has been vindicated. Before Covid appeared, scientists and officials advised time and again that masks would be ineffective at containing a pandemic respiratory virus, and the evidence Miller has compiled suggests they were correct.

It is not difficult to see why mask mandates proved irresistible to politicians. Masks are the perfect form of hygiene theatre, conveying an intuitive sense of safety regardless of demonstrable efficacy at scale. They also offload responsibility for controlling the pandemic to ordinary people. The overcrowding of ICUs can be blamed on the bad behavior of “anti-maskers”, rather than on the allocation of resources by governments and hospital CEOs. When cases and deaths spike, it is the fault of the citizenry, not the leadership.

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“..plenty of people get Covid-19 who had the jabs and the CDC itself admits that against Omicron the efficacy is statistically zero.”

So You’ve Seen The Canadian Truckers, Right? (Denninger)

It is not my place to pass judgment on another nation’s sovereign decisions. I can certainly agree or disagree, but one of the principles of national sovereignty is that short of projecting something into another nation the limit of it is whether you choose to trade with said nation and its people or not. But here, in the United States, since I’m a US Citizen, its a different story. For two years now, approximately, we’ve listened to nothing but lies. We now have two alleged “approved vaccines” for Covid-19, both of which, in the FDA’s approval letter, claims they prevent Covid-19. We know this is a lie; plenty of people get Covid-19 who had the jabs and the CDC itself admits that against Omicron the efficacy is statistically zero.

Since Omicron is the only circulating variant of statistical importance right now (again, per the CDC) these claims by the FDA are frauds since, to whatever extent they were valid, that disease no longer exists. A jab against something that doesn’t exist is stupid. But more to the point is that none of these are actually available in the US. All the arm-waving is pure performative art, that is, theater intended to convince people and businesses that an experimental drug really isn’t — when in fact, from a legal and marketing perspective it is experimental and nothing has factually changed. I have, since the first letter, challenged people to send me a photograph of a vial with the approved drug on the label, its lot number visible and that same lot and drug entered on the person’s vaccine card.

That is, not only is it available said person got that shot, per the certified actions of a health care professional which, if they lied, would constitute use of a mislabeled drug and is a criminal violation of law. I’ve yet to receive even one such piece of evidence. Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t exist. This much is utterly certain when it comes to stopping government lies, whether related to Covid-19 or anything else: Without the voluntary actions of a whole lot of people, specifically truckers, rail personnel and similar, you get nothing whatsoever.

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Spotify has deleted 135 episodes by now?

Rumble Offers Joe Rogan $100 Million for a 4-Year Censorship-Free Contract (TC)

Rogan signed a $100 million deal giving Spotify exclusive rights to “The Joe Rogan Experience” in 2020. However, Spotify is facing increasing pressure to censor the popular podcast over Rogan’s willingness to speak to guests with different perspectives about the pandemic. Though the company has said they will not pull the plug on the podcast, they have removed approximately 70 episodes from their library in recent days. Launched in 2013, Rumble runs its own infrastructure — so the company says it is “immune to cancel culture.” Rumble went public through a deal with CF Acquisition Corp. VI with an initial enterprise value of $2.1 billion in December. In a letter to Rogan tweeted by the company, CEO Chris Pavlovski urged Rogan to join Rumble.

Pavlovski wrote, “We stand with you, your guests, and your legion of fans in desire for real conversation. So we’d like to offer you 100 million reasons to make the world a better place.” “How about you bring all your shows to Rumble, both old and new, with no censorship, for 100 million bucks over four years?” Pavlovski continued. The letter concluded, “this is our chance to save the world. And yes, this is totally legit.” Though episodes are being removed, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has defended keeping Rogan on the platform. Ek told upset employees last week that the solution is not to get rid of Rogan’s podcast, but perhaps to obtain more exclusive content from different perspectives.

“The real thing here is to try to go for an even broader set of exclusives that represent even more voices,” Ek said. “There are many things that Joe Rogan says that I strongly disagree with and find very offensive. But let me go back to what I said earlier, if you want even a shot at achieving our bold ambitions, it will mean having content on Spotify that many of us may not be proud to be associated with,” he continued. “Not anything goes, but there will be opinions, ideas, and beliefs that we disagree with strongly and even makes us angry or sad.” He pointed out that there have been episodes of the podcast that did not make it onto the platform because they violated the rules.

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“..imprisoned for 46 years for crimes he maintains he never committed..”

US Senator Asks Biden To Release Leonard Peltier (LP)

The president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, Patrick Leahy, called for the release of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, imprisoned for 46 years for crimes he maintains he never committed. “There is no question that our criminal justice system is imperfect, and Peltier knows firsthand how imperfect it can be,” the Vermont Democratic lawmaker told President Joe Biden in his unequivocal plea for clemency. His trial was so riddled with flaws that even one of the prosecutors who tried him acknowledged that Peltier was wrongly convicted, he added in his request to the president. According to Leahy, releasing the inmate from prison on an expedited basis “is the right thing to do”. In prison since Feb. 6, 1976, Peltier is now 77 years old and ill with multiple health problems, he recalled.

“I have long believed that pardons and commutations are vital tools to provide clemency and relief, especially when our criminal justice system has been contorted to propagate injustices,” Leahy concluded. In a recent statement, Peltier, considered America’s longest-serving political prisoner, described the conditions of his confinement in a Florida federal prison as a “torture chamber.” “The loneliness and lack of care are like a torture chamber for sick and elderly people,” warned the also writer and poet. Of Anishinaabe Lakota descent, leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which arose in the 1960s in the heat of the struggles for Civil Rights, Peltier was accused of the murder of two FBI agents in 1975 during a shooting that took place in the Pine Ridge aboriginal reservation, in South Dakota.

At that time, massacres of natives took place and as a consequence of this harassment of the Lakota people, more than 250 people of this indigenous nation were murdered, without the crimes having been investigated until now.
Several international organizations denounced irregularities in the trial that condemned Peltier in 1977 to two consecutive life sentences and it is even said that there are more than 10,000 pages with categorical evidence that would absolve him immediately. Filmmaker Michael Moore urged Barack Obama to review the multiple documents that prove that Peltier did not have a fair trial, but the former African-American president followed the same line of his predecessors. Born on September 12, 1944, when he was imprisoned in February 1976 he was a young fighter for the rights of native peoples and had already known repression and jail, historians point out.

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“..Russia has done far more to build resilience to Western sanctions than the European Union has to improve its ability to survive disruption..”

EU Sounds Alarm Over Russian Gas Supply (RT)

Russia has done far more to build resilience to Western sanctions than the European Union has to improve its ability to survive disruptions in the gas supply chain, the EU high representative for foreign affairs said on Sunday. Writing in his weekly blog, Josep Borrell accused Moscow of using energy supplies for “political purposes” and suggested any further measures against the Kremlin have serious blowback effects for the EU, including a reduction of gas available to the bloc. His comments came ahead of a meeting of the EU-US Energy Council, due to be held on Monday, in America. “Energy prices have surged due to global supply and demand issues,” Borrell wrote. “With the severe crisis that we are currently going through with Russia, it has become not only a price issue but also a matter of security of supplies.”

According to the Eurocrat, over 40% of EU gas imports come from Russia, while the EU provides over 60% of Russia’s import revenues. “However, in recent years, Russia has enhanced its resilience against economic sanctions, by increasing its foreign currency reserves, more than we have done to enhance our capacity to face potential gas supply cuts,” he explained, calling on the bloc to begin developing EU strategic gas reserves and boost investment in renewable sources of energy. In the last three months, Moscow has been threatened by Western nations with the possibility of hard-hitting sanctions, following fears that it is planning an invasion of Ukraine. Russia stands accused of placing more than 100,000 troops on the frontier, with some believing that this is a sign of an upcoming military incursion. This claim has repeatedly been denied by the Kremlin.

However, despite serious rhetoric, the media has suggested that the EU is not unanimously in agreement over potential measures. Last month, America’s Bloomberg news agency reported on a German demand that proposed measures do not include restrictions on energy, insisting that the sector be exempted.

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Happens every year. Just a bit louder this time.

NY Times, Washington Post Driving US to War with Russia Over Ukraine (MPN)

Western media and governments have expressed alarm over a suspected buildup of Russian military forces close to its over-1200-mile border with Ukraine. There are reportedly almost 100,000 troops in that vicinity, causing President Joe Biden to warn that this is “the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II.” Yet this is far from the first media panic over a supposedly imminent Russian invasion. In fact, warning of a hot war in Europe is a near yearly occurrence at this point. In 2015, outlets such as Reuters and The New York Times claimed that Russia was massing troops and heavy firepower, including tanks, artillery and rocket launchers right on the border, while normally sleepy frontier towns were abuzz with activity.

In 2016 there was an even bigger meltdown, with media across the board predicting that war was around the corner. Indeed, The Guardian reported that Russia would soon have 330,000 soldiers on the border. Yet nothing came to pass and the story was quietly dropped. With the next spring came renewed warnings of conflict. The Wall Street Journal claimed that “tens of thousands” of soldiers were being deployed to the border. The New York Times upped that figure to “as many as 100,000.” A few months later, U.S. News said that thousands of tanks were joining them. In late 2018, The New York Times and other media outlets were again up in arms over a fresh Russian buildup, this time of 80,000 military units.

And in the spring of last year, it was widely reported (for instance, by Reuters and The New York Times) that Russia had amassed armies totaling well over 100,000 units on Ukraine’s border, signaling that war was imminent. Therefore, there are actually considerably fewer Russian units on Ukraine’s border than there were even 11 months ago, according to Western numbers. Furthermore, they are matched by a force of a quarter-million Ukrainian troops on the other side. Thus, many readers will be forgiven for thinking it is Groundhog Day again. Yet there is something different about this time: coverage over the conflict has been enormous and has come to dominate the news cycle for weeks now, in a way it simply did not previously. The possibility of war has scared Americans and provoked calls for a far higher military budget and a redesign of American foreign policy to counter this supposed threat.

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“The organization has independently raised around 12,569 ETH, i.e., approximately $38.8 million, to bid on the ‘Clock’ NFT..”

“Censored” NFTs Raising Funds To Help Julian Assange (CD)

The auction for the upcoming ‘Censored’ NFT collection that consists of two generative interactive blockchain artworks will start from February 7, 2 PM GMT. The first part is a single edition NFT title ‘Clock,’ which counts the total number of days that Assange has been in prison. The NFT is dynamic and generative and is programmed to keep counting the days. It is designed to blink in a rhythmic heartbeat, and the bidding for the piece will start at 1 ETH on the censored.art website. In mid-December, the US government won its appeal against a UK court ruling that prevented Assange’s extradition. Once extradited to the US, Assange will face 175 years in prison under charges of “publishing truthful information.”

On the same day, a group of ‘cypherpunk’ organized in a Telegram group and decided to set up the decentralized autonomous organization AssangeDAO to raise awareness and support for the liberation of Julian Assange from prison. The organization has independently raised around 12,569 ETH, i.e., approximately $38.8 million, to bid on the ‘Clock’ NFT and contribute to Julian Assange’s legal defense fund. The founder of Wikileaks is currently being held in a London prison and is fighting extradition to the U.S. AssangeDAO members are raising ETH in return for JUSTICE governance tokens which they will use to bid on the NFT released by Pak in collab with Assange. All auction proceeds will be deposited in the Wau Holland Foundation to support Assange’s case.

The second part of the collection, ‘Censored,’ is a 48-hour open edition. This means that it will have unlimited NFTs, and anyone can participate in it over the span of 48 hours. Participants can tokenize a message that they want to broadcast to the community by minting an NFT that will display the message. This can include a word, symbol, statement, purpose, hypothesis, idea, question, vision, belief, plan, clue, thought, feeling, or scheme. The message that will be displayed as an NFT will be struck through to represent censorship. The NFTs can be minted free of cost, but contributions of any amount are being welcomed. Pak has already minted the first NFT in the collection as a message that reads ‘Pak was here’ and contributed 100 ETH to the cause. All the proceeds from the Open Edition collection will go to organizations promoting freedom of information, education, digital privacy, health, and animal rights organizations.

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CNN sucks
https://twitter.com/i/status/1490891558929190913

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dec 032021
 
 December 3, 2021  Posted by at 9:32 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  51 Responses »


Joseph Mallord William Turner The Sun Rising over Water 1825-30

 

Leaked Pfizer Post-Marketing Safety Report (Mathew Crawford)
First Batch Of Pfizer Documents: Over 1,200 Vaccine Deaths In First 90 Days (GP)
Fourth Dose May Be Required To Tackle Pandemic – Greek Expert (K.)
AstraZeneca Uncovers What’s Triggering Blood Clots After Its Jab (DM)
Vaccine Mandates: Unscientific, Divisive, and Enormously Costly (BI)
CMS Suspends Vaccine Mandate Enforcement (ET)
Germany: Mandatory Covid Jabs A Step Closer As Unvaccinated Face Lockdown (G.)
Researchers Shoot Holes In Study Touted For Confirming ‘Masks Work’ (JTN)
300,000 Brits Face Heart Problems Due To Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder (ES)
Russia Warns About Nightmare Scenario Of Military Confrontation In Europe (RT)
Assange Judge Is 40-Year ‘Good Friend’ Of Minister Who Set Up Arrest (DUK)

 

 

 

 

Horse dewormer is 438 times safer than the vaccines.

 

 

 

“..69 cases of confirmed (57) or probable (12) cases of acute kidney injury and renal failure, but that includes none at all in the U.S., strangely. A third of the cases (23) were fatal at the time of the report with only 10 of the cases resolved.”

Leaked Pfizer Post-Marketing Safety Report (Mathew Crawford)

Late yesterday, I received a purportedly leaked copy of a Pfizer post-marketing safety report, marked confidential and dated April 30, 2021 and tracks adverse events through February 28, 2021 of a cohort of 42,086 case reports of patients who suffered post-injection adverse events. The 38-page report, if validated, contains Pfizer’s internal knowledge of an extremely serious number of illnesses, injuries, and deaths associated with its injectable product recipients (call them “vaccines” if you like). Note: I cannot yet vouch for the authenticity of the document, but in my opinion, it looks legitimate. Before we dig into the details, let’s take the conservative approach and note that this purported internal study does not involve investigations of causal associations. I will discuss some basic computations along the way, but take them with an appropriate grain of salt. There are a lot of missing details from which to make important leaps. As such, consider my computations to be “envelope math”, if soberly performed. The crux of the report is the table on page 7:

It appears that roughly half of the reported AEs are serious AEs (SAEs).

Vaccine Associated Enhanced Disease (VAED). I am inclined for the moment to take as face-value the lack of detection of VAED as my opinion has veered further and further toward the belief that these injectable products simply don’t interact much with the virus in most individuals (perhaps in the immunocompromised who can carry the virus for months, we see evolutionary pressures that may lead to variants of interest).

In Table 7, there are 69 cases of confirmed (57) or probable (12) cases of acute kidney injury and renal failure, but that includes none at all in the U.S., strangely. A third of the cases (23) were fatal at the time of the report with only 10 of the cases resolved. The lack of cases for these SAEs is entirely unlike the rest of the report where U.S. cases are the most or second-most common. Are these cases being hidden in the U.S.? On the other hand, the U.S. topped the charts in medical errors, and by a wide margin [also unlike the rest of the report]. Huh.

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“Elon will make it to Mars way before the documents would be fully released ..”

First Batch Of Pfizer Documents: Over 1,200 Vaccine Deaths In First 90 Days (GP)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released the first batch of documents related to Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine after a federal judge ordered that they must comply with a massive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that was filed by a government accountability group called Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. The esteemed group of more than 30 professors and scientists asked the federal government to share any and all data that factored into the agency’s hasty decision to grant Pfizer’s experimental mRNA vaccine an emergency use authorization (EUA) – which amounts to a trove of over 329,000 documents.

In a shameless effort to bury the information, the FDA challenged the FOIA request in court. After the agency was told that it must turn over the documents, Justice Department lawyers representing the FDA asked a federal judge to allow them an unthinkable 55 years to process the request, saying that they would be able to release just 500 pages a month. In other words, Elon will make it to Mars way before the documents would be fully released – in the year 2076. A motion that was also filed by the same group of doctors and scientists is currently pending in federal court that would force the FDA to expedite processing and releasing these documents. Meanwhile, the FDA still has to comply with the original order to begin turning over documents. Lo and behold, the first release is a bombshell.

According to an official Pfizer document that is titled Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Records Reports, in just the first 90 days of the vaccine’s roll out under the FDA’s EUA – from December 1st. 2020 – February 28th, 2021 – there were TENS OF THOUSANDS of reported adverse reactions, including OVER 1200 DEATHS. The report only included adverse events to the vaccine that researchers considered “serious cases,” there were thousands more submissions that were left out of this data. Any cases deemed “non-serious” would be processed within 90 days, but this report was released before 90 days of Pfizer’s vaccine being available had even passed.

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More! Faster!

Fourth Dose May Be Required To Tackle Pandemic – Greek Expert (K.)

A fourth dose of vaccine against Covid-19 may be needed later on in the pandemic to protect the general public from the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus, according to Athanasios Tsakris, professor of microbiology and member of the Health Ministry’s committee of experts on the pandemic. Tsakris said the issue is being discussed among pharmaceutical companies but much more data will be required to know how the variant will behave. “The specially formulated vaccine, if needed, can be prepared in a short time. However, clinical data is needed in order to give the green light in time for its administration.


“The information we have is that this whole process will take 2-3 months,” he told Skai. Asked about the third dose of the vaccine that has been rolled out in Greece, Tsakris said he is in favour of speeding up its administration to five months from the current six. Health Minister Thanos Plevris announced Thursday that health authorities had identified the first case of Covid-19 caused by the Omicron variant, in a Greek national who returned from South Africa to Crete.

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Please stop saying “extremely rare”, or we’re going to be extremely mad.

AstraZeneca Uncovers What’s Triggering Blood Clots After Its Jab (DM)

Scientists believe they have solved the mystery behind the extremely rare blood clots caused by the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. A team of international experts, involving researchers from AstraZeneca, say that in a very small number of cases — about one in 100,000 in the UK — the vaccine can set off a chain reaction which leads to the body confusing its own blood platelets for fragments of virus. The British-made vaccine is thought to have saved about a million lives from Covid and was the backbone of the UK’s initial rollout earlier in the year, helping it to become the most vaccinated country in the West.

But concerns about clots saw its restriction in under-40s in the UK in spring and led Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines being favoured for young adults and as boosters. It was outright banned in many European countries and the US decided not to purchase a single dose. The UK Government gave an emergency grant to a team of scientists led by Cardiff University to investigate the clotting phenomenon. They found that the shell of the vector vaccine — the weakened cold virus used to teach cells how to neutralise Covid — sometimes acts like a magnet and attracts platelets, a protein found in the blood.

For reasons the scientists are still probing, the body then mistakes these platelets as a threat and produces antibodies to fight them. The combination of the platelets and the antibodies clumping together leads to the formation of dangerous blood clots. But they stress this is extremely rare, with only 426 cases in the UK recorded the cases so far out of about 50million doses of the vaccine, equivalent to less than one in 100,000. The side effect has been linked to 73 deaths in the UK. Researchers are now doing further work to learn more about the process that causes these clots and if the vaccine can be tweaked to reduce this risk.

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“Unscientific” would have been enough.

Vaccine Mandates: Unscientific, Divisive, and Enormously Costly (BI)

[..] the most relevant study endpoint is not death from COVID-19 but all-cause mortality, which counts every death that occurred during the study period. All-cause mortality is the key outcome of interest not simply because it circumvents the oftentimes subjective decision as to why someone died but also because it balances all the possible effects of a COVID-19 vaccine, both good and bad, that could influence risk of death. In other words, it allows us to quantify lives saved by the COVID-19 vaccine while taking into account potential lives lost from vaccine-related heart disease, blood clots, severe allergic reactions, and perhaps other causes.

Because results from the two trials were so similar regardless of the type of vaccine used it is helpful to merge the results. Following a combined total of 74,580 individuals, half given the COVID-19 vaccination and half given a placebo shot, over six to seven months, the two studies reported that thirty-seven people who were vaccinated died as compared to thirty-three people who received placebo. Simply put, the very best scientific evidence currently available to mankind does not support the widely held contention that COVID-19 vaccination using the Pfizer or Moderna brands lowers risk of death, at least over the first half-year after vaccination. Interestingly, these striking findings were not reported in the main body of the papers but in supplemental sections. There are several additional points to consider.

First, the studies’ findings were limited by the fact that their design did not take into consideration previous infection leading to subsequent immunity from COVID-19 infection, which could very well have lowered risk of death in one or both study groups. Second, there are serious concerns over falsification of data and other data integrity issues in the Pfizer trial so this could also have influenced results. Importantly, because both trials mostly excluded groups at highest risk of dying from COVID-19 such as the frail elderly, the very obese, or those with serious chronic illnesses, we cannot assume that the vaccines do not protect against death in these populations. Based on my clinical judgment and lesser quality supportive evidence, I generally assume when treating such patients that the vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks and so advocate for their use, though I cannot be absolutely certain they offer protection against death because of the lack of randomized controlled evidence.

Finally, the very low rates of death from COVID-19 observed in both studies should serve to remind us of how minimal this risk is in the general population.the most relevant study endpoint is not death from COVID-19 but all-cause mortality, which counts every death that occurred during the study period. All-cause mortality is the key outcome of interest not simply because it circumvents the oftentimes subjective decision as to why someone died but also because it balances all the possible effects of a COVID-19 vaccine, both good and bad, that could influence risk of death. In other words, it allows us to quantify lives saved by the COVID-19 vaccine while taking into account potential lives lost from vaccine-related heart disease, blood clots, severe allergic reactions, and perhaps other causes.

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Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The federal mandates are dead. They’re feeding you the info a little every day, so Biden doesn’t look so bad.

CMS Suspends Vaccine Mandate Enforcement (ET)

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) suspended enforcement of its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers after two court orders earlier this week. A memo issued by the agency, posted by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt on Twitter Thursday, said that CMS “remains confident” it will prevail in court but is “suspending activities related to the implementation and enforcement of this rule pending future development in the litigation.” “While these preliminary injunctions are in effect,” it continues to say, “CMS surveyors must not survey providers for compliance with the requirements” with the rule. The memo is referring to federal government officials conducting checks of whether Medicare- or Medicaid-funded facilities are complying with the Biden administration’s mandate that healthcare staff gets fully vaccinated for COVID-19 by Jan. 4.

The CMS rule allows for religious and medical exemptions to the vaccine. Schmitt, a Republican who is running for Missouri’s U.S. Senate seat, hailed CMS’s memo as a victory in a Twitter post. This week, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued preliminary injunctions against the CMS vaccine rule, which was unveiled on Nov. 4 alongside federal rules that mandate either testing or vaccines for employers with 100 or more workers. “Between the two of them, these injunctions cover all states” as well as Washington, D.C. and U.S. territories, the memo said. CMS has appealed the two federal court decisions.

The rule for private businesses, which is being enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was dealt a blow last month when a U.S. Fifth Court of Appeals issued an injunction that blocked its enforcement. The same court affirmed its previous decision several days later, which is currently being challenged by the Biden administration.

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I don’t believe Merkel doesn’t know the Nuremberg Code.

Germany: Mandatory Covid Jabs A Step Closer As Unvaccinated Face Lockdown (G.)

Vaccination could become mandatory in Germany from February, Angela Merkel has said, as she announced what her successor as chancellor, Olaf Scholz, described as “a lockdown of the unvaccinated”. As more EU countries confirmed cases of the Omicron variant, which the bloc’s health agency said could make up more than half of all infections on the continent within months, Merkel described the situation as “very serious”. Meeting with Scholz and Germany’s 16 state leaders for emergency talks on Thursday on tougher measures to stem rocketing Covid cases, the outgoing chancellor said an “act of national solidarity” was required.

“We have understood that the situation is very serious and that we want to take further measures in addition to those already taken,” she said. “To do this, the fourth wave must be broken, and this has not yet been achieved.” Daily new infections in Germany have broken records in recent weeks, with many hospitals operating at or over capacity. Authorities said 73,209 new cases were recorded in the past 24 hours. Deaths have surged from a rolling seven-day average of just over 10 a day in August to nearly 300 this week. Merkel said Germany’s ethics council would issue formal guidance on a vaccine mandate, and the Bundestag would vote on the legislation by the end of the year. If passed, the rule would come into force from February.

“Given the situation, I think it is appropriate to adopt compulsory vaccination,” said Merkel, who is due hand over to Scholz next week. The move would follow the example of neighbouring Austria, which is planning mandatory vaccinations from February. Greece also announced mandatory jabs for the over-60s, with unvaccinated people facing fines if they fail to comply. Merkel also announced a blanket ban on people who have not been vaccinated or recovered from Covid entering bars, restaurants, theatres, cinemas and other leisure venues, as well as non-essential shops and Christmas markets. In areas where the incidence rate exceeds 350 per 100,000 people, discos and nightclubs will close.

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The one study cited everywhere, gone. Masks gone, too?!

Researchers Shoot Holes In Study Touted For Confirming ‘Masks Work’ (JTN)

An acclaimed study on the effectiveness of masks in reducing symptomatic COVID-19 is facing new scrutiny after a researcher highlighted the minuscule infection differences between “treatment” and control groups randomized across 600 Bangladeshi villages. Accused of design flaws and overstating its findings when it was released in late August, the study’s newly released data show only 20 more symptomatic COVID cases in the villages that didn’t receive masks and related education, reminders and “role modeling by community leaders.” In a total study population of 342,126 adults, 1,106 people in the control group tested positive, compared to 1,086 in the treatment group. The latter group represented 52% of the study population.

“I have a hard time going from these numbers to the assured conclusions that ‘masks work’ that was promulgated by the media or the authors after this preprint [not yet peer reviewed] appeared,” University of California Berkeley professor Ben Recht, who studies machine learning, wrote in an essay last week. He said he was frustrated that the “raw number of seropositive cases” was left out of the preprint by researchers led by Yale University economists Jason Abaluck and Ahmed Mobarak, preventing him from “computing standard statistical analyses of their results.” The researchers posted the replication code and data in early November, long after media coverage touting “the largest randomized trial to demonstrate the effectiveness of surgical masks, in particular, to curb transmission of the coronavirus.”

In light of the full release, “a complex intervention including an educational program, free masks, encouraged mask wearing, and surveillance in a poor country with low population immunity and no vaccination showed at best modest reduction in infection,” Recht said. The newly provided raw numbers exacerbate other weaknesses of the study, according to Recht, who was also initially skeptical of the research because of its “statistical ambiguity.” The study was not blinded, did not exclude pre-intervention infections, and was “highly complex” because of the mixed interventions, he said.

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Ha ha ha. You sure it’s not the vaccines?

300,000 Brits Face Heart Problems Due To Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder (ES)

Up to 300,000 people in the UK are facing heart-related illnesses due to post-pandemic stress disorder (PPSD), two London physicians have warned. This could result in a 4.5 per cent rise in cardiovascular cases nationally because of the effects of PPSD, with those aged between 30 to 45 most at-risk, they claim. Mark Rayner, a former senior NHS psychological therapist and founder of EASE Wellbeing CIC, said that as many as three million people in Britain are already suffering from PPSD, thanks to stress and anxiety caused by the effects of Covid-19. He fears this could result in a dramatic rise in physical health issues, such as coronary heart failure, if cases are not detected or treated early.

Mr Rayner said: “PPSD is a very real problem on a massive scale. As well as the condition itself with all its immediate problems, one of the biggest collateral issues is the affect it can have on heart health. “It is widely recognised that reducing stress and mental health problems is crucial to the prevention and recovery of cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes. “We are talking about as many as 300,000 new patients with heart issues.” Mr Rayner warned that without at least doubling the current funding, the NHS will not be able to tackle the “trauma timebomb”, which could have potentially fatal consequences for those suffering with long-term PPSD.

Meanwhile, Tahir Hussain, a senior vascular surgeon at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, said he has seen a significant rise in cases where he works. He said: “I’ve seen a big increase in thrombotic-related vascular conditions in my practice. Far younger patients are being admitted and requiring surgical and medical intervention than prior to the pandemic. “I believe many of these cases are a direct result of the increased stress and anxiety levels caused from the effects of PPSD. “We also have evidence that some patients have died at home from conditions such as pulmonary embolism and myocardial infarction. I believe this is related to many people self-isolating at home with no contact with the outside world and dying without getting the help they needed.”

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NATO faking relevance.

Russia Warns About Nightmare Scenario Of Military Confrontation In Europe (RT)

Europe may be returning to a situation of military confrontation, and NATO is completely refusing to listen to all Russian proposals to de-escalate tensions, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed on Thursday. Speaking in Stockholm, which is currently hosting a meeting of the OSCE Ministerial Council, Lavrov emphasized that Moscow wants to improve “strategic stability” on the continent, which he said is “rapidly eroding.” “NATO refuses to consider our proposals on de-escalation of tensions and prevention of dangerous incidents,” Lavrov said, accusing the US-led bloc of rejecting constructive discussion. “On the contrary, the alliance’s military infrastructure is moving closer to Russia’s borders… The nightmarish scenario of military confrontation is returning.”


Lavrov’s comments come amid increasing fears over an alleged military buildup on the Russian border with Ukraine. Since the start of November, some Western media outlets have claimed that Moscow is planning an “invasion” of its neighbor, an allegation strongly denied by the Kremlin. Last month, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg asked Russia to be transparent about its military activities, calling the purported troop buildup “large” and “unusual.” “We have to be clear-eyed, we need to be realistic about the challenges we face,” he said. “We know that Russia has been willing to use these types of military capabilities before to conduct aggressive actions against Ukraine.”

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“Duncan reported he gave Moreno “a beautiful porcelain plate from the Buckingham Palace gift shop.” “Job done,” he added.”

Assange Judge Is 40-Year ‘Good Friend’ Of Minister Who Set Up Arrest (DUK)

Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the judge that will soon decide Julian Assange’s fate, is a close personal friend of Sir Alan Duncan, who as foreign minister arranged Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy. The two have known each other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan called Burnett “the Judge”. Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017, when Burnett was a judge at the court of appeal. Now the most powerful judge in England and Wales, Burnett will soon rule on Assange’s extradition case. The founder of WikiLeaks faces life imprisonment in the US. In his recently published diaries, In The Thick of It, Duncan wrote in July 2017: “My good friend and Oxford contemporary Ian Burnett is announced as the next Lord Chief Justice.”

He continued: “At Oxford we always called him ‘the Judge’ and they always called me ‘Prime Minister’, but Ian’s the one who’s got there.” In an emailed response to Declassified, Lord Chief Justice Burnett confirmed he and Duncan have been “friends since university days”. Duncan studied politics and economics at St John’s College, Oxford from 1976-79, while Burnett studied jurisprudence at Pembroke College in the same period. “At Oxford we always called him ‘the Judge’ and they always called me ‘Prime Minister’” Duncan’s diaries also show that as foreign minister he spoke privately to Lord Chief Justice Burnett in May 2019, a conversation that was not logged in government records. Burnett briefed him on a dinner he’d had with then prime minister Theresa May two days before.

But Duncan told Declassified: “There was nothing that was required to be ‘logged in government records’.” He and Burnett both said nothing related to their roles as a minister or judge was discussed. Duncan served as foreign minister for Europe and the Americas from 2016-19. He was the key official in the UK government campaign to force Assange from the embassy. As minister, Duncan did not hide his opposition to Julian Assange, calling him a “miserable little worm” in parliament in March 2018. In his diaries, Duncan refers to the “supposed human rights of Julian Assange”. He admits to arranging a Daily Mail hit piece on Assange that was published the day after the journalist’s arrest in April 2019.

Duncan watched UK police pulling the WikiLeaks publisher from the Ecuadorian embassy via a live-feed in the Operations Room at the top of the Foreign Office. He later admitted he was “trying to keep the smirk off [his] face”, and hosted drinks at his parliamentary office for the team involved in the eviction. Duncan then flew to Ecuador to meet President Lenín Moreno in order to “say thank you” for handing over Assange. Duncan reported he gave Moreno “a beautiful porcelain plate from the Buckingham Palace gift shop.” “Job done,” he added.

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Oz haircuts

 

 

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Nov 192021
 


Elio Ciol Via Portica, Assisi 1958

 

Vaccinated Up To 9x More Likely To Be Hospitalized Than Unvaccinated (Kirsch)
29,934 Deaths, 2,804,900 Injuries in EU Database of Adverse Reactions (HIN)
US Government Pays $5.29 Billion to Pfizer for Anti-Covid Pills (GR)
AstraZeneca Covid-19 Antibody Drug Offers 83% Protection Over 6 Months (R.)
Another Major Red Flag About Covid Vaccines And Death (Berenson)
93%-Vaccinated Ireland Has Gone Back Into ‘Partial Lockdown’ (ZH)
Italian Governors Call For Unvaccinated to be Put Under Lockdown (SN)
The Covid Lab Leak Theory Just Got Even Stronger (Sp.)
Mood Darkens In New Zealand As Covid Restrictions Bite (G.)
Comprehensive Review of Face Mask Studies Finds No Evidence of Benefit (DS)
Mask Wearing Cuts New Covid-19 Cases By 53% (F.)
Greek Lawyer Arrested For Spreading Covid Misinformation (K.)
Greek PM: Unvaccinated Adults To Be Barred From All Indoor Public Venues (K.)
Private Doctors In Northern Greece Ordered To Pitch In For A Month (K.)

 

 

 

 

Atlas

 

 

 

 

9x may be a bit much. But hey, there’s an easy $1 million in it if you prove him wrong, or even just debate him and his team.

Vaccinated Up To 9x More Likely To Be Hospitalized Than Unvaccinated (Kirsch)

It is hard to get good, honest data out of hospitals nowadays for some reason. I have no clue as to why that is. You’d think things would be more transparent. But Aaron Siri discovered someone who convinced their hospital to do something really unusual: track the vaccination status of each admitted patient to the hospital. Tracking was based on whether you got the vaccine or not, not “two weeks after you got the vaccine” which is a major definition difference. In short, honest tracking. You’ll never guess what happened so I’ll tell you. Siri wrote on his substack:

A concerned Physician Assistant, Deborah Conrad, convinced her hospital to carefully track the Covid-19 vaccination status of every patient admitted to her hospital. The result is shocking. As Ms. Conrad has detailed, her hospital serves a community in which less than 50% of the individuals were vaccinated for Covid-19 but yet, during the same time period, approximately 90% of the individuals admitted to her hospital were documented to have received this vaccine. These patients were admitted for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to COVID-19 infections. Even more troubling is that there were many individuals who were young, many who presented with unusual or unexpected health events, and many who were admitted months after vaccination. As you might expect, the hospital rewarded Deborah Conrad for her courage and leadership to expose the truth by firing her.

The message is clear: If you speak the truth, you will be pay the price. It is imperative that information that doesn’t align with the “narrative” be suppressed. This is why doctors don’t speak out. And it’s why I had to quit my job in high tech to speak out as well. But here’s the part Aaron didn’t point out that needs to be stated very clearly: The only way you can get those numbers is if vaccinated people are 9 times more likely to be hospitalized than unvaccinated It is mathematically impossible to get to those numbers any other way. Period. Full stop. This is known as an “inconvenient truth.”

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Works as poorly as VAERS. Do they catch even 5%?

29,934 Deaths, 2,804,900 Injuries in EU Database of Adverse Reactions (HIN)

The European Union database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, and they are now reporting 29,934 fatalities, and 2,804,900 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 following COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here.

The EudraVigilance database reports that through October 19, 2021 there are 29,934 deaths and 2,804,900 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots. From the total of injuries recorded, almost half of them (1,311,861) 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. 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.*These totals are estimates based on reports submitted to EudraVigilance. Totals may be much higher based on percentage of adverse reactions that are reported. Some of these reports may also be reported to the individual country’s adverse reaction databases, such as the U.S. VAERS database and the UK Yellow Card system. The fatalities are grouped by symptoms, and some fatalities may have resulted from multiple symptoms.

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“..the cost of the oral medication is lower, to the tune of $530, as opposed to the $700 that one course of the Merck pills costs.”

US Government Pays $5.29 Billion to Pfizer for Anti-Covid Pills (GR)

The pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer has signed a $5.3 billion deal with the United States government to supply its anti-Covid Paxlovid pills to the American people, according to a statement released by the company on Thursday. This is enough to supply a total of 10 million courses of its antiviral drug, as the medication is placed before the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization. The Pfizer pill is the second one to be developed to fight the coronavirus, after Merck’s Molnupiravir, which was placed before the FDA for review on October 11. Molnupiravir is already approved for emergency use in the United Kingdom. The Pfizer deal is nearly double the amount of the contract that the US inked with Merck although the cost of the oral medication is lower, to the tune of $530, as opposed to the $700 that one course of the Merck pills costs.

After recently telling the press that his corporation would file for approval “before Thanksgiving,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla put the results of laboratory tests before the FDA this week. According to the pharmaceuticals firm, Paxlovid is 89% effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths in this who are at risk for severe Covid. President Joe Biden announced in a statement on Thursday “While this pill still requires a full review by the Food and Drug Administration, I have taken immediate steps to secure enough supply for the American people.” Like the coronavirus injections that hundreds of millions of Americans and other peoples around the world have received, the anti-Covid pills will also be easily accessible and free of any cost. Pfizer noted in its statement that it will begin deliveries of Paxlovid pills as soon before the year is out if it is authorized for emergency use by the FDA.

Market watchers noted on Thursday that Pfizer shares rose 1%, to $51.40 in early trading, while Merck shares were marginally lower. Reuters reports that Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra stated that becoming vaccinated should still be a priority for Americans, but the anti-covid pills that may allow at-risk individuals to stay out of the hospital “could be a lifesaver.” The Pharma behemoth says that it has the capacity to manufacture 180,000 courses of treatment by the end of December; possibly more than 50 million courses of the anti-covid pill may be produced by the end of next year.

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Antibody prophylaxis?!

AstraZeneca Covid-19 Antibody Drug Offers 83% Protection Over 6 Months (R.)

AstraZeneca on Thursday cemented its lead in bringing a preventative Covid-19 shot for the non-infected to market for people who do not respond well to vaccines, saying its antibody drug cocktail offered 83% protection over six months. The injected therapy, called AZD7442 or Evusheld, had previously been shown to confer 77% protection against symptomatic illness after three months, in an earlier readout of the late-stage PROVENT trial in August. The Anglo-Swedish company also said a separate study in patients with mild-to-moderate Covid-19 showed a higher dose of AZD7442 cut the risk of symptoms worsening by 88% when given within three days of first symptoms.


The latest results from longer-term follow-ups potentially position AstraZeneca, like rival Pfizer as a future supplier of both Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, with AstraZeneca having said the therapy’s “real advantage” was as a preventative shot. “These new data add to the growing body of evidence supporting AZD7442’s potential to make a significant difference in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19,” Executive Vice President Mene Pangalos said in a statement.

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“..3,939 of 4.03 million Swedes who received the second dose died less than two weeks later.”

Another Major Red Flag About Covid Vaccines And Death (Berenson)

People appear to die at rates 20 percent or more above normal for weeks after receiving their second Covid vaccine dose, according to data from a huge Swedish study. The figures are buried in a preprint paper on vaccine effectiveness released last month. The headline finding of the paper was that protection against Covid, including severe cases, plunged after six months. The researchers did not explicitly examine deaths from all causes – which have risen since the summer in many countries that have highly vaccinated populations. But on page 32 of the 34-page report, a chart shows that 3,939 of 4.03 million Swedes who received the second dose died less than two weeks later.

Over a one-year period, that rate of death would translate into an annual mortality rate of about 2.5 percent a year – 1 person in 40 – almost three times the overall Swedish average. In a typical year, about 1 in 115 Swedes dies. Of course, that huge gap does not account for an important confounding factor: younger people, who have a much lower risk of death, were less likely to be vaccinated. But Sweden also provides detailed data on overall deaths nationally, making a crude baseline comparison possible. That data shows that from an average of about 1,650 Swedes died every week between 2015 and 2019 between April 1 and early August, the period in which almost all of those 4 million Swedes in the study received their second dose. Death rates hardly varied over those years.

In other words, during the spring and summer, Sweden normally has about 3,300 deaths every two weeks – not just in the people who received vaccines, but in all 10.6 million of its people. So let’s make an incredibly conservative assumption, one that strongly favors the vaccines. (The next couple paragraphs are a bit tricky, but I hope the payoff is worth taking the time to read and think through them.) Assume that the group of people who received vaccines were so much older and unhealthier than those who didn’t that they would have accounted for every single death in Sweden whether or not they were vaccinated. In other words, assume that even if the vaccines did not exist, every person in Sweden who died would have been part of that group of 4.03 million people the researchers tracked – while not one other person would have died.

In that case, those 4.03 million people “should” have about 3,300 deaths every two weeks. They CANNOT HAVE MORE – because all of Sweden does not have more. But the vaccines do exist. Those 4.03 million people received them. And in the two weeks after receiving the second vaccine dose, as a group, the researchers reported they had not about 3,300 deaths, but 3,939. And 3,939 deaths is about 20 percent more deaths than “should” have occurred in those two post-vaccine weeks. Again, the 20 percent figure understates the real gap, because in the real world some deaths will occur in the 6.6 million unvaccinated people too, so the actual baseline number for the vaccinated group is not 3,300 deaths but somewhat lower.

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If this doesn’t spell “failure”, what does?

93%-Vaccinated Ireland Has Gone Back Into ‘Partial Lockdown’ (ZH)

Amid what’s being called a fourth wave of infections to hit highly vaccinated Ireland, the government on Tuesday unveiled new Covid-related restrictions at a moment many are now worried the country could be headed toward a full nationwide lockdown before Christmas. The new measures take effect Friday, despite government officials confirming that at least 93% of Ireland’s population of over 5 million people are fully vaccinated. This makes Ireland among the most vaccinated countries in the world, and yet similar to what the UK, Israel, and more recently Austria have experienced, infection rates are still exploding. The new Irish restrictions, which is being dubbed a semi-lockdown, include a nationwide midnight curfew, new ‘work from home’ guidelines encouraging all who are able to do their job from home, as well as stricter implementation of already existing Covid passes – which will now be required by law in cinemas and theaters.

Entering the holiday season, it’s the midnight curfew that’s especially controversial – given it will disproportionately hit pubs, restaurants, and entertainment venues the hardest. One bar industry organization, the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland (VFI), representing some 4,000 Irish pub-owners (or publicans), reacted as follows: “The news that restricted trading hours are set to be reintroduced is a hugely disappointing development for the many late-night pubs and night clubs many of whom will now be forced to shut just three weeks after reopening.” The statement spelled out that “The decision to introduce a new closing time of midnight will effectively close many late-night pubs and nightclubs. It will also seriously restrict other outlets at the most critical time of the year.

“Many of these have already survived over a year of on-and-off again forced closures since the start of pandemic, gutting the hospitality industry which is only just now starting to re-emerge. As has been the pattern, many Irish officials and pundits are blaming the unvaccinated, despite mainstream media outlets like Sky News pointing out the obvious: “The 14-day incidence of the disease currently stands at 959 per 100,000 people. This is despite having one of the most vaccinated populations, with around 93% of all adults fully vaccinated.” [..] So once again we are seeing an ultra-vaxxed society experiencing an uncontrollable surge in the virus, but the refrain of government leaders remains the same simplistic “solutions”: more restrictions, more vaccines, less freedom.

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“The death toll is rising; the situation is serious. Vaccination is the only solution, there is no other,” said Babis.”

Italian Governors Call For Unvaccinated to be Put Under Lockdown (SN)

Five Italian Governors have called for lockdown measures to be imposed on the unvaccinated, following the example of Austria, while Czech Republic and Slovakia are also moving to enforce similar measures. As we previously highlighted, after Austria placed the unjabbed under lockdown, preventing them from leaving their homes for anything other than “essential reasons,” police were seen patrolling supermarkets and highways checking resident’s vaccination status. Several states in Germany also announced that they would ban the unvaccinated from numerous venues. Now Italy’s unvaccinated population, which stands at around 7 million, could be about to face the same form of medical apartheid.


“Eventual new lockdowns should not have to be suffered by those who are vaccinated. Restrictions should only apply to those who are not immunized,” said Massimiliano Fedriga, the Governor of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the northeast of the country. The Telegraph reports that, “His stance is supported by the governors of Tuscany, Calabria, Liguria and Piedmont.” Former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi echoed the demand, tweeting, “You’re not vaccinated? Then stay at home.” Outgoing Czech Republic Prime Minister Andrej Babis has also announced that the the unvaccinated will be banned from shops and restaurants, with the option to provide a negative test removed (despite the fact that the vaccinated can still transmit the virus). “The death toll is rising; the situation is serious. Vaccination is the only solution, there is no other,” said Babis.

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“..to avoid the complication of signing up local subcontractors to their grants in those countries, they promised to send the samples to a laboratory they already funded. And where was this lab? Wuhan.”

The Covid Lab Leak Theory Just Got Even Stronger (Sp.)

Two years in, there is no doubt the Covid pandemic began in the Chinese city of Wuhan. But there is also little doubt that the bat carrying the progenitor of the virus lived somewhere else. Central to the mystery of Covid’s origin is how a virus normally found in horseshoe bats in caves in the far south of China or south-east Asia turned up in a city a thousand miles north. New evidence suggests that part of the answer might lie in Laos. The search for viruses closely related to Sars-CoV-2 took a new turn in September when a team of French and Laotian scientists found one in a horseshoe bat living in a cave in the west Laotian province of Vientiane. Other related viruses had been found in Cambodia, Thailand, Japan and elsewhere in China, but this one, Banal-52, was different.

For the first time since the pandemic began, this was a virus genetically closer to the human Sars-CoV-2 virus than one called RaTG13, collected in southern Yunnan in 2013. RaTG13, which had been stored for six years in a freezer in a lab in Wuhan itself, is genetically 96.1 per cent the same as Sars-CoV-2; Laos’s Banal-52 is 96.8 per cent. The discovery of Banal-52 was greeted with relief by champions of the theory that the virus must have jumped into people in a natural spillover event, not an accident inside a laboratory. If Covid’s closest cousins are flitting about in bats in south-east Asia, then that sample in the freezer in Wuhan looks less suspicious. ‘I am more convinced than ever that Sars-CoV-2 has a natural origin,’ said Linfa Wang of Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, a close collaborator of the Wuhan scientists.

True, the Laos virus lacked a critical feature in a key part of a key gene that makes Covid so infectious: a special 12-letter segment of genetic text called a furin cleavage site. It’s a feature that has never been seen in a Sars-like virus, except for Sars-CoV-2. Apart from that, it seemed that the Laotian virus might have knocked the burden of proof back across the philosophical net into the court of the proponents of lab-leak. Then last month a bunch of emails, uncovered by a lawsuit from the so-called White Coat Waste Project, returned the ball right back over the net. They comprised an exchange between the American virus–hunting foundation, the EcoHealth Alliance and its funders in the US government. The scientists discussed collecting viruses from bats in eight countries including Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 2016 and 2019. But to avoid the complication of signing up local subcontractors to their grants in those countries, they promised to send the samples to a laboratory they already funded. And where was this lab? Wuhan.

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“..a “wave” of disinformation tinged with violent rhetoric, QAnon-style conspiracy theories and far-right undertones.”

Ardern is just another Pfizer sales rep. She’s the one who provides the disinformation. Or does that graph look like a success to you?

Mood Darkens In New Zealand As Covid Restrictions Bite (G.)

For more than a year, New Zealand’s “team of 5 million” stood largely united in the face of Covid-19. This month, as the country expanded vaccine mandates and a tougher roadmap of restrictions for the unvaccinated, that mood has splintered and darkened. Among a small but vocal sliver of the population, dissent has been turning ugly, with death threats against MPs and journalists, increasing protests, warnings from security services about Covid-prompted terror threats, and what researchers have called a “wave” of disinformation tinged with violent rhetoric, QAnon-style conspiracy theories and far-right undertones.

“We’re talking … your aunt and uncle type-people using language like Nuremberg 2.0, common law trials, like ‘the prime minister is a Nazi’ – these are quite extreme terms and terminologies,” says Kate Hannah, a research fellow at Te Punaha Matatini’s disinformation project, a research institute that monitors online extremism and rhetoric. Hannah says the team observed an incredibly rapid shift in both the volume and tone of disinformation circulating in New Zealand’s online communities since the Delta outbreak and level 4 lockdown began. “Since August 2021 to now, there has been almost a day-on-day increase in both the volume of production of misinformation products or things being shared, the level of engagement by communities … and also the tone,” she said. An unregulated online environment, particularly on chat app Telegram, she said, had “normalised – very, very quickly – content which is extremely violent.”

Some of that online chatter manifested in the flesh last week in a series of anti-vaccine mandate protests, several-thousand strong. While the protests were broadly peaceful, one police officer was bitten by a demonstrator, and a news outlet reported that one of their journalists had been harassed and pushed by protesters. The signs and slogans proffered by the crowds presented an odd blend of factions and allegiances – tino rangatiratanga [Maori sovereignty] flags alongside Nazi imagery, anti-vaccine mottoes, evangelical preachers, those calling for the prime minister’s arrest and execution. Hannah says that same blend is what researchers are seeing online – where the rhetoric and networks of vaccine-scepticism are acting as a “Trojan horse” for more extreme ideologies.

“People genuinely feel excluded from society – there are genuine grievances and genuine fears,” Hannah said. And the shifts in political rhetoric have accompanied the country’s material change in pandemic fortunes. While the country rode out most of 2020 as a Covid-free idyll, now it has had to reckon with months-long lockdowns, steadily growing case numbers, near-daily deaths, and the threat of lost jobs and freedoms for those who refuse vaccination.


Cases in New Zealand are up 2,686% in the three months since their most recent mask mandate, despite 91% of the eligible population being at least partially vaccinated and strict lockdowns

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Weird that we’re still discussing the all-too-obvious.

Comprehensive Review of Face Mask Studies Finds No Evidence of Benefit (DS)

The Cato Institute has published its latest working paper, a critical review of the evidence for face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Entitled “Evidence for Community Cloth Face Masking to Limit the Spread of SARS- CoV-2: A Critical Review” and written by Ian Liu, Vinay Prasad and Jonathan Darrow, the paper is an admirably thorough and balanced overview of the published evidence on the efficacy of face masks. While even-handedly acknowledging and summarising the studies that show benefit, the authors overall conclusion is that: More than a century after the 1918 influenza pandemic, examination of the efficacy of masks has produced a large volume of mostly low- to moderate-quality evidence that has largely failed to demonstrate their value in most settings. At 61 pages in length, however, not everyone will make it through to the end, so here s a TL;DR, with some key quotes to serve as a handy overview. The paper is, of course, worth reading in full, though. Here’s the authors’ own summary in the form of the abstract:

“The use of cloth facemasks in community settings has become an accepted public policy response to decrease disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet evidence of facemask efficacy is based primarily on observational studies that are subject to confounding and on mechanistic studies that rely on surrogate endpoints (such as droplet dispersion) as proxies for disease transmission. The available clinical evidence of facemask efficacy is of low quality and the best available clinical evidence has mostly failed to show efficacy, with fourteen of sixteen identified randomised controlled trials comparing face masks to no mask controls failing to find statistically significant benefit in the intent-to-treat populations. Of sixteen quantitative meta-analyses, eight were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks, and the remaining eight supported a public mask intervention on limited evidence primarily on the basis of the precautionary principle. Although weak evidence should not preclude precautionary actions in the face of unprecedented events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, ethical principles require that the strength of the evidence and best estimates of amount of benefit be truthfully communicated to the public.”

The authors open by recalling the initial advice on masks from the WHO and others and the pre-Covid evidence it was based on. “Until April 2020, World Health Organization COVID-19 guidelines stated that “[c]loth (e.g. cotton or gauze) masks are not recommended under any circumstance”, which were updated in June 2020 to state that “the widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence”. In the surgical theatre context, a Cochrane review found “no statistically significant difference in infection rates between the masked and unmasked group in any of the trials”. Another Cochrane review, of influenza-like-illness, found “low certainty evidence from nine trials (3,507 participants) that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the outcome of influenza-like illness (ILI) compared to not wearing a mask (risk ratio 0.99, CI 0.82 to 1.18).”

Considering mechanisms for transmission and thus modes of operation for masks, the authors review the evidence for aerosol transmission and find it very likely. They argue that the ability of masks to inhibit the passage of sufficient aerosols to protect the wearer or infect others, whether through tiny holes in the material or leaking round the sides, is limited. They write: [F]iltering capability is unlikely to be reliable surrogate for infection control, since exhaled air necessarily either leaks around a mask’s edges or passes through it. Such leakage has been shown to account for the vast majority (~5:1 ratio) of particle penetration of standardised surgical masks, and exhaled air easily passes around the edges of most cloth masks. One study of cloth masks simulated leakage and found that a hole equal to ~1% of the mask area decreased mask efficiency by over 60%…

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But like clockwork, there’s always a different report. Cato vs BMJ. Just got to wonder what the logic is to justify 180º turn.

Nice detail: handwashing reduces incidence by the exact same percentage as masks, 53%.

Mask Wearing Cuts New Covid-19 Cases By 53% (F.)

Mask wearing cuts the number of new Covid-19 infections by 53%, according to a new peer reviewed study in the British Medical Journal, which found the controversial and highly politicized precaution to be the single most effective tool against the coronavirus. Mask wearing, social distancing and handwashing are all effective at lowering the number of new Covid-19 cases, according to an analysis of evidence from 72 global studies that looked atg non-pharmaceutical public health measures. Mask wearing was the most effective public health measure at reducing the incidence of Covid-19, the study found, while physical distancing reduced incidence by 25%. Handwashing was found to reduce coronavirus incidence by 53%, though the researchers noted this finding was not statistically significant on account of the small number of studies that assessed handwashing.

The researchers said it was not possible to evaluate other public health measures—including quarantine, lockdowns and school closures—due to differences in the way studies assessing these interventions were designed and conducted. While evidence indicates the effectiveness of these more stringent measures, the researchers said the restrictions are not sustainable, have significant economic and social impacts and must be “carefully” assessed to weigh potential positives against negatives. Though masks have been a critical tool in curbing the spread of Covid-19 from early on in the pandemic, they have become a flashpoint in a culture war pitting individual liberties against the public good. In the U.S., mask mandates have spurred protests, conspiracies and been a hot button issue for politicians to jump on, even as cases and deaths soared.

Tensions have been so high that mask-related disputes have led to a number of violent altercations, some lethal, while some states have prevented local officials from putting their own rules requiring them in place. Getting the pandemic under control is likely to depend on both high vaccination coverage and ongoing adherence to effective and sustainable public health measures. More research will be needed to assess the effectiveness of public health measures in highly vaccinated populations, the researchers wrote. The lack of good research on public health measures to tackle Covid-19 is one of the “tragedies of the pandemic,” wrote professors Paul Glasziou, Susan Michie and Atle Fretheim in a linked editorial. “More and better research are needed.”

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One of the reasons for the arrest is claiming “that the vaccines against Covid-19 have side effects”. Go figure.

Greek Lawyer Arrested For Spreading Covid Misinformation (K.)

A Greek lawyer at the forefront of online anti-vaccination campaigns was arrested on Wednesday for spreading fake news about the pandemic on social media, in the first application of the new law passed in Parliament on November 12. Nikos Antoniadis is also accused of inciting disobedience — both of the charges are misdemeanors. The case file against Nikos Antoniadis was formed by the police’s cybercrime division after a complaint was filed containing evidence that allegedly showed the lawyer stating that there is no coronavirus, that the intubation of patients is done for no good reason and that the vaccines against Covid-19 have side effects. His arrest was ordered by the Athens Prosecutor’s Office, which has been conducting relevant investigations for a long time about the activities of anti-vaxxers. Antoniadis was later released and the prosecutor will decide whether to proceed with the prosecution or continue the preliminary investigation.

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Damn the science.

Greek PM: Unvaccinated Adults To Be Barred From All Indoor Public Venues (K.)

The government will impose more restrictions for those not vaccinated against Covid-19 from next week, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Thursday following a steep rise in infections in recent weeks. The measures were announced by Mitsotakis in a televised address to the nation and include barring unvaccinated citizens from all indoor spaces including cinemas, museums and gyms as of Monday, November 22. Mitsotakis said his plan was for Greece “to have a better Christmas this year than last year.” The new measures mean unvaccinated adults will no longer be able to access indoor venues by presenting a negative Covid test result. At present, unvaccinated adults are only excluded from indoor eateries.


He also said that the vaccination certificate for vaccinated persons over 60 years of age would cease to be valid seven months after the administration of the vaccine. Thus, this age group will be given one month to receive the booster vaccine. Staggered working hours would also apply in the public and private sectors in order to avoid overcrowding, especially at rush hour times and on public transport. Special provisions will apply for parents with schoolchildren. Mitsotakis also said controls would be ramped up. Private doctors would be requisitioned to support the National Health System, he added. The premier also said that unvaccinated churchgoers should have a negative laboratory test, as the Synod of the Orthodox Church of Greece has already called for.

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They put 1000s of them on unpaid leave because of vaccine status, then say the system is overwhelmed.

Rumor has it that over 50% of police are unvaxxed. Wonder how they’ll deal with that.

Private Doctors In Northern Greece Ordered To Pitch In For A Month (K.)

A decision by the Greek Health Ministry requisitioning the services of doctors in the private sector to help in state-run hospitals struggling under the burden of the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic was published in the Government Gazette on Thursday. The decision is directed at medics active in regions of northern Greece, where hospitals are at their limits: Western, Central and Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, as well as Thessaly in central Greece. Authorities are asking for pulmonologists, pathologists and general practitioners stating that their services will be needed, initially, for a period of one month.


Up until Nov. 16, the ministry had secured the voluntary participation of only around 40 private doctors through the medical associations, with at least half of them registered in the previous 24 hours, prompting the activation of the requisition procedures as this this number was deemed unsatisfactory based on the needs of the hospitals. According to ministry estimates, more than 100 doctors in specific specialties are needed to support the National Health System (ESY) at this point.

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 July 11, 2021  Posted by at 6:18 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


John Falter The Windy City 1946

 

 

Time to take a closer look at how safe the Covid vaccines actually are, you know, the ones every politician, “expert” and media figure says are “safe”. This is not that easy to find out, because it’s not something the media report on. That is, they report these things are safe, and if they are not, they don’t report that. We are living under a system of censorship that has not even that slowly crept up on us, and people mostly appear to be fine with that. Maybe that’s because they don’t recognize it for what it is.

I was thinking about this when I saw a tweet by Robert Malone, pioneer/inventor of mRNA technology, who said:

 

 

Of course in this case, what happens with trust in public health is the same as what happens with trust in media, they’re all in it together, supporting the same narrative, and since those same media would have to report on the safety of ivermectin and the not-so safety of the genetic vaccines, and don’t, who would know? It will take a lot of deaths and other forms of misery before they would feel obliged to publicly contradict themselves on the topic.

For now, it all looks like a closed circuit. Which includes the vast majority of politicians and experts, who get their news, info and opinions from the same media that everyone else gets them from. The experts have access to “expert media”, but what’s the difference if and when publications like the Lancet also bury reports on the lab leak theory etc.? Top it all off with social media bans and deletions and Bob’s your uncle.

Still, we can try. There are registration systems for adverse effects of vaccines, legal obligations, the EudraVigilance in the EU (which I’ll leave alone for now) , VAERS in the US, and MHRA/Yellow Card in the UK. They all come with a major caveat, as described by Daily Exposé:

[..] evidence has emerged which proves Doctors and Nurses are refusing to log adverse reactions to the jabs into the system. The current rate according to the UK Government and MHRA of people suffering an adverse reaction to one of the jabs stands at 1 in every 142 people. However it is estimated only 1 – 10% of people actually report an adverse reaction to the Yellow Card scheme so the rate is most likely significantly higher.

In other words: multiply all numbers below by a factor of 10. It’s not just the doctors and nurses, it’s everyone: it’s difficult to fill in the questionnaires in these systems, and when people are sick after a vaccination, they will often feel they have more important things to do. Obviously, reporting a death is not the same as reporting a headache, but many a doctor will be tempted to put a death down to something other than a vaccine. That’s today’s “climate”.

The Daily Exposé went through the latest MHRA report. I selected a few of their findings, but left out the facial paralysis and Bell’s palsy cases:

UK Gov. release 23rd report on Adverse Reactions to the Covid-19 Vaccines

• Up to 30 June 2021, the MHRA had received Yellow Card reports of 399 cases of major thromboembolic events (blood clots) with concurrent thrombocytopenia (low platelet counts) in the UK following vaccination with COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca. Thirty six of the 399 reports have been reported after a second dose. Of the 399 reports, 207 occurred in women, and 189 occurred in men aged from 18 to 93 years. The overall case fatality rate was 18% with 71 deaths, five of which occurred after the second dose.

 

 

• Up to and including 30 June 2021, we have received 74 reports of myocarditis and 50 reports of pericarditis following use of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, as well as one report each of viral pericarditis, infective pericarditis and Streptococcal endocarditis. For the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca there have been 60 reports of myocarditis and 98 reports of pericarditis following vaccination up to and including 30 June 2021 as well as four reports for viral pericarditis and endocarditis, two reports for endocarditis bacterial and one report for viral myocarditis. There have been seven reports of myocarditis, six reports of pericarditis and one report of endocarditis following use of COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna up to the same date.

 

 

• There have also been 6,310 reports of Lymphadenopathy as an adverse reaction to the pfizer mRNA jab. This is a condition that results in a terrible skin rash, unexplained weight loss, an enlarged spleen (the organ that filters the blood) and fever and night sweats.

• Next up is cardiac disorders, of which the Pfizer jab has caused 3,158 resulting in 77 deaths. 29 of these deaths occurred due to the 77 cases of cardiac arrest reported as adverse reactions to the Pfizer jab. But there is also another condition with concerning numbers – Tachycardia.Tachycardia is an extremely high heart rate that occurs without explanation. There have been 530 cases of tachycardia reported to the MHRA due to the Pfizer jab as of the 30th June 2021.

• All in all there have been 8,318 cardiac disorders reported to the MHRA as adverse reactions to the AstraZeneca jab as of the 30th June 2021, this has sadly resulted in 136 deaths.

• There have also been 36 reports of haemorrhagic stroke resulting in 5 deaths, 98 reports of subarachnoid haemorrhage resulting in 5 deaths, and 116 reports of ischaemic stroke resulting in 4 deaths.

• There have been 149 reported cases of cerebral haemorrhage due to the AstraZeneca jab, sadly resulting in 40 deaths. As well as 33 cases of cerebral thrombosis resulting in 2 deaths. But the highest amount of strokes to occur is a cerebrovascular, of which there have been 1,021 resulting in 39 deaths.

• The next adverse reaction is a little strange when taken out of context, but it isn’t so strange when you look at the numbers of brain haemorrhages to have occurred due to both jabs. As the next two adverse reactions we are about to list can result as complications of these haemorrhages occurring – Deafness and Blindness.

• As of June 30th there have been 140 reports of people going deaf as a result of the Pfizer / BioNTech mRNA gene therapy, this is a 180% increase on the number reported as of the 5th April 2021. As of June 30th there have been 320 reports of people going deaf as a result of the AstraZeneca jab. This is a 170% increase on the number reported as of the 5th April 2021. As of June 30th there have been 66 reports of people going blind as a result of the Pfizer / BioNTech mRNA gene therapy, this is 175% increase on the number reported as of the 5th April 2021. As of June 30th there have been 253 reports of people going blind as a result of the AstraZeneca jab. This is a 188% increase on the number reported as of the 5th April 2021.

• In all there have been 450 deaths among the 236,555 adverse reactions to the Pfizer mRNA vaccine reported to the MHRA Yellow Card scheme as of the 30th June 2021. The AstraZeneca jab has had 960 deaths among 775,940 adverse reactions reported to the MHRA Yellow Card scheme as of the 30th June 2021. There have also been 6 deaths among the 22,191 adverse reactions to the Moderna jab, and 24 deaths among the 2,690 adverse reactions reported where the brand of vaccine was not specified. This means that as of 30th June 2021 the Covid-19 vaccines have caused 1,037,376 adverse reactions and 1,440 deaths..

 

 

Then there’s the VAERS numbers in the US. Note that while the UK numbers are mostly totals for the epidemic, US numbers are more reported in weekly segments. Last week, July 2-9, 2,063 people died from getting a vaccine. Sure, the numbers are low compared to that of vaccinations, but at 2,000 deaths in one week it becomes impossible to talk about “extremely rare”. Especially when these numbers are hugely underreported ones.

 

 

 


click to enlarge in new tab

Note: the number of vaccinations per week fell a lot, from 23 million in early May to 4 million in early July.

Curious: in the first two weeks of June we see 700 deaths per week, second two weeks: just over 100 deaths per week. I don’t know why that is. And then of course it became 800+ deaths and now 2,000+. Why? What happened?

I must confess that when reading the numbers, and thinking about them, I find it very hard not to see the people who’ve taken a vaccine, because their doctor or their government said so, and told them it was safe, and who then come away with a permanent heart condition or who are blind for the rest of their lives. It makes it hard to write an article like this, it kind of cuts off my tongue.

It’s not up to me to tell people to either take a vaccine or not, but I can tell you to please think about the risks and benefits. These things are not 100% safe. And you deserve to be informed about that.

 

 

 

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May 082021
 


Charles Sprague Pearce Lamentations over the Death of the First-Born of Egypt 1877

 

Halt Vaccine Passports! It’s Illegal, Medical Apartheid (Dr Mike Yeadon)
Full Approval Of A Vaccine Could Make Mandates More Likely (F.)
Catastrophic Side Effects Of Pfizer Vaccine To Every System In Human Body (GGI)
EMA ‘Assessing Reports’ Of AstraZeneca Jab Link To Rare Immune Disorder (RT)
Claim That SARS-CoV-2 Genes Can Integrate With Human DNA (SMag)
Michael Lewis’ ‘The Premonition’ Is A Sweeping Indictment Of The CDC (NPR)
Children Are Far More Likely To Die From Diarrhea Than Covid-19 (Black)
As Virus Cases Explode, Why Has The Mekong Region Success Story Ended? (SEAG)
Vaccine Waiver Pledge Tests Biden-World’s Pharma Ties (DP)
The Truth Is Surely Baseless (Kunstler)
Why Stocks Soared While America Struggled (Vox)
U.S. Added 266,000 Jobs Last Month vs 1 Million Expected (F.)

 

 

 

 

Crystal clear.

Halt Vaccine Passports! It’s Illegal, Medical Apartheid (Dr Mike Yeadon)

It is very important that people understand what is happening here. The intention is to introduce vaccine passports everywhere. But this is a disguise. It’s a world’s first digital common-format, globally-interoperable ID system with an editable health flag (vaccinated Y or N). It makes no one safer. If you’re vaccinated, you’re protected & are not made safer by knowing others immune status. As in Israel, you will be compelled to present a valid VaxPass in order to access defined facilities or access services. No VaxPass, you’re denied. This system only needs 50%+ of the adult population to start up because of its huge, coercive power on the unvaccinated. It’s illegal, medical apartheid. If they succeed, it won’t help you to refuse. They’ll move on, leaving that minority behind.

A VaxPass System like this will give to those controlling the database & it’s algorithms TOTALITARIAN TYRANNY over us all. The ONLY way to stop this biosecurity nightmare is to NOT GET VACCINATED FOR NON-MEDICAL REASONS!!! I fear that, if our adversaries gain this absolute control, they will use it to harm the population. There’s no limit to the evil which will flow from this strategic goal. DO NOT ALLOW THIS SYSTEM TO START UP, because it’s unstoppable afterwards. One example: your VaxPass pings, instructing you to attend for your 3rd or 4th or 5th booster or variant vaccine. If you don’t, your VaxPass will expire & you’ll become an out-person, unable to access your own life. How much choice do you have? It’s none. You are controlled. Forever. PLEASE share this widely, on every platform you use.

Thank you,
Dr Mike Yeadon

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Yeadon: “The ONLY way to stop this biosecurity nightmare is to NOT GET VACCINATED FOR NON-MEDICAL REASONS!!!”

Full Approval Of A Vaccine Could Make Mandates More Likely (F.)

Pfizer and BioNTech began the process of applying for full FDA approval of their Covid-19 vaccine Friday, an expected move that could force the issue of whether vaccine mandates—proposed for schools, colleges and even some workplaces—will be a legal way to combat the virus. The Pfizer vaccine has been used in the U.S. under an emergency use authorization since December, a designation that requires companies to continue clinical trials and work towards full approval. Full approval would mean the vaccine can stay on the market once the pandemic emergency is over, important if we are to remain vigilant against circulating pockets of coronavirus and counter novel variants.

A full license adds a new dimension to the debate over whether organizations, schools and universities are allowed to require vaccination, with many opponents arguing that people cannot be required to get a vaccine licensed under an emergency use authorization. Legally speaking, there hasn’t really been a test as to whether a temporarily authorized vaccine can be mandated, Carmel Shachar, executive director of Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center, told Forbes, though a fully licensed vaccine would certainly “be less controversial to mandate.” While any mandate would have to take account of legally protected medical and religious exemptions, Shachar said any further accommodations—such as an opposition to vaccination—would be decided by the organization implementing it and relevant local laws.

Shachar added that it “would not be that much of a stretch” to add a Covid-19 vaccine to the “long list” of vaccines children need to get in order to attend school or daycare. [..] A fully approved vaccine could have a significant impact on persistent vaccine hesitancy in the U.S.. Polls commonly record people waiting to see if the vaccines are safe as a reason for refusing a shot, something Field said often stems from a “misconception out there about the nature of an” emergency authorization. Many believe the designation means they are still “experimental,” Field said, despite ample evidence demonstrating safety and efficacy. Hesitancy appears to be particularly strong in parents, many of whom have doubts over vaccinating their children. However, experts say vaccinating children will be vital to protect them and keep the community safer.

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“..during January-February 2021, at the peak of the Israeli mass vaccination campaign, there was a 22% increase in overall mortality in Israel compared with the previous year.” “In fact, January-February 2021 have been the deadliest months in the last decade..”

Catastrophic Side Effects Of Pfizer Vaccine To Every System In Human Body (GGI)

The Israeli People Committee (IPC), a civilian body made of leading Israeli health experts, has published its April report into the Pfizer vaccine’s side effects indicating damage to almost every system in the human body. If the findings by IPC are genuine, then Pfizer vaccine is linked to more deaths in Israel than AstraZeneca’s in the whole of Europe. The findings are catastrophic on every possible level. This is a detailed report that highlights the most devastating findings. The verdict of the Israeli People Committee is that “there has never been a vaccine that has harmed as many people.” The report is long and detailed. “We received 288 death reports in proximity to vaccination (90% up to 10 days after the vaccination), 64% of those were men.”

Yet the report states, “according to data provided by the Ministry of Health, only 45 deaths in Israel were vaccine related.” If these are the genuine numbers, then Israel has failed to report on its experimental results genuinely. We have been hearing a lot about the rare side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine and more than 300 cases of blood clots found in Europe. German scientists have found the exact 2 step process how the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine causes blood clots in recipients. They describe a series of events that has to happen in the body before the vaccines create these large clots. If the findings by IPC are genuine, then Pfizer vaccine is linked to more deaths in Israel than AstraZeneca’s in the whole of Europe.

Meanwhile, the US CDC and FDA have lifted their recommended pause on use of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine with a condition that it will now include a safety label warning that its vaccine comes with blood clot risks. “According to Central Bureau of Statistics data during January-February 2021, at the peak of the Israeli mass vaccination campaign, there was a 22% increase in overall mortality in Israel compared with the previous year.” “In fact, January-February 2021 have been the deadliest months in the last decade, with the highest overall mortality rates compared to corresponding months in the last 10 years.” The IPC finds that “amongst the 20-29 age group the increase in overall mortality has been most dramatic. In this age group, we detect an increase of 32% in overall mortality in comparison with previous year.”

“Statistical analysis of information from the Central Bureau of Statistics, combined with information from the Ministry of Health, leads to the conclusion that the mortality rate amongst the vaccinated is estimated at about 1: 5000 (1: 13000 at ages 20-49, 1: 6000 at ages 50-69, 1: 1600 at ages 70+).” “According to this estimate, it is possible to estimate the number of deaths in Israel in proximity of the vaccine, as of today, at about 1000-1100 people.”

Read more …

These are the things that usually come out in tests.

EMA ‘Assessing Reports’ Of AstraZeneca Jab Link To Rare Immune Disorder (RT)

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is investigating reports of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine causing Guillain-Barre syndrome, as the pharmaceutical company remains embroiled in controversy over the jab’s link to blood clotting. In a meeting this week, the European Medicines Agency’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC) revealed that it was “assessing reports” of the rare immune system disorder being found in people following vaccination. “As part of the review of the regular pandemic summary safety reports for Vaxzevria, AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, the PRAC is analysing data provided by the marketing authorization holder on cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) reported following vaccination”, the PRAC declared.

“GBS was identified during the marketing authorization process as a possible adverse event requiring specific safety monitoring activities”, the committee continued, adding that it has requested “further detailed data” on the cases and will release new information as it becomes available. According to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), Guillain-Barre syndrome is a “very rare and serious condition that affects the nerves”, and can create feelings of numbness, weakness, and pain in those who have it. Though the NHS advises that Guillain-Barre syndrome is a treatable condition and that “most people will eventually make a full recovery”, it can also be life-threatening and leave those who have had it with “long-term problems”

Following hundreds of cases of blood clotting – and dozens of deaths – AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine has already been restricted in many countries to older people only. In the UK, those under the age of 40 are set to be offered an alternative vaccine provided this causes no “delays” in the vaccination program, however the European Medicines Agency maintains that the vaccine’s benefits outweigh the risk for much of the population.

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Not yet fully convincing.

Claim That SARS-CoV-2 Genes Can Integrate With Human DNA (SMag)

A team of prominent scientists has doubled down on its controversial hypothesis that genetic bits of the pandemic coronavirus can integrate into our chromosomes and stick around long after the infection is over. If they are right—skeptics have argued that their results are likely lab artifacts—the insertions could explain the rare finding that people can recover from COVID-19 but then test positive for SARS-CoV-2 again months later. Stem cell biologist Rudolf Jaenisch and gene regulation specialist Richard Young of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the work, triggered a Twitter storm in December 2020, when their team first presented the idea in a preprint on bioRxiv. The researchers emphasized that viral integration did not mean people who recovered from COVID-19 remain infectious.

But critics charged them with stoking unfounded fears that COVID-19 vaccines based on messenger RNA (mRNA) might somehow alter human DNA. The critics also presented a brace of scientific criticisms, some of which the team addresses in a paper released online today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “We now have unambiguous evidence that coronavirus sequences can integrate into the genome,” Jaenisch says. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has genes composed of RNA, and Jaenisch, Young, and co-authors contend that on rare occasions an enzyme in human cells may copy the viral sequences into DNA and slip them into our chromosomes. The enzyme, reverse transcriptase, is encoded by LINE-1 elements, sequences that litter 17% of the human genome and represent artifacts of ancient infections by retroviruses.

In their original preprint, the researchers presented test tube evidence that when human cells spiked with extra LINE-1 elements were infected with the coronavirus, DNA versions of SARS-CoV-2’s sequences nestled into the cells’ chromosomes. Many researchers who specialize in LINE-1 elements and other “retrotransposons” thought the data were too thin to support the claim. “If I would have had this data, I would have not submitted to any publication at that point,” says Cornell University’s Cedric Feschotte, who studies endogenous retrovirus chunks in the human genome. He and others also said they expected higher quality work coming from scientists of the caliber of Jaenisch and Young. In two subsequent studies, both posted on bioRxiv, critics presented evidence that the supposed chimeras of human and viral DNA traces are routinely created by the very technique the group used to scan for them in chromosomes.

Read more …

“In January and February of 2020, hundreds of Americans in Wuhan, China, were flown back to the U.S. Considering how many people had died of COVID-19 in China at that point, it would have made sense to test those Americans who were coming back.”

Michael Lewis’ ‘The Premonition’ Is A Sweeping Indictment Of The CDC (NPR)

“No one should have to be as brave as Charity Dean was as a local public health officer. To do her job, she had to be brave in a way that brought tears to my eyes,” Lewis tell NPR. “And when I first met her, I realized I had a character because all over her house were like these Post-it notes reminding her to be brave, like … ‘courage is a muscle memory’ or ‘the tallest oak in the forest was once just a little nut.’ She had all these kind of inspirational things. And when you get into the story of what Charity Dean … had to do on the ground, your hair stands up on the back of your neck.” Lewis writes about how Dean tried and tried to get the state officials around her to look at the data and act to make sure the virus didn’t spread. She put it all on the line, her reputation, her job.

And across the country, there was another group of doctors led by Carter Mescher trying to do the same thing at the federal level. “It was incredible to me that there was this kind of secret group of seven doctors — they called themselves the Wolverines — who were positioned in interesting places in and around the federal government, who had been together for the better part of 15 years and who had come together whenever there was a threat of a disease outbreak to help organize the country’s response,” Lewis says. But by 2020, the Trump administration had disbanded the pandemic response unit and these doctors were forced to go rogue. A mutual acquaintance put Charity Dean in touch with Carter Mescher.

“And Charity picked up all of Carter Mescher’s analysis. And she said it was like pouring water on a dying plant, that it was the first person she met who was thinking about this threat the way she was thinking about it,” Lewis says. “And so she’s very soon on the private calls. … Think of her as an actual battlefield commander. She’s in the war, in the trenches, as if she’s figured out in the course of her career in public health that there are no generals or the generals don’t understand how the, how the battle’s fought. And she’s going to have to kind of organize the strategy on the field.” In January and February of 2020, hundreds of Americans in Wuhan, China, were flown back to the U.S. Considering how many people had died of COVID-19 in China at that point, it would have made sense to test those Americans who were coming back.

But according to Lewis and his sources, then-CDC Director Robert Redfield refused to test them, saying it would amount to doing research on imprisoned persons. “Redfield is a particularly egregious example, but he’s an expression of a much bigger problem. And if you just say, ‘oh, it’s the Trump administration’ or ‘oh, it’s Robert Redfield,’ you’re missing the bigger picture,” Lewis says. “And the bigger picture is we as a society have allowed institutions like the CDC to become very politicized. And this is a larger pattern in the U.S. government. More and more jobs being politicized, more and more people in these jobs being on shorter, tighter leashes. More the kind of person who ends up in the job being someone who is politically pleasing to whoever happens to be in the White House. And so … the conditions for Robert Redfield being in that job were created long ago.”

Read more …

“..precisely 54 children in the Land of the Free have died from COVID (according to CDC data through April 28). Given that there have been roughly 4 million confirmed COVID cases among children, this implies a survival rate of 99.999%”

Children Are Far More Likely To Die From Diarrhea Than Covid-19 (Black)

In the winter of 1837, Charles Dickens published the first two chapters of what would become one of his most popular works– the story of an orphan called Oliver Twist. If you’ve never read it, the book is one of Dickens’ most damning condemnations of the poverty, crime, and child labor that dominated 19th century Britain. It was personal for Dickens; as a boy, he was forced to work long hours in a shoe polish factory for pitiful wages after his father had been hauled off to debtors’ prison. And Oliver Twist was so shocking it began a global conversation about child labor and contributed to the worldwide Children’s Rights Movement. By the early 20th century, children were starting to be viewed as more than just cheap, easily exploitable workers. Instead, western nations began to prioritize children’s well-being.

It’s been that way for generations. Then along came COVID-1984… and all the dictatorial public health measures that have accompanied it. Entire economies were locked down, borders closed, business shuttered, and basic human interactions forbidden. These restrictions have been especially damaging for children. Even to this day, more than a YEAR later, schools are still closed in many parts of the world. Millions of children simply stopped learning at the age when their minds develop more rapidly than at any other time in life. Sheepish bureaucrats hid behind Zoom classes as an adequate substitute for real learning and human interaction, though hardly a thought was given to the cost versus benefit. It’s hard to fault anyone for the decisions they made back in March or April of 2020. There was no data. And plenty of people took the most conservative approach.

But by summer 2020, there were mountains of data to support an informed decision. Consider, for example, precisely 54 children in the Land of the Free have died from COVID (according to CDC data through April 28). Given that there have been roughly 4 million confirmed COVID cases among children, this implies a survival rate of 99.999%. For kids, even the Chicken Pox is more fatal, not to mention a variety of other common illnesses ranging from the flu to strep throat. Yet the world never closed schools due to the chicken pox. Curiously, his grace, Lord Protector Anthony Fauci, noted back in 2009 during the Swine Flu epidemic that “we have already 76 children dying from the 2009 H1N1 virus, and it’s only the beginning of October.”

Yet his eminence did not demand schools close. And the CDC specifically recommended NOT closing schools. (Fauci also stated then, “you can’t isolate yourself from the rest of the world for the whole flu season. . .”) Point is, public health bureaucrats and school officials clearly didn’t conduct a basic cost/benefit analysis before closing the schools. They didn’t consider how many kids would fall behind. Or the mental health consequences of social isolation, like the higher rates of self-harm and skyrocketing calls to suicide hotlines. The only thing that mattered was a disease with a 99.999% survivability rate. Not their learning, their future, or their mental health.

Read more …

“..cases have jumped from 516 as of February 20 to 17,621 as of May 7..”

As Virus Cases Explode, Why Has The Mekong Region Success Story Ended? (SEAG)

Cambodia is not alone in its rapid decline since February. While the unfolding public health disaster in India dominates global headlines, a slower burning crisis is emerging across Southeast Asia’s Greater Mekong Subregion, with Thailand and Laos also witnessing a spike in cases in recent weeks and months. Once heralded as unique case studies in successfully containing the virus, seemingly immune to its most severe health effects, these three nations are now brewing outbreaks fuelled by potent strains, porous borders and public holidays. With the virus spreading on its doorstep, Vietnamese officials are anxiously preparing for what seems an inevitable arrival of cases. Though infection rates remain low in Vietnam, it now joins its neighbours in the scramble to halt the spread of Covid-19 before it’s beyond control in a region collectively home to nearly 200 million people.

Dr Jessica Manning, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told the Globe that B.1.1.7 has exposed many previously held myths surrounding the Mekong region’s supposed resilience to the virus. “We thought that there was this mystery to the Mekong, that maybe Southeast Asia was faring better than the rest of the world because of preexisting immunity,” said Manning, who has studied infectious diseases in Cambodia since 2017, pivoting in January last year to track Covid-19 in the Kingdom. “But with the new variants that have exploded, it’s just so much drastically worse that we no longer harbour those thoughts of Cambodians or Thais or Vietnamese having some shield related to pre-existing immunity. B.1.1.7 has just blasted through all of that.”

It’s within recent memory that Cambodia still boasted some of the best Covid-19 public health statistics globally. As of late January, the Kingdom recorded the fourth lowest cases per capita worldwide, and was also the largest country population-wise to report no fatalities of those with more than 20 cases. At that point, simple public health measures proved effective in containing the virus. “With the wild type [early] virus, Cambodia seemed to do ok with these really bread and butter public health measures, like quarantine, lockdown, schools closed, good contact tracing,” Manning said. But since that ill fated night, cases have jumped from 516 as of February 20 to 17,621 as of May 7. The B.1.1.7 variant, now Cambodia’s dominant strain, according to Kinzer and Manning, has spread with ruthless efficiency. Deaths have also begun to mount with 114 as of publishing – dispelling yet another myth around Cambodia’s resilient, youthful population.

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“Her statement also preemptively warned that the “negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved” — a process that could provide drugmakers an opening to try to limit a final waiver.”

Vaccine Waiver Pledge Tests Biden-World’s Pharma Ties (DP)

Several of President Joe Biden’s most powerful appointees and advisers have had business relationships with pharmaceutical giants lobbying the administration on COVID-19 and intellectual property issues, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Poster. Those ties — and Biden’s longtime alliance with pharmaceutical industry interests — could prove particularly relevant as drug companies now try to defang any new waiver of patent rules that might reduce their profits and facilitate the wider distribution of vaccines to COVID-afflicted countries. Last summer, Biden broke with his own legislative record and pledged to support relaxing those intellectual property rules to distribute a COVID-19 vaccine, saying it “is the only humane thing in the world to do.”

With the pandemic creating a full-fledged humanitarian crisis in India this spring, Biden’s administration on Wednesday issued a statement reiterating that general promise. “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” said United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai in a press release. “The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines.” The declaration was widely hailed by public interest groups, who feared the administration would follow past precedent and oppose any emergency action on patents.

However, Tai’s statement was narrow: It only mentioned COVID vaccines and avoided endorsing an existing, broad waiver proposed by India and South Africa which would cover “diagnostic kits, vaccines, medicines, personal protective equipment and ventilators.” Her statement also preemptively warned that the “negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved” — a process that could provide drugmakers an opening to try to limit a final waiver.

Read more …

Still Trump?!

The Truth Is Surely Baseless (Kunstler)

Among other things, the horror show of corruption in Ukraine, starring (but not limited to) Joe and Hunter Biden in their ceaseless quest for grift, but also featuring many of the origins of the RussiaGate hoax and its spin-offs, plus the involvement of State Department personnel such as Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and deputy George Kent, double-plus the shady activities of George Soros and his Atlantic Council in seditious activity working hand-in-hand with the CIA’s “whistleblower” (Eric Ciaramella) to damage Mr. Trump — who was impeached for simply inquiring about what was going on in Ukraine.

Mr. Giuliani had to conduct his own investigation into all that for the obvious reason that the usual US agencies who would ordinarily investigate official misconduct were actually perpetrating it: the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and State Department. And who, at the DOJ now, might be behind the current effort to neutralize Mr. Giuliani? Try Lisa Monaco, the new Deputy Attorney General, formerly one of Barack Obama’s chief White House fixers — i.e., an attorney detailed to shutting down investigations and covering the tracks left by questionable operations — and a protégé of former CIA Director John Brennan. Is the weak and pliable AG Merrick Garland fronting for her running the DOJ now? Joe Biden is going to need a whole lot of fixin’. And, is Lisa Monaco actually still reporting to Barack Obama? He can also probably use a fix or two. Who knows what’s coming down pike? Just maybe a loaded semi driven by the nearly forgotten John Durham?

MSNBC might have made an unforced error on Wednesday scripting 10 o’clock troll Lawrence O’Donnell to diss former AG William Barr — some jive about Mr. Barr trying to mess with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts back in 2018 to nail Mr. Trump on an obstruction of justice rap. Is this the time to piss-off Mr. Barr? You have to wonder. Is it possible that the FBI concealed its possession of the Hunter Biden laptop from Mr. Barr during those 2019 days of impeachment, when Mr. Trump was attempting to mount a defense for making a phone call to Ukraine? Who might be responsible for hiding that, if it were so? By the way, it was Mr. Barr who, just before resigning in late 2020, made John Durham a Special Counsel, whose work — whatever that might be, maybe nothing at all, maybe something consequential, nobody knows — can’t be blocked by Merrick Garland (or Lisa Monaco).

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“29% of Americans have been jobless for over 1 year. And the s&p 500 is +29% during that time. Perfect.”

Why Stocks Soared While America Struggled (Vox)

The market was temporarily shaken in March 2020, as stocks plunged for about a month at the outset of the Covid-19 outbreak, but then something strange happened. Even as hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, millions of people were laid off and businesses shuttered, protests against police violence erupted across the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and the outgoing president refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election — supposedly the market’s nightmare scenario — for weeks, the stock market soared. After the jobs report from April 2021 revealed a much shakier labor recovery might be on the horizon, major indexes hit new highs.


The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street, between corporate CEOs and the working class, has perhaps never felt so stark. How can it be that food banks are overwhelmed while the Dow Jones Industrial Average hits an all-time high? For a year that’s been so bad, it’s been hard not to wonder how the stock market could be so good.

To the extent that there can ever be an explanation for what’s going on with the stock market, there are some straightforward financial answers here. The Federal Reserve took extraordinary measures to support financial markets and reassure investors it wouldn’t let major corporations fall apart. Congress did its part as well, pumping trillions of dollars into the economy across multiple relief bills. Turns out giving people money is good for markets, too. Tech stocks, which make up a significant portion of the S&P 500, soared. And with bond yields so low, investors didn’t really have a more lucrative place to put their money. To put it plainly, the stock market is not representative of the whole economy, much less American society. And what it is representative of did fine.

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One hell of a miss.

U.S. Added 266,000 Jobs Last Month vs 1 Million Expected (F.)

The United States added 266,000 jobs in April, according to data released by the Labor Department Friday—much worse than the 1 million job gains economists expected and far fewer than the 916,000 jobs added in March, indicating that the long-tepid labor market recovery is slowing down again even as stocks and corporate earnings rip higher. The unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1% in April, as compared to 6% in March; the metric hit a record high of 14.7% in April 2020. There are now 9.8 million unemployed people in the United States, higher than 9.7 million in March and much higher than the prepandemic level of 4 million in February 2020, the government said. Overall, the U.S. economy has added back roughly 14 million of the 22 million jobs lost at the height of pandemic uncertainty in March and April of last year.

At 3.5 million, the number of permanent job losers is still about three times prepandemic levels, and the labor force participation rate in April was little changed at 61.7%, compared to 63.4% in February 2020. According to the Labor Department, 9.4 million people reported that they were unable to work last month because their employer closed or lost business as a result of the pandemic—still a sizable portion of the labor market but down from 11.4 million in March, thanks to businesses reopening. April’s report also continued to show stark differences in unemployment by race, with minority groups such as Black Americans and Hispanics facing above-average unemployment rates of 9.7% and 7.9%, respectively.

“Obviously, the jobs report is a large disappointment . . . however, the economy is still on a recovery footing,” says Vital Knowledge Media Founder Adam Crisafulli. “Notable job gains in leisure and hospitality, other services, and local government education were partially offset by losses in temporary help services and in couriers and messengers.” The losses in temporary help services, Crisafulli says, suggest companies “may be gearing up for more permanent hires.” 16.2 million. That’s how many people are still receiving some form of government unemployment benefit—shockingly high compared to historical levels, according to weekly data released Thursday. It’s also higher than the number of unemployed Americans due to the startling number of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force because they’re no longer looking for work.

Read more …

 

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May 052021
 


Edgar Degas The laundress 1873

 

India Latest Country to Approve Use of Ivermectin to Treat Covid-19 (NC)
Do Stupid Things, Win Stupid Prizes (Denninger)
Pfizer Will File For Full FDA Approval By End Of May (F.)
Pfizer Sees Covid-19 As ‘Durable’ Revenue Stream As Profits Rise (Y!)
‘Obscene’ Bonus Hike For AstraZeneca Boss Prompts Investor Anger (G.)
Fauci Tells CNN We’re ‘At Least Halfway Through’ The Covid-19 Pandemic (RT)
US Birth Rate Sees Biggest Fall For Nearly 50 Years (G.)
The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown (Atl.)
The Dynamics Behind the Ugly Amount of Empty Office Space (WS)
Don’t Be Fooled By Joe Biden (Chris Hedges)
CNN Turns To Disgraced FBI Official For Legal Analysis On Rudy Giuliani (TP)
The Instagram Ads Facebook Won’t Show You (Signal)
Facebook’s New Campaign Should Have Free Speech Advocates Nervous (Turley)

 

 

Some memes are stronger than others.

 

 

 

And this time for real. Until now it was only 2 states.

India Latest Country to Approve Use of Ivermectin to Treat Covid-19 (NC)

[..] the huge uncontrolled wave of infections hitting India is having all sorts of implications for the Modi government. In its desperation to regain control of the virus, India’s government quietly changed its treatment guidelines last week. The new guidelines include the option of prescribing two repurposed medicines for mild Covid patients: budesonid and ivermectin. The former is an inhaled steroid that has been shown to reduce the time to recovery and need for urgent medical care. The latter is an off-patent anti-parasitic that has been discovered to have powerful anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. India is no stranger to ivermectin. The medicine has been used as an anti-parasitic for decades. It has also been used in the fight against malaria.

Two of its regions, Uttar Pradesh (population: 230 million) and Bihar, have been using the medicine since August, to dramatic effect. By the end of 2020, Uttar Pradesh (UP) — which distributed free ivermectin for home care — had the second-lowest fatality rate in India at 0.26 per 100,000 residents. Only the state of Bihar, with 128 million residents, had less. But Uttar Pradesh (UP) did more than treat 300,000 mild cases at home through 2020; it also opted to use ivermectin to prevent infection. COVID response teams began taking the drug and they did not catch the illness. The same thing was reported in a study of frontline critical care workers in Argentina. U.P. then had contacts of COVID patients take it, with similar success. “Recognizing the sense of urgency,” Amit Mohan Prasad, a U.P. health official, wrote in a Dec. 30 article, “we decided to go ahead.”


Yet UP’s remarkable success at controlling the virus did not inform national policy — at least not until now. The Indian Council of Medical Research declined in October to recommend ivermectin nationwide, citing, like so many health regulators, the need for more data. But all that changed last week as India became the biggest country on the planet to adopt nationwide use of ivermectin against Covid-19. More than 20 countries are now using ivermectin to treat Covid-19 to one degree or another, with promising results, despite the fact the World Health Organization has not approved its use. They include Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt.

Read more …

”..the shot is one hundred times more dangerous than the disease..”

Do Stupid Things, Win Stupid Prizes (Denninger)

It’s ok folks, it’s very “rare”. Uh huh, sure it is. High school senior Emma Burkey received her “one and done” Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine on March 20, and within two weeks was in an induced coma following seizures and clotting in her brain. “She’s making a slow recovery, having recently been transfered from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, and the first round of bills totaled $513,000. The 18-year-old’s family friends in the Las Vegas area started a GoFundMe account to help with medical expenses from the very rare vaccine reaction.” An 18 year old, according to the CDC, has a roughly 1/50,000 risk of being killed by Covid-19 assuming the FDA’s and CDC’s “standard of care” which prohibits the use of budesonide, ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies and a whole host o other drugs which we know work.

One of them, budesonide, has a roughly 90% efficacy in preventing hospitalization (and of course death usually is preceded by that if you get Covid); the others also have some efficacy. Stacking just those three likely winds up around 95-99% effective, so your actual risk, if you’re not a dumb-ass and are both young and get Covid-19 is more like 1/500,000. And that’s if you get Covid. The CDC says about 1/10 people have over a year’s time, so your risk as a healthy 18 year old is approximately 1/5,000,000 since to be exposed to the risk of death you first must get the disease and that is not certain. Remember, according to the CDC if you die while Covid-19 positive then your death was caused by Covid-19, even though this is not scientifically proved. This is the same standard that VAERS uses for vaccine death; you died associated with receiving the shot; it is not proved it was caused, but if that’s good enough for the CDC to claim the Coof killed you then it sure as hell is good enough to claim the vaccine killed you.

By the CDCs VAERS numbers and the number of delivered shots into arms the risk of the shot killing you is approximately 1/45,000 and if you take the shot the hazard is 100% probable to be undertaken, obviously. So if you’re not specifically morbid the shot is one hundred times more dangerous than the disease. Oh, and we know the VAERS reports are wildly understated. Why? Because it’s a voluntary system; there is no mandate on any person or health provider to report potential adverse connected effects. While you (as the impacted individual) can report to the system obvious doing that if you’re dead is somewhat difficult. Were this a mandatory system where any death within “X” time of an inoculation had to be reported, with a criminal penalty for not doing so by health providers, we might have a more-full picture. But unlike death certificates which must be issued, and the CDC rules for Covid-19 that say if you were positive any time in the last 28 days, or at death, your death is ruled Covid-related there is no such mandate for VAERS.

Maybe health insurance will pay Emma’s bill, at least in part. What’s Emma’s deductible, if she has insurance? Will she be eating that deductible every year for the rest of her life with a continuing care requirement? Will her insurer refuse to pay entirely, since these were experimental shots? What happens if Emma wants to start a family and tries to get life insurance down the road? Will it be available at any reasonable price? Has her ability to bear a child been damaged or destroyed? What about her ability to enjoy all the things she used to enjoy; will she, for example, still be able to go for a nice jog? Can she hold a driver license? What about a CDL or pilot’s license? What about something as simple as driving a forklift in a warehouse? Have the seizures permanently destroyed those options for Emma?

Read more …

Not supposed to be completed until 2023. Nothing matters anymore. All those carefully crafted procedures are just a hindrance.

Pfizer Will File For Full FDA Approval By End Of May (F.)

Pfizer and BioNTech, the manufacturers of one of the three authorized Covid-19 vaccines in the U.S., plan to file for full approval from the Food and Drug Administration by the end of May as they expect the vaccine to generate about $26 billion in revenue this year. Pfizer and German drug manufacturer BioNTech announced their plan to ask the FDA for full approval of its vaccine in its quarterly earnings report. The vaccine, the first Covid-19 jab to be authorized for emergency use in the U.S., was given its emergency use authorization in December, and is currently authorized to be administered to Americans over the age of 16. The vaccine brought it $3.5 billion in revenue in the first three months of 2021. The FDA is expected to expand eligibility for the Pfizer vaccine to adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15 as soon as this week.

Full FDA approval would allow Pfizer to market its vaccine directly to consumers, and could help make Pfizer Covid-19 booster shots–something Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has said will be necessary–available to the public without needing another emergency use authorization from the FDA. The FDA grants emergency use authorizations when the Secretary of Health and Human Services deems it “appropriate” for the FDA to “authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products” when there are few or no alternatives. Vaccination EUA proposals must include “safety data accumulated from phase 1 and 2 studies” and “with an expectation that phase 3 data” will include follow up information on trial subjects. The FDA can then grant an EUA when an FDA panel determines the “known and potential benefits outweigh the known and potential risks.”

It’s likely that all Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers with EUAs will go on to file for full FDA approval because emergency use authorizations can be revoked once a public health crisis subsides. Both Pfizer and Moderna have released phase 3 trial information for their vaccines that showed high levels of protection against Covid-19, which allow them to move forward with filing for full FDA approval. Some health experts hope that full FDA approval for Covid-19 vaccines will help lessen vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams wrote in The Washington Post: “Many people who are lower risk understandably ask if the benefits justify taking a medication that has not received the full and traditional FDA stamp of approval,” and wrote “further studies” will “help show skeptics that the authorized COVID vaccines are safe.”

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Surprising they don’t use “sustainable”.

Pfizer Sees Covid-19 As ‘Durable’ Revenue Stream As Profits Rise (Y!)

Pfizer sharply increased its 2021 profit projections on Tuesday, citing much higher Covid-19 vaccine sales which are on track to provide a “durable” revenue stream in the wake of the pandemic. The drugmaker reported a jump in first-quarter profits based on surging revenues, with nearly one-fourth of sales coming from Covid-19 vaccines. With German partner BioNTech, the pharma giant is ramping up vaccine production and now estimates 2021 revenues of $26 billion from the vaccine, up from the $15 billion projected in February. But the surging profits have drawn criticism as governments face pressure to step in to ensure vaccines are provided to underserved countries.

Pfizer, which says it is on the cusp of winning US approval for individuals 12 to 15 years old to receive its vaccine, is holding talks with “basically all governments of the world” about providing booster shots through 2024, Chief Executive Albert Bourla told analysts on a conference call Tuesday. The company is studying the efficacy of giving the jabs six or more months after the second vaccine dose, and developing doses that could be stored at standard refrigerated temperature for up to 10 weeks. Bourla expects “durable demand” for Covid-19 vaccines, similar to that of the flu vaccine. “It is our hope that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will continue to have a global impact by helping to get the devastating pandemic under control and helping economies around the world not only open, but stay open,” Bourla said in prepared remarks.

That would create “a scenario in which Pfizer can continue to be both a leader and a beneficiary,” he said. Pfizer has won wide praise for its technological prowess in developing a game-changing vaccine in record time. However, critics called the profits troubling given the divide in vaccine availability between rich and poor countries. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last month decried a “shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines” and called for efforts to fortify the WHO’s Covax programs, which aims to ensure that poorer nations can access the shots. India and South Africa are leading an effort in the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property and patent rules, at least temporarily, which would open the door to broader production of vaccines at a time when the virus is causing mass misery in India and some other countries.

President Joe Biden said Tuesday he had not made a decision on whether to support a vaccine waiver, but that the United States was moving “as quickly as we can” to export doses. Biden also said he was ready to “immediately” begin vaccinations for 12 to 15-year-olds as soon as Pfizer’s Covid shot is approved by regulators for the age group. Pfizer reported net income of $4.9 billion, up 45 percent from the same period of the prior year. Revenues also jumped 45 percent to $14.6 billion, including $3.5 billion in Covid-19 vaccine sales.

Read more …

You mean the investors who make obscene profits?

‘Obscene’ Bonus Hike For AstraZeneca Boss Prompts Investor Anger (G.)

AstraZeneca is facing mounting opposition over its plans to award its chief executive, Pascal Soriot, a big increase in bonuses, with three investor advisory groups calling on shareholders to vote against the policy. Pirc, Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) have all flagged concerns over moves to raise the maximum share bonus Soriot can receive under a long-term plan from 550% of his £1.3m base salary to 650%. AZ also plans to hoist Soriot’s maximum annual bonus to 250% of salary from 200%, depending on performance targets being hit. The advisory groups recommended investors vote against the pay policy at next Tuesday’s annual meeting.


Neville White, the head of responsible investment policy and research at EdenTree Investment Management, which holds AstraZeneca shares, described the proposed bonus increases as “obscene” and said he would vote against them. He added: “It is obviously tricky, because Pascal is both a hero and an antihero at the moment.” The pay vote comes at a sensitive time, as AstraZeneca has faced a barrage of criticism over its coronavirus vaccine after supply shortages and, in rare cases, a potential link to blood clots. It has, however, pledged to supply the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic, and lost money making it in the first quarter of the year. Soriot has been paid more than £15m in each of the last two years, after overseeing a turnaround as he rebuilt AstraZeneca’s drug portfolio. The firm has faced down several shareholder pay revolts over the years.

Read more …

“Podcast host Dave Rubin suggested headlining the Blitzer-Fauci interview, “Drunk on power, highest-paid person in government egomaniac talks to synthetic humanoid news anchor on fake news channel using sports imagery.“

Fauci Tells CNN We’re ‘At Least Halfway Through’ The Covid-19 Pandemic (RT)

White House health expert Anthony Fauci may have quite some time remaining to rule as “master” of all things Covid-19 as he told CNN that Americans are “at least halfway through” the pandemic. “We’ve really got to not declare victory prematurely,” Fauci told CNN host Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday. “So we’re in the late innings, but it’s not over. That’s the thing we’ve got to get people to appreciate.” Pressed by Blitzer to be more specific, in baseball terms, how soon the pandemic will end for Americans, Fauci said, “the bottom of the sixth.” That would mean the battle is more than 60% completed – unless the game can somehow be extended into extra innings. Critics of Fauci, who is chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, found no encouragement in the doctor’s comments.

“Time to pull Dr. Fauci off the mound,” US Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said on Twitter, continuing with the baseball analogy. Fauci has a history of flip-flopping on his Covid-19 advice and moving the goalposts at various stages of the pandemic. What started as “15 days to slow the spread” has turned into a 14-month battle, with the doctor calculating another nine to 14 months to go. He admitted last December to purposely deceiving the public about vaccine herd-immunity projections to manipulate opinions. Biden on Tuesday set a new goal of having 70 percent of adults vaccinated with at least one Covid-19 jab by July 4. Earlier in 2020, Fauci said the US could achieve herd immunity once 60-70 percent of the population was fully vaccinated. But he repeatedly moved that target back as the year wore on, going to as high as 85 percent in December.

“We’re going in the right direction,” Fauci said in Tuesday’s CNN interview. “We’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but now’s not a time to declare victory. It’s a time to get more and more people vaccinated.” Fauci has enjoyed rock-star status during the pandemic, being showered with awards and mainstream-media adulation. A children’s book that’s scheduled for release in June bestows him the title “America’s doctor.” His 80th birthday was celebrated as Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington, DC, and he was serenaded with the birthday song by Biden, then president-elect, and future First Lady Jill Biden. Podcast host Dave Rubin suggested headlining the Blitzer-Fauci interview, “Drunk on power, highest-paid person in government egomaniac talks to synthetic humanoid news anchor on fake news channel using sports imagery.”

Read more …

“..the rate has been sliding for more than 10 years and last year dropped to about 1.6, the lowest rate on record..”

US Birth Rate Sees Biggest Fall For Nearly 50 Years (G.)

The US birth rate has fallen 4% in the largest single-year drop in nearly 50 years, according to a government report. The rate dropped for mothers of every major race and ethnicity, and in nearly all age groups, falling to the lowest point since federal health officials started tracking it more than a century ago, the report due to be published on Wednesday said. Births have been declining in younger women for years, as many postponed motherhood and had smaller families. Birth rates for women in their late 30s and in their 40s have been inching up. But not last year. The US once was among only a few developed countries with a fertility rate above the 2.1 children per woman that ensured each generation had enough children to replace itself.


But the rate has been sliding for more than 10 years and last year dropped to about 1.6, the lowest rate on record. “The fact that you saw declines in births even for older moms is quite striking,” said lead author of the report, Brady Hamilton, of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The figures suggest that the current generation will not have enough children to replace itself. The CDC report is based on a review of more than 99% of birth certificates issued last year. The findings echo a recent Associated Press analysis of 2020 data from 25 states showing that births had fallen during the coronavirus outbreak. The pandemic contribute to last year’s big decline, experts said. Anxiety about Covid-19 and its impact on the economy likely caused many couples to think that it was not the right time to have a baby.

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It’s a symbiosis. The MSM only caters to the “left”, which demands ever scarier stories. Happy to provide.

The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown (Atl.)

Lurking among the jubilant americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington.

And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates. Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others. Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.

For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me. Gandhi describes herself as “left of left,” but has alienated some of her ideological peers because she has advocated for policies such as reopening schools and establishing a clear timeline for the end of mask mandates. “We went the other way, in an extreme way, against Trump’s politicization,” Gandhi said. Geography and personality may have also contributed to progressives’ caution: Some of the most liberal parts of the country are places where the pandemic hit especially hard, and Hetherington found that the very liberal participants in his survey tended to be the most neurotic.

Read more …

Some things have changed for good.

The Dynamics Behind the Ugly Amount of Empty Office Space (WS)

Companies are not massively defaulting on their office leases, and that’s the good thing. But they have put a historic amount of vacant office space on the sublease market, while continuing to pay rent to the landlord. They decided they no longer need that much space, now that some form of flexible work, or hybrid work-from-home, or even permanent work-from-anywhere is being integrated into office real estate plans, cost cutting efforts, and footprint-reduction strategies. Now, 14 months into the Pandemic, office occupancy – workers actually showing up at the office – is still dreadfully low. As of the end of April, office occupancy in the 10 largest metros averaged only 26.5% of where it had been just before the Pandemic, according to Kastle Systems today, whose electronic access systems secure thousands of office buildings around the country. In other words, the number of people entering these offices was still down by 73.5% from pre-pandemic levels and has barely made headway in recent months:

The epicenters of work-from-home show the biggest drops in office occupancy rates, according to Kastle’s “Back to Work Barometer” at the end of April: in San Francisco, the occupancy rate was at 14.8% of the pre-Pandemic level, in New York City at 16.2%, and in San Jose at 18.0%. Among tech companies, 95% expect remote work for at least a few days a week; 9% said that they will never return to the office at all; another 47% said that they will need less office space; only 13% said they would need more office space, according to a survey by Savills.A survey of Californian residents found that 82% of the employees who now work at home want to continue working at home at least some of the time. Only 18% don’t want to work at home at all. But even at the top end of office occupancy, working remotely is still king. In Dallas, office occupancy is at 41.2% of where it was pre-Pandemic, and in Austin at 40.2% :

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“Biden is the epitome of the empty, amoral creature produced by our system of legalized bribery.”

Don’t Be Fooled By Joe Biden (Chris Hedges)

Don’t be fooled by Joe Biden. He knows his infrastructure and education bills have as much chance at becoming law as the $15-dollar minimum wage or the $2,000 stimulus checks he promised us as a candidate. He knows his American Jobs Plan will never create “millions of good paying jobs – jobs Americans can raise their families on” any more than NAFTA, which he supported, would, as was also promised, create millions of good paying jobs. His mantra of “buy American” is worthless. He knows the vast majority of our consumer electronics, apparel, furniture and industrial supplies are made in China by workers who earn an average of one or two dollars an hour and lack unions and basic labor rights.

He knows his call to lower deductibles and prescription drug costs in the Affordable Care Act will never be permitted by the corporations that profit from health care. He knows the corporate donors that fund the Democratic Party will ensure their lobbyists will continue to write the laws that guarantee they pay little or no taxes. He knows the corporate subsidies and tax incentives he proposes as a solution to the climate crisis will do nothing to halt oil and gas fracking, shut down coal-fired plants or halt the construction of new pipelines for gas-fired power plants. His promises of reform have no more weight than those peddled by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who Biden slavishly served and who also promised social equality while betraying working men and women.

Biden is the epitome of the empty, amoral creature produced by our system of legalized bribery. His long political career in Congress was defined by representing the interests of big business, especially the credit card companies based in Delaware. He was nicknamed Senator Credit Card. He has always glibly told the public what it wants to hear and then sold them out. He was a prominent promoter and architect of a generation of federal “tough on crime” laws that helped militarize the nation’s police and more than doubled the population of the world’s largest prison system with harsh mandatory sentencing guidelines and laws that put people in prison for life for nonviolent drug crimes, even as his son struggled with addiction. He was a principal author of the Patriot Act, which began the stripping away of our most basic civil liberties. And there has never been a weapons system, or a war, he did not support.

Read more …

What a dynamic this is. Lying to the FBI doesn’t matter anymore. Not at CNN.

CNN Turns To Disgraced FBI Official For Legal Analysis On Rudy Giuliani (TP)

Disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe provided legal analysis on CNN Friday morning of ongoing investigations into former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz. Unmentioned in McCabe’s “New Day” segment was that he was fired by the FBI in 2018 for lying to government officials about his authorization of leaks to the media. Federal prosecutors also opened a grand jury investigation into whether McCabe made false statements to FBI and Justice Department officials about the leaks. The FBI raided Giuliani’s apartment in New York City this week as part of an investigation into whether he violated foreign agent laws through his Ukraine-related work in 2019 and 2020. Federal prosecutors are reportedly looking into whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with an underage girl.


Both Giuliani and Gaetz have denied any wrongdoing and have both said they are being targeted for political reasons. McCabe addressed reports that the FBI gave so-called defensive briefings to Giuliani and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson in late 2019 about Russia’s efforts to sow disinformation about Joe Biden. McCabe called the briefing “a big deal,” saying that it shows that the FBI had “a significant amount of information” that Russia was using Giuliani to disseminate information about Biden. McCabe said that the FBI often observes the recipients of the defensive briefing to see how they respond to the information. “If you cut off your interactions with them, that’s a good sign. If you continue to interact with them, which we know Rudy Giuliani did here, that’s a very bad sign,” McCabe said.

Read more …

They don’t really want you to know what they know about you.

The Instagram Ads Facebook Won’t Show You (Signal)

Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives. This isn’t exactly a secret, but the full picture is hazy to most – dimly concealed within complex, opaquely-rendered systems and fine print designed to be scrolled past. The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible. However, Facebook’s own tools have the potential to divulge what is otherwise unseen. It’s already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the ads you’re shown; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a surveilling stranger who knows you. We wanted to use those same tools to directly highlight how most technology works. We wanted to buy some Instagram ads.

We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea. Ad account disabled. This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled. You can’t use it to run ads. Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience. So, here are some examples of the targeted ads that you’ll never see on Instagram. Yours would have been so you.

Read more …

By no means only Free Speech Advocates either.

Facebook’s New Campaign Should Have Free Speech Advocates Nervous (Turley)

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick released a dark comedy classic titled “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The title captured the absurdity of getting people to embrace the concept of weapons of mass destruction. The movie came to mind recently with the public campaign of Facebook calling for people to change her attitudes about the Internet and rethink issues like “content modification” – the new Orwellian term for censorship. The commercials show people like “Joshan” who says that he was born in 1996 and grew up with the internet.” Joshan mocks how much computers have changed and then asks why our regulations on privacy and censorship cannot evolve as much as our technology.

The ads are clearly directed at younger users who may be more willing to accept censorship than their parents who hopelessly cling to old-fashioned notions of free speech. Facebook knows that it cannot exercise more control over content unless it can get people to stop worrying and love the censor. There was a time when this would have been viewed as chilling: a corporate giant running commercials to get people to support new regulations impacting basic values like free speech and privacy. After all, Joshan shows of his first computer was a “giant behemoth of a machine” but that was before he understood “the blending of the real world and the internet world.”

The Facebook campaign is chilling in its reference to “privacy” and “content modification” given the current controversies surrounding Big Tech. On one level, the commercial simply calls for rethinking regulatory controls after 25 years. However, the source of the campaign is a company which has been widely accused of rolling back on core values like free speech. Big Tech corporations are exercising increasing levels of control over what people write or read on the Internet. While these companies enjoy immunity from many lawsuits based on the notion of being neutral communication platforms (akin to telephone companies), they now censor ideas deemed misleading or dangerous on subjects ranging from climate denial to transgender criticism to election fraud.

Moreover, Facebook knows that there is ample support for increasing censorship and speech regulation in Congress and around the world. Free speech is under attack and losing ground — and Facebook knows it. The rise of the corporate censor has challenged long-standing assumptions of the free speech community. Our Constitution and much of free speech writings are focused on the classic model of government censorship and state media. What we have seen in the last few years is that corporations have far greater ability to curtail speech and that you can have a type of state media without the state.

Read more …

 

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Apr 162021
 


Edvard Munch Spring in Johan Karl Street 1944

 

Blood Clots As Prevalent With Pfizer, Moderna Vaccine As Astrazeneca (MW)
Risk Of Rare Blood Clotting Higher For Covid-19 Than For Vaccines (Oxford)
EU Commission To End AstraZeneca and J&J Vaccine Contracts At Expiry (R.)
India’s COVID-Vaccine Woes — By The Numbers (Nature)
Brazil’s P1 Coronavirus Variant Mutating, May Become More Dangerous (R.)
Norwegian Experts Recommend Stopping Further Use Of AstraZeneca Vaccine (RT)
Ireland May Delay 2nd Vaccine Doses Amid J&J Delays, AstraZeneca Age Limits (RT)
Poland Starts J&J Covid Vaccine Rollout Amid Objections, Health Concerns (RT)
37 People In Denmark Seek Compensation Over Covid Vaccine Side Effects (RT)
Rapid Covid Testing In England May Be Scaled Back Over False Positives (G.)
Is Boris Lauding Lockdowns Because He’s Planning Another For October? (Clark)
‘Vaccine Passports’ Can’t Be Requirement For Travel, Says EU (F.)

 

 

Another one of those days where there’s just too much news. So I split it up in this Covid Rattle and a Debt Rattle that will follow imminently.

 

 

Despite all the bad news, here’s what I think will happen in much of the northern hemipshere, following this graph from Daniel J. Wilson at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (see Debt Rattle April 13)

 

 

Around June 1, in many countries the viral load will have fallen off a cliff. Summer will be much less dangerous than winter. Makes sense. Whether Covid will return in autumn will depend largely on what we do to make people’s immune systems stronger. Vitamin D plays a large role in that, but so do exercise and healthy food.

 

 

Just as everyone starts banning AstraZeneca, turns out mRNA “vaccines” are just as bad. And just as poorly tested.

Blood Clots As Prevalent With Pfizer, Moderna Vaccine As Astrazeneca (MW)

A study by Oxford University found the number of people who receive blood clots after getting vaccinated with a coronavirus vaccine are about the same for those who get Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as they are for the AstraZeneca vaccine that was produced with the university’s help. According to the study, 4 in 1 million people experience cerebral venous thrombosis after getting the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, versus 5 in 1 million people for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The risk of getting CVT is much higher for those who get COVID-19 — 39 in a million patients — than it is for those for get vaccinated. AstraZeneca’s vaccine use has been halted or limited in many countries on blood clot concerns.

Read more …

But the report this is based on comes from Oxford, one of the makers of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Risk Of Rare Blood Clotting Higher For Covid-19 Than For Vaccines (Oxford)

Researchers at the University of Oxford have today reported that the risk of the rare blood clotting known as cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) following COVID-19 infection is around 100 times greater than normal, several times higher than it is post-vaccination or following influenza. The study authors, led by Professor Paul Harrison and Dr Maxime Taquet from Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry and the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, counted the number of CVT cases diagnosed in the two weeks following diagnosis of COVID-19, or after the first dose of a vaccine. The then compared these to calculated incidences of CVT following influenza, and the background level in the general population.

They report that CVT is more common after COVID-19 than in any of the comparison groups, with 30% of these cases occurring in the under 30s. Compared to the current COVID-19 vaccines, this risk is between 8-10 times higher, and compared to the baseline, approximately 100 times higher. The breakdown comparison for reported cases of CVT in COVID-19 patients in comparison to CVT cases in those who received a COVID-19 vaccine is:

• In this study of over 500,000 COVID-19 patients, CVT occurred in 39 in a million patients.
• In over 480,000 people receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna), CVT occurred in 4 in a million.
• CVT has been reported to occur in about 5 in a million people after first dose of the AZ-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine.
• Compared to the mRNA vaccines, the risk of a CVT from COVID-19 is about 10 times greater.
• Compared to the AZ-Oxford vaccine, the risk of a CVT from COVID-19 is about 8 times greater.

However, all comparisons must be interpreted cautiously since data are still accruing. Paul Harrison, Professor of Psychiatry and Head of the Translational Neurobiology Group at the University of Oxford, said: ‘There are concerns about possible associations between vaccines, and CVT, causing governments and regulators to restrict the use of certain vaccines. Yet, one key question remained unknown: ‘What is the risk of CVT following a diagnosis of COVID-19?’. ‘We’ve reached two important conclusions. Firstly, COVID-19 markedly increases the risk of CVT, adding to the list of blood clotting problems this infection causes. Secondly, the COVID-19 risk is higher than we see with the current vaccines, even for those under 30; something that should be taken into account when considering the balances between risks and benefits for vaccination.’

Read more …

Pfizer is winning.

EU Commission To End AstraZeneca and J&J Vaccine Contracts At Expiry (R.)

The EU Commission has decided not to renew COVID-19 vaccine contracts next year with AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Italian daily La Stampa reported on Wednesday, citing a source from the Italian health ministry. “The European Commission, in agreement with the leaders of many (EU) countries, has decided that the contracts with the companies that produce (viral vector) vaccines that are valid for the current year will not be renewed at their expiry,” the newspaper reported. It added that Brussels would rather focus on COVID-19 vaccines using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, such as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s.


A spokesman for the EU Commission said it was keeping all options open to be prepared for the next stages of the pandemic, for 2022 and beyond. “We cannot, however, comment on contractual issues,” the spokesman added. Later on Wednesday the President of the European Commission said the EU was in talks with Pfizer and BionTech for a new contract for 1.8 billion doses, confirming a Reuters report from last week. “We need to focus on technologies that have proven their worth. mRNA vaccines are a clear case in point,” she added.

Read more …

India is not winning. Wonder what went wrong there. Note: 1.4 billion is a lot of people.

India’s COVID-Vaccine Woes — By The Numbers (Nature)

India, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of vaccines, is facing a COVID-19 vaccine crunch, partly due to an explosion of cases linked to new variants. This spells trouble for many countries relying on Indian-made vaccines supplied through the World Health Organization’s COVAX initiative for equitable access to vaccines. On 12 April, India reported 168,912 new COVID-19 cases, its highest daily total yet. It has now had more than 13.5 million confirmed cases in total, overtaking Brazil as the world’s second-worst hit country, behind the United States. “While new variants are surfacing in India, a decline in COVID-appropriate behaviour such as wearing masks and social distancing is adding to their faster spread,” says Randeep Guleria, director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

By 14 April, more than 111 million people had been vaccinated in the country (see ‘The race to vaccinate’). But in March, fears of vaccine shortages led to the government temporarily halting exports of a version of the University of Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine known as Covishield, which is produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), based in Pune. The SII, the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccine components, was expected to provide many of the doses for COVAX. But a fire at a facility in January is part of the reason that it hasn’t yet been able to live up to its production target of 100 million doses per month. Currently it produces between 60 million and 65 million per month.

Last June, AstraZeneca, which is based in Cambridge, UK, announced that it had licensed the SII to supply a total of one billion doses of Covishield for low- and middle-income countries. But only 64 million had been exported before the halt in exports last month, 28 million of which went to COVAX. Earlier this year, chief executive Adar Poonawala said on Twitter that the SII had been directed by the Indian government “to prioritise the huge needs of India and along with that balance the needs of the rest of the world”. India’s battle with a surge in cases could delay planned deliveries of Covishield to 64 lower-income countries through COVAX, according to a 25 March statement by initiative member Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a health partnership based in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Note: this article says: “Studies have shown the P1 variant to be as much as 2.5 times more contagious than the original coronavirus ..”

That makes much more sense than the recent piece that claimed the B117 variant was 67 times more contagious than the original.

Brazil’s P1 Coronavirus Variant Mutating, May Become More Dangerous (R.)

Brazil’s P1 coronavirus variant, behind a deadly COVID-19 surge in the Latin American country that has raised international alarm, is mutating in ways that could make it better able to evade antibodies, according to scientists studying the virus. Research conducted by the public health institute Fiocruz into the variants circulating in Brazil found mutations in the spike region of the virus that is used to enter and infect cells. Those changes, the scientists said, could make the virus more resistant to vaccines – which target the spike protein – with potentially grave implications for the severity of the outbreak in Latin America’s most populous nation.


“We believe it’s another escape mechanism the virus is creating to evade the response of antibodies,” said Felipe Naveca, one of the authors of the study and part of Fiocruz in the Amazon city of Manaus, where the P1 variant is believed to have originated. Naveca said the changes appeared to be similar to the mutations seen in the even more aggressive South African variant, against which studies have shown some vaccines have substantially reduced efficacy. “This is particularly worrying because the virus is continuing to accelerate in its evolution,” he added. Studies have shown the P1 variant to be as much as 2.5 times more contagious than the original coronavirus and more resistant to antibodies.

Read more …

Can you still follow it?

Norwegian Experts Recommend Stopping Further Use Of AstraZeneca Vaccine (RT)

The Institute of Public Health in Norway has recommended that the government stop using the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine after a lengthy review of the jab. Oslo suspended its use on March 11.
In a press release on Thursday, the agency said that after considering, in collaboration with external experts, the continued use of the heavily-scrutinized Covid-19 jab, that it would no longer recommend its use. It said more evidence has emerged to suggest there is a link between the jab and very rare cases of potentially fatal blood clots. “Based on this knowledge, we have arrived at a recommendation that the AstraZeneca vaccine be removed from the coronavirus vaccination program in Norway,” Geir Bukholm, director of infection control at the National Institute of Public Health, said in the statement.


The institute noted that Norway has made great strides in vaccinating its elderly and those most at risk of Covid. Therefore, those who are yet to be vaccinated are younger and less at risk from the virus – but are also potentially more prone to thrombotic events linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine. Those who have already received their first dose of the Anglo-Swedish jab will get a second shot from another vaccine manufacturer, the body stated. Also on Thursday, Health Minister Bent Hoeie said the government would not be drawn into a decision yet. “The government believes that we do not have a good enough basis for drawing a final conclusion that the AstraZeneca vaccine should be removed from the Norwegian vaccination program at this point,” Hoeie told a news conference.

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They must have found a different science.

Ireland May Delay 2nd Vaccine Doses Amid J&J Delays, AstraZeneca Age Limits (RT)

The Irish government has said it is considering whether to space out the administering of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in order to reach more people with a first dose as the country looks to open up from tough restrictions.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland on Thursday, the Irish deputy prime minister, Leo Varadkar, said it would make sense to space out the administering of the Pfizer shots, like in the UK, for those under 60 years old and in good health. The current interval between the administration of the two shots is 28 days, but some other countries have extended that to 12 weeks, allowing more people to be partially immunized against coronavirus in a shorter period of time. Research from the UK, before the country approved the Moderna jab, showed that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines greatly reduced the risk of hospitalization from Covid-19 after just one shot.


On Wednesday, Irish Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said a decision on whether to spread the vaccines out would be made within the week. The possible move comes as the EU’s medicines regulator reviews the use of the single-shot J&J vaccine and after Ireland limited the AstraZeneca vaccine to those aged 60 and over. On Tuesday, J&J said it would be delaying shipments to Europe while the vaccine is being reviewed following its suspension in the US; its rollout is yet to start in the EU. Similar technology was used in the development of their vaccines, which have been linked to very rare cases of blood clotting. Meanwhile, the EU announced on Wednesday that the bloc would be receiving an additional 25% of vaccines doses in quarter two from Pfizer.

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It’s just lovely that every country’s experts reach different conclusions. Great for confidence.

Poland Starts J&J Covid Vaccine Rollout Amid Objections, Health Concerns (RT)

Polish health authorities began rolling out doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine on Thursday, rejecting the concerns of the majority-Catholic country’s religious community and fears about the side effects of the jab. The government’s vaccine chief, Michal Dworczyk, confirmed the state’s vaccine rollout now included the Johnson & Johnson jab, stating health experts felt the benefits outweighed the side effects and they “have not received signals that there are problems or that patients are refusing [to take it].” Some 120,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have arrived in the country, with the first jabs from the consignment administered on Thursday.


On Wednesday, a senior official in Poland’s Catholic Church called on its members to reject both the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines over the use of abortion-derived cells in their manufacturing processes. Bishop Jozef Wrobel declared that the church has a “serious moral objection” to the use of vaccines that include cells “derived from aborted foetuses” in the manufacturing process despite the jabs not containing any abortion-related cells in their ingredients. The comments from Poland’s religious authority contradict earlier remarks from Pope Francis, who declared that it is “morally acceptable” to be vaccinated with jabs developed using the aborted cell-linked manufacturing process. Addressing similar concerns to the Polish Catholic Church, the Pope said that having the vaccine does “not constitute formal cooperation” with or support of abortion.

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“..if you have had a serious side effect and there is a temporal connection with the vaccination, then I would encourage you to seeks compensation from us..”

37 People In Denmark Seek Compensation Over Covid Vaccine Side Effects (RT)

Some 37 people in Denmark are requesting compensation over adverse effects they say were suffered after getting a Covid-19 jab. Most of the cases are related to AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which the country has stopped using. A total of 29 people have applied for compensation for side effects believed to be linked to the Swedish-British jab – which was renamed Vaxzevria last month – the Danish Patient Compensation Association said in a statement on Thursday. A further eight people applied for compensation in connection with the coronavirus jab made by Pfizer. The side effects cited in the applications range from mild fever and discomfort to such extreme conditions as paralysis, blood clots, miscarriage, and even death.

In Denmark, patients are eligible for state-sponsored compensations if they suffer rare or severe adverse effects of any medicines. The relatives of patients who have died can also receive compensation. “There are almost no drugs without side effects. That is why we have a safety net in Denmark that picks up the patients who are so unfortunate as to be affected by rare and serious side effects,” the director of Patient Compensation, Karen-Inger Bast, stated. The director also urged other people who might have suffered side effects to come forward with their complaints as well. She warned, though, that the health troubles must be serious in order to receive compensation.

“It is important to say that you do not receive compensation for mild and transient symptoms such as a little fever or pain in the arm. But if you have had a serious side effect and there is a temporal connection with the vaccination, then I would encourage you to seeks compensation from us,” Bast stated. The association’s announcement comes a day after Denmark became the first European country to completely discontinue use of AstraZeneca vaccine, citing “a possible link between very rare cases of unusual blood clots, bleeding, low blood platelets counts” and the shot by the drug maker. “Our overall assessment is there is a real risk of severe side effects associated with using the Covid-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca,” Danish Health Authority Director General Soeren Brostroem said.

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Painting rapid tests in a bad light? PCR is crap too, so no testing left?

Rapid Covid Testing In England May Be Scaled Back Over False Positives (G.)

Senior government officials have raised “urgent” concerns about the mass expansion of rapid coronavirus testing, estimating that as few as 2% to 10% of positive results may be accurate in places with low Covid rates, such as London. Boris Johnson last week urged everyone in England to take two rapid-turnaround tests a week in the biggest expansion of the multibillion-pound testing programme to date. However, leaked emails seen by the Guardian show that senior officials are now considering scaling back the widespread testing of people without symptoms, due to a growing number of false positives.

In one email, Ben Dyson, an executive director of strategy at the health department and one of health secretary Matt Hancock’s advisers, stressed the “fairly urgent need for decisions” on “the point at which we stop offering asymptomatic testing”. On 9 April, the day everyone in England was able to order twice-weekly lateral flow device (LFD) tests, Dyson wrote: “As of today, someone who gets a positive LFD result in (say) London has at best a 25% chance of it being a true positive, but if it is a self-reported test potentially as low as 10% (on an optimistic assumption about specificity) or as low as 2% (on a more pessimistic assumption).”

He added that the department’s executive committee, which includes Hancock and the NHS test and trace chief, Dido Harding, would soon need to decide whether requiring people to self-isolate before a confirmatory PCR test “ceases to be reasonable” in low infection areas where there is a high likelihood of a positive result being wrong. The accuracy of rapid coronavirus tests and how they should be deployed have been the focus of months of debate in the UK. The proportion of false positives – people incorrectly told they have the virus – increases when the prevalence of the disease falls. This happens because although the number of true positives is falling, the tests produce roughly the same number of false positives – meaning the proportion of incorrect results becomes greater.

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Is it lockdowns, vaccines or 50% of under-25s already carrying antibodies because the virus was so widespread? Fried of a friend in London says everyone he knows has “already had it”.

Is Boris Lauding Lockdowns Because He’s Planning Another For October? (Clark)

The prime minister’s claim that it was lockdown, and not the vaccine or seasonal factors, which led to the rapid fall in Covid cases and deaths in the UK should set alarm bells ringing very loudly. The Man in Black wanted us to be in no doubt during his interview this week with Sky News: it was the lockdown whatdunit. “It is very, very important for everybody to understand,” Johnson said, “that the reduction in these numbers, in hospitalisations, in deaths, in infections, has not been achieved because of the vaccination programme. “People don’t, I think, appreciate that it’s the lockdown that has been overwhelmingly important in delivering this improvement in the pandemic and in the figures that we’re seeing. And so, yes of course the vaccination programme has helped, but the bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown.”

Repeat after Me: “The bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown.. The bulk of the work…” Why is Johnson so keen to downplay the government’s roll-out of a mass vaccination programme and instead big-up lockdown? Some have said it’s because he fears legal challenges for locking us down again in early January and wants to get his defence statement in before the writ. But I think BoJo is looking forwards, not backwards. By stressing ’lockdowns work’ now, he is ‘nudging’ us towards accepting another shutdown of the non-virtual economy in autumn. There are already some pretty strong clues about what might lie ahead. As I’ve noted in previous articles, the extension of furlough has been an excellent guide over the last twelve months for what is going to happen – far better than the smug ‘inside the tent’ pundits who have assured us since last March that things would soon be getting back to normal.

In December, Chancellor Sunak’s extension of furlough until April was the giveaway – no pun intended – that we’d be locked down again in the New Year, and so it proved. On December 18, I correctly predicted the exact date (January 4) that Johnson would announce the new 2021 lockdown. In early March, furlough was extended again, until the end of September, despite the government assuring us all restrictions would be lifted on June 21. This suggests it’s odds-on that some form of restrictions will remain well past that date, because what happens in October? Why, the autumn/winter flu season starts. It would be so easy for Johnson at that point to say “We need another lockdown” to “protect the NHS” from another wave (the ‘third’ or ‘fourth’) or from a “variant of concern” of coronavirus.

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They call it the “Digital Green Certificate” instead. Same difference.

‘Vaccine Passports’ Can’t Be Requirement For Travel, Says EU (F.)

Travel is on the up and up. CBS News Travel Editor, Peter Greenberg reported that U.S. domestic airfares are rapidly increasing, as are hotel rates (not to 2019 levels yet, but certainly rising). Cruise liners are not waiting for CDC permission to set sail from U.S. ports and are instead repositioning cruises to leave from and visit non-U.S. ports (in the Caribbean, for instance). One cruise liner started selling tickets for its 2021/2022 world cruise, at $40,o00 a cabin, and the ship sold out in one day. And of course, there needs to be a way to verify that people are traveling safely without transmitting the virus to one place from another. In the EU, all 27 countries have agreed that coordination is necessary and that this will take the form of a Digital Green Certificate.

Crucially, however, the EU has agreed that people who don’t have this certificate shouldn’t be discriminated against–that’s why it isn’t called a passport or doesn’t have anything called vaccine near the title. Firstly, it’s to be called a Digital Green Certificate, able to be downloaded onto your phones. It’s not called a vaccination passport, because–the EU said Thursday–you don’t need to be vaccinated to get it. You can also get a certificate if you have had Covid-19 (and recovered) and if you have had a negative Covid-19 test before departure. That way, it doesn’t discriminate between those that have been vaccinated and those who haven’t. As reported by The Local, the EU plans to roll it out by mid-June, initially across the 27 EU bloc to citizens and residents, but also eventually to be compatible with non-EU countries.

Eduardo Santander, chief executive officer of the European Travel Commission, an association of national tourism organizations based in Brussels said: “Finally, we have a tangible solution to coordinating and harmonizing travel measures. I think other countries like the U.S. will also come up with their own technological solutions that will be compatible, and after a period of trials this summer, a global standard will be established.” Individual countries will also have a way of setting individual rules within the certificate. For example, Hungary uses Russia’s Sputnik vaccine, which most of the other EU countries do not, and so–under the certificate–they would be able to incorporate the vaccines they each want to use.

Read more …

 

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Apr 072021
 


Jacobello Alberegno The Beast of the Apocalypse 1360-90

 

0.1% Of Covid-19 Cases In Ireland Come From Outdoor Transmission (IT)
Ron Paul Urges Americans To ‘Wake Up’ And Reject Vaccine Passports (RT)
Texas Becomes 2nd US State To Ban Vaccine Passports (RT)
Yup, Still Waiting for the Maskless Texan Apocalypse (NR)
California’s Failed Response To COVID (Bhattacharya/Kulldorff)
AstraZeneca Trial Involving Minors Halted As EMA Links Jab to Blood Clots (ZH)
Only Half Of Americans Intend To Vaccinate Their Children Against Covid (F.)
Travel Bubble Between New Zealand And Australia To Start On 19 April (G.)
Australia Calls On EU To Supply Outstanding Astrazeneca Vaccine Doses (G.)
Comedy Club Pulls Out Of Covid Safety Trial After Online ‘Hate Campaign’ (G.)
In Biden Change Of Tune, US Mulling Boycott Of 2022 Beijing Olympics (ZH)
Biden Admin Mulls Restarting Border Wall Construction (ZH)
The Greatest Game (Booth)

 

 

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.
– Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

Or maybe it’s even as high as twice that, 0.2%?!

Here in Greece, as in many other places, all outdoor sites, like restaurant and café terraces, remain closed, forcing people indoors, where the other 99.9% of infections occur.

And when people do go outside, they have to wear a mask. For an 0.1% risk.

0.1% Of Covid-19 Cases In Ireland Come From Outdoor Transmission (IT)

Earlier on Tuesday, a professor of immunovirology said figures showing 0.1 per cent of Covid-19 cases in the State come from outdoor transmission may be an underestimate. Prof Liam Fanning of University College Cork said he was surprised by the figures and felt there could be a “slight bias” in the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) data on cases linked to outdoor transmission. Figures from the HPSC showed just one confirmed case of Covid-19 in every thousand is traced to outdoor transmission. Of the 232,164 cases of Covid-19 recorded in the State up to March 24th this year, 262 were as a result of outdoor transmission, representing 0.1 per cent of the total, the data revealed. There were 42 outbreaks associated with outdoor gatherings, with one community outbreak accounting for seven cases.


Speaking to Newstalk Breakfast on Tuesday, Prof Fanning said there was an obvious difference in transmission rates of the virus between outdoor and indoor locations. He cautioned that meeting people outdoors still posed a risk, as the virus could be spread if someone infectious was “face-on chatting” to other individuals. People should try to avoid speaking directly face-to-face and instead attempt to speak to each other while side by side when outdoors, a common method used during the Spanish flu, he said. Prof Fanning said financial support to encourage more outdoor dining spaces should also be “much higher”, given the low transmission rates outdoors. At present, restaurants, cafes and bars are restricted to delivery or takeaway services only, with no outdoor dining permitted.

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Liberty. It’s an easy concept.

Ron Paul Urges Americans To ‘Wake Up’ And Reject Vaccine Passports (RT)

Ron Paul has warned that Covid-19 vaccine passports could be used by the US government to restrict freedoms, stirring up an already heated debate over whether such IDs are necessary. The former US congressman and physician said on Monday that requiring certificates to verify vaccination for international travel or daily activities would “solidify the whole idea that our lives belong to the government.” “They own liberty and now you are going to get permission to use a little bit of it. They are going to divvy it out a little bit. You’ll never get back what you should have,” he said while speaking on his program, the Ron Paul Liberty Report. The Biden administration has acknowledged that it is collaborating with tech companies to develop a variety of potential vaccine passport apps.

At the state level, New York has already created its own digital certificate that grants entry to venues. Paul warned that the initiative could be used to regulate nearly all aspects of life, including where you will be allowed to go and what kind of activities you will be permitted to participate in. He said he hoped Americans would “finally wake up” and oppose vaccine IDs. If people don’t “take a stand” now things are going to get “bad,” the former Texas lawmaker predicted. He called on his supporters to reach out to family and friends in order to start a grassroots movement against identification programs, adding that those who choose to do so should understand “what life and liberty is.”

The message resonated with many. Some commenters echoed Paul’s fears that the initiative could be used to usher in a dystopian nightmare. Others said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ pledge to ban the use of vaccine passports should be emulated nationwide and expressed hope that the Supreme Court will ultimately rule the IDs unconstitutional. One observer said they opposed storing personal health data in a digital device but saw nothing wrong with doctors issuing paper certificates showing vaccination status. There were plenty who disagreed with Paul, however. “The government is there to serve & protect us,” argued one Twitter user, adding that while passports could potentially lead to discrimination, the spread of Covid-19 poses a greater threat to our freedoms.

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Dormant rights?! Oxymoron.

“..bars and restaurants in Florida and Texas were thronged with people celebrating their long-dormant right to gather outside their homes..”

Texas Becomes 2nd US State To Ban Vaccine Passports (RT)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has announced a ban on so-called vaccine passports, becoming the second US governor to officially do so, just a few days after Florida’s Ron DeSantis. The issue has largely broken along political lines. Abbott made an announcement on Tuesday declaring that no Texas government agencies or political entities would be permitted to require “vaccine passports” in the state. “Don’t tread on our personal freedoms,” the governor warned, even as he made clear that he was not against the idea of vaccination in principle, but resented forced vaccination. “Every day Texans return to normalcy as more people get (and become immune to) the spread of Covid-19,” Abbott declared, adding that the jabs “help slow the spread of Covid, reduce hospitalizations and reduce fatalities.”

The Biden administration’s medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, seemed almost displeased with Texas’ refusal to slide down its predicted Covid-streaked death spiral, where “the restaurants and the bars are full and open, the ballparks are full, and yet we’ve seen cases and hospitalizations since then continue to tick downward,” as an MSNBC host put it. “It looks like 2019,” he said in shock, noting that bars and restaurants in Florida and Texas were thronged with people celebrating their long-dormant right to gather outside their homes. Attempting to explain why Texas and Florida’s case counts had dropped despite their having some of the least strict virus regulations, Fauci blamed a “lag,” arguing that the undesirable data everyone was waiting for was still coming – it was just a few weeks down the line.

“We’ve gotta make sure we don’t prematurely judge [the case numbers],” the doctor continued. At least 17 separate vaccine passes are in the works to track travelers’ medical data, the Biden administration told the media earlier this week, though the president has previously insisted that he has no plans for a nationwide vaccine passport. Abbott’s Florida counterpart, Ron DeSantis, unveiled a similar ban on Friday, barring all state agencies and local businesses from issuing “vaccine passports” and banning state government agencies from doing business with private companies that require such passports.

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What Fauci doesn’t like.

Yup, Still Waiting for the Maskless Texan Apocalypse (NR)

The day before Texas’s statewide mask mandate ended, March 9, Texas had 5,119 new cases of COVID-19, and the seven-day average for new cases was 3,971. On that day, the state had 126,404 active cases of COVID-19. As of March 9, the seven-day average for new deaths was 104. Yesterday, Texas had 2,906 new cases, and the seven-day average for new cases is 2,815. As of yesterday, the state had 96,640 active cases of COVID-19. As of yesterday, the seven-day average for new deaths was 81. When Texas governor Greg Abbott announced the decision, I argued that he and other state officials were not crazy or exhibiting “Neanderthal thinking.” I noted that masks were not disappearing from public life in Texas.

Major grocery chains and Walmart and Target still required them, as did many public-school districts, some localities, and so on. Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso would require them in city-owned buildings. Since early March, I have noted that Texas COVID-19 statistics keep gradually getting better instead of worse, the opposite trend of what many mask advocates and all-purpose critics of Texas expected. Every time, folks on social media told me that it’s just too early to tell, and that the catastrophic consequences of the rescinding of the Texas statewide mask mandate are just around the corner. And yet, here we are, a month later, and all of the measuring sticks show significant improvement.

I am sure many people will declare that the huge crowd at yesterday’s Texas Rangers game is a potential “super-spreader” event. Before the event, President Biden called the stadium and state policies “not responsible.” And maybe yesterday’s large attendance will turn out to be a bad decision. But some other large gatherings, where people intermittently followed social-distancing guidelines if they followed them at all, did not turn into super-spreader events, like the crowds of thousands of people around the Super Bowl in Tampa. This pandemic is unpredictable, and the data rarely line up perfectly with people’s expectations or yearning for confirmation of their partisan preferences. By far the sharpest increase in cases occurring right now is in Michigan, where the masking and lockdown policies have been comparably strict.

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Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff.

California’s Failed Response To COVID (Bhattacharya/Kulldorff)

From the beginning, the Golden State has taken an aggressive stance toward the epidemic, including imposing the earliest shelter-in-place order in the nation; ceasing in-person schooling for the vast majority of public-school kids; shuttering churches, parks, and playgrounds; mandating masks, with hefty fines for violators; and forcing the closure of “non-essential” businesses that cannot operate using distancing technologies, such as videoconferencing. Even Disneyland has been closed since March 2020. In short, California has followed one of the strictest lockdowns in the country. Though the state’s response received high marks in July from the “covidian” high priesthood, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the state has seen exploding coronavirus cases and deaths.


Through March 28, 2021, 8.9 percent of all Californians have been identified as COVID cases – 3.6 million cases. Since most infections are not recognized as cases, a much larger fraction of the population has been infected with COVID. Through March 29 this year, nearly 57,800 people have died in California with COVID. To put these numbers in perspective, it helps to have a comparison state that has followed a very different policy. For that, we should consider Florida, which partially lifted its lockdown in May 2020 and then further relaxed restrictions in September (based in part on focused protection ideas advocated by us).

In sharp contrast to California, in Florida most schools and universities have been open for in-person instruction since the fall, normal human activities—sports, church going, visits to the park—occur with regularity, and businesses have been open for in-person activities. Local ordinances can recommend masks and social distancing and impose indoor-capacity limitations but cannot mandate closures, as is the case in California. Disneyworld has been open since July. At the same time, Florida increased testing and protection within its nursing homes to reduce the risk of COVID among its most vulnerable residents.


The Florida policy has drawn sharp criticism from Fauci, who said it “opened up too quickly” in July. However, the infection control results to date look remarkably similar to California’s, and in some ways better. Through March 28, 9.5 percent of Floridians have been identified as COVID cases. Once we account for the fact that Florida has one of the oldest populations in the country and California has one of the youngest, the death rates with COVID through March 28 are lower in Florida than in California. In fact, the COVID death rate for the under-65 population and the over-65 population are both lower in Florida than in California.

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How can anyone inject a child with a untested substance?

AstraZeneca Trial Involving Minors Halted As EMA Links Jab to Blood Clots (ZH)

Just days after Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Michael Kidd, acknowledged that there was likely a connection between rare blood clots and the COVID vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford, officials from the EMA, Europe’s top pharmaceutical regulator, have finally acknowledged the link, even if the agency’s official stance – that there’s no evidence of a link, but no evidence to rule it out – remains unchanged. The EMA declared at the conclusion of a hasty “safety review” last month that the benefits of the AstraZeneca jab (which is expected to to be the workhorse of the global vaccination rollout as Covax, the WHO/Gates Foundation program to vaccination developing countries, expects to heavily rely on the jab) far outweighed any risks, while saying it couldn’t definitively rule out the possibility that the blood clots and the vaccine might be connected.

But researchers from Norway, Germany and elsewhere insisted they had found evidence of a connection. And after the UK acknowledged more than 2 dozen new cases of the rare clots – 9 of them fatal – it seems the dam has finally broken. New findings from the EMA show that there is indeed a link between the “very rare” blood clots in the brain and the AstraZeneca vaccine, but the exact possible causes are still unknown, according to a senior EMA official, who made the comments in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Messagero. Here’s a Reuters summary of that report. “In my opinion, we can now say it, it is clear that there is an association (of the brain blood clots) with the vaccine. However, we still do not know what causes this reaction,” Marco Cavaleri, chair of the vaccine evaluation team at the EMA, told Italian daily Il Messagero.

Cavaleri provided no evidence to support his comment.[…] Cavaleri said the EMA would say in its review that there is a link but was not likely to give an indication this week regarding the age of individuals to whom the AstraZeneca shot should be given. In a separate interview, Armando Genazzani, a member of the EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use, told another Italian newspaper, La Stampa, that a connection between the jab and the clots was “plausible.” The EMA is officially investigating 44 cases of the brain blood clots, an ailment known as a cerebral venous thrombosis (or CVST). More than 9.2M people in the EU have received the vaccine in total.

In response to Cavaleri’s comments, the Amsterdam-based EMA said in a statement on Tuesday: “EMA’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee (PRAC) has not yet reached a conclusion and the review (of any possible link) is currently ongoing.” While the EMA refused to confirm the comments made by individual officials, WSJ reported Tuesday that the University of Oxford had decided to pause trials of the vaccine in the UK that involved children between the ages of 12 and 15. An Oxford spokesman said Tuesday that while no safety issues have arisen in the trial, broader concerns about rare clotting problems in adults have triggered further regulatory reviews in the UK and Europe to investigate any potential link with the vaccine.

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“All states have the power to require vaccination among students attending school; many do for diseases like polio and measles.”

Yes, but those are tested and approved actual vaccines.

Only Half Of Americans Intend To Vaccinate Their Children Against Covid (F.)

Only half of Americans intend on getting their children immunized against Covid-19 as soon as vaccines become available, according to a new Axios/Ipsos survey published Tuesday, another potential barrier towards expanding vaccine access ahead of schools returning in fall. 48% of parents surveyed in April said they are not likely to have their children vaccinated against Covid-19 when the shots first become available. The figure contrasts with growing adult acceptance of the vaccines, which has grown from around 38% in September and October to nearly 70% today. Vaccine hesitancy remains a problem, however, and polls throughout 2021 show that one in five Americans consistently say they are unlikely to get vaccinated.

The Axios poll found Republicans (31%) and those with a high school education or less (28%) to be most resistant to vaccines. Vaccinating children is going to play a major role in ending the pandemic and getting life back to normal as schools return in fall. While children and young teens don’t often get seriously sick from Covid-19, they can and do: 227 children have died from Covid-19 in the U.S., according to the New York Times. They can also pass on the virus to others, notably adults who are likely to be much more vulnerable. A vaccine for this age group would help cut the risk of illness, limit transmission from children and better contain outbreaks. Now that adult vaccination drives are well under way, manufacturers are starting to trial shots in younger people.

After promising preliminary results from a clinical trial in late March, Pfizer said it plans to apply for an expanded emergency use authorization for young teens in Europe and the U.S. in coming weeks. Moderna also has several ongoing trials exploring its vaccine’s effectiveness in young children and adolescents. Experts are still debating whether the B.1.1.7. variant of the virus, first found in the U.K., is able to infect children more readily. Though few states have started to fully grapple with the idea of requiring vaccination for Covid-19 in children—Tennessee and Pennsylvania have said vaccination will remain optional—some school districts have signaled an intent to mandate it, setting the stage for wider conflict if and when vaccines are approved for use, especially if resistance remains high. All states have the power to require vaccination among students attending school; many do for diseases like polio and measles.

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Does New Zealand even have vaccines?

Travel Bubble Between New Zealand And Australia To Start On 19 April (G.)

After nearly a year shut off from the world, New Zealand is cracking open its borders, with a trans-Tasman travel bubble allowing two-way quarantine-free travel with Australia. The NZ prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced on Tuesday the bubble would open from 19 April, allowing quarantine-free travel between the two nations. Travellers from New Zealand have been able to enter selected Australian states without quarantining since October but the arrangements did not apply in the other direction. Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, applauded Ardern’s announcement while airlines in both countries hurriedly advertised hundreds of weekly flights and routes. However, tourism operators warned the benefits would be muted in the short term, as the first passengers would likely be low-spending travellers visiting family.


At a press conference on Tuesday, Ardern said she was “confident not only in the state of Australia, but in our own ability to manage a travel arrangement”. More than 600,000 New Zealanders live in Australia, and many families straddle the border. “One sacrifice that has been particularly hard for many to bear over the past year has been the separation from friends and family who live in Australia, so today’s announcement will be a great relief for many,” Ardern said. “This is the next chapter.” Ardern said the arrangement – of two countries, both maintaining a full elimination strategy for Covid-19 opening up to international travel – was potentially unique in the world. The plan has been in the works for months now, but was paused repeatedly after outbreaks of Covid-19 on either side of the border.

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Australia has some vaccines, but not enough.

Australia Calls On EU To Supply Outstanding Astrazeneca Vaccine Doses (G.)

Scott Morrison denies his government has presented the public with overly rosy assessments about the state of its Covid-19 vaccine rollout, as he steps up calls for the European Union to allow 3.1m outstanding AstraZeneca doses to be shipped to Australia. While declaring that vaccine supply issues were a matter of “straightforward maths”, the prime minister also attempted to calm a growing diplomatic dispute between Australia and the EU, insisting he had not made any criticism of Brussels over its handling of the matter. Earlier on Wednesday, the Morrison government issued a statement accusing the European Commission of “arguing semantics” by saying just one shipment of 250,000 AstraZeneca doses had been formally blocked.

The government said the commission had signalled it would block other applications to export vaccine doses from the region. The government also complained that the European Commission has not responded to Australia’s request for 1m doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to be made available to Papua New Guinea, one of the countries hardest hit in the region. The latest statements follow comments by a European Commission spokesman on Tuesday that the only export request rejected out of nearly 500 received has been a shipment of 250,000 doses to Australia in March. Morrison told reporters on Wednesday the government was asking AstraZeneca to resubmit its application to the European Commission to export the remaining 3.1m of the 3.8m contracted vaccine doses to Australia.

He was seeking further talks with the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, to discuss the issue. The prime minister said he was “pleased to hear that the European Union overnight has indicated that they are not seeking to restrict these vaccines to Australia”. He said the government would therefore encourage Brussels to allow the rest of the 3.8m does to come to Australia, including 1m “to provide support to our Pacific family in Papua New Guinea that are undergoing a humanitarian crisis”. He also wanted the remaining doses to “be part of the vaccination rollout here in this country”.

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Of course there’s resistance.

Comedy Club Pulls Out Of Covid Safety Trial After Online ‘Hate Campaign’ (G.)

A comedy club has pulled out of a trial to test how venues can operate safely after it said the government failed to clarify whether it would involve Covid-19 vaccine passports. The Hot Water comedy club in Liverpool said it was subjected to a “hate campaign” online after reports suggested it was working with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to trial Covid-status certification. Club co-owner Binty Blair said he had tried to contact DCMS to clarify whether vaccine passports would be trialed in the pilot event, but to no avail. The club has subsequently cancelled its event, which was due to be the first in the pilot. It had been due to take place on 16 April with an audience of 300 at Liverpool’s M&S Bank Arena Auditorium. “The reason for us backing out is the government wasn’t clear about the Covid passports,” Blair told the PA news agency.


“The problem is we don’t know what we signed up for.” On Tuesday evening, the government confirmed there will be no requirement for participants in the initial pilot events to have received a vaccination in venues like a comedy club. DCMS announced over the weekend that a series of pilot events were planned for the coming months as officials look to find a way for venues such as football grounds and nightclubs to reopen without the need for social distancing. It said Covid-status certification would be trialled as part of the programme, while detailing a number of events on an initial list of pilots, including Hot Water comedy club. Blair said he had agreed to take part in the pilot in March but only learned of the government’s plans to trial Covid-19 vaccine passports two days ago. He said four acts had lost £300 each as a result of the cancelled event.

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Brought to you by the same people stoking unrest in Ukraine.

In Biden Change Of Tune, US Mulling Boycott Of 2022 Beijing Olympics (ZH)

As if US-China relations weren’t bad enough at this moment, things are about to escalate further – potentially taking the Biden White House past even beyond the low-point of the trade war during the Trump presidency. State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters during a daily briefing on Tuesday that the US and its allies are discussing a joint boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. = It’s not the first time the issue has been addressed, and previously it was mainly Republicans pressuring action regarding the Olympics and China’s egregious human rights record. In early February the White House had indicated it “had no plans” for a boycott, with Jen Psaki asserting at the time, “We’re not currently talking about changing our posture or our plans as it relates to the Beijing Olympics.”

But “plans” have clearly changed, especially following the March 22 coordinated sanctions slapped on top Beijing officials over the Uighur crackdown by the US, UK, EU and Canada. The Canadians in particular have been the most vocal in parliament for urging an international boycott of the 2022 games, which has riled China. Here’s what the State Department’s Ned Price said in the Tuesday afternoon comments: “It [a joint boycott] is something that we certainly wish to discuss,” …he told reporters when asked about the Biden administration’s plans ahead of the international games. “A coordinated approach will not only be in our interest but also in the interest of our allies and partners,” he added.

Price said that the United States has not yet made a decision but was concerned about China’s egregious human rights abuses. The Olympic Games are due to take place between Feb. 4 to Feb. 20. When pressed over a possible timeline of when such a decision would be reached, Price added: “We’re talking about 2022, and we are still in April of 2021, so these Games remain some time away.” “I wouldn’t want to put a time frame on it, but these discussions are underway.”

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It’s almost too funny.

Biden Admin Mulls Restarting Border Wall Construction (ZH)

Less than 90 days after President Biden signaled his immense virtue by halting construction on Trump’s border wall and canceling future contracts, Biden’s beleaguered Department of Homeland Security is exploring whether to restart border wall construction in order to ‘plug gaps’ in the current barrier, according the Washington Examiner, citing DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. This of course would make Biden a xenophobic tyrant, if we’re playing by the Trump-era media guidebook. “In a conversation with Immigration and Customs Enformcement employees last week Mr. Mayorkas was asked about his plans for the wall and he said that while President Biden has canceled the border emergency and halted Pentagon money flowing to the wall, “that leaves room to make decisions” on finishing some “gaps in the wall.”

“Mr. Mayorkas, according to notes of the ICE session reviewed by The Washington Times, said Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the wall, has submitted a plan for what it wants to see happen moving forward.” -Washington Examiner. “It’s not a single answer to a single question. There are different projects that the chief of the Border Patrol has presented and the acting commissioner of CBP presented to me,” said Mayorkas, adding “The president has communicated quite clearly his decision that the emergency that triggered the devotion of DOD funds to the construction of the border wall is ended. But that leaves room to make decisions as the administration, as part of the administration, in particular areas of the wall that need renovation, particular projects that need to be finished.”

According to Mayorkas, the work would cover “gaps,” “gates,” and areas “where the wall has been completed but the technology has not been implemented.” Former President Trump’s acting commissioner of CBP, Mark Morgan, said Mayorkas’ comments were “more spin and misdirection,” and that the agency has always given the administration options on how to proceed with the wall. When Trump left office, around 460 miles of border wall was completed – most of which being improvements in areas with existing wall and/or outdated designs, or vehicle checkpoints that people could simply walk around.

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“..by preventing failure in economies in the short term, Creative Destruction has only moved — now to the level of our international economic system..”

The Greatest Game (Booth)

Breakthroughs, that step-change our lives for the better, invariably come from something that most people couldn’t see. Our belief of how the world should exist and operate is shaped from looking backwards, not forward, so it makes sense that new paradigms that change everything — face resistance in our minds. Because most people don’t see them, breaking through an existing paradigm needs to provide enough compelling value for users to disrupt an old paradigm. Apple’s iPhone for instance, didn’t copy the market leader, Research in Motion’s Blackberry design of needing a keyboard or selling to businesses who required RIM’s security. It created a digital interface when that wasn’t ‘needed’ and created an entirely new platform that changed the industry as a result.


Along the way, the Blackberry died, unable to compete with the value for users, that was now increasing exponentially on Apple’s platform. That process describes “Creative Destruction” a paradoxical term first coined by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 to describe how Capitalism works in a “free market.” Entrepreneurs innovate and “create” value for society — and that value gained by society also often “destroys” the former monopoly power. That process and its importance is at the centre of how all modern economies have evolved and given rise to most of the benefits to society we take for granted today. New winners become so valuable that they disrupt existing market power or structures. It is all driven from a near-constant flow of innovative entrepreneurs with bold ideas and the capital backing them that go up against the status quo and are only successful, “if’’ they create value for society.

For the process to work, failure is critical! Both for entrepreneurs and the capital in them whose business doesn’t work, and for legacy businesses that get disrupted by them if their innovation brings better value to society. And while failure is hard, preventing failure is much worse. Why? Because by preventing failure, market incentives become warped, and in doing so, eventually put a small number of people (government/central banks) in charge of choosing who gets what, instead of the free market. Unfortunately, preventing failure has been the policy makers tool for the last 20 years and it has enormous consequences.


By socializing losses and preventing failure in our economies, central banks and governments have all but ensured that the existing monetary system of the world collapses — and is replaced by something new. In other words, by preventing failure in economies in the short term, Creative Destruction has only moved — now to the level of our international economic system. I believe with what is to come, Bitcoin has a higher than average probability of overcoming all barriers and becoming a global reserve currency. More importantly, I believe it gives humanity its best chance for a peaceful transition to the future. A world where the abundance gained from our technological progress is more widely distributed. It is not hyperbole to say that almost everything changes as a result of this innovation.

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Ricky Gervais

 

 

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