Edward Hopper People in the sun 1963
Note: the text says 52,000 spontaneous abortions.
Unsafe
Appalling if true… pic.twitter.com/UEUXlX2AHq
— Heidegger (@heidegger79) June 21, 2021
1 death from COVID, 2 from blood clots. Technically true, but a weird headline for USA Today.
• More Australians Have Died From AstraZeneca-Related Clots Than Covid (USAT)
Australia’s top medical officer on Monday urged countrymen who have received an AstraZeneca COVID shot to “not delay” getting the second dose – even though the vaccine has been linked to more deaths than COVID in Australia this year. Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly, after a National Cabinet meeting, reiterated the benefits of vaccination and encouraged Australians to stay vigilant for symptoms of COVID-19. He told Australia’s ABC network that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in combating COVID-19 “far outweighed” the risks of developing a very rare blood clotting syndrome. Two women in Australia have died from the blood clots. The only COVID fatality this year was an 80-year-old traveler who died in April after being infected overseas and diagnosed in hotel quarantine. Last week authorities recommended that the AstraZeneca vaccine be given only to people 60 or over; people 50-59 were encouraged to get the Pfizer vaccine instead.
How did he become the sole truth teller?
• Sen. Johnson: Media Suppress Information About Over 5,000 Vaccine Deaths (OAN)
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) highlighted reports of a rising number of deaths caused by coronavirus vaccines. He announced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported thousands of deaths from side effects of experimental vaccines. The Republican senator argued Dr. Anthony Fauci and various media outlets have been turning a blind eye to warning signals from the Vaccine Adverse Event Warning System from the CDC, which has reported about 5,000 deaths. Johnson stressed there are safe and effective treatments for COVID-19, such as hydroxychloroquine, and Democrat calls for mass vaccination have been misleading.
“Over 1,700 within days zero, one and two of getting vaccinated. We have thousands of people who have permanent disabilities, 20,000 hospitalizations,” he expressed. “That, quite honestly, compares to less than 200 deaths per year in the entire 30 year history of the VAERS system with other vaccines.” Johnson went on to say Big Tech and mainstream media are still censoring the information about early treatments for COVID-19, which must be investigated. He argued that American people will continue to suffer the consequences of misleading information and the ignorance of leading health experts.
Daszak was removed from the Covid-19 commission yesterday.
• Lab Lies: A Conflict of Interest for Dr. Daszak (HE)
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been much debate about the origins, treatment and rushed vaccines. Many doctors have been interviewed and consulted, with varying opinions about the virus, research, and the best medicines on the market to help those afflicted with the virus. One such doctor is Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of the Eco-Health Alliance, a group based in New York City. His bio on the site says that his company is a US-based organization that conducts research and outreach programs on global health, conservation and international development. Unfortunately, when he participated in a statement for the medical journal, The Lancet, with other medical professionals, he was not 100% forthcoming. There may have been some factors that swayed his professional opinions on the COVID-19 virus and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now we know that EcoHealth gave over $600k in taxpayer dollars to The Wuhan Institute of Virology, and even more through grants. The NY Post and Vanity Fair both did reports about these connections, and discovered some troubling connections: The nonprofit, which says it’s “dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergency of disease,” has received as much as $15 million a year in grant money from various federal agencies, Vanity Fair said. EcoHealth has used those grants to fund controversial “gain-of-function” research — which can increase the infectiousness and virulence of viruses — at facilities that include the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to Vanity Fair.
The WIV received about $600,000 from a five-year, $3 million-plus grant that Vanity Fair said EcoHealth got from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Daszak was questioned in London about his visit to the Wuhan Lab in January of this year. Daszak was the only American to visit the lab with the World Health Organization. His statement regarding that trip VIA Vanity Fair: “…Daszak admitted that the group didn’t ask to inspect the WIV’s database of 22,000 virus samples and sequences, a decision he defended by saying that “a lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance,” Vanity Fair said.” Now, the Lancet, which is widely peer-reviewed, is making adjustments to the statement Daszak participated in so as to inform of his bias and influence. From the Lancet :
“In February 2020, 27 public health experts co-authored a Correspondence in The Lancet (“Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19”), supporting health professionals and physicians in China during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this letter, the authors declared no competing interests. Some readers have questioned the validity of this disclosure, particularly as it relates to one of the authors, Peter Daszak.”
A harmless variant?!
• Vaccines Exhibit “Reduced Efficacy” Against “Delta” Variant: WHO Doctor (ZH)
As the mutant COVID-19 strain known as “Delta” picks up steam across Europe and the US, one of the WHO’s leading doctors has just expressed concern about recent research published in the Lancet showing that the first generation of COVID-19 vaccines aren’t as effective at protecting against “Delta”. Answering a question from a reporter during the organization’s regular Monday briefing in Geneva, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove said that there is data “showing a reduction in neutralization” for the Delta variant, but not as much as the “Beta” variant – better known as the mutant strain that was first discovered in South Africa. She continued on, noting that the first generation of vaccines are still highly effective:
“Having said that, these vaccines are still highly effective, they produce enough antibodies to protect against serious disease and death. While we are seeing some reduced efficacy, they are still effective at preventing severe disease and death including against the delta variant.” Ultimately, the WHO needs to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible – which is the goal of Covax, the WHO’s program to vaccinate the world – to give dangerous variants less opportunity to take root and spread. “The goal of Covax is that we need those who are most at risk to severe disease, and those who are most exposed, to receive those vaccines and to be protected,” Dr. Kerkhove said.
To learn more about vaccine efficacy, the WHO has been “working with a global network…to get these studies under way…and to look at real-world efficacy data as well.” New research is coming in “fast and furious” and WHO is doing everything it can to determine what’s relevant and what’s not. The agency remains vigilant, however, because they fear that over time a growing number of “double” or “triple” mutants could further erode the efficacy of the first generation of vaccines. What’s more, “there may be a time where we have a constellation of mutations that arise in a variant” that will cause vaccines to lose potency entirely.
UK Delta variant
Untested.
The normal development process for drugs, including vaccines, includes pharmacokinetic (how a dug moves through the body) studies of biodistribution (where the drug, or vaccine, ends up in the body, and when). In the ordinary course of development, these pre-clinical animal studies are comprehensive and thorough, but in the case of covid vaccine development and approval, regulatory authorities lowered the bar considerably. The MHRA’s Reg 174 Information for Healthcare Professionals on Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, for example, drops the bar through the floor (“5.2 Pharmacokinetic properties Not applicable.”), while in its long and complicated lay summary of the vaccine it says “Pharmacokinetic studies have not been conducted with COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 and are generally not considered necessary to support the development and licensure of vaccine products…”.
The EMA (European Medicines Agency, Europe’s equivalent to our MHRA) is happily singing along on the same hymn sheet: “No traditional pharmacokinetic or biodistribution studies have been performed with the vaccine candidate BNT162b2”. Instead the regulators relied on studies that use surrogates for the vaccine. The results are not easy to find: those for biodistribution are buried deep in a Pfizer report submitted to the Japanese regulators in Japanese which defeats even google translate. [..] The surrogate used in the biodistribution study uses the same LNP (lipid nanoparticle) RNA technology as the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine, and there are no reasons to suppose its biodistribution is significantly different to the vaccine’s distribution, allowing it to pass muster for the vaccine, at least in the regulators’ eyes.
But we should apply a caveat. Animal studies are only an indication of how a drug will behave in humans, because different species handle drugs in different ways. Nonetheless, it is an indication, and furthermore, it is all we have. After giving a large dose (getting on for 500 times the normal vaccine dose per kilogram of body weight used in humans) of a radio-actively labelled version of the surrogate to rats, researchers turned off the lights, and watched, observing when and where the rats started to glow in the dark.
Tucker WHO
Tucker about how W.H.O. won't recommend vaccines for kids pic.twitter.com/7zeonn7096
— Heidegger (@heidegger79) June 22, 2021
“..an extra 1.5 million children and young people will require mental health support..”
• Lockdown Trauma Causing 5-Year-Olds to Suffer Panic Attacks (SN)
Children in the UK as young as five are suffering panic attacks and other psychological trauma as a result of COVID lockdowns, leaving 1.5 million kids in need of mental health treatment, according to a new report. NHS leaders say that the impact of repeated lockdowns has left children fearful of leaving their homes or meeting their friends amid an explosion of “locked-in trauma.” “Forecasts seen by this newspaper state that an extra 1.5 million children and young people will require mental health support “as a direct impact of the pandemic” during the next three to five years,” reports the Telegraph. “The calculations from the Centre for Mental Health, involving NHS economists, suggest demand will be as much as three times greater than the capacity of mental health services.”
One individual said that her daughter had a panic attack over a planned play date, while another parent said his 5-year-old was housebound and unable to go to school due to being traumatized by lockdown propaganda. With the NHS overwhelmed, child psychologist Maryhan Baker says demand for her services has doubled in recent months. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better. There are a lot of children who were maybe just a bit anxious before the pandemic presenting now with compulsions, eating disorders, self-harm and other control behaviours,” she said.
Spread the goodies.
• WHO To Establish First Vaccine Tech Transfer Hub In South Africa (F24)
South Africa will host the continent’s first Covid-19 vaccine production facility, as President Cyril Ramaphosa said Monday Africa now understood that doses would “never come” from elsewhere in time to save lives. Ramaphosa joined the World Health Organization (WHO) and French President Emmanuel Macron in announcing the new hub for Messenger RNA coronavirus vaccine technology. But as the project will take time to get off the ground, no vaccines are expected from it until next year. At tech transfer hubs, the technology is established at industrial scale, while interested manufacturers can receive training and any necessary licences to the technology.
“The ability to manufacture vaccines, medicines and other health-related commodities will help to put Africa on a path to self-determination,” Ramaphosa told a WHO virtual press conference via video-link. “It’s been shown now that we just cannot continue to rely on vaccines that are made outside of Africa because they never come. They never arrive on time and people continue to die.” The hub is seen by the Geneva-based WHO as a way to combat the vast inequality in access to vaccines between the world’s wealthiest and poorest nations. WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said it could take nine to 12 months before Covid-19 vaccines could be produced in South Africa using tested and approved processes.
Under the tech transfer hub system, the WHO and its partners bring in the production know-how, quality control and necessary licences to enable a rapid roll-out. At the South African hub, the bio-pharmaceutical company Biovac will act as developer; the Afrigen biotechnology firm will be the manufacturer; and a consortium of universities will provide the scientific know-how. Messenger RNA genetic technology — as used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus jabs — trains the body to reproduce spike proteins similar to those found on the coronavirus. When exposed to the real virus later, the body recognises the spike proteins and is able to fight them off. The WHO said it would “continue its assessment of potential mRNA technology donors and will launch subsequent calls for other technologies, such as viral vectors and proteins, in coming months”.
Stories like these in many countries.
• UK Crony Capitalism: They Didn’t Want To Reveal These Names
Good Law Project is now able to reveal the names of six more companies awarded PPE contracts through the controversial ’VIP’ fast-track lane for associates of ministers and advisers. These six firms landed nearly half a billion pounds of public contracts – all without competition – and were uncovered in documents prised from Government in the course of our litigation: Uniserve Limited is a logistics firm controlled by Iain Liddell. Prior to the pandemic the firm had no experience in supplying PPE, yet the firm landed a staggering £300m+ in PPE contracts from the DHSC and an eye watering £572m deal to provide freight services for the supply of PPE. The company shares the same address as Cabinet Minister Julia Lopez MP and is based in her constituency. Here they are together.
Draeger Safety UK Ltd which is a subsidiary of the Germany-based Draeger AG, landed a direct award contract in July 2020 to supply FFP3 masks valued at £87m. Urathon Europe Limited, a Wiltshire based supplier of wheelchair accessories, was handed two contracts worth £74m to supply face masks. Correspondence released during our recent PPE hearing revealed the Urathon contracts were ‘escalated through VIP Channel’. First Aid For Sport Limited, SanaClis, and Global United Trading and Sourcing PTE Ltd were awarded contracts from the DHSC worth a combined total of £28.6m.
The six companies revealed here are in addition to the six other ‘VIPs’ previously revealed by Good Law Project. In April we revealed documents showing P14 Medical, Luxe Lifestyle, and Meller Designs were fast-tracked down the ‘VIP’ route alongside Pestfix and Ayanda. P14 Medical, run by a Tory donor and ex-Tory councillor, was awarded £276m in PPE contracts. Meller Designs, run by another large Tory donor, David Meller, won more than £160m of PPE contracts. Luxe Lifestyle, a tiny recently-formed company with no staffand no experience in buying and selling PPE, was awarded a contract worth £26m after being referred to the VIP lane by an MP. This followed our scoop last December that Government had handed PPE Medpro, a firm linked to an associate of a Conservative peer with mystery investors, £200m of PPE contracts via the ‘high-priority lane.’
“Xi is following The Art of War to the letter so far.”
• Thinking Out Loud (Kunstler)
While all that is cooking on one front burner, we also have the case of the US equity markets burbling away at bubblicious highs on another burner, and therefore primed for a nauseating boil-over. Would a new and lethal government scandal supply the few extra therms for that? And by scandal, I mean something more like a broad loss of legitimacy and paralysis of the “Joe Biden” government. Also, how would a market train-wreck affect the credit markets? The US dollar? Whatever is left of the on-the-ground economy? Let’s just say it sure won’t act as a tonic for any of that; more like a slug of ethylene glycol. So now we’re talking about a simultaneous government crisis and financial crisis.
Now, consider what might happen in the fall if a potent new strain, or “third wave,” of Covid-19 virus wafts across America. We’ve already seen speculation in the medical media that the residual action of mRNA “vaccines,” if exposed to yet another novel coronavirus, might tend to whack-out the immune response of those who got vaxed, killing them, as well as killing a new cohort of victims among the unvaxed, adding up to many millions of dead Americans. How would the country manage any of this along with a twin crisis of economy and government? We couldn’t even manage the pandemic when our institutions were supposedly still functioning. And now, consider what might happen if China decides this is a good time to gain control of Taiwan (and the world’s leading chip manufacturers). A savvy friend of the blog writes:
“They’ll hit Taiwan, Guam, Vietnam, South Korea, Philippines, Australia. Iran would move to secure the overland route from China to Africa. The Israeli/Saudi coalition could stop Iran but only if China didn’t help Iran. (Iran/China are far ahead of us in drone swarm warfare.) China could overrun all of it in a matter of weeks and establish a deep defensive perimeter before we could effectively respond. More importantly they’ll hit our infrastructure so hard we’ll have a hard time hitting back effectively for years. Last year pretty much exposed our weakness; now they’ll move to exploit it. They’ll not wait till 2030, as our fearless leaders are touting, otherwise we might have time to mend our ways. Sun Tzu dictates they act now. My bet is they follow his guidance. It is the one area they are most predictable. Xi is following The Art of War to the letter so far.”
Is bitcoin truly uncensorable?
• Julian Assange’s Continued Imprisonment Is A Test For Bitcoin’s Values (F.)
When Wikileaks first emerged, it represented an affinity with another emerging community: bitcoin. Julian Assange had spoken at length about the Cypherpunks, the early 90s movement that sought to enact change through code and the laws of cryptography. This included experiments with early versions of digital money. So it was a natural fit for Wikileaks to use bitcoin due to its uncensorable nature, with Assange once commenting that “bitcoin is the real Occupy Wall Street”. The threat model for Wikileaks was simple and yet devastatingly powerful: the most powerful state collective in the world was likely to go after them eventually, if not now, then sometime in the future.
This included not only the “rogue’s gallery” Assange described in a 2010 speech to the Oslo Freedom Forum (states such as North Korea, Iran and the People’s Republic of China), but also the states that controlled the financial and trade apparatus that ran the world’s financial system, one where deviation and dissent was routinely punished with sanctions and exclusion. Even as early as 2010, Assange expressed a desire to wrestle with censorship in the West, including in “common law” societies that “prided” themselves on fundamental freedoms and Enlightenment ideals.
[..] I sat down and spoke with Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s half-brother, to discuss the case and what is happening with it. He has recently been active in publishing articles describing the effects Assange’s imprisonment can have broadly when it comes to the Internet and press freedoms, and specifically when it comes to bitcoin. One of the first things he commented on was Assange’s continued belief in bitcoin, his love for a tool that made it possible to do his work. The way he thought about cryptography fighting the inevitable centralization of repression made his thought process a natural complement and extension of bitcoin’s fight to remake classical economic and financial systems.
People who support bitcoin should be concerned about Assange’s imprisonment not only because it reflects the betrayal of bitcoin’s ideals in the specific case of Assange — states tying themselves into pretzel knots in order to undermine a non-violent disseminator of information — it also makes vulnerable the principles of true transaction neutrality that underpin bitcoin, creating the most pressing version of the “wrench attack”. If you cannot go after the system, you must go after the person. Dissidents around the world are using bitcoin now: some are using it to avoid censorship in Nigeria by the ruling economic elites against police brutality protests that have involved the murder of civilians by the ruling class. People in Belarus are accepting payment in order to defy the government, which has tried to crush protests with force. Hong Kong Free Press, a bastion of pro-democracy views in a Hong Kong that is seeking to crush journalists through weaponization of the financial system, accepts bitcoin.
The point isn’t trying to determine whether or not any of these individual causes is more worthy or not, or which ones align with our geopolitical views. The point is to acknowledge that all of them are only possible if they are branches stemming from the same uncensorable tree.
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