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Debt Rattle August 16 2021

Aug 162021
 
 August 16, 2021  Posted by at 9:37 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  93 Responses »


Roy Lichtenstein Hopeless 1963

 

• Ultrapotent Antibodies vs Diverse & Highly Transmissible Covid19 Variants (Sc.)
• Vaccine Inventor Dr. Robert Malone Ruined “His Chances For A Nobel Prize” (TSU)
• Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination with Delta (Mx)
• Here Comes Nosocomial DISASTER (Denninger)
• A Message From France (TBP)
• French Covid Permit Scheme Extended To Paris Department Stores (G.)
• UAE Covid-19 Death Toll Exceeds 2,000 For First Time, 1,189 New Cases (AlA)
• Biden Offers Cash To Florida Schools That Defy Gov. Ron DeSantis (NYP)
• China, the WHO and the Powergrab That Fuelled A Pandemic (Times)
• The Clocks Are Wrong or Biden’s Camp David Photo Was Taken Months Ago (GP)
• White House Twitter Account Apparently ‘Outs’ Intel Officials, Locations (RT)
• CNN Praises Taliban For Wearing Masks During Attack (BBee)

 

 

Biden “may talk in a few days”, Kamala is AWOL, and Jen Psaki is gone until August 22.

What do you think when you’re in Hong Kong, or Taiwan, Ukraine, Lithuania? That America’s got your back?

This damage is forever. The US gave itself all away in 24 hours.

 

 

 

 

10% have had 3rd vaxx. Israeli PM Bennett is a confused man.

 

 

 

 

“Our study demonstrates that convalescent subjects previously infected with ancestral variant SARS-CoV-2 produce antibodies that cross-neutralize emerging VOCs with high potency.”

• Ultrapotent Antibodies vs Diverse & Highly Transmissible Covid19 Variants (Sc.)

Our key defense against the COVID-19 pandemic is neutralizing antibodies against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus elicited by natural infection or vaccination. Recent emerging viral variants have raised concern because of their potential to escape antibody neutralization. Wang et al. identified four antibodies from early-outbreak convalescent donors that are potent against 23 variants, including variants of concern, and characterized their binding to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. Yuan et al. examined the impact of emerging mutations in the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein on binding to the host receptor ACE2 and to a range of antibodies. These studies may be helpful for developing more broadly effective vaccines and therapeutic antibodies.

Blood from 22 convalescent subjects who recovered from SARS-CoV-2 WA-1 infection was screened for neutralizing and binding activity, and four subjects with high reactivity against the WA-1 variant were selected for antibody isolation. SARS-CoV-2 spike (S)–reactive antibodies were identified through B cell sorting with S protein–based probes. WA-1 live-virus neutralization assays identified four RBD-targeting antibodies with high potency [half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) 2.1 to 4.8 ng/ml], two of which were derived from the same IGHV1-58 germline but from different donors. Antigen-binding fragments (Fabs) of these antibodies exhibited nanomolar affinity to S (2.3 to 7.3 nM).

Competition assays and electron microscopy indicated that two of the most potent antibodies blocked angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and bound open conformation RBD, whereas the other two bound both up and down conformations of RBD and blocked ACE2 binding. Binding and lentivirus neutralization assays against 13 circulating VOCs or variants of interest—including B.1.1.7, B.1.351, B.1.427, B.1.429, B.1.526, P.1, P.2, B.1.617.1, and B.1.617.2—indicated that these antibodies were highly potent against VOCs despite being isolated from subjects infected with early ancestral SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Cryo-EM studies of the two most potent antibodies in complex with S revealed that these antibodies target a site of vulnerability on RBD but have minimal contacts with mutational hotspots, defining the structural basis for their high effectiveness against the emerging VOCs and further delineating an IGHV1-58 antibody supersite.

To investigate potential mechanisms of escape, we applied antibody selection pressure to replication-competent vesicular stomatitis virus (rcVSV) expressing the WA-1 SARS-CoV-2 S (rcVSV-SARS2) and identified S mutations that conferred in vitro resistance. We evaluated these antibodies individually or in combinations for their capacity to prevent rcVSV-SARS2 escape and discovered that antibody combinations with complementary modes of recognition to the RBD lowered the risk of resistance. [..] Our study demonstrates that convalescent subjects previously infected with ancestral variant SARS-CoV-2 produce antibodies that cross-neutralize emerging VOCs with high potency. Structural and functional analyses reveal that antibody breadth is mediated by targeting a site of vulnerability at the RBD tip offset from major mutational hotspots in VOCs. Selective boosting of immune responses targeting specific RBD epitopes, such as the sites defined by these antibodies, may induce breadth against current and future VOCs.


Isolation and characterization of convalescent donor antibodies that effectively neutralize emerging SARS-CoV-2 VOCs.

Antibodies isolated from donors infected with ancestral SARS-CoV-2 viruses showed ultrapotent neutralization of emerging VOCs. The two most potent antibodies shared usage of the IGHV1-58 gene and targeted the RBD with minimal contact to VOC mutational hotspots. Cocktails of antibodies with complementary binding modes suppressed antibody escape.

Read more …

“This was a conscious decision to take risk.”

• Vaccine Inventor Dr. Robert Malone Ruined “His Chances For A Nobel Prize” (TSU)

This afternoon, The Atlantic wrote a fair piece titled, “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation.” The article started out with the author, Tom Bartlett, asking: “Robert Malone claims to have invented mRNA technology. Why is he trying so hard to undermine its use?” Again, we think the article is fair and objective. Unlike Logically.AI, which categorically said Dr. Malone was not the original inventor of the vaccine, Mr. Bartlett credited Dr. Malone for being the first person to “demonstrate how RNA could be delivered into cells using lipids.” Below is how Mr. Bartlett describes Dr. Malone’s body of work:

“The abridged version is that when Malone was a graduate student in biology in the late 1980s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, he injected genetic material—DNA and RNA—into the cells of mice in hopes of creating a new kind of vaccine. He was the first author on a 1989 paper demonstrating how RNA could be delivered into cells using lipids, which are basically tiny globules of fat, and a co-author on a 1990 Science paper showing that if you inject pure RNA or DNA into mouse muscle cells, it can lead to the transcription of new proteins. If the same approach worked for human cells, the latter paper said in its conclusion, this technology “may provide alternative approaches to vaccine development.””

Mr. Bartlett’s piece is not really the purpose of this article. The question is, what did Dr. Malone say or do to jeopardize his chances of winning a Nobel Prize? To answer this question, we need to go back to his TV appearance on June 23. During the interview, Dr. Malone stated that he was not discouraging the use of the vaccine that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. “[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. And so, I’m of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept a vaccine or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines,” Dr. Malone said, pointing to the fact the vaccines are not formally approved but instead being administered under Emergency Use Authorization.

Dr. Malone added: “This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics,” he said. “And so, my concern is that I know that there are risks. But we don’t have access to the data, and the data haven’t been captured rigorously enough so that we can accurately assess those risks — and therefore … we don’t really have the information that we need to make a reasonable decision.” Immediately after the interview, the news about what he said quickly travel across the mainstream media, News York Times, Washington Post, and now, The Atlantic. Since then, Dr. Malone has been under attack. About a month later, Logically.Ai wrote a piece claiming that Dr. Robert Malone did NOT invent mRNA vaccines. Just as Mr. Bartlett said in the Atlantic story, “Whether Malone really came up with mRNA vaccines is a question probably best left to Swedish prize committees, but you could make a case for his involvement.”

Which leads us to Dr. Malone’s chances of getting a Nobel prize. In a tweet this afternoon, Dr. Malone shared a statement from a cellular immunologist Stan Gromkowski who did work on mRNA vaccines in the early 1990s. According to the tweet, Gromkowski said this about Dr. Malone: “He’s fucking up his chances for a Nobel Prize.” In the same tweet, Dr. Malone added that he was well aware of the potential impact on a possible Nobel. “I made a choice,” he wrote. That’s not all. In a follow-up tweet, Dr. Malone said he was “very aware of this risk and discussed it with Bret and Steve right before the infamous Dark Horse podcast, indicating that the stakes were too high to worry about a Prize when trying to save the lives and health of our children. This was a conscious decision to take risk.”

Read more …

“68% of individuals infected despite vaccination tested positive with Ct <25, including at least 8 who were asymptomatic at the time of testing.”

• Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination with Delta (Mx)

The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant and its sublineages (B.1.617.2, AY.1, AY.2, AY.3; [1]) can cause high viral loads, are highly transmissible, and contain mutations that confer partial immune escape [2,3]. Using PCR threshold cycle (Ct) data from a single large contract laboratory, we show that individuals in Wisconsin, USA had similar viral loads in nasal swabs, irrespective of vaccine status, during a time of high and increasing prevalence of the Delta variant. Infectious SARS-CoV-2 was isolated from 51 of 55 specimens (93%) with Ct <25 from both vaccinated and unvaccinated persons, indicating that most individuals with Ct values in this range (Wilson 95% CI 83%-97%) shed infectious virus regardless of vaccine status.

Notably, 68% of individuals infected despite vaccination tested positive with Ct <25, including at least 8 who were asymptomatic at the time of testing. Our data substantiate the idea that vaccinated individuals who become infected with the Delta variant may have the potential to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others. Vaccinated individuals should continue to wear face coverings in indoor and congregate settings, while also being tested for SARS-CoV-2 if they are exposed or experience COVID-like symptoms.

Read more …

“Viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020.”

• Here Comes Nosocomial DISASTER (Denninger)

“Methods: We studied breakthrough infections among healthcare workers of a major infectious diseases hospital in Vietnam. We collected demographics, vaccination history and results of PCR diagnosis alongside clinical data. We measured SARS-CoV-2 (neutralizing) antibodies at diagnosis, and at week 1, 2 and 3 after diagnosis. We sequenced the viruses using ARTIC protocol.

Findings: Between 11th–25th June 2021 (week 7–8 after dose 2), 69 healthcare workers were tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. 62 participated in the clinical study. 49 were (pre)symptomatic with one requiring oxygen supplementation. All recovered uneventfully. 23 complete-genome sequences were obtained. They all belonged to the Delta variant, and were phylogenetically distinct from the contemporary Delta variant sequences obtained from community transmission cases, suggestive of ongoing transmission between the workers. Viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020. Time from diagnosis to PCR negative was 8–33 days (median: 21). Neutralizing antibody levels after vaccination and at diagnosis of the cases were lower than those in the matched uninfected controls. There was no correlation between vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody levels and viral loads or the development of symptoms.”

Reasonable conclusions drawn from this data:
• The vaccines do not prevent health care workers from getting infected; the antibodies are ineffective.
• When health care workers get infected post-vaccination with Delta they are not becoming infected from the community; they are passing it among each other.
• Their viral loads and thus infectiousness are extremely high; in other words they become a reservoir of extreme infection risk to other employees in the facility and, it must be assumed to the patients in their care.
• A reasonable hypothesis (but not proved) is that the vaccines are in fact potentiating viral replication via ADE-type effects, specifically given the paper I pointed to yesterday. That is the act of encouraging or even forcing medical workers to take the jabs is leading to higher viral loads and thus greater infectiousness — that is, greater risk to patients rather than less.

Congratulations folks — you just turned hospitals into death traps for anyone who is medically compromised, particularly if they were either unable to be vaccinated themselves for medical reasons or, far worse, they were vaccinated but due to immune compromise failed to build an effective response. PS: Want to know why this sort of study hasn’t — and won’t — be done here? Because the instantaneous freak-out factor, never mind the nasty words “malpractice” or even “depraved indifference” — would start getting thrown around immediately, that’s why.

Read more …

A message of hope. Everything comes to a standstill. Tons of pics of empty cafes and restaurants.

In the US, tens of millions soon’t can’t fly. Will that make the airlines happy?

• A Message From France (TBP)

Here in France it has gone to the extreme with the “Health” Pass. Last week on the 21st ALL restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and any leisure activities like sporting events, theaters, cinemas, museums, were closed to anyone without “the pass” and all staff at these places are mandated to get the jab to keep their job. It is now a 6 Month prison sentence if you are caught inside any of these places without the pass (the man who slapped the president in the face got only 3 months prison time). Business owners will get a fine of 45,000 euros and 1 year prison sentence if they do not comply with the use of “the pass” and force all their employees to get the jab. (If you know France, you can commit murder and have less of a sentence)

So the result? All the low paid employees quit, they can make more on welfare here (for now). We can still technically “get take out food” but I just tried last night and every restaurant in our town (that is dine in with take out) has closed their doors due to the lack of staff. As of last week ALL doctors, nurses and health industry workers have been mandated to get the jab or lose their license, practice, job, business etc. (ALL health care here is Govt paid positions and there are no private health care Doctors or Hospitals etc.) Since the Health care system is state run and funded, it has been run into the ground. All the good doctors left France 5 Years ago, all the hospitals look like they are 3rd world hospitals since there is no money to repair them, half of the equipment doesn’t work and not every hospital is stocked with supplies needed for daily needs (masks, gels, disposable gowns etc).

For 5 years Nurses have been understaffed and doing double the work because the Health care system is nearly bankrupt…. So add to this the mandatory jab. So the result? Well they took to the streets by the millions and now all the hospitals just lost another 50% of staff capacity. My doctor just went into early retirement (a.k.a. he quit) and I have yet to find a replacement. As of Aug 1st ALL large malls, retail stores and grocery store owners and their staff need to be jabbed and the health pass is required to enter for employees and customers. This would be the equivalent to closing ALL Targets, Walmarts, Costcos, Home Depots, and all major grocery stores. (basically any building over 20,000 squre meters) to those without “the pass”. Result.?? Aug 15th Truckers will be going on strike nation wide; Blocking all access roads in and out of Paris.

Yesterday an entire airport in Northern France closed due to the majority of staff quitting. As of Sept 15th All public areas and access will be off limits. No farmers markets, no parks, no national parks, lakes, rivers, beaches, recreation areas, campsites etc. and no gathering over 100 people, no churches, no weddings, etc. As of Oct 1st ALL small vendors such as, delis, pizza trucks, sandwich shops, butchers, bakers, vegetable stands etc. So as of Oct 1st I will only be able to purchase food by internet and pick up (if allowed). Food shortages, Truckers strike, hospitals and airports shutting down unemployment going through the roof. Its going to be a bumpy ride folks. Is it me or does all this seem a bit extreme for a “pass” that isn’t exactly working? America, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, you’d better wake up.

Read more …

Close those too.

• French Covid Permit Scheme Extended To Paris Department Stores (G.)

France’s pass sanitaire health permit system will be extended to more than 120 major department stores and shopping centres on Monday in areas where levels of Covid infection are causing concern, including Paris and the Mediterranean coast. The decision to extend the measure restricting entry to customers who can prove they have been vaccinated, have had a negative Covid test or have recovered from coronavirus was made by local officials. The pass will be required for shoppers entering Paris department stores such as Galeries Lafayette, Printemps, BHV, Le Mon Marché and La Samaritaine, and others mainly in the south of the country.


Several large shopping centres around the Channel ports popular with British tourists had feared being included but were given a reprieve as the local Covid infection rates are lower than the national average. Local prefects are imposing the pass on large stores and shopping malls in areas where the infection rate is above 200 per 100,000 people. Although Paris has not reached this level, officials are concerned about the high number of cases especially among young people in the neighbouring areas of Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne. The worst-hit areas are in departments along the Mediterranean coast. In the Bouches-du-Rhône, which includes the popular holiday areas of Provence, the Côte d’Azur, Marseille, Arles and Aix-en-Provence, the rate has reached 693 per 100,000.s

The French bring their own chairs, table, food. No pass required.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1426810220471361538

Read more …

Most vaccinated country on earth. They work great. UAE=9.7 million people.

• UAE Covid-19 Death Toll Exceeds 2,000 For First Time, 1,189 New Cases (AlA)

The United Arab Emirates on Sunday recorded 1,189 new coronavirus infections, 1,419 recoveries and four deaths in 24 hours, the country’s National Emergency Crisis and Disasters Management Authority (NCEMA) reported. Health authorities conducted 218,163 COVID-19 tests to determine Sunday’s numbers which indicated another daily decline in infections from Saturday’s 1,206. The UAE’S COVID-19 death toll now sits at 2,001, while total recoveries increased to 679,760, according to NCEMA. The country has recorded a total of 701,776 coronavirus cases since the pandemic’s onset. There are currently 20,015 active cases within the country. As of yet, over 81 percent of the population has received at least one vaccine dose and around 72 percent have been fully inoculated against COVID-19.

Read more …

They love hurting DeSantis for 2024.

• Biden Offers Cash To Florida Schools That Defy Gov. Ron DeSantis (NYP)

The Biden administration is offering cash to Florida school districts that defy Gov. Ron DeSantis’ mask ban as COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations rose in the state. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona on Friday sent a letter to DeSantis and the Florida education commissioner saying school districts can at their “sole and complete discretion” use federal funds to pay the salaries of administrators and board members withheld by the state for defying the order. “We are eager to partner with [the Florida Department of Education] on any efforts to further our shared goals of protecting the health and safety of students and educators,” Cardona wrote. “If FLDOE does not wish to pursue such an approach, the Department will continue to work directly with the school districts and educators that serve Florida’s students.”


A DeSantis spokeswoman blasted the Biden administration for wanting to spend federal funds “on the salaries of superintendents and elected politicians, who don’t believe that parents have a right to choose what’s best for their children, than on Florida’s students, which is what these funds should be used for.” The Republican governor last month signed an executive order banning school districts from making face masks mandatory for students and staff defending “parents’ freedom to choose.” The order came days after the CDC recommended all students and staff wear masks when they return this fall. On Monday, the governor’s office threatened to withhold the salaries of school board members and superintendents who did not comply with the ban. DeSantis has also threatened to withhold state funding from districts as well.

Read more …

“Beijing had been instrumental in installing Tedros as the £170,000-a-year head of the agency by pulling strings and calling in favours during the 2017 election for the job.”

• China, the WHO and the Powergrab That Fuelled A Pandemic (Times)

Barely eight months after taking charge, the director-general of the WHO gave a speech that would prove extraordinarily prophetic. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that all nations were facing the ever-present threat that a new respiratory illness, such as the Spanish flu, might emerge and spread across the globe in weeks or months, killing millions. It was why, the Ethiopian told the audience at his keynote speech in Dubai in February 2018, he had made it his daily priority since becoming the WHO’s chief to make sure he was up to date on the thousands of reports the health body received every month that might flag up signs of an outbreak The WHO, a Geneva-based United Nations agency with a £5 billion budget from 194 member states, was on a war footing.

Tedros said it would act fast and decisively, because ignoring the signs of an outbreak could “be the difference between global spread of a deadly disease and rapid interruption of transmission”. So far this “new tighter focus” was working, he added. So when the first alert of a mysterious respiratory illness in China, exactly as Tedros had described, was reported by health monitors in Taiwan at the end of December 2019, the health agency should have been prepared and ready for action. In fact the WHO would receive considerable criticism for failing to help stop the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus in the opening weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did the organisation fail to act but it also promulgated misinformation about the virus originating from China and even discouraged other nations from taking steps that might have contained the spread.

For all his foresight, Tedros would be accused of being ineffective when the big test came. The world paid a heavy price for the WHO’s inaction. As Tedros predicted, the virus has killed more than four million people, and there will be many more. The body that is charged with looking after the world’s health seriously malfunctioned in those opening weeks, when humanity most needed it to come to the rescue. Why? Our investigation reveals today how a concerted campaign over many years by Beijing to grab power inside the WHO appears to have fatally compromised its ability to respond to the crisis. It raises serious concerns about the extent of Beijing’s influence over the WHO and its director-general, and how this undermined the organisation’s capacity — and willingness — to take the steps necessary to avert a global pandemic.

Its leadership put China’s economic interests before public health concerns. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic. It is a story that stretches back many years before the Covid-19 crisis. After being strongly criticised by the health agency for attempting to cover up the 2003 Sars crisis, China set out to increase its influence over the WHO. By applying financial and diplomatic leverage over some of the world’s poorest nations, Beijing won a global power struggle to get its favoured candidates installed at the very top of the organisation. As a result, years later, a body that was set up with the lofty goal of “attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health” has been co-opted into aiding the Chinese state’s campaign for global economic dominance.

Its leadership began to speak differently, espousing statements and pursuing policies that were markedly convenient to China — even praising Beijing’s questionable allies such as North Korea, despite its appalling health and human rights record. Beijing had been instrumental in installing Tedros as the £170,000-a-year head of the agency by pulling strings and calling in favours during the 2017 election for the job.

Read more …

Or months into the future?

• The Clocks Are Wrong or Biden’s Camp David Photo Was Taken Months Ago (GP)

Either the clocks in Camp David are wrong or the photo taken of Joe Biden as Kabul fell to the Taliban is several months old. Former Fox News producer Kyle Becker noticed the time errors and pointed them out in a tweet late Sunday evening. “Recent White House photos show a 3-hour time diff. b/w London & Moscow. There are a few good explanations for this. Either Camp David’s clocks are wrong or the photos are from before March 28, when London went ahead on Daylight Savings Time, but Moscow didn’t. This is *fine,*” Becker wrote. “Also, Tehran is an hour and a half difference from Moscow currently, which is why I circled it when I was checking it out. (And yes, that half-hour difference is right; India has a time zone with a half-hour difference as well.)” — Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) August 16, 2021

“Also, Tehran is an hour and a half difference from Moscow currently, which is why I circled it when I was checking it out. (And yes, that half-hour difference is right; India has a time zone with a half-hour difference as well.)” Becker added. “This morning, the President and Vice President met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the draw down of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul. — The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 15, 2021

The photo discrepancy is particularly odd as Biden has been MIA and did not address the nation as the chaos unfolded. Instead, it was reported that he will do so “in the next couple of days.” Additionally, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki will be taking the entire next week off. Questions sent to Psaki are being met with an autoreply saying that she will be out of the office through August 22. “I will be out of the office from August 15th-August 22nd,” the auto reply email being sent to reporters reads.

Read more …

What an incredible mess. There should be awards for this.

• White House Twitter Account Apparently ‘Outs’ Intel Officials, Locations (RT)

A White House tweet showing President Joe Biden appearing to be on top of the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan may also have inadvertently revealed the faces and locations of intelligence agents. The official White House Twitter account posted a photo on Sunday of Biden meeting by video conference with intelligence officials to hear updates on the drawdown of civilian personnel, “the ongoing security situation in Kabul,” and evacuations of Afghan allies, including interpreters who helped US and NATO forces during the 20-year war. The picture showed other meeting participants on a large screen, including CIA officials and three men at the “Doha Station.” Richard Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence in the Trump administration, called out the apparent blunder, tweeting, “Who took this picture outing intel officials? Dear God.”

One Twitter user quipped, “Umm, is the public supposed to see the faces of the CIA agents? Are we supposed to know there is a Doha Station?” The White House tweet may have been meant to portray Biden as actively involved in the evacuation from Afghanistan amid criticism that he was silent and on vacation while the Taliban was recapturing the country and triggering a rushed evacuation of Americans and allied Afghans from Kabul. Supporters of the president used the photo to brush off the criticism, insisting it shows that Biden is preoccupied with the crisis. Some eagle-eyed commentators suggested that the photo might not even be recent, pointing to the time difference between London and Moscow on the clocks in the conference room. The current difference is two hours, while the clocks above the conference screen show a three-hour difference. This would have been possible before March 28, when the clocks in the UK were moved forward by one hour.

The planned US withdrawal from Afghanistan has turned into a disaster for the Biden administration after the Taliban overran 26 provincial capitals out of 34 in the weeks after last US troops left Bagram’s airfield, their main military base in Afghanistan. Biden has faced backlash for apparently gravely underestimating the Taliban and overestimating the ability of the US-trained Afghan forces to withstand the assault. In July, Biden predicted that the Taliban wouldn’t overrun the country and that the evacuation would be nothing like the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US embassy staffers had to be plucked from the rooftop to escape North Vietnamese forces. On Sunday, two CH-47 Chinook helicopters were seen evacuating US embassy staff in Kabul as Taliban fighters entered the city and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

The White House video conference tweet became more fodder for mockery. Biden supporters argued that identities of the people who appeared on the video-conference screen weren’t necessarily secret, but other observers said the existence of the Doha Station was not publicly known. “Heck of a job, White House communications shop,” National Review contributor Jim Geraghty said. “I figure you would want to crop out the teleconference screens labeled CIA and Doha Station – you panicking, amateur idiots.”

Read more …

Not sure we should be laughing.

• CNN Praises Taliban For Wearing Masks During Attack (BBee)

Approximately twelve minutes after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan, Taliban fighters have completely taken over the entire country. “Woah, that’s a bummer,” said the Biden Administration’s foreign policy team. “We didn’t see that one coming.” As the Taliban began its campaign of shooting and killing, as is their time-honored tradition, CNN anchors gushed with praise after noticing all the Taliban fighters were responsibly wearing masks to protect themselves and others from COVID. “Wow! In the midst of the battle and bloodshed, these noble desert knights of Islamic superiority are wearing masks! Bravo!” said Brian Stelter.


TV anchor and world-renown polemicist Don Lemon was also quick to weigh in. “All things considered, we ought to be praising the COVID-safe masks these majestic mujahideen warriors are wearing,” he said. “They are showing all of us the proper way to behave during a pandemic—something those horrible idiot Trump supporters don’t seem to get.” Inspired by their example, the Biden Administration has invited the Taliban to the White House to record TikTok videos in hopes of convincing Trump supporters to get vaccinated.

Read more …

 

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Debt Rattle August 15 2021

Aug 152021
 
 August 15, 2021  Posted by at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  119 Responses »


Henri Matisse Luxury, calm and pleasure 1904

 

• Taliban Launches Offensive On Kabul (Sp.)
• Defining Away Vaccine Safety Signals (Crawford)
• Covid-19 Injections Dangerous For Mothers and Babies (Yeadon)
• Class Action Lawsuit Says Vaccine Has Killed 45,000 People (Rumble)
• Children Born During Pandemic Have Lower IQs (G.)
• Well, ****…. (Denninger)
• French Study Claims ADE Occurring In Delta Variant Infections (TMN)
• Denmark Abolishes All Corona Measures (FFN)
• New Covid Variants ‘Will Set Us Back A Year’, Experts Warn UK Government (O.)
• Booster Shots Will ‘Be Obligatory For Trips Abroad And Care Home Staff’ (DM)
• The Teens Who’d Prefer To Catch Covid Than Have The Vaccine (DM)
• I Wish To Take A Little Walk With You And Talk, Deliberately, About This (TLR)

 

 

233

 

 

China will recognize the Taliban. And then build a pipeline.

 

 

Crick

 

 

Killer T cells

 

 

“US intelligence agencies who said just 4 days ago that Kabul could fall in 90 days have revised the figure to 72 hours.”

• Taliban Launches Offensive On Kabul (Sp.)

Biden short

The Taliban* has already taken control of all of Afghanistan’s border crossings, leaving the Kabul Airport as the only route out of the country. Taliban insurgents have launched an offensive on Kabul, having surrounded the Afghan capital, the country’s Interior Ministry announced on Sunday. According to the ministry, the terrorists are entering the capital from all sides. The Office of the President of Afghanistan has taken to Twitter to say that the country’s security and defence forces have the situation under control “in coordination with international partners”. The tweet added that gunfire was heard in several remote areas of Kabul. A source told Sputnik that the Taliban had already taken control of Kabul University and raised the group’s flag in one of the city’s districts.

The Associated Press has cited officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to release the information, as saying there hadn’t been any fighting yet. The insurgents are said to be in the districts of Kalakan, Qarabagh, and Paghman. Less than an hour ago, a member of the negotiating team of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Matin Bek, urged people not to panic and claimed that the Afghan capital was safe. Shortly before the Taliban entered Kabul, the Torkham border crossing with Pakistan, the last post still under the Afghan government’s control, fell to the terrorist group. Thus, the insurgents now control all of Afghanistan’s border crossings. The insurgents took control of the key eastern city of Jalalabad on Sunday, just hours after seizing the northern bastion of Mazar-i-Sharif.

The United States, meanwhile, is sending more troops to the encircled capital to help evacuate its civilians and diplomatic staff as the risk of a Taliban takeover of Kabul became more clear. Earlier this week, US intelligence assessed Kabul could be isolated within 30 days and fall to the Taliban within 90 days.

Read more …

It’s a neat little trick.

• Defining Away Vaccine Safety Signals (Crawford)

We get to section 2.3, and this is where things get really crazy. This is where signals (for assessing safety/danger of the vaccines) get defined. Subsection 2.3.1 begins (emphasis mine), “CDC will perform PRR data mining on a weekly basis or as needed. PRRs compare the proportion of a specific AE following a specific vaccine versus the proportion of the same AE following receipt of another vaccine (see equation below Table 4). A safety signal is defined as a PRR of at least 2, chi-squared statistic of at least 4, and 3 or more cases of the AE following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest. ” Only a real dork would emphasize the word ‘and’, right? A logic dork, mind you, but we’ll get to that…

First, note that PRR is the proportional reporting ratio, and these PRR numbers are the outputs of a function defined by the CDC based on four variables (which they list in a table as capital letters, then apply in a function as lower-case letters, which always makes me a little uncomfortable as I rarely see such sloppy transition from definitions to application, and somehow they always seem to come from government documentation where I worry about ass covering and plausible deniability).

Look at the numerator of this formula. The variables a and b are specific to each vaccine. Now, consider what would happen if an extremely dangerous vaccine were introduced that resulted in 20 times as many AEs of all types as all the other vaccines to which it gets compared.

The PRR remains invariant in the scaling of adverse events!

This means that one vaccine that kills and cripples 20 or 50 or 1,000 times as much as a very safe vaccine will show the same PRR (mild adjustments for variables c and d notwithstanding), and no safety signal will be identified by the CDC. By design. In my circle of discussion, I’ve found out (to my dismay) that this definition of PRR has also been used for other vaccines. Just during the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, important safety signals have come and gone without notice, such as the MedDRA term “death” showed up as a signal in dispersion analysis in February, but no longer does due to the rising quantity of so many other AEs, which forces structural mean-reversion of the PPR function (toward 1) by inflating the denominator. In other words, the number of an AE, a, is normalized to the total number of adverse events (not the number vaccinated, or doses), the ratio of which is then normalized again to the aggregated totals (fraction c over c + d) from other vaccines.

Read more …

“..there isn’t an aware person who wouldn’t call a halt at this point.”

• Covid-19 Injections Dangerous For Mothers and Babies (Yeadon)

The covid-19 vaccines currently subject to emergency use authorisations all share a common and novel feature: they are gene-based products. Instead of containing a small amount of killed or live-attenuated pathogen, they instead comprise genetic code, instructions as it were to manufacture in our own cells a part of the pathogen. In some products, the genetic code is of DNA & use a weakened respiratory virus to ensure delivery to our cells, or of messenger RNA (the intermediate between the DNA of our genes and the protein product thereby manufactured). There is a further commonality: they cause the recipients cells to manufacture a portion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called the spike protein. This is literally the spike projecting outwards from the spherical object that contains the virus itself.

As detailed elsewhere in this packet of information, coronavirus spike proteins are biologically active and they initiate the blood coagulation cascade among other properties. It is alleged that it is the induction of blood coagulation in various locations in the body which is responsible for a high proportion of the serious adverse events including deaths which are being reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in the USA and in analogous databases elsewhere. The rate of fatal outcomes following covid-19 vaccination, usually from clotting or bleeding disorders, is extraordinary and exceeds that from any previous vaccine by a very large amount, which this reviewer estimates is of the order of 60-fold.

That this astonishingly high rate of adverse events after vaccination is a consequence of two factors: 1. The manufacturers were simply not required to study the way the product moves around the body after injection and 2. They were not required to study the functional effects of the genetic code within the product after administration. There are no products on the mass market which operate in this way. It is my expert opinion that this is the greatest failure of medicinal product regulation in relation to reproductive health since thalidomide and is very much greater in terms of societal impact. It is imperative that all these products be suspended until improved safety testing can determine whether there are any groups in whom the benefits outweigh the risks.

[..] It is essential to lay out the backdrop to the current position with clinical use of covid-19 vaccines, for one reason: we have NEVER, since thalidomide, exposed women of childbearing potential (WOCBP) and ESPECIALLY NEVER pregnant women to ANY novel, experimental pharmaceutical product without that product first having completed a full battery of reproductive toxicology tests. Even after this crucial step, pilot studies are always conducted in a small number of pregnant women to minimise risk to the developing fetus. Neither of these essential steps have been undertaken.

[..] This new data, which shows that women do raise antibodies to a component of their placenta after vaccination with the Pfizer/BioTech product, raises serious concerns for fetal safety. It is not safe to assume that this will not have adverse consequences on successful pregnancy. It is not safe to assume that the other vaccines will not have similar effects. Again, as with the distributional study, a presumption of risk, potentially severe, arises from these clinical observations, and there isn’t an aware person who wouldn’t call a halt at this point.

Read more …

“There are effective treatments. It’s unnecessary to test asymptomatic people because the CDC says that they don’t spread the virus.”

• Class Action Lawsuit Says Vaccine Has Killed 45,000 People (Rumble)

Michael Green has filed a class action lawsuit at first representing 1,200 first responders against the Governor & Mayor’s vaccine mandates with thousands more expected to join. Michael Green says that the vaccine is killing people all around the country. There are effective treatments. It’s unnecessary to test asymptomatic people because the CDC says that they don’t spread the virus. Honolulu Fire Captain Kaimi Pelekai gives an emotional testimony about losing his job because he doesn’t want to put this experimental vaccine in his body that is killing people.

Read more …

Mean score drops from 100 to 78.

• Children Born During Pandemic Have Lower IQs (G.)

Children born during the coronavirus pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor and overall cognitive performance compared with children born before, a US study suggests. The first few years of a child’s life are critical to their cognitive development. But with Covid-19 triggering the closure of businesses, nurseries, schools and playgrounds, life for infants changed considerably, with parents stressed and stretched as they tried to balance work and childcare. With limited stimulation at home and less interaction with the world outside, pandemic-era children appear to have scored shockingly low on tests designed to assess cognitive development, said lead study author Sean Deoni, associate professor of paediatrics (research) at Brown University.

In the decade preceding the pandemic, the mean IQ score on standardised tests for children aged between three months and three years of age hovered around 100, but for children born during the pandemic that number tumbled to 78, according to the analysis, which is yet to be peer-reviewed. “It’s not subtle by any stretch,” said Deoni. “You don’t typically see things like that, outside of major cognitive disorders.” The study included 672 children from the state of Rhode Island. Of these, 188 were born after July 2020 and 308 were born prior to January 2019, while 176 were born between January 2019 and March 2020. The children included in the study were born full-term, had no developmental disabilities and were mostly white.

Those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds fared worse in the tests, the researchers found. The biggest reason behind the falling scores is likely the lack of stimulation and interaction at home, said Deoni. “Parents are stressed and frazzled … that interaction the child would normally get has decreased substantially.” Whether these lower cognitive scores will have a long-term impact is unclear. In the first few years of life, the foundations for cognition are laid, much like building a house – it’s easier to add rooms or flourishes when you’re building the foundation, Deoni said. “The ability to course-correct becomes smaller, the older that child gets.”

Read more …

“In mid-December, before the first person had full vaccinated immunity, cases were falling dramatically in the United States. Herd Immunity. For real. It was over. We had suffered, but, had we not been stupid, Covid was more-or-less finished with us.”

• Well, ****…. (Denninger)

“Antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection is a safety concern for vaccine strategies. In a recent publication, Li et al. (Cell 184 :1-17, 2021) have reported that infection-enhancing antibodies directed against the N-terminal domain (NTD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein facilitate virus infection in vitro, but not in vivo. However, this study was performed with the original Wuhan/D614G strain. Since the Covid-19 pandemic is now dominated with Delta variants, we analyzed the interaction of facilitating antibodies with the NTD of these variants. Using molecular modelling approaches, we show that enhancing antibodies have a higher affinity for Delta variants than for Wuhan/D614G NTDs.

We show that enhancing antibodies reinforce the binding of the spike trimer to the host cell membrane by clamping the NTD to lipid raft microdomains. This stabilizing mechanism may facilitate the conformational change that induces the demasking of the receptor binding domain. As the NTD is also targeted by neutralizing antibodies, our data suggest that the balance between neutralizing and facilitating antibodies in vaccinated individuals is in favor of neutralization for the original Wuhan/D614G strain. However, in the case of the Delta variant, neutralizing antibodies have a decreased affinity for the spike protein, whereas facilitating antibodies display a strikingly increased affinity. Thus, ADE may be a concern for people receiving vaccines based on the original Wuhan strain spike sequence (either mRNA or viral vectors).”

You stupid, stupid bastards….. Coronaviruses have a long history of doing this sort of thing and its one of the reasons we’ve never managed to have a vaccine developed for them before; it simply doesn’t work. But we were sure it wouldn’t happen this time. It had happened all the other times, but not this time. We were so sure we didn’t need to take the several years required to prove it. We’re smart! We have the new technology, never before deployed in man or beast, which we were absolutely certain would evade the risk that had always, in previous trials, derailed attempted vaccines. Oh, and there were also billions of dollars involved for the companies involved and many newly minted billionaires to be, including the NIH itself who holds some of the patents involved.

So here’s what happened. In mid-December, before the first person had full vaccinated immunity, cases were falling dramatically in the United States. Herd Immunity. For real. It was over. We had suffered, but, had we not been stupid, Covid was more-or-less finished with us. Yes, there were and would remain some of us who hadn’t gotten it, and the extremely rare person who could get it a second time, that would continue to get the virus. It was, however, over. But we were stupid. We jabbed a huge percentage of our population. And as has occurred every other time with coronavirus vaccine attempts the virus mutated around the protection and in fact used the vaccine antibodies to enhance infection. Delta is in fact promoted by those who were vaccinated. As with all other Covid variants most people get a mild or no real illness, but some people get hammered.

However, prior infection doesn’t help if you got jabbed since you took a drug that helps the virus attack you. We created a third wave by our own stupidity: Stupidity seen in nation after nation, but only in nations with high vaccine prevalence; Israel, the UK, Iceland and here in the United States. Don’t run the bull**** on me that this isn’t happening: Not only is the science now in on how its happening but Israel and Palestine, two nations literally next door to each with one having near 100% vaccination and the other about 10% could not be more-stark. Palestine is seeing a small uptick in infections while Israel is getting hammered. The “smartest men in the room” screwed not just a nation — bad enough — but an enormously-large part of the world. Including, quite possibly, you. There’s a reason we’ve never attempted to vaccinate against coronaviruses before. THIS IS THE REASON!

Read more …

Would new vaccines help? Only until the next one.

• French Study Claims ADE Occurring In Delta Variant Infections (TMN)

A new study by French researchers from Aix-Marseille Université has alarmingly found that ADE or antibody dependent enhancement is indeed occurring in infections with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant. The study findings were peer reviewed and published in the Journal of Infections. ADE or antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection is a safety concern for vaccine strategies. A misleading earlier study reported that infection-enhancing antibodies directed against the N-terminal domain (NTD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein facilitate virus infection in vitro, but not in vivo. This study however was performed with the original Wuhan/D614G strain. Importantly since the COVID-19 pandemic is now dominated with Delta variants, the study team analyzed the interaction of facilitating antibodies with the NTD of these variants.

Utilizing molecular modeling approaches, the team showed that enhancing antibodies have a higher affinity for Delta variants than for Wuhan/D614G NTDs. The study team demonstrated that enhancing antibodies reinforce the binding of the spike trimer to the host cell membrane by clamping the NTD to lipid raft microdomains. This stabilizing mechanism may facilitate the conformational change that induces the de-masking of the receptor binding domain. As the NTD is also targeted by neutralizing antibodies, the study data suggest that the balance between neutralizing and facilitating antibodies in vaccinated individuals is in favor of neutralization for the original Wuhan/D614G strain. Alarmingly, in the case of the Delta variant, neutralizing antibodies have a decreased affinity for the spike protein, whereas facilitating antibodies display a strikingly increased affinity.

Hence antibody dependent enhancement or ADE may be a concern for people receiving vaccines based on the original Wuhan strain spike sequence (either mRNA or viral vectors). Under these circumstances, second generation vaccines with spike protein formulations lacking structurally-conserved ADE-related epitopes should be considered. [..] It should be noted that all current Covid-19 vaccines (either mRNA or viral vectors) are based on the original Wuhan spike sequence. In as much as neutralizing antibodies overwhelm facilitating antibodies, ADE is not a concern. However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants may tip the scales in favor of infection enhancement. The study’s structural and modeling data suggest that it might be indeed the case for Delta variants. The study team concludes and warns that ADE may occur in individuals receiving vaccines based on the original Wuhan strain spike sequence (either mRNA or viral vectors) and then exposed to a Delta variant.

Read more …

But The Science!

• Denmark Abolishes All Corona Measures (FFN)

Danish parliament recently decided in Copenhagen that all Corona measures should be ended from October 1. There will therefore no longer be a mask requirement and the test regime will be abolished. The Danes will then no longer have to provide evidence of whether they are vaccinated or unvaccinated, or whether they have tested positive or negative. All Corona measures are being lifted in view of the increasing incidence figures in Denmark, reported RT Deutsch. Since the beginning of July this value has risen from 31 to 107,2 (as of August 8). At the same time, the upper limits of this Corona indicator has increased significantly. At the same time, the incidence limits are increased significantly: In communities from 300 to 500 infected people within seven days, in the districts from 500 to 1000.

However, the prerequisite is that an increasing number of Covid-19 patients does not overload the health care system. Denmark’s SSI infectious diseases agency said it no longer relied on vaccination to achieve herd immunity in the country. Tyra Grove Krause, the SSI’s acting academic director, said a new wave of infections were expected after people return to work and school at the end of this summer, but it should not be cause for alarm. “It will be more reminiscent of the flu,” Krause said. Overall, the current vaccination rate is just under 58,4 percent of fully vaccinated people in Denmark. In Germany, this value is only slightly lower at 54,5 percent (as of August 8) but vaccine advocates have been persistent in their fear-mongering and pressure on the unvaccinated.

Tyrolean lawyer Dr. Renate Holzeisen, meanwhile strongly recommended that all employers refrain from vaccination pressure or compulsory vaccination, because most of them were “obviously not even aware of the far-reaching legal consequences associated with it”. The fact that the so-called Covid-19 vaccines, according to the official approval documents of the EMA and the European Commission were not developed and approved for the prevention of infection with the SARS-COV-2 virus, but solely to prevent a more severe course of the disease, were conditionally approved for this reason alone, Holzeisen underscored.

The official approval documents therefore show that these substances cannot interrupt the chain of infection because the people treated with them can become infected and thus be infectious. Practice also proves that people who are completely “vaccinated” become infected with the virus and even have the same viral load as “unvaccinated people” as the CDC, among others, has admitted. It is therefore clear that any Covid-19 “compulsory vaccination” actually lacks any justification. All pressure, including moral pressure (alleged act of solidarity with one’s neighbor) is therefore illegal in terms of criminal and liability law based on the official approval documents.

Read more …

But we knew they were coming?! Why didn’t you prepare?

• New Covid Variants ‘Will Set Us Back A Year’, Experts Warn UK Government (O.)

Ministers are being pressed to reveal what contingency plans are in place to deal with a future Covid variant that evades current vaccines, amid warnings from scientific advisers that such an outcome could set the battle against the pandemic back a year or more. Recent papers produced by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) have suggested that the arrival of a variant that evades vaccines is a “realistic possibility”. Sage backed continued work on new vaccines that reduce infection and transmission more than current jabs, the creation of more vaccine-production facilities in the UK and lab-based studies to predict evolution of variants. With the arrival of a new variant seen as one of the main dangers that could intensify the crisis once again, prominent scientific figures stressed the risks.

Prof Graham Medley, a member of Sage and a leader of the government’s Covid modelling group, said it was “clearly something that the planners and scientists should take very seriously as it would put us back a long way”. “It is not that different to the planning that needs to be done between pandemics – a new variant that was able to overcome immunity significantly would be essentially a new virus,” he said. “The advantage would be that we know we can generate vaccines against this virus – and relatively quickly. The disadvantage is that we would be back to the same situation we were in a year ago, depending on how much impact current immunity had against a new variant. Hopefully, evolution is slow, so that new variants arise that are only marginally evasive rather than one big jump.”

Dr Marc Baguelin, from Imperial College’s Covid-19 response team and a member of the government’s SPI-M modelling group, said preventing the importation of variants of concern with “moderate to high immune-escape properties would be critical, as these could lead to future waves orders of magnitude larger than the ones experienced so far”. “It is unlikely that such a new virus evades entirely all immunity from past infection or vaccines,” he said. “Some immunity should remain at least for the most severe outcomes such as death or hospitalisation. We would most likely be able to update the current vaccines to include the emerging strain. “But doing so would take months and means that we might need to reimpose restrictions if there were a significant public health risk. The amount of restrictions would be a political decision and would need to be proportionate with how much this virus would evade current vaccines.”

Read more …

Not long ago all of it was voluntary. All of it.

• Booster Shots Will ‘Be Obligatory For Trips Abroad And Care Home Staff’ (DM)

Booster jabs are set to be compulsory for travel abroad and care home staff in plans under discussion by Ministers. A source close to the talks about Covid certification told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The assumption is that you will be required to have the most up-to-date health passport. ‘So if the advice is to have a booster six months after your second jab, then that is what you’ll need.’ At the moment, double-jabbed Brits can go to amber list countries without having to quarantine upon their return. Booster vaccines will be compulsory for care home workers once they are rolled out, a senior Government source said. This will add to the legal requirements for care home staff, who from October will have to be double-jabbed to work in the sector, subject to parliamentary approval.

Millions are set to be offered a third jab from September after Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced the roll-out to priority groups. A Minister told the Mail on Sunday the ‘logical’ move will be to make the booster shots a requirement for travel, adding that the most up-to-date Covid certification for travel will become as normal as the need to have a yellow fever jab to enter certain countries. Last night Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, said: ‘If I were the Government I would tread carefully on this. Booster jabs will take a while to get to the majority of the travelling public. ‘And there are issues around whether they are necessary – some scientists say that they may not be necessary.’

Meanwhile talks about what booster jabs will mean for domestic certification are still at an early stage within Government. One insider said that, as domestic passports have only been announced for nightclubs, discussions over whether boosters will one day be required for entry are still in ‘very early days’. The Government will make its decision on boosters following final advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which is reviewing the scientific evidence on the third jabs. The JCVI previously issued interim advice in June that Brits ‘should be prepared’ for another round of inoculations.

Read more …

The article doesn’t know whether to agree or not.

• The Teens Who’d Prefer To Catch Covid Than Have The Vaccine (DM)

Trawling through Government Covid statistics might seem like a strange hobby for a 16-year-old. But when he isn’t practising on his guitar, or watching TikTok videos, that’s what Jacob Mellor can be found doing. And thanks to his keen interest in ‘the data’, he has come to a decision – one that could have a profound impact on his own health and that of those around him. Earlier this month, when it was announced that all 16- and 17-year-olds would be offered a Covid jab, Jacob promptly announced he would be opting out. All the evidence, he says, shows this virus is not a threat to him. And so he feels it would be better to catch Covid, and develop natural immunity, than to have a vaccine.

‘From the beginning we’ve been told that this virus didn’t affect kids,’ says Jacob, from Croydon in South London, who attends an independent school. ‘We even had assemblies about it at school, telling us why we shouldn’t worry because it’s just a cold for people my age. ‘So why should I take a vaccine to protect against something I won’t get ill from? Especially when I know there’s a risk involved with having it. The risk is small, I appreciate that, but it’s still there and I can’t get over that.’ Not only does Jacob have no qualms about catching Covid, he is almost looking forward to it. ‘It would be a good thing, in my eyes. I’d build a strong immunity and I wouldn’t have to worry about risks, like I would with the jab,’ he says.

‘Loads of my friends had Covid last year and the worst that happened was that they were stuck in bed for a couple of days. We all see Covid as something we’re not really bothered about. If I get it, it might suck for a few days, but I’ll be immune, so there’s a benefit to me.’ According to Jacob’s mother Sally, her eldest child – who is one of three, with siblings aged 14 and nine – is ‘an independent thinker’ and has been ‘brought up to appreciate the value of natural immunity’. Sally, a 51-year-old creative director for a major retailer, and husband Steve, 49, a recruitment director, haven’t been vaccinated either. ‘I believe in natural immunity, and I’m nervous about the lack of long-term data about the Covid vaccine,’ she adds.

‘We were a family that would be outside in the dirt and around animals, and I told the kids this would protect them from allergies and make sure they could fight off infections. ‘So Jacob has always asked questions when it came to vaccines, from a very young age – like why did he have to have a tetanus booster, for instance – although he did have all his childhood jabs.’ While more than 16,000 of Britain’s 1.5 million 16- and 17-year-olds took up the Government’s offer to get jabbed last weekend, thousands, like Jacob, are not as enthusiastic. The latest Office for National Statistics Covid survey suggests one in ten of them don’t plan to have the vaccine.

Read more …

“But *NOW* you are the problem. You are guilty. You are an extremist. You didn’t change at all. Something else changed. But notice how the spotlight on what changed is YOU, and not the origin of the change?”

• I Wish To Take A Little Walk With You And Talk, Deliberately, About This (TLR)

Something shifted after the election of Barack H Obama in 2008. Something subtle that was quietly taking place in the background that surfaced just slow enough so that most people didn’t notice. But before getting to that, let’s first just look at the DHS announcement as presented in their words. Look at this small sentence and the worldview it expresses: ..”Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances over public health safety measures and perceived government restrictions.”.. Notice the word “perceived”? The government imposed mandates, mask and vaccination requirements are only “perceived government restrictions.” In essence, the chains that bind your expressions of liberty and freedom are merely figments of your imagination.


The needle being forced into the arm of federal workers by the Federal Government is only the perception of a forced medical treatment. Your perception of what they are doing is the problem. You must therefore correct your wrong-thoughts to eliminate the wrong perception. Yes, Dear Leader appreciates your compliance. Your reluctance to change your perception is what identifies you as an extremist. Think about that for a moment with your friends and family. The label of Domestic Extremist is applied to the target who is reluctant to change their perception. The target is transparently innocent of any wrongdoing. They are doing, feeling, believing, and ultimately living, exactly the same as they always have…. but something now is different. You are transparently innocent, yet you are now guilty and labeled. This takes our conversation to an inflection point.

When Barack H Obama was elected/installed as the President of the United States, the people in/around him brought forward a new approach. While the U.S. media had always been biased, manipulative and dishonest, there was something more that changed after the installation of The One, the Lightbringer… and it was assisted by the rise of Big Tech and Social Media. The shift coincided with the merge between the intelligence apparatus and the new platforms of social media. The speed of the shift aligned with the speed of technology that was driving communication. Together the intelligence apparatus, the customary U.S. media and Big Tech began testing how far and how fast they could control the outlook of Americans. Historic leftists, progressives, used to justify their own behavior, and the behavior of their tribe through the media.

History is replete with leftist media excusing the behavior of the transparently guilty. The media would create narratives to justify extremism they aligned with. The transparently guilty were excused and defended. We became used to seeing this. However, when traditional media merged in ideology with social media, no longer was they trying to excuse or justify the transparently guilty of accountability; starting around 2011 & 2012 what the new-era attack started to do was falsely accuse the transparently innocent. Together with ideological institutions in government (Obama’s crew ie. DOJ etc.), the customary U.S. media and Big Tech began testing how far and fast they could control the outlook of Americans… to accuse the transparently innocent. The shift was directly proportional to the training, teaching and development of the crew that came with Obama. All classically trained Saul Alinsky followers.

The Harvard police officer (James Crowley), just doing his job…. that led to Henry Louis Gates outrage, that led to the big PR effort and the beer summit. “Never let a crisis go to waste”… All optically and narrative controlled. Then came George Zimmerman, then Darren Wilson, then The Baltimore Six,… all, again, transparently innocent – but the media framework was exactly the opposite. They were able to label the transparently innocent as ‘guilty’, just by controlling information. Skip through the years of numerous examples as the orchestration continued. The manipulative effort is driven by political intent. Take a transparently innocent person and manipulate a narrative to make them guilty Now, pause for a moment and go back to the current DHS announcement.

What does this current DHS terrorism bulletin do? It exactly continues the process. Government is now expanding the targeting of the transparently innocent. You hold the same ideas, outlooks, worldviews, and expectations of Liberty and Freedom that you held yesterday, last week, last month and perhaps even long before 9-11-01… But *NOW* you are the problem. You are guilty. You are an extremist. You didn’t change at all. Something else changed. But notice how the spotlight on what changed is YOU, and not the origin of the change? You are the problem. Not those changing the structures of freedom or liberty… YOU are the guilty party. See how they did that? See the shift now?

Read more …

 

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Debt Rattle August 14 2021

Aug 142021
 
 August 14, 2021  Posted by at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  125 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The old guitarist 1903-4

 

• Biden Admin Warns Of Threat From Anti-Lockdown ‘Extremists’ and More (RT)
• Ex-Pfizer VP Urges Pregnant, Childbearing Age Women Not To Get Vaccine (CP)
• Dr. Peter McCullough – Ends The Pandemic With 5 COVID Facts (LS)
• Pfizer CEO to Public: Just Trust Us on the Covid Booster (KHN)
• Renowned German Pathologist Urges More Autopsies of Vaccinated People (NA)
• Israel Predicts Thousands Of Seriously Ill Covid Patients Within Month (ToI)
• Japanese Doctors Recommend Ivermectin to Cure Corona (Tribun)
• Why Won’t Our Government Even Inform People About Vitamin D? (Horowitz)
• Head Of WHO Covid Origin Team Admits China Ordered Them What To Write (SN)
• Drug Firms Poised To Make Billions Of Dollars From Covid Booster Jabs (G.)
• Low-Cost Test Could Detect Delta Variant In Saliva (MNT)
• Brace for Impact (Kunstler)
• The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama (Taibbi)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The right thing
https://twitter.com/i/status/1422286221015982082

 

 

 

 

The storyline is being written right before your eyes:

Unvaccinated = Anti-Lockdown Extremist = Conspiracy Theorist = Domestic Terrorist = Jihadist = Al-Qaeda.

“..though there are currently no credible or imminent threats identified.”

• Biden Admin Warns Of Threat From Anti-Lockdown ‘Extremists’ and More (RT)

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a terror warning that appears to put Americans pushing back against Covid-19 restrictions on par with jihadists who might strike on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. A DHS bulletin published Friday said that “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists” may try to “exploit the emergence of Covid-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the US as a rationale to conduct attacks.” The Covid-19 pandemic has stoked “societal strains and tensions,” the DHS said, “driving several plots by domestic violent extremists, and they may contribute to more violence this year.”

The terrorism warning, which runs through November 11, cited a host of other potential threats, including violent bigots who may perpetrate mass-casualty attacks, “though there are currently no credible or imminent threats identified.” Other potential attackers include “domestic violent extremists” and other “ideologically-motivated” individuals who may be triggered by “conspiracy theories” on such issues as “perceived election fraud,” DHS said. “Law enforcement have expressed concerns that the broader sharing of false narratives and conspiracy theories will gain traction in mainstream environments, resulting in individuals or small groups embracing violent attacks to achieve their desired objectives,” the bulletin claimed.

President Joe Biden’s administration has elevated domestic “extremism” as a top security threat in the wake of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. Democrat politicians have hyped the riot as a racially motivated “insurrection,” and Biden in April called it “the worst attack on our Democracy since the Civil War.” Critics pushed back against the claim, noting such previous tragedies as the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, four presidential assassinations and – more recently – race riots that torched cities and left dozens of people dead last summer.

On Friday, however, the DHS again raised the specter of January 6. DHS intelligence chief John Cohen told CNN that online rhetoric is similar to the chatter seen before the Capitol riot. He cited such “extremist” comments as “the system is broken,” “take action into their own hands,” and “bring out the gallows.” DHS also noted that, with the 20-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaching, Al-Qaeda recently published the first issue of its English-language magazine in more than four years. That move “demonstrates that foreign terrorist organizations continue efforts to inspire US-based individuals susceptible to violent extremist influences,” the agency said.

Read more …

It really has never been tested. Some things are still hard to believe.

“Our government is urging pregnant women, and women of childbearing age, to get vaccinated. And they’re telling them they’re safe. And that’s a lie because those studies have simply not been done.“

• Ex-Pfizer VP Urges Pregnant, Childbearing Age Women Not To Get Vaccine (CP)

A former Pfizer executive recently advised that women of childbearing age and those who are already pregnant should consider opting out of taking the COVID-19 vaccine. “We never, ever give experimental medicines to pregnant women,” said Michael Yeadon, Ph.D., in a presentation for Life Site News’ “Stop the Shot” conference held on Aug. 4 that featured physicians, scientists, attorneys and religious leaders. Yeadon, who holds degrees in biochemistry and toxicology, and a Ph.D. in respiratory pharmacology, served as vice president and chief scientist for allergy and respiratory at Pfizer until 2011, when he retired to launch his own biotech company after working in the pharmaceutical industry for 32 years.

The British pharmacologist, who has attracted media attention for questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, criticized those in power for not providing the public with adequate information about vaccine risks. “You’re being lied to,” he said to pregnant women who’ve been told that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe for them and their preborn babies. “That’s bad enough because what that tells me is that there’s recklessness. No one cares. The authorities do not care what happens,” Yeadon asserted. “You never ever give inadequately tested medicines, medicinal products, to a pregnant woman,” he continued. “And that is exactly what is happening. Our government is urging pregnant women, and women of childbearing age, to get vaccinated. And they’re telling them they’re safe. And that’s a lie because those studies have simply not been done.”

Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, advise that pregnant women can get the COVID-19 vaccine. Similarly, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have urged pregnant women to get vaccinated. The CDC states that pregnant women are at increased risk for severe illness with COVID-19 compared to non-pregnant women, adding that they’re also at increased risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes. CDC adds that experts believe the vaccines are “unlikely to pose a risk for people who are pregnant,” but “there are currently limited data on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant people.”

During his presentation, Yeadon listed three concerns he has with COVID-19 vaccines that he said haven’t undergone adequate toxicology testing to assess their effects on the reproductive system. Thousands of birth malformations resulted from pregnant women taking thalidomide to treat morning sickness 60 years ago, he said, because studies at the time did not assess that thalidomide was toxic for babies in the womb. “So here we are. There’s been potentially hundreds of millions of women of child-bearing potential [injected] with products which are untested in terms of impacts on fertilization and development of the baby,” he continued. Yeadon added that a study out of Japan found high concentrations of the spike protein in the ovaries, organs and tissue when tested on rats.

“What we find is the vaccine [in rats] doesn’t just distribute around the body and then wash out again, which is what you’d hope,” he said. “It concentrates in ovaries of rats, and it concentrates at least 20-fold over the concentration in other background tissues like muscles.” “You don’t want this product in your ovaries. It’s simply not necessary to induce immunity to have a vaccine in your ovaries. And, as it’s concentrating in the ovaries, getting higher concentrations over time, they have not even defined what the maximum levels are or when that occurs,” he added.

Read more …

And this man is being sued for $1 million.

• Dr. Peter McCullough – Ends The Pandemic With 5 COVID Facts (LS)

Dr. Peter McCullough – Ends The Pandemic With 5 COVID Facts

1. The virus does not spread asymptomatically.

2. We should never test asymptomatic people.

3. Natural immunity is robust, complete, and durable.

4. COVID-19 is easily treatable at home.

5. The current vaccines are obsolete, unsafe, and unfit for human use.

Read more …

“Pfizer announced its global phase 3 trial on a third dose in mid-July. That trial’s completion date is in 2022.”

But they will give it to you in September. Already have in Israel. Trials are for pussies.

• Pfizer CEO to Public: Just Trust Us on the Covid Booster (KHN)

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was confident in June about the ability of his company’s vaccine to protect against the highly contagious delta variant, as it marched across the globe and filled U.S. hospitals with patients. “I feel quite comfortable that we cover it,” Bourla said. Just weeks later, Pfizer said it would seek authorization for a booster shot, after early trial results showed a third dose potentially increased protection. At the end of July, Pfizer and BioNTech announced findings that four to six months after a second dose, their vaccine’s efficacy dropped to about 84%. Bourla was quick to promote a third dose after the discouraging news, saying he was “very, very confident” that a booster would increase immunity levels in the vaccinated. There’s one hitch: Pfizer has not yet delivered conclusive proof to back up that confidence.

The company lacks late-stage clinical trial results to confirm a booster will work against covid variants including delta, which now accounts for 93% of new infections across the U.S. Pfizer announced its global phase 3 trial on a third dose in mid-July. That trial’s completion date is in 2022. Phase 3 results generally are required before regulatory approval. “We are confident in this vaccine and the third dose, but you have to remember the vaccine efficacy study is still going on, so we need all the evidence to back up that,” Jerica Pitts, Pfizer’s director of global media relations, said Monday. The financial stakes are enormous: Pfizer announced in July that it expects $33.5 billion in covid-19 vaccine revenue this year. Meanwhile, Pfizer recently said that if a third dose couldn’t combat the delta or other variants, the drugmaker is poised to come up with a “tailor-made” vaccine within 100 days.

All of this has sown a sense of confusion about what exactly will work, and when. The pharmaceutical industry’s rush to recommend boosters for the public is “a little frustrating,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an adviser to the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration. Even if a booster is found to be safe, he said, the U.S. effort should focus on “vaccinating people who are unvaccinated.” In any case, decisions about boosters do not rest with vaccine makers, he said. “Pharmaceutical companies aren’t public health agencies, it’s really not theirs to determine when or whether there should be booster dosing,” Offit said. “That is the purview of the CDC.”

Read more …

“..if we had had a data and safety monitoring board, they would have shut down the vaccine in February of 2021..”

• Renowned German Pathologist Urges More Autopsies of Vaccinated People (NA)

A renowned German pathologist has sounded the alarm on the number of fatal consequences of COVID-19 vaccinations being drastically underestimated, according to his findings. Peter Schirmacher, the director of the Pathological Institute of the University of Heidelberg, who was admired by The Pathologist magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential professionals in the field, stated that 30 to 40 percent of people who died within two weeks after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine and whom he performed an autopsy on died from the vaccination, according to the local outlet Augsburger Allgemeine.

The pathologist argues that just like cadavers of people who died from COVID-19, corpses of people who die within the short period of time after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine should be examined more frequently and meticulously. He added that currently, pathologists do not study possible connections between inoculation and a development of deadly health implications such as cerebral vein thrombosis or autoimmune diseases. Since vaccinated people usually do not die under clinical observation, Schirmacher explains, “The doctor examining the corpse does not establish a context with the vaccination and certifies a natural death and the patient is buried. Or he certifies an unclear type of death, and the public prosecutor sees no third-party fault and releases the corpse for burial.”

Schirmacher said that in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, his autopsy group worked closely with public prosecutors, the police, and resident doctors to study the phenomenon, and that the vaccine-related morbidity rate that they established is a “politically explosive statement in times when the vaccination campaign is losing momentum, the delta variant is spreading rapidly and restrictions on non-vaccinated people are being discussed.” [..]The administration of German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected Schirmacher’s conclusions and seemingly declined his calls, stating that vaccines are safe. The Paul Ehrlich Institute, a German federal agency, medical regulatory body, and research institution for vaccines and biomedicines, announced that Schirmacher’s statements were “incomprehensible.”

Thomas Mertens, chairman of the Standing Committee on Vaccination (Stiko), dismissed the findings: “I don’t know of any data that would allow a justifiable statement to be made here and I am not assuming an unreported number.” Schirmacher defends his opinion and calls for further study into the issue. “My colleagues are definitely wrong because they cannot assess this specific question competently,” he responded. Schirmacher added that while he has no intention to spread panic or discourage vaccination, he believes that “individual protection consideration” had been overlooked in the attempt to mass-vaccinate the general public.

[..] The underreporting of vaccine-related deaths and adverse effects is becoming an issue in the United States as well. As reported by the New American, a lawsuit filed in federal court in Alabama is alleging that the federal government is hiding, as of the beginning of July, “at least 45,000” deaths related to COVID-19 vaccines. According to the testimony from whistleblower working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and who has access to government servers including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service, there is evidence that the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System (VAERS), which collects data on vaccine-related deaths, is under-reporting such deaths “by a conservative factor of at least five.” According to Dr. Peter McCullough, since typically only 10 percent of vaccine-injury cases make it to VAERS, the death toll from the vaccines may actually be 10-fold higher than the official number. Still, he said, a vaccine that leads to 150 deaths is usually withdrawn from use. “I think if we had had a data and safety monitoring board, they would have shut down the vaccine in February of 2021,” McCullough said.

Read more …

Berenson: “Israel, with a nearly entirely vaccinated adult population, now expects this coronavirus wave to be the worst yet – up to 2,500 serious cases compared to 1,200 in January.


Note: the article doesn’t mention vaccines once. It’s like they never even happened.”

• Israel Predicts Thousands Of Seriously Ill Covid Patients Within Month (ToI)

Israeli hospitals have to prepare for an influx of nearly 5,000 coronavirus patients within weeks, half of whom will need acute care to deal with severe bouts of COVID-19, health officials have warned Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, according to reports Wednesday. The dire predictions came during a Tuesday meeting between Bennett and senior health experts amid a major influx of new cases, prompting the premier to back a plan to expand hospital capacity, a signal that the government will look to absorb the crush of severe cases head-on rather than attempt to swerve out of its way. Senior Health Ministry officials and other experts presented Bennett with data forecasting some 4,800 coronavirus patients requiring hospitalization by September 10.


The experts expect half of the patients to be seriously ill, putting a major strain on Israel’s health system, according to Hebrew-language media reports on the closed-door meeting. Israel has seen new case numbers skyrocket in recent weeks from a few dozen a day to over 6,000 on Monday. Another 5,755 were diagnosed on Tuesday, the Health Ministry said Wednesday morning, bringing the number of active cases to 38,942. Ministry numbers showed 694 patients hospitalized as of Wednesday morning, 400 of whom were listed in serious condition. Sixty-two people were being treated on ventilators. Bennett and Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz agreed to pump money into the health system to bring in 100 more doctors, 500 nurses and 200 paramedical and support staff every 10 days to keep up with growing demand, according to a summary of the meeting drafted by the Prime Minister’s Office and published by the Ynet news site.

Read more …

More Israel. This one is a bit strange, a Google doc as a pic in Hebrew, no access. But the details, via Ran Israeli, are interesting:

• New Concerning Results, Israel 2021 (Prof. Retsef Levi)

MDA Emergency calls:

25% increase in Cardiac arrests & Heart attacks (16-29).

83.6% increase in Heart attacks (Women 20-29).

According to the study, this increase was correlated with Mass vaccination.

Read more …

Google translate from Indonesia.

• Japanese Doctors Recommend Ivermectin to Cure Corona (Tribun)

Dr. Kazuhiro Nagao (63) Chairman of medical company Yuwakai, director (Head) of Nagao Amagasaki Clinic, Hyogo prefecture, and visiting professor at Kansai University of International Studies highly recommend Ivermectin as a drug that can cure early patients infected with the corona virus. “Medical situation we are currently in a state of almost critical and many patients can not be accommodated in the hospital. For patients who are exposed to the corona early is highly recommended to drink the drug Ivermectin . I’ve tried a lot to me and heal patients,” said Dr. Nagao this afternoon (12/8/2021) on NTV. Professor Nagao also sees this (the drug Ivermectin ) as one of the solutions among many efforts to suppress the increasing number of people infected with the corona and at risk of becoming severe.

“In the early stages it’s good to take the drug . I always give my patients the drug , of course it’s made in Japan and the next day it gets better. I ask them to report to me every day the effects of the drug and it turns out to be good, they get well immediately,” he continued again. . In addition, Dr. Nagao also appealed to the Minister of Health and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to immediately promote the drug Ivermectin to the public so that it would be widely used among those infected with the early corona virus. “So far, all of my patients are good, recovering without any problems with the drug . In addition, the drug is also guaranteed and included in insurance coverage in Japan . So I think it’s not a problem and light, not too burdensome for the Japanese people ,” he added.

Until now, the Japanese government, especially the ministry of health, is still monitoring the use of the drug Ivermectin in Japan , and there has been no decision to promote the drug in the midst of the current pandemic. Tokyo itself this Thursday (12/8/2021) drastically increased the number of infected nearly 5000 people per day. Last week a doctor predicted that around August 18 the number of patients infected with the corona virus in Tokyo could reach 10,000 people per day. Professor Yoshihito Niki, Deputy Director of the Respiratory Center, Kurashiki Daiichi Hospital, Professor of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Japan’s Showa University School of Medicine estimates the number of infections could reach 10,000 people in Tokyo around August 18, he explained last August 6.

Read more …

Basics.

• Why Won’t Our Government Even Inform People About Vitamin D? (Horowitz)

Imagine if rather than running out to buy worthless Chinese face diapers or toilet paper last March, there had been a mad rush to stock up on vitamin D. What would our hospitalization rate have been after the initial wave, and after the early science was clear about the efficacy of vitamin D, had government mailed out free vitamin D to every American (especially in nursing homes)? For a fraction of the cost of a shutdown, waning vaccines, remdesivir, and endless welfare, government could have offered free blood tests of everyone’s vitamin D, C, and zinc levels and advised a plan to bulk up those levels?

Well, we have a new study that demonstrates a good number of hospitalizations could have been avoided. Government agencies that are censoring information on vitamin D can no longer say the same thing about the vaccines, given how Israel is now showing that the vaccine wears off and the country is preparing for the worst run on hospitals ever, despite nearly every adult having been vaccinated. And unlike the vaccines and everything else our government promoted and mandated, vitamin D comes with no risk, numerous other vital benefits, and empowers rather than controls people. There is a misnomer that those promoting vitamin D for COVID somehow believe that all people have to do after getting the virus is to take vitamin D and they will suddenly get better (although there is evidence it works in the active form).

That is obviously an easy straw man for those who oppose preventives and early treatment to knock down. In reality, while vitamin D is definitely important post-infection, it takes several months to bulk up one’s level if it is deficient. A new study recently published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice demonstrates that had Fauci and Co. simply told Americans, especially the vulnerable, to take high doses of Vitamin D (like he does), most of the hospitalizations could have been avoided. The meta-analysis of 23 published studies containing 11,901 participants found the following: One who is vitamin D deficient was 3.3 times more likely to get infected with SARS-CoV-2 than one who is not deficient.

The serum vitamin D concentration, on average, was 20.3 ng/mL among all COVID19 patients but was 16.0 ng/mL among those with severe cases. It’s recommended that one’s levels be at least over 40. “The chance of developing severe COVID-19 is about five times higher in patients with vitamin D deficiency.” A total of 84% of COVID patients in the study were either deficient or insufficient in vitamin D. In other words, whether your vitamin D level is 15, 30, or 50 will make all the difference in terms of getting a mild, moderate, or severe case of the virus, or perhaps getting it at all. How is it that, to this very day, there is no effort to inform people about such a painless, cheap, and effective fix?

Read more …

Horse, door, barn.

• Head Of WHO Covid Origin Team Admits China Ordered Them What To Write (SN)

The head of the World Health Organization’s origin investigation into COVID-19 has admitted that China basically ordered his team on what to write in their report and allowed them to mention the lab leak theory, but only on the condition that they didn’t recommend following it up. Revealing what is clear evidence of a cover up, the Washington Post reports that Danish WHO chief Ben Embarek made the admission after also commenting that he believes patient zero was a worker at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where experiments on coronaviruses were being carried out. Embarek noted that “human error” could have ultimately led to the virus jumping to humans, but that “the Chinese political system does not allow authorities to acknowledge that.”

Embarek commented that “Somebody could also wish to hide something.” As we have previously noted, the Communist Chinese government, along with Dr. Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, steered the course of the pathetic WHO “investigation”, which had already dismissed the lab leak notion after only a three hour visit to the facility in February. In addition, China has refused to cooperate with the renewed WHO probe, declaring that any attempt to look into the lab leak theory goes “against science” and claiming, contrary to U.S. intelligence and the WHO’s own conclusions, that workers in the lab were hospitalised with COVID in the autumn of 2020.

Read more …

The Guardian has two different articles on this. Must be important.

• Drug Firms Poised To Make Billions Of Dollars From Covid Booster Jabs (G.)

The drug companies Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are poised to make billions of dollars from Covid-19 booster jabs this autumn, with analysts estimating that sales could rival the $6bn-a-year market for seasonal flu vaccines. The UK government is expected to announce details of its booster programme in the coming days, based on formal advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, but the health secretary, Sajid Javid, has suggested the over-50s could be offered a dose along with their winter flu jabs. The UK is expected to join France and Germany in offering follow-up doses from September. The US authorities on Friday approved a third dose for those with compromised immune systems, and Israel and Chile have begun administering boosters to their elderly citizens.


However, health experts are warning that many more people around the world will die of Covid if western countries prioritise boosters for their own populations instead of sharing them with the rest of the world. Moderna, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, have already inked over $60bn in sales for this year and next, in deals for supplying follow up shots and also the initial two doses for those being inoculated for the first time in less wealthy countries. Analysts polled by data group Refinitiv have forecast revenue of more than $6.6bn for the Pfizer/BioNTech shot and $7.6bn for Moderna in 2023, mostly from booster sales. They expect the annual market to settle at about $5bn or higher eventually, with additional drugmakers competing for those sales.

Read more …

CAN you test for Delta? Yes, but only through genome sequencing, and that doesn’t happen all the time. Instead, as an MD explains: “The CDC does intermittent sequencing of the virus to determine what strain/variant is predominant in a particular region at any given time. The PCR tests do not differentiate.”

In other words: “There is not a specific test for the delta variant. However, since the vast majority of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are the delta variant, it’s likely a positive test result indicates you could be infected with the delta variant, according to Human and Health Services of Texas.”

• Low-Cost Test Could Detect Delta Variant In Saliva (MNT)

Scientists from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), both in Cambridge, MA, and several Boston-area hospitals, recently created miSHERLOCK. miSHERLOCK is an inexpensive, CRISPR-based diagnostic test that allows users to self-test for variants of SARS-CoV-2 at home, using their saliva. “Simple things that used to be ubiquitous in the hospital, like nasopharyngeal swabs, were suddenly hard to get, so routine sample processing procedures were disrupted, which is a big problem in a pandemic setting,” said co-first author of the study, Dr. Rose Lee, who is a visiting fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at MIT. “Our team’s motivation for this project was to eliminate these bottlenecks and provide accurate diagnostics for COVID-19 with less reliance on global supply chains, and could also accurately detect the variants that were starting to emerge,” she notes.


“miSHERLOCK is a low-cost point-of-care [COVID-19] test that is capable of detecting and differentiating specific SARS-CoV-2 variants, which could be used to guide patient care as well as for infection control or epidemiological purposes,” lead author Helena de Puig Guixe, a postdoctoral researcher at the Collins lab at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, told Medical News Today. “Our device is low-cost, provides a simple visual answer in 1 hour, and only requires saliva from a patient with no additional equipment separate from the device itself (including its standard battery). […] Our full device, including all testing components, costs $15, down to $6 with reuse of the housing and electronics, but could be as low as $2–3 per test if produced at scale,” she added.

Read more …

“General David Berger, Commandant of the US Marine Corps, briskly told the SecDef, in effect, to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. What do you make of that?”

• Brace for Impact (Kunstler)

My Pillow man Mike Lindell’s three-day Cyber Symposium demonstrated a couple of things about the current depraved state of our nation: You could prove pretty conclusively that the national election of 2020 was saturated with fraud; and that no one in the news business would either care or dare to report it. Otherwise, it’s a little early to tell whether the exercise will have any effect on the country’s mood, though it is apparently a fact that millions tuned into the event on the few Internet sites that evaded the efforts to hack it out of existence.

The presentations by physicist Douglas Frank, law professor (New Mexico State U) David Clements, and retired army intelligence analyst Seth Keshel made a multi-dimensional case that the Dominion vote tallying machines were both pre-programmed with insidious algorithms and were also run remotely by Internet connection through servers in Senegal tied to China the night of Nov. 3, 2020. Even so, the vote in favor of Donald Trump so overwhelmed the programming that oafish mopping-up operations with bogus write-in paper ballots had to be conducted on-the-fly to make sure the election came out in “Joe Biden’s” favor.

It was interesting to be reminded that four key states — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — all claimed to have stopped counting votes around 10:30 eastern time, and nobody reporting the tally on TV (a national ritual going back seventy years) seemed to consider anything irregular about it. But since when in US elections do officials not work through the whole of election night to reach a result? The answer, of course, is never before. It is, as they say, not a thing. Shouldn’t that have been a national WTF moment?

And so began the secret after-hours hijinks, such as in the Fulton County, GA, arena, where poll watchers were shooed out of the joint and then ballot-counters supplied by a Stacey Abrams-owned temp worker company got foolishly caught on a security camera running reams of paper ballots multiple times through their machines… and the arrival in Philadelphia of a truck from Long Island delivering tens of thousands of fresh paper ballots… and so on through the long night of supposedly no vote counting.

[..] The regime is trying to soften up the public for mandatory vaxes now, using its propaganda arms to turn up the volume on pandemic fear and new variants, using phony statistics and threats to turn the unvaxed into social pariahs, including schoolchildren. The regime is playing with nitroglycerine there. How desperate and crazy are they, really? Is something wicked coming their way? I think so, and I think they know it’s so, and I think they have just about run out of tricks for avoiding it. A crack in the edifice of tyrannical coercion materialized a few days ago when SecDef Lloyd Austin declared his intention to vax-up the whole military. General David Berger, Commandant of the US Marine Corps, briskly told the SecDef, in effect, to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. What do you make of that?

Read more …

Barack and Hunter, the new elites.

• The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama (Taibbi)

“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic? A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball.

Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.

Read more …

 

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If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.”
– Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

 

 

 

 

Oz

 

 

@LilithAssyria
My Russian friends told me – it was a very strict compliance about vax passports in Moscow.

Nobody would be allowed to come into the restaurant without a vax.

That lasted about 3 weeks. Why? Because nobody went to the restaurants anymore.

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 13 2021

Aug 132021
 
 August 13, 2021  Posted by at 7:41 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  136 Responses »


Roy Lichtenstein Forget it! Forget me! 1962

 

• C-19 Pandemia: Quo Vadis, Homo Sapiens? (Vanden Bossche)
• Deadly Lambda Variant Could Be Vaccine-Resistant (NYP)
• “Herd Immunity Is Not A Possibility”: Dr. Malone Vindicated (ZH)
• Fauci Says Everybody Will Need A Covid Vaccine Booster Shot Eventually (CNBC)
• Wakeup Call: Pfizer Vax Only 42% Effective Against Infection In July (ZH)
• 360, 000 Teens Age 12 To 17 Develop Myocarditis After Covid-19 Shots (UPI)
• Scientists Who Denied Lab Engineering Acknowledged Possible Lab Origin (USRTK)
• Young Adult Mortality In Israel During The Covid-19 Crisis (Ohana)
• Half Of America Values Vaccine Mandates, COVID Passports Over Freedom (SN)
• The Impersonator: Eric Feigl-Ding (Schachtel)
• A Day in the Death of British Justice (John Pilger)
• Do Britain And US Secretly Want Julian Assange To Commit Suicide? (Galloway)

 

 

While I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear.

– Emily Dickinson

 

 

Egypt: 2% Vaccinated; 100M Pop.; 66 New Daily Cases

 

 

 

 

Vanden Bossche called a lot of what is happening, a long time ago.

• C-19 Pandemia: Quo Vadis, Homo Sapiens? (Vanden Bossche)

The WHO’s mass vaccination program has been installed in response to a public health emergency of international concern. As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccinees and threatening the unvaccinated. This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity.

As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vaccinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the nonvaccinated. This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs. Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives.


Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treaments of Covid-19 disease.

Read more …

77,692 US Delta cases so far? Is that a typo?

• Deadly Lambda Variant Could Be Vaccine-Resistant (NYP)

As the US struggles to suppress the rapidly advancing coronavirus Delta variant, new evidence has emerged that the latest Lambda mutation — ravaging parts of South America — won’t be slowed by vaccines. In a July 28 report appearing on bioRxiv, where the study awaits peer review prior to getting published, researchers in Japan are sounding the alarm on the C.37 variant, dubbed Lambda. And it’s proven just as virulent as Delta thanks to a similar mutation making them even more contagious. The strain has been contained in 26 countries, including substantial outbreaks in Chile, Peru, Argentina and Ecuador. “Notably, the vaccination rate in Chile is relatively high; the percentage of the people who received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine was [about] 60%,” the authors write.

“Nevertheless, a big COVID-19 surge has occurred in Chile in Spring 2021, suggesting that the Lambda variant is proficient in escaping from the antiviral immunity elicited by vaccination,” they warn. The Lambda variant is thought to have emerged somewhere in South America between November and December 2020, and has since turned up in countries throughout Europe, North America and a few more isolated cases in Asia, according to GISAID data. The proportion the Lambda variant has of COVID-19 cases in the US is low with just one-tenth of 1% of the share — about 911 cases. Compare that to Delta, which has infected some 77,692 Americans so far. “In addition to increasing viral infectivity, the Delta variant exhibits higher resistance to the vaccine-induced neutralization,” the authors said.

“Similarly, here we showed that the Lambda variant equips not only increased infectivity but also resistance against antiviral immunity.” Lambda has so far been labeled a “variant of interest” by the World Health Organization, compared to the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta strains, which have all risen to “variant of concern,” or VOC, status. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has published scant literature on the Lambda variant, though a COVID-19 vaccine briefing from July 27 cited another pre-print study, dated July 3, which concluded that the mRNA vaccine in particular is thought to effectively neutralize the Lambda variant. In Chile, where C.37 is proliferating, their notably aggressive vaccine campaign relied predominantly on the Sinovac Biotech vaccine, which employs the inactivated virus to promote the production of COVID-19 antibodies.

Read more …

This from Zero Hedge doesn’t seem quite right: “..’imperfect’ vaccines might actually help foster more virulent COVID variants due to a phenomenon called ‘ADE’..”

That’s not what ADE is. But when Pollard mentions highly vaccinated Israel’s surge in “cases”, which might be due to ADE, it is not mentioned.

• “Herd Immunity Is Not A Possibility”: Dr. Malone Vindicated (ZH)

In one of the most appalling examples of Big Tech silencing scientists who refuse to withhold their criticisms of the mRNA technology behind the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccines, Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer who helped develop mRNA vaccine technology, saw the credit for his contribution to medicine effectively erased from the Internet by Wikipedia after he raised concerns about potential long-term autoimmune issues and other complications potentially arising from mRNA jabs. He has also shared other medical heresies, including the possibility that ‘imperfect’ vaccines might actually help foster more virulent COVID variants due to a phenomenon called ‘ADE’ – antibody-dependent enhancement. Essentially, what doesn’t kill the virus makes it stronger. In retaliation for sharing these views, Dr. Malone was ridiculed by colleagues as a conspiracist and an “anti-vaxxer”.

But earlier this week, Dr. Malone saw his views subtly vindicated by an unexpected source: a British scientist and academic named Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, who is the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group. During a briefing, Sir Pollard warned Parliament that the UK likely won’t ever achieve herd immunity, thanks to the delta variant. In remarks that risked undermining the government’s vaccination campaign, Sir Pollard, a professor of pediatric infection and immunity, warned Parliament on Tuesday that achieving herd immunity is likely “not a possibility” thanks to variants like delta.

[..] He said it was unlikely that herd immunity will ever be reached, saying the next variant of the novel coronavirus will be “perhaps even better at transmitting in vaccinated populations.” Pollard also shared what sounded like a subtle criticism of masks by saying that “We don’t have anything which will stop that transmission to other people.” As an example, he pointed to Israel, which saw new cases and hospitalizations nearly disappear before the new variant took hold, causing cases and hospitalizations to surge once again. Now, there have even been a handful of patients who have tested positive even after receiving their third dose of the Pfizer jab (which the US has only just approved for a third dose as well).

Read more …

“Remember when you got your Covid vaccine and they told you you’d need a booster real soon-like?
Of course you do! It was also when they told you it didn’t actually stop infection.”

• Fauci Says Everybody Will Need A Covid Vaccine Booster Shot Eventually (CNBC)

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday everybody will someday “likely” need a booster shot of the Covid-19 vaccines. “We’re already starting to see indications of some diminution” in the durability of the vaccines, Fauci told “CBS This Morning.” However, he said it’s not likely that they will be widely administered any time soon. The priority, Fauci said, is to give boosters to people who have compromised immune systems, including those with cancer and transplanted organs. “We don’t feel at this particular point that, apart from the immune-compromised, we don’t feel we need to give boosters right now,” he said.

Fauci’s comments come the same day the Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize third Covid shot for people with weakened immune systems, a highly anticipated move intended to shield some of the most vulnerable Americans from the highly contagious delta variant. Such people, including cancer and HIV patients, represent only about 2.7% of the U.S. adult population but make up about 44% of hospitalized Covid breakthrough cases, which is when a fully vaccinated individual becomes infected, according to recent data from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory group. Studies suggest that a third vaccine shot might help patients whose immune systems don’t respond as well to a first or second dose.

Covid vaccine makers, including Pfizer and Moderna, have repeatedly argued that everyone will eventually need a booster shot and potentially extra doses every year, just like for the seasonal flu. Pfizer has said it plans to ask the FDA to authorize boosters as it sees signs of waning immunity. The U.S. drugmaker has cited data out of Israel, where officials are reporting the two-dose vaccine is now just 39% effective in the country. The vaccine is still highly effective against severe disease, hospitalizations and deaths, according to Israeli health officials. The CDC does not currently recommend booster doses of the vaccines for otherwise healthy people at this time. But Fauci, speaking Thursday on NBC’s “TODAY,” said “inevitably there will be a time when we’ll have to get boosts.” “No vaccine, at least not within this category, is going to have an indefinite amount of protection,” he said.

Read more …

Not exactly a wake-up call, we knew. But important to note that 42% is not enough for an EUA, so why use it as a booster shot?

• Wakeup Call: Pfizer Vax Only 42% Effective Against Infection In July (ZH)

“This week, Dr. Fauci confirmed that “at some time in the future” everyone will likely need a booster shot for the Covid-19 vaccine due to “fading efficacy.” Now, Axios reports that a new preprint study which has ‘already grabbed the attention of top Biden administration officials’ over the vaccines’ effectiveness against new variants, with Pfizer’s jab being of particular concern. The study found the Pfizer vaccine was only 42% effective against infection in July, when the Delta variant was dominant. “If that’s not a wakeup call, I don’t know what is,” a senior Biden official told Axios. The study, conducted by nference and the Mayo Clinic, compared the effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in the Mayo Clinic Health System over time from January to July. -Axios

The overall figures suggest that the vaccines provide robust (yet lower-than advertised) immunity early on, only to sharply drop in efficacy over time. Between January and July, Moderna’s vaccine was found to be 86% effective against infection over the study period, while Pfizer’s was 76%. As far as hospitalization, Moderna’s vaccine was 92% effective, while Pfizer’s was 85%. Bringing the averages down, of course, was the sharp drop in efficacy observed in July with Moderna proving just 72% effective against infection and Pfizer clocking in at 42%. In other states such as Florida, the risk of infection in July among those who had taken the Moderna vaccine was around 60% lower than for people full vaccinated with Pfizer. More via Axios:

“Why it matters: Although it has yet to be peer-reviewed, the study raises serious questions about both vaccines’ long-term effectiveness, particularly Pfizer’s. • It’s unclear whether the results signify a reduction in effectiveness over time, a reduced effectiveness against Delta, or a combination of both. • “Based on the data that we have so far, it is a combination of both factors,” said Venky Soundararajan, a lead author of the study. “The Moderna vaccine is likely — very likely — more effective than the Pfizer vaccine in areas where Delta is the dominant strain, and the Pfizer vaccine appears to have a lower durability of effectiveness.” • He added that his team is working on a follow-up study that will try to differentiate between the durability of the two vaccines and their effectiveness against Delta.”

Bring on the boosters.

Read more …

Must have gone something like this: Quiet UPI article about a very small study, “rare”, “mildly affected”, yada yada, and then some editor figures out that 4% of 9 million is 360,000 and makes that the headline!

• 360, 000 Teens Age 12 To 17 Develop Myocarditis After Covid-19 Shots (UPI)

Teens who develop myocarditis after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 typically do so within six days of their second dose, and most are “mildly affected” by it, according to an analysis published Tuesday by JAMA Cardiology. The condition, which is rare, is characterized by inflammation of the heart muscle that affects its ability to pump blood to the body. In the small study of 15 teens age 12 to 18, all experienced chest pain within six days of COVID-19 vaccination, while two-thirds had a fever and more than half had muscle pain, the data showed. All 15 patients in the study were hospitalized due to the heart complication, but all were discharged after an average of two days without the need for intensive care, and only one had lingering symptoms.

“Myocarditis is a rare complication that develops following COVID-19 vaccination in children [and though] the acute course was relatively benign … the long term cardiac effects remain unknown,” study co-author Dr. Audrey Dionne told UPI in an email. However, “myocarditis is also a risk with COVID-19 infection [and its] course can be more severe acutely,” said Dionne a cardiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. For this reason, “the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks,” even in teens, she said. The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for use in teens ages 12 to 15 years in May.

The Moderna vaccine, which has a similar composition, has not yet received an EUA or approval for children in this age group, though studies are ongoing. Through mid-July, nearly 9 million teens in the age group had received at least one dose of the two-shot vaccine, with just over 4% developing myocarditis, according to data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Still, fewer than 1% of teens age 12 to 17 required medical care in the week after receiving either vaccine dose, the agency said.

Read more …

They all knew and said nothing.

• Scientists Who Denied Lab Engineering Acknowledged Possible Lab Origin (USRTK)

Four prominent U.S. virologists who published a widely cited commentary strongly rebutting the theory that SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, might have been engineered in a lab privately acknowledged that they could not “rule out the possibility” of a lab leak, according to emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know. The emails discuss the need for careful wording of the commentary titled “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2,” which was published in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections (EMI) on February 26, 2020.


[..] The newly released emails contain discussions between scientists Shan-Lu Liu and Linda Saif, both with Ohio State University; Susan Weiss, of the University of Pennsylvania; and Lishan Su, who at the time was employed by the University of North Carolina. Some correspondence includes EMI editor Shan Lu, of the University of Massachusetts. The published EMI commentary outlined multiple arguments as to why SARS-CoV-2 was not the result of laboratory engineering, arguing it was “more likely” the virus originated “in nature between a bat CoV and another coronavirus in an intermediate animal host.” The authors stated in the article: “there is currently no credible evidence to support the claim that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory engineered CoV.” They wrote that despite “speculations, rumours and conspiracy theories that SARS-CoV-2 is of laboratory origin,” there was in fact “no evidence of laboratory origin.” However, in a Feb. 16, 2020 email, Liu wrote to Weiss “we cannot rule out the possibility that it comes from a bat virus leaked out of a lab.”

[..] An important part of the debate over the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the existence of a furin cleavage site (FCS) at the junction between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein domains, S1 and S2. SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a group of viruses known as betacoronaviruses lineage B. The FCS, however, does not appear in any of the other coronaviruses in this group. One argument in support of the lab origin hypothesis is that the FCS within the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein could be a result of laboratory manipulation. The EMI commentary does not address the existence of the FCS, even though it is widely considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence of lab engineering. Evidence supports the importance of the FCS in the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect human cells and tissues. Engineering FCS within coronaviruses is a well-known practice in coronavirus research labs.

[..] The emails also show the commentary included the involvement of coronavirus expert Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Baric and Shi have been central figures in ongoing inquiries regarding the potential origins of SARS-CoV-2 and whether or not there is a connection between the virus and gain-of-function research collaborations between UNC and WIV. Such collaborations have been funded in part by the USAID-EPT-PREDICT program through an organization called EcoHealth Alliance. [..] Documents show that Kristian Andersen, a virologist with the Scripps Research Institute, emailed Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, early in 2020 expressing concerns about possible genetic engineering of the virus.

Andersen had a conference call with Fauci and other scientists in February 2020, and shortly after led the authoring of a high profile article, published as a correspondence in the journal Nature Medicine, specifically arguing against any possible laboratory engineering of the virus.

Read more …

Something to keep an eye on.

• Young Adult Mortality In Israel During The Covid-19 Crisis (Ohana)

In this paper, we analyze excess mortality in Israel during the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on the age group of young adults under 50 years of age, as their susceptibility to COVID-19 mortality is low. Based primarily on online data from the Central Bureau of Statistics of Israel, we observed an unexpected rise of excess mortality among 20 to 49-year-olds in February-March 2021. It should be noted that excess mortality peaks among these young age groups are rarely observed, with low number of deaths that are usually caused by wars. We examined whether COVID-19 could account for this excess mortality.


The inconsistency between the reported COVID-19 deaths and the excess deaths within this age group led to consider other potential causes: accident and vaccination. Indeed, the surge in mortality coincided with the rollout of the Israeli vaccination campaign for the 20 sto 49-year-olds, which reached more than 75% of individuals in this age group. This unexpected rise in excess mortality among young adults was also found in two other countries, the United Kingdom and Hungary, which have in common with Israel a massive vaccination of their populations. Thus, our observations should prompt to pause the campaign, while clarifying the underlying reasons for those excess deaths, especially in the context of a low mortality risk from COVID-19 within adults under 50 years of age.

Read more …

More dangerous than a virus.

• Half Of America Values Vaccine Mandates, COVID Passports Over Freedom (SN)

A Fox News poll contends that a majority of Americans are in SUPPORT of vaccine mandates and the introduction of COVID passports that tie freedoms to vaccination status. The survey found that 50 percent of respondents are in favour of requiring proof of a coronavirus vaccine for “indoor activities such as restaurants, gyms and performances,” while 46% oppose the idea. Fifty percent also agreed that “protecting the safety of Americans” by requiring vaccinations in order to engage in everyday activities trumps “protecting the freedom” of Americans to choose whether or not they are vaccinated. In contrast, 47% of respondents said protecting freedom is more important.


The poll also found that 44% said they were more likely to frequent stores and establishments that require customers and workers to be vaccinated, or have a recent negative COVID-19 test. Only 24% said they were less likely to do that. Other interesting findings of the poll include 46% of Americans believing the federal government’s change in mask guidance has more to do with politics than science, with 42% saying the opposite. In addition, 63% of parents agree schools should mandate masks for the unvaccinated, while 60% of respondents who said they had not taken the vaccine said they had no plans to do so. The poll correlates with findings from April, when a Rasmussen poll revealed that almost half of Americans support the introduction of vaccine passports in order to get “back to normal.”

Read more …

10 months old but just too funny. He’s in the news again.

• The Impersonator: Eric Feigl-Ding (Schachtel)

If you’re on social media and you follow news related to the coronavirus pandemic, chances are you’ve stumbled upon some panicked pandemic posts coming from a man named Eric Feigl-Ding, a nutritionist and longtime democrat political operative who has succeeded in impersonating a medical professional, and is generating a cult following in the process. With one hysterical tweet after another, Feigl-Ding went from having a small social media following to accumulating a massive army of influence. Feigl-Ding’s consistent elevation of fear and panic, doom and gloom, and his relentless themes of chaos and destruction related to a virus with a 99.8% recovery rate has brought his accounts millions of clicks and views, and hundreds of thousands of new followers.

And he did it all without having a clue what he’s talking about. At the beginning of 2020, Feigl-Ding was an unpaid, visiting scientist in Harvard’s nutrition department. His academic research centered entirely around nutrition, diet, and exercise. If Eric Feigl-Ding was interested in pandemics and the study of viruses, his research and academic credentials did not reflect that. When the coronavirus pandemic began to make waves in the media, everything changed. Feigl-Ding, an aspiring politician, appeared to see an opening to influence the masses and build up his brand. Feigl-Ding’s rise to coronavirus stardom began with a since-deleted tweet falsely describing the coronavirus as “the most virulent virus epidemic the world has ever seen.”

But not everyone associated with Feigl-Ding was thrilled with the early panic promotion act. Feigl-Ding’s frequent use of Harvard-associated credentials to elevate his baseless COVID-19 proclamations greatly upset some of his colleagues (despite many of them advocating for the same draconian measures proposed by Feigl-Ding to “combat” the virus), and landed him in hot water with the academic institution. Twitter, for reasons unknown, decided to credential him as a “COVID-19 health expert,” which further elevates his supposed legitimacy as an “expert” on the pandemic. In mid March, Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, described him as a “charlatan exploiting a tenuous connection for self-promotion.” The Association of Health Care Journalists also took notice, reporting that he has “precisely zero experience in infectious diseases.”

Read more …

It’s already died.

• A Day in the Death of British Justice (John Pilger)

For those who may have forgotten, WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments, such as Venezuela’s, the collusion between nominal political opponents (Bush and Obama) to stifle a torture investigation and the CIA’s Vault 7 campaign that turned your mobile phone, even your TV set, into a spy in your midst. WikiLeaks released almost a million documents from Russia which allowed Russian citizens to stand up for their rights. It revealed the Australian government had colluded with the U.S. against its own citizen, Assange. It named those Australian politicians who have “informed” for the U.S.

It made the connection between the Clinton Foundation and the rise of jihadism in American-armed states in the Gulf. There is more: WikiLeaks disclosed the U.S. campaign to suppress wages in sweatshop countries like Haiti, India’s campaign of torture in Kashmir, the British government’s secret agreement to shield “U.S. interests” in its official Iraq inquiry and the British Foreign Office’s plan to create a fake “marine protection zone” in the Indian Ocean to cheat the Chagos islanders out of their right of return. In other words, WikiLeaks has given us real news about those who govern us and take us to war, not the preordained, repetitive spin that fills newspapers and television screens. This is real journalism; and for the crime of real journalism, Assange has spent most of the past decade in one form of incarceration or another, including Belmarsh prison, a horrific place.

Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, he is a gentle, intellectual visionary driven by his belief that a democracy is not a democracy unless it is transparent, and accountable. On Wednesday, the United States sought the approval of Britain’s High Court to extend the terms of its appeal against a decision by a district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in January to bar Assange’s extradition. Baraitser accepted the deeply disturbing evidence of a number of experts that Assange would be at great risk if he were incarcerated in the U.S.’s infamous prison system. Professor Michael Kopelman, a world authority on neuro-psychiatry, had said Assange would find a way to take his own life — the direct result of what Professor Nils Melzer, the United Nations rapporteur on torture, described as the craven “mobbing” of Assange by governments – and their media echoes.

Those of us who were in the Old Bailey last September to hear Kopelman’s evidence were shocked and moved. I sat with Julian’s father, John Shipton, whose head was in his hands. The court was also told about the discovery of a razor blade in Julian’s Belmarsh cell and that he had made desperate calls to the Samaritans and written notes and much else that filled us with more than sadness. Watching the lead barrister acting for Washington, James Lewis — a man from a military background who deploys a cringingly theatrical “aha!” formula with defence witnesses — reduce these facts to “malingering” and smearing witnesses, especially Kopelman, we were heartened by Kopelman’s revealing response that Lewis’s abuse was “a bit rich” as Lewis himself had sought to hire Kopelman’s expertise in another case.

Read more …

Secretly? Why do you think they’re talking about suicide in front of him?

• Do Britain And US Secretly Want Julian Assange To Commit Suicide? (Galloway)

The recent shameful High Court ruling in London indicates that the only way Britain’s most prominent political prisoner can prove he’s a suicide risk is by actually taking his own life. Is that what the authorities are hoping? The 21st century has provided many days of shame for Britain and yesterday was just another. The High Court in London casually set aside a decision by one of its own judges – who’d heard every minute of the evidence – that Julian Assange, Britain’s most prominent political prisoner, might commit suicide if extradited to the United States injustice system.

The Appeal Court decided that the main US appeal against the refusal of their extradition in October MAY now argue that the original judge was misled about the true mental health of Assange – who has been a prisoner effectively for a decade – and the US’s lawyers need not be confined to arguing that their super-max penitentiaries are perfectly humane places really. The bizarre argument of the Biden government’s English counsel may be a unique non sequitur. Julian can’t be a suicide risk, she argued, because he had “secretly fathered children” with his fiancée Stella Morris. What that even means is beyond me – in nearly 30 year as a parliamentarian, I’ve never heard such nonsense. Doesn’t every man father his children secretly? Do some men do it publicly? Did she mean out of wedlock? How quaint.

Are married fathers more likely to be suicide risks? Or did she mean that he was a father at all? Are childless men more likely to be a suicide risk? So mindless are these contentions, it’s a wonder how anyone could take fees for arguing them, more wondrous that any judge could side with them. Most wondrous of all is that President Joe Biden, the tan-suited Democratic party animal of Martha’s Vineyard, could commission them. The long and the short of it is that it’s more likely today that Assange will be extradited to the US than it was the day before yesterday. And certain that he will remain in the Devil’s Island of Belmarsh Prison while the glacial course of events creeps on. Perhaps the only way Assange can prove he’s a suicide risk is by committing suicide. Come to think of it, maybe that’s Joe Biden’s big idea…

Read more …

 

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Debt Rattle August 12 2021

Aug 122021
 
 August 12, 2021  Posted by at 8:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  147 Responses »


Julian #Assange attending today’s hearing by video-link from H.M.P. Belmarsh. It is astounding how much he seems to have aged in the space of six months. Puffed-up face and tired eyes. Hair and beard growing unruly. Very sad state of affairs. – Tareq Haddad

 

• Microscopic Covid Vaccine-Induced Blood Clots (LSN)
• Delta Variant Has Made Herd Immunity Impossible – AZ Developer (BI)
• The Delta Variant Isn’t As Contagious As Chickenpox. But It’s Contagious (NPR)
• La Pampa Ivermectin Monitored Intervention Program Results (IC)
• India’s Ivermectin Blackout (Hope)
• CDC Adjusts Florida Covid-19 Numbers After Health Department Call-Out (Fox)
• SAGE Advisor Says Lockdowns Can No Longer Be Justified (SN)
• Australia Can’t Escape Covid Lockdowns Even If 90% Is Vaccinated – Expert (DM)
• Joe Biden Never Mentioned Covid ‘Quarantine Camps’… But The CDC Did (Bridge)
• The Ultimate Power of The Word “NO” (Rossini)
• Andrew Cuomo Is Resigning, But The Investigations Will Continue (USAT)
• US Allowed To Challenge Key Psychiatric Evidence in Assange Case (RT)

 

 


 

 

Serious covid cases in Israel spike — 90% of serious cases are people over 50.

Fun fact: 95% of people over 50 are vaccinated

 

 

Oh, just great. And not even surprising anymore.

“And so, we understood in the end, the reason why the lungs fail is not because the virus is there. It is because micro blood clots are there..”

• Microscopic Covid Vaccine-Induced Blood Clots (LSN)

Dr. Charles Hoffe has been practicing medicine for 28 years in a small, rural town in British Columbia, Canada, and recently gave a long interview. He has given about 900 doses of the Moderna experimental mRNA vaccine to his patients. So, contrary to some critics, he is no anti-vaccine doctor. The core problem he has seen are microscopic clots in his patients’ tiniest capillaries. He said, “Blood clots occurring at a capillary level. This has never before been seen. This is not a rare disease. This is an absolutely new phenomenon.” Most importantly, he has emphasized these micro-clots are too small to show up on CT scans, MRI, and other conventional tests, such as angiograms, and can only be detected using the D-dimer blood test, a standard test that indicates whether blood clots are being actively formed somewhere within a person’s vascular system.

Using the latter, he found that 62 percent of his patients injected with an mRNA shot were positive for clotting, not a small fraction that can be easily dismissed. He has explained that what is happening in bodies is that the spike proteins in the vaccine become “part of the cell wall of your vascular endothelium. This means that these cells which line your blood vessels, which are supposed to be smooth so that your blood flows smoothly, now have these little spikey bits sticking out. … when the platelet comes through the capillary, it suddenly hits all these COVID spikes, and it becomes absolutely inevitable that blood clots will form to block that vessel.” He made an important distinction: “The blood clots we hear about, which the media claim are very rare, are the big blood clots, which are the ones that cause strokes and show up on CT scans, MRI, etc.

“The clots I’m talking about are microscopic and too small to find on any scan. They can thus only be detected using the D-dimer test.” “The most alarming part of this is that there are some parts of the body like the brain, spinal cord, heart and lungs which cannot re-generate. When those tissues are damaged by blood clots, they are permanently damaged.” This is his pessimistic, scientific view: “blood vessels in their lungs are now blocked up. In turn, this causes the heart to need to work harder to try to keep up against a much greater resistance trying to get the blood through your lungs. This is called pulmonary artery hypertension – high blood pressure in the lungs because the blood simply cannot get through effectively. “People with this condition usually die of heart failure within a few short years.”

[..] The eminent Dr. Peter McCullough noted, “So, this is a very different type of blood clotting that we would see with major blood clots in the arteries and veins, for instance, blood clots involved in stroke and heart attack, blood clots involved in major blood vessels in the legs. This was a different type of clotting, and in fact, the Italians courageously did some autopsies and found micro blood clots in the lungs.” “And so, we understood in the end, the reason why the lungs fail is not because the virus is there. It is because micro blood clots are there. … When people can’t breathe, the problem is micro blood clotting in the lungs. … The spicule on the ball of the virus itself which damages blood vessels that causes blood clotting.”

Read more …

Some of this stuff is plain weird. This guy admits his vaccine fails to do what it promised, but says it’s only because there’s a new variant. And herd immunity can only be reached with vaccines. Which is contradicted even by the WHO’s new distorted definition that now says: “Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that can occur with some diseases when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through vaccination or previous infections..”

• Delta Variant Has Made Herd Immunity Impossible – AZ Developer (BI)

The Delta variant has changed the equation for achieving herd immunity, the developer of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has said. Speaking at a UK parliamentary meeting on Tuesday, Sir Andrew Pollard, a professor of pediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, said that achieving herd immunity is “not a possibility” now that the Delta variant is circulating. “We know very clearly with coronavirus that this current variant, the Delta variant, will still infect people who have been vaccinated, and that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated, at some point, will meet the virus,” Pollard said. He said it was unlikely that herd immunity will ever be reached, saying the next variant of the novel coronavirus will be “perhaps even better at transmitting in vaccinated populations.”


Some experts had hoped that herd immunity could be reached with COVID-19, as was the case with measles, which is also highly infectious. Many countries have achieved herd immunity with measles by vaccinating 95% of the population against it, such as the US, where endemic transmission ended in 2000. That is because once a person is vaccinated against measles, they cannot transmit the virus. With COVID-19, vaccines still fulfill their primary role: protecting against severe disease. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccinated people who catch the Delta variant are 25 times less likely to have a severe case or die. The overwhelming majority who do catch it will have mild or no symptoms. But growing evidence suggests that, with the Delta variant, fully vaccinated people can still transmit the virus.

Read more …

The CDC lied again. Who notices anymore?

• The Delta Variant Isn’t As Contagious As Chickenpox. But It’s Contagious (NPR)

In a leaked report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made a surprising claim about the delta variant of the coronavirus: It “is as transmissible as: – Chicken Pox,” the agency wrote in a slideshow presentation leaked to The Washington Post on July 26. Chickenpox is one of the most contagious viruses known. Each individual can spread the virus to as many as “90% of the people close to that person,” the CDC reports. Is the delta variant that contagious as well? The short answer is no, says evolutionary biologist and biostatistician Tom Wenseleers at the University of Leuven in Belgium. “Yeah, I didn’t find the CDC’s statement entirely accurate,” says Wenseleers, who was one of the first scientists to formally calculate the transmission advantage of the alpha and delta variants over the original versions of SARS-CoV-2.

Nonetheless, delta is still highly transmissible, he adds. It’s one of the most contagious respiratory viruses that we know of, he says. Here’s why. When scientists measure a virus’s transmissibility, they often use what’s known as R0, or “R nought. ” It’s the number of people a sick person will infect when the entire population is vulnerable to the virus. “So it’s the virus’s potential of spreading, given ideal conditions for the virus, when no one has any immunity,” says computational biologist Karthik Gangavarapu at the Scripps Research Institute. For example, the flu has an R0 of about two. Each person infected with flu passes the virus on to two people on average. Some people will infect more than two people, and some will infect fewer. But over time, the average will be about two.

Chickenpox, on the other hand, is way more contagious, Gangavarapu says. Chickenpox has an R0 of about nine or 10. So each person with chickenpox infects about 10 other people on average. Outbreaks are explosive. For SARS-CoV-2, the R0 has actually risen over the course of the pandemic as the virus evolved. When the coronavirus first emerged in 2019, SARS-CoV-2 was slightly more contagious than flu, Gangavarapu says. “The initial COVID-19 strain had an R0 between two and three.” Then about a year later, the virus began to mutate quickly. The alpha variant emerged, likely in the U.K., and was more transmissible than the original strain. A few months later, the delta variant emerged, most likely in India. It was even more transmissible than alpha.

“For the delta variant, the R0 is now calculated at between six and seven,” Wenseleers says. So it’s two- to three-times as contagious as the original version of SARS-CoV-2 (R0 = 2 to 3) but less contagious than the chickenpox (R0 = 9 to 10).

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Google translate from Argentina. Bit confusing, 4 different percentages in a few paragraphs. And I don’t get why they specifically focus on mortality (or even how), given that 99.9% of people survive.

• La Pampa Ivermectin Monitored Intervention Program Results (IC)

“The primary objective in the community of the two populations was to evaluate mortality related to COVID-19. In this context, we studied 3,269 patients older than 18 years of the Ivermectin Group, and in the same period we compared it with a group of 18,149 patients who did not participate in the program. In the results of the mortality analysis in the Ivermectin Group, we found that it was 27.4% lower compared to the group of patients who did not use the drug. And when we evaluate the population over 40 years of age, the cut-off point that we established, the decrease was 33.4%. It means that, if confirmed with a randomized clinical study, 1 out of every 3 deaths would be avoided, it is a very strong figure, ”said Kohan.

The minister added that, in the Program, a dose of 0.6 milligrams per kilo of weight was used, in a period of 5 days. “The previous work carried out gave the clue that this was the correct dose in the first 5 days of transit of the disease with mild symptoms,” he added. Kohan. With the statistical data in hand, he considered it valuable that the study carried out in La Pampa was made known to the scientific community through the fastest possible channels. “We are going to publish it, we have discussed it with the working group, and we believe it is important that it be made available. And we are going to try to pave the way for rapid dissemination, so we first thought of making a preprint (in academic publication it is an original manuscript of an author before peer review) in a specialized journal.

We want others to discuss this issue and, as I said in June, we are not fans of Ivermectin but we found valuable elements in favor of the population. The statistics are there, and we also find more favorable statistics even in patients with comorbidities ”he added. Even under the encouragement of positive statistics, Kohan considered it important to be cautious with the dissemination of them. “Those who intervened and signed the consent are specifically detailed in specific files, those of the Control Group are not. For this reason, when you add the risk factors in people over 40 years of age, the mortality reduction is 44%, it is amazing, but you have to take it with great caution, “he said. Finally, he gave an account of the evaluations of intensive care hospitalizations and/or deaths “where we verified a 38% reduction in the patients of the Ivermectin Group” he concluded.

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Obesity may play a major role here. US is 15 times worse than even Tamil Nadu.

• India’s Ivermectin Blackout (Hope)

The graphs and data from the Johns Hopkins University CSSE database do not lie. On the contrary, they provide a compelling trail of truth that no one can dispute, not even the NIH, CDC, FDA, and WHO. Just as Galileo proved with his telescope that the earth was NOT the center of the Universe in 1616; today, the data from India shows that Ivermectin is effective, much more so than the vaccines. It not only prevents death, but it also prevents COVID infections, and it also is effective against the Delta Variant. In 1616, you could not make up the telescopic images of Jupiter and its orbiting moons, nor could you falsify the crescent-shaped images of Venus and Mercury. These proved that the earth was NOT the center of the Universe – a truth the Catholic Church could not allow.

Likewise, the massive drop in cases and deaths in India to almost nothing after the addition of Ivermectin proved the drug’s effectiveness. This is a truth that the NIH, CDC, and FDA cannot allow because it would endanger the vaccine policy. Never mind that Ivermectin would save more lives with much less risk, much less cost, and it would end the pandemic quickly. Let us look at the burgundy-colored graph of Uttar Pradesh. First, allow me to thank Juan Chamie, a highly-respected Cambridge-based data analyst, who created this graph from the JHU CSSE data. Uttar Pradesh is a state in India that contains 241 million people. The United States’ population is 331 million people. Therefore, Uttar Pradesh can be compared to the United States, with 2/3 of our population size.

This data shows how Ivermectin knocked their COVID-19 cases and deaths – which we know were Delta Variant – down to almost zero within weeks. A population comparable to the US went from about 35,000 cases and 350 deaths per day to nearly ZERO within weeks of adding Ivermectin to their protocol. By comparison, the United States is the lower graph. On August 5, here in the good ol’ USA, blessed with the glorious vaccines, we have 127,108 new cases per day and 574 new deaths. Let us look at the August 5 numbers from Uttar Pradesh with 2/3 of our population. Uttar Pradesh, using Ivermectin, had a total of 26 new cases and exactly THREE deaths. The US without Ivermectin has precisely 4889 times as many daily cases and 191 times as many deaths as Uttar Pradesh with Ivermectin.

Uttar Pradesh on Ivermectin: Population 240 Million [4.9% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 26
COVID Daily Deaths: 3

The United States off Ivermectin: Population 331 Million [50.5% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 127,108
COVID Daily Deaths: 574

Let us look at other Ivermectin using areas of India with numbers from August 5, 2021, compiled by the JHU CSSE:
Delhi on Ivermectin: Population 31 Million [15% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 61
COVID Daily Deaths: 2

Uttarakhand on Ivermectin: Population 11.4 Million [15% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 24
COVID Daily Deaths: 0

Now let us look at an area of India that rejected Ivermectin. Tamil Nadu announced they would reject Ivermectin and instead follow the dubious USA-style guidance of using Remdesivir. Knowing this, you might expect their numbers to be closer to the US, with more cases and more deaths. You would be correct. Tamil Nadu went on to lead India in COVID-19 cases.
Tamil Nadu off Ivermectin: Population 78.8 Million [6.9% fully vaccinated]
COVID Daily Cases: 1,997
COVID Daily Deaths: 33

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By close to 50%. How often does the CDC make such “mistakes”?

• CDC Adjusts Florida Covid-19 Numbers After Health Department Call-Out (Fox)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday updated its COVID-19 tracker for Florida over the past few days after the state’s department of health appealed publically for an update. The CDC told Fox News in an email on Tuesday that it was working with the state’s health department to correct the information. The state took to Twitter on Monday to ask the CDC to update its COVID-19 case tracker because it incorrectly combined “MULTIPLE days into one.” The Sunday total was the state’s worst ever, according to the CDC data. Multiple media organizations picked up on the number and the department corrected the stories online with some bite.


“Wrong again. The number of cases @CDCgov released for Florida today is incorrect,” it responded to a report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “They combined MULTIPLE days into one. We anticipate CDC will correct the record.” The CDC initially reported 28,317 new cases on Sunday but adjusted that number to 19,584 by Tuesday. The health department said there were 15,319 cases on Sunday.

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They’re going to do them anyway.

• SAGE Advisor Says Lockdowns Can No Longer Be Justified (SN)

A top SAGE adviser to the UK government says that COVID lockdowns can no longer be justified and that measures to control the virus should instead be aimed at protecting the most vulnerable. Professor Andrew Hayward, a University College London epidemiologist, said that the days of disruptive restrictions imposed on everyone should end in favor of a more targeted approach. “I think as we generally move into an endemic rather than pandemic situation the potential harm that a virus can cause at a population level is much less,” Hayward told BBC Radio 4. “So you can’t really justify such broad population-wide control measures and we tend to target the control measures more to those who are most vulnerable,” he added.

“And so I think, not only in testing but in all sorts of forms of control, as we move into a situation where we’re coming to live with this virus forever, then we target the measures to the most vulnerable rather than having the more disruptive measures,” said the professor. Hayward’s view that we need to learn to live with the virus was echoed by signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration, in which 12,000 scientists asserted that the strategy should be centered on “focused protection,” not endless lockdowns. However, the UK government is still pursuing the idea of vaccine passports for some venues from September onwards while eliminating the option of negative COVID tests, despite the fact that fully vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus.

The domestic passports have proven highly controversial in France, where police were seen earlier this week checking the medical papers of people sitting outside at cafes. As we previously highlighted, some lockdown advocates appear to be upset that the restrictions might not make a return, with a Guardian journalist writing about how he is “going to miss being locked down.”

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Build a wall around it. Shut down the airlines and the ports. Don’t let anyone leave ever again.

• Australia Can’t Escape Covid Lockdowns Even If 90% Is Vaccinated – Expert (DM)

A top US disease expert who was among the first to sound the alarm when the Covid pandemic first appeared in Wuhan has painted a bleak picture for millions of Australians hoping to be released from stay-at-home orders. Harvard-trained epidemiologist Dr Eric Feigl-Ding warned that even with 90 per cent of Australia’s population vaccinated – 10 per cent higher than the federal government’s reopening target of 80 per cent – it still won’t be enough to fend off the relentless cycles of lockdowns. Dr Feigl-Ding said in order to live with the highly infectious Indian Delta variant, life will need to remain in a perpetual state of restrictions including a ban on indoor dining and a move to premium face masks.

But despite the grim outlook, he’s still urging everyone to get the potentially life-saving jab as its proven to reduce hospitalisation rates by about 90 per cent. ‘Even for highly vaccinated countries, relying on vaccines alone is not a panacea to stop Delta,’ he told A Current Affair. ‘What that means is just relying on that single vaccine approach is very, very narrow minded. ‘We must do other layers in addition to waiting around for vaccines.’ He says life returning to normal is still a long way off and suggests a public health strategy ‘in between’ being locked down or fully opened is needed. This would include bans on indoor dining and cloth-made masks, improved ventilation standards and a nationwide vaccine passport system.

‘No one wants lockdowns… but if you don’t have these in place I guarantee you, you will be headed towards a lockdown because the cases will be surging so quickly and the hospital beds will be filling up,’ Dr Feigl-Ding said. ‘Without these measures you’re headed for disaster.’

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The CDC is just one long horror story. Bunch of career bureaucrats in no way up to an actual challenge.

Just like Fauci, who spent 40 years in his job in silence, building ties with Big Pharma. Of course he’s going to screw up after all that.

• Joe Biden Never Mentioned Covid ‘Quarantine Camps’… But The CDC Did (Bridge)

As a number of politicians push for ‘vaccine passports’ amid fears that a new brand of medical apartheid is coming, a re-surfaced CDC publication advocating internment camps for the ‘high-risk’ has some people fearing the worst. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a paper that floated the totally not suspicious idea of relocating “high-risk” individuals into green zone “camps.” While the proposal didn’t attract much attention at the time, as draconian anti-Covid measures are beginning to ramp up, and basic human rights and liberties are coming under attack, the document has attracted newfound attention. And not without reason, it seems.

The very first line of the document discusses the implementation of a “shielding approach in humanitarian settings… focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings.” Essentially, and this will be important later on, ‘humanitarian settings’ is just another way of saying ‘camps’. Many people are quick to associate the idea of camps with the containment of refugees, for example, or illegal aliens who have breached the border. Yet the only time the word ‘refugee’ is mentioned in the paper is in reference to a camp in Kenya. At the same time, ‘camp’ and ‘camps’ are referred to about 20 times. There is another ambiguous thing about this document, and that involves its description of “high-risk” individuals and the “general population.”

The paper reads: “In most humanitarian settings [i.e. camps], older population groups make up a small percentage of the total population. For this reason, the shielding approach suggests physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population to prioritize the use of the limited available resources and avoid implementing long-term containment measures among the general population.” In other words, the CDC is saying that older people being held in camps (humanitarian settings), because they are in the ‘high-risk’ category, should be separated from the ‘general population’ in these facilities so as to reduce the ‘containment measures’. OK, fine. But the document never explains who makes up the general population inside the camps, and why these ‘low-risk’ individuals are being held in these humanitarian ‘green zones’ in the first place.

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Via Ron Paul.

• The Ultimate Power of The Word “NO” (Rossini)

Fear is the primary tool of authoritarians. It mentally disarms the population. We know about the desire to physically disarm the population, by trying to take away guns. Well, fear is the tactic for mental disarmament. When one is afraid, one makes bad decisions. One doesn’t think things through. One tends to act impulsively in an attempt remove immediate dissatisfaction. One tends not to question, but blindly obey. In a state of fear, one may submit and agree that 2+2=5; only to afterwards be filled with regret at doing such a stupid thing. Fear is meant to break your individual will. Your will to say the word “NO” stands in the way of every authoritarian scheme. The authoritarian needs you to say “YES,” even if you don’t really believe it. The authoritarian will pull all the levers available, and move all the pieces on the board to corner you, all with the goal of getting you to say “YES.”

Mass propaganda is designed to get you to say “YES”. Everywhere you look, you see the same exact message. “Say YES”…”Say YES”…”Say YES”… Slapping the mask on your face provided two wins for authoritarians: First, you said “YES” to allowing authoritarians to dress you when you left your house. Second, it conditioned you to realize that all others had their wills broken too. Everyone’s face was now dressed up, and hidden from view. What a powerful visual to break down your will. Saying “YES” to unprecedented “Lockdowns” and isolation has led to massive mental and physical illnesses that will reverberate through the ages, and will be talked about for the rest of our lives, much in the same way that the World Wars and Great Depression are talked about.

Now, the levers are being pulled, and pieces are being maneuvered for the grand slam: Saying “YES” to having foreign chemicals injected into your body, even if you don’t want them and don’t need them. Medical treatments, especially those that will be with you and inside of your body for the rest of your life, should never (EVER) be mandatory. Most people would agree with this in a heartbeat. Yet, with a constant diet of fear, the goal is to get you to say “YES.” Saying “YES” to this not only breaks your will, but surrenders your sovereignty over the one (and only) body that you will ever have. Allow this, even a single time, and saying “NO” to future mandated injections will be neutralized. It’s too late. Whatever injections are decreed, your body will always be at the mercy of other human beings.

One word from you puts an end to this: “NO.” One word keeps your sacred will intact: “NO.” One word can possibly and literally save your life: “NO!”

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They won’t go after him for killing old people. Too many other Democrats did the same.

• Andrew Cuomo Is Resigning, But The Investigations Will Continue (USAT)

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is giving up the powerful job he’s dedicated most of his life to keeping within his family, but his resignation won’t end a bevy of pending investigations into him and his administration. No fewer than five district attorneys have made preliminary inquiries into Cuomo’s alleged sexual harassment detailed in the scathing, 165-page report last week from Attorney General Letitia James’ office that ultimately led to the governor’s announcement Tuesday that he will resign in two weeks. That includes Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who is in the midst of a criminal investigation into claims by a Cuomo executive assistant who says the governor groped her breast at the Executive Mansion last year.

There’s also a pending investigation by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn who are looking into the Cuomo administration’s handling of COVID-19 in nursing homes and its withholding of certain death data at the height of the pandemic last year. And that’s not all. James is still looking into whether Cuomo illegally used state resources to pen his book on the COVID-19 crisis, for which he is due to be paid $5.1 million. And the Assembly’s impeachment inquiry continues on, though its immediate future is no longer clear. The investigations and litigation could enmesh Cuomo for months or years after his scheduled departure from public office in two weeks. “The inquiry into criminal conduct in our jurisdiction remains open and pending,” Soares spokesperson Cecilia Walsh said Tuesday, just after Cuomo announced his pending resignation.

[..] Separately, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York have subpoenaed material related to Cuomo’s recent memoir as part of an investigation of the state’s handling of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes on Cuomo’s watch, The Wall Street Journal reported in June. [..] James, meanwhile, told reporters last week that her investigation into Cuomo’s book deal remains underway. “The investigation with respect to the book and whether or not public resources were utilized is ongoing and it’s separate and apart from this investigation,” she said Aug. 3. The Assembly Judiciary Committee, which has been investigating various Cuomo-related issues to determine whether to impeach the governor, is scheduled to meet Monday.

Lawmakers had been moving toward impeaching the governor, but Cuomo’s resignation could change their plans. The Assembly could still pursue an impeachment that could prevent Cuomo from running for state office again. Such an endeavor, however, would cost millions of dollars in taxpayer money, which Cuomo himself highlighted during his resignation speech. “It will consume government,” Cuomo said of his potential impeachment. “It will cost taxpayers millions of dollars. It will brutalize people.”

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The presence of judges makes you think this is about law. It is about politics. No matter that the key witness, without whom there would be no case, says he made it all up. No matter that Julian helping Manning crack something was a blatant lie. Those things have become part of the case, accepted as facts.

Yesterday was only about whether his two kids will prevent him from suiciding. As if this should ever have been allowed to become about that.

There have been people walking around with signs for a decade, and writing righteous texts on social media. When will they realize this is no use? As a society, we will never process the death through torture of our bravest and smartest. And we don’t deserve to. We deserve to be forced to explain this to our grandchildren.

• US Allowed To Challenge Key Psychiatric Evidence in Assange Case (RT)

The High Court in London has allowed the US to challenge a psychiatric evaluation of Julian Assange, which was key in an earlier court ruling refusing Washington’s request to extradite him for trial. Wednesday’s appeal proceeding is the latest development in the continuing effort by the US to extradite Assange to stand trial on American soil for alleged computer-related crimes. A British judge refused the request in January on humanitarian grounds, ruling that there was a high risk of Assange taking his own life if she agreed to his extradition. Testimonies by psychiatrist Michael Kopelman about the poor state of the Australian’s mental health were crucial in the case. The US was allowed to challenge the ruling of the District Court on three points and wanted to pursue two further arguments.

One of their extra lines of attack, which was granted by Lord Justice Tim Holroyde, was to seek the dismissal of Kopelman’s testimonies, due to the fact that he initially concealed Assange’s relationship with Stella Moris and the fact that they had two children together. Clair Dobbin, who represents the US side, argued that the professor had misled the court and that his opinion about Assange’s state of mind should have been dismissed by Judge Vanessa Baraitser. The name of Assange’s partner was not public at the time of Kopelman’s initial testimony, but it became known before the ruling was passed. The expert witness for the defense did report Assange’s fatherhood, and said when pressured by the US side during the extradition hearings that he didn’t disclose Moris’ identity out of respect for her privacy.

Judge Baraitser decided when rejecting the extradition request that although Kopelman did mislead the court, he didn’t fail in his role as an impartial witness. Edward Fitzgerald, who represents Assange, argued against the challenge, saying concern for family safety was natural in his situation. He recalled that a Spanish private security firm hired to spy on Assange allegedly snatched a diaper from his baby son to test his DNA and identify the child’s parents. The baby boy was regularly brought by an associate of Assange to visit him at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was staying for seven years to avoid extradition proceedings. The firm is suspected to have worked on behalf of the US government, and its alleged activities were cited extensively before Judge Baraitser.

Matt Kennard

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Inflation, right? So what’s going to make the money flow?


 

 

Pilger

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 11 2021

Aug 112021
 
 August 11, 2021  Posted by at 9:23 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  111 Responses »


Henri Matisse Window at Tangiers 1912

 

• Public health experts must check ‘egos at the door’ – Malone (JTN)
• Teenage Boys Are 14 Times More Likely To Suffer Rare Heart Complication From Pfizer’s Covid Jab
• Pfizer and Moderna Go Head to Head Against Delta (MPT)
• Hawaiian Airlines Latest Carrier To Mandate Covid Vaccinations For Staff (CNBC)
• 3 Major US Airlines Will Not Mandate Shots For Unvaccinated Workers (CNN)
• What Would Our Economy Look Like In The Shadow Of Vaccine Passports? (Smith)
• Oregon High School Grads Need Not Be Proficient in Reading, Writing, Math (JT)
• Cuomo’s Legacy: Normalizing Corruption And Lawlessness (Sirota)
• Billionaire-Backed Mining Firm To Seek EV Metals In Greenland (R.)
• Assange In Court Today (Rozenberg)

 

 

 

 

Ducky Bomb

 

 

Vaxx the young!

 

 

Pr. Raoult: viral loads are not correlated to the symptomatic/asymptomatic condition of the patient.

 

 

Sometime I think I have Malone overkill, but kudo’s to him. John Solomon has lots of readers.

• Public Health Experts Must Check ‘Egos At The Door’ – Malone (JTN)

Dr. Robert Malone urges public health officials to “check [their] egos at the door” and change their policies with the science regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Malone, an immunologist and epidemiologist who says he invented the mRNA technology that’s used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, explained on the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday that new mutant variants of COVID-19 “are able to bypass, to a significant extent, the protection afforded by the current vaccines.” With the immune systems of everyone who’s vaccinated trained to fight the virus in the same way, “what that’s going to do is create a setup where once we do have a fully functional viral escape mutant, there will be no barriers to it spreading rapidly through the human population and, basically, completely abrogating any benefits associated with the vaccines,” he warned.

“What we had been told, that these vaccines are protective, they’re going to protect us, they’re going to prevent us from getting infected, they’re going to prevent us from having virus replicate in our bodies, and they’re going to prevent us from infecting other people, those are not true,” Malone said. “And there has been a variety of statements to the effect that those responsible for these effects, this viral evolution, are the unvaccinated. That’s just not true.” Malone, who has received the Moderna vaccine, recommends using therapeutics early on in COVID-19 infections to recover from the virus. He mentioned that the director of the National Center for Advanced Technology at National Institutes of Health (NIH) resigned from his position because he was frustrated when his team identified “repurpose drug candidates” that could be used to fight COVID-19 “but just couldn’t get any capital from NIH to advance them.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci has “two odd, exclusive focuses,” Malone said. One is “only focusing on antivirals when this is a hyperinflammatory disease, and we’ve got a lot of great anti-inflammatories. And the other is the focus on hospitalized, as opposed to early-onset patients, outpatients.” Malone compared the “paradox” of focusing on hospitalized patients, rather than early-onset patients, to someone going to the hospital with COVID-19 symptoms but being turned away because they weren’t sick enough to be hospitalized.

He added that instead of admitting they were wrong with their COVID-19 policies, like scientists do when confronted with a changing reality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is censoring people by “using these incredibly powerful new tools to suppress any dissent or discussion.” Malone has personally experienced censorship. His LinkedIn account was suspended without explanation over his comments on the COVID-19 vaccines before it was later restored.

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Very small study.

• Teenage Boys Are 14 Times More Likely To Suffer Rare Heart Complication From Pfizer’s Covid Jab (DM)

Pfizer’s Covid vaccine may pose more of a risk to boys, a study claimed today amid growing calls for No10 to rethink plans to dish out jabs to children. New research has suggested boys are 14 times more likely to be struck down with a rare heart complication called myocarditis. The data, from the US, will likely fuel an already fierce debate over Britain’s decision to press ahead with inoculating all 16 and 17-year-olds. Last week, the Government’s advisory panel ruled older teenagers should be given their first dose. Ministers plan to invite them before they head back to schools and colleges in September. But health officials have yet to make concrete plans for children to get top-ups. They want to wait for more safety data about myocarditis before pressing ahead.

Real-world data from the US, which has been vaccinating children for months, have shown teenage boys to be at a higher risk. It prompted one member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which green-lighted the move to jab children, to admit different advice for boys was ‘theoretically on the cards’. There is already precedent for just giving vaccinating just one gender, with the HPV jab offered only to girls until 2018. The new research, published in JAMA Cardiology, was based on an analysis of just 15 children struck down with myocarditis after getting Pfizer’s vaccine — which will be given to British children. Only one was a girl.

The findings echo data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which suggests the risk is up to nine times higher among teenage boys. All 15 experienced chest pain, which started a couple of days after being vaccinated and lasted for up to nine days. None were struck down with a serious bout of myocarditis or required intensive care. All were discharged within five days. But doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital cautioned that the long-term risks of post-vaccination myocarditis ‘remain unknown’.

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Pfizer 42% effective in July. Not enough for a EUA.

• Pfizer and Moderna Go Head to Head Against Delta (MPT)

Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine appeared to have a higher effectiveness rate compared with the Pfizer vaccine during the period of time when the Delta variant first became predominant, researchers reported. While both vaccines were highly protective against infection from January to July in Minnesota (Moderna 86%, Pfizer 76%), their effectiveness estimates declined during the month of July, with an estimate of 76% for Moderna (95% CI 69-81) and 42% for Pfizer (95% CI 13-62), reported Venky Soundararajan, PhD, of nference, a healthcare research company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues.

Moreover, in a matched cohort from multiple states, a two-fold risk reduction against breakthrough infection was seen with Moderna’s vaccine versus Pfizer’s (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 0.50, 95% CI 0.39-0.64), the authors wrote in a study published on the preprint server medRxiv. However, they found no significant differences in the rate of complications in breakthrough cases from either vaccine, with similar rates of 21-day hospitalizations, 21-day ICU admissions, and 28-day mortality. An earlier report of a Cape Cod cluster of breakthrough infections published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report late last month did not seem to find an imbalance between the percentage of breakthrough infections and the percentage of Massachusetts residents who received the vaccine (46% and 56% with Pfizer, and 38% and 38% with Moderna, respectively).

In the current study, Soundararajan and co-authors examined adults in the Mayo Clinic Health System or affiliated hospitals in Minnesota, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, and Wisconsin with at least one PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 who received at least one dose of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine after Dec. 1, 2020 but before July 29, 2021, and who did not test positive prior to receiving their first vaccine dose. Overall, 119,463 patients met this criteria for the Pfizer vaccine, and 60,083 met this criteria for Moderna, the authors said. Notably, the prevalence of Delta variant in Minnesota in July was 70% compared with a prevalence of 0.7% in January.

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Oh well. Take a different airline.

• Hawaiian Airlines Latest Carrier To Mandate Covid Vaccinations For Staff (CNBC)

Hawaiian Airlines told U.S. staff they will be required to be vaccinated against Covid-19, becoming the third major carrier to issue such a mandate in less than a week. CEO Peter Ingram told employees Monday that they must receive their second shot, if they are getting a two-dose vaccine, by Nov. 1, though there will be exceptions for medical or religious reasons, according to a staff memo reviewed by CNBC. Last week, United Airlines became the country’s first major carrier to mandate vaccines, requiring that its 67,000-person U.S. workforce show proof of inoculation by Oct. 25 at the latest. Frontier Airlines also announced that it will require that its employees be vaccinated against Covid by Oct. 1 or that they are regularly tested.


“It is not a decision I take lightly, and I would acknowledge that my own thinking on this has evolved over the last few months as I have watched this pandemic continue to take its terrible toll,” Ingram said in his note. He said senior leadership “deliberated extensively” and consulted the board of directors. “Safety is the foundation of air travel, and it is ingrained throughout our operation and service. This is no different,” he said. Most other U.S. airlines have encouraged but not mandated that staff get vaccinated. However, Delta Air Lines said in the spring that new hires would need to show proof of vaccination. United had followed suit several weeks later. Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly told employees Monday that United’s announcement last week sparked questions from its own staff about the airline’s stance. “We continue to strongly encourage Employees to get vaccinated,” Kelly said. “We are continually evaluating the effects of the pandemic. Obviously, I am very concerned about the latest Delta variant, and the effect on the health and Safety of our Employees and our operation, but nothing has changed.”

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“We certainly encourage it everywhere we can, encourage it for our customers and our employees, but we’re not putting mandates in place..”

• 3 Major US Airlines Will Not Mandate Shots For Unvaccinated Workers (CNN)

The CEOs of Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines say they are not requiring unvaccinated employees to receive the shot, breaking with United Airlines’ mandate that workers get vaccinated by October 25 or face getting fired. In an internal memo obtained by CNN, Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly said the airline will “continue to strongly encourage” that workers get vaccinated, but the airline’s stance has not shifted. “Obviously, I am very concerned about the latest Delta variant, and the effect on the health and Safety of our Employees and our operation, but nothing has changed,” Kelly said. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian told Good Day New York on Tuesday that 75% of its workforce has already been vaccinated even without a companywide mandate.


In May, Delta became the first major carrier to require that all new hires be vaccinated. United Airlines made a similar announcement in June. “I think there’s some additional steps and measures we can take to get the vaccine rates even higher, but what we’re seeing is every day is those numbers continue to grow,” Bastian said. Both announcements follow a New York Times podcast interview with American Airlines CEO Doug Parker, who said the airline is giving workers who get vaccinated by the end of this month one extra day of vacation in 2022. “We certainly encourage it everywhere we can, encourage it for our customers and our employees, but we’re not putting mandates in place,” said Parker. In a statement, American Airlines said there was “no update at this time” to its vaccination policy. “We are strongly encouraging our team members to get vaccinated, and we are offering an incentive for those who do.”

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“Simply put, vaccine passports could result in the death of what’s left of the free market as we know it.”

• What Would Our Economy Look Like In The Shadow Of Vaccine Passports? (Smith)

The real concern with a vaccine passport has nothing to do with coronavirus, or herd immunity, or saving lives. It’s a tool of control. Like the Soviet Union’s communist party membership card, it’s an official document that demonstrates compliance to authority. It’s a tool to divide the U.S. population. If this autocratic diktat was directed at a tiny minority of people within the population, it might work at frightening them into accepting the vaccinations; to go along to get along. But, with hundreds of millions of people saying “no way,” history tells us the more pressure applied the more rebellion is inspired. Second, we have to consider what the immediate economic and financial effects will be in light of this conflict. For example, look at the amount of relocation and migration that has happened in the U.S. in the past year alone.

Many millions of people have escaped from predominantly blue states based on political and social factors; and the covid mandates and lockdowns are a big part of what inspired most people to leave. As has been well documented, blue states are much slower in recovering economically when compared to red states with less restrictions. Not only that, but money moves with people. This is a hard reality. Conservative states are seeing ample cash inflows from tourism and mass migration while blue states are bleeding tax revenues. In light of this revelation, red states are going to ask themselves this question: “Why would we commit economic suicide like the blue states by following their example? Wouldn’t vaccine passports be the equivalent of blue state covid mandates times a hundred?”

But let’s say for a moment that vaccine passports were somehow implemented everywhere in the country at the same exact time. What would happen then? Well, the amount of bureaucracy that would be added between the average consumer and everyday trade would be immense, and with red tape comes a slowdown in business. Whole new wings of the government would have to be created to track and enforce vaccine passports rules (I say “rules” because none of the mandates have ever been passed into law or voted on by the public). Regular inspections of businesses would have to be enacted, and new taxes would have to be created to pay for the system. The amount of space and employees needed to meet new standards for retailers would increase in order to check every customer that comes through the door for a passport.

Also, let’s not forget that many thousands of people in multiple states have had “breakout” covid infections despite being fully vaccinated, which means rules on social distancing and masking will also still be in place. The amount of capital that a business owner would have to spend to meet the government requirements would continue to rise while their profits would continue to fall. Eventually, the majority of small businesses would close, just as we saw during the first series of lockdowns. Smaller businesses, which represent about half of the U.S. retail economy, would be under so much stress from maintaining the proper restrictions and adding infrastructure that they simply would not be able to compete with major corporations and Big Box stores.

The end result would be the complete disintegration of the small business sector (except perhaps online retailers). Only national and international conglomerates would be left behind to provide brick-and-mortar services to the public, and of course many millions of jobs would be lost in the process. Less competition means ever increasing prices and a lower quality of goods and services. Simply put, vaccine passports could result in the death of what’s left of the free market as we know it. The majors will know they have the public by the scruff of the neck, so why bother trying anymore? They can throw us scraps from the table and we would have to take them and be happy with what we get.

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The pilot story is great: “no one dies on the plane.”

• Oregon High School Grads Need Not Be Proficient in Reading, Writing, Math (JT)

I was once told by a pilot that jet bridges are the most dangerous places in aviation because “no one dies on the plane.” When someone has a fatal episode on a plane, the preference is to move the person outside to “call the code” on the bridge rather than require the plane to be held or quarantined due to the death. If you just move them outside, they died somewhere else. The result is that it can be challenging to determine how many people actually die on airplanes. That story came to mind this week as more schools moved to end standardized testing — a move that can guarantee no one fails in their schools. In this case, students who lack proficiency in basic subjects are being sent out into society or even college to fail somewhere else. Anywhere other than the school.

Many of us have long objected to the chronic failure of public schools in major cities like New York, Detroit, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore to achieve bare proficiency for many students in reading, writing, and math. The response in many districts is for some to declare standardized testing or meritocracy as racist while other district eliminate special programs or schools for gifted students. Oregon has found a simpler approach. Gov. Kate Brown (D) just signed a bill last month that drops any proficiency requirement in reading, writing or math, before graduation. Problem solved. The short bill includes this provision: “SECTION 3. Notwithstanding any rules adopted by the State Board of Education, a student may not be required to show proficiency in Essential Learning Skills as a condition of receiving a high school diploma during the 2021-2022, 2022-2023 or 2023-2024 school year.”

The pandemic was the basis for initial suspension of such requirements but now it is being extended. The call for a more “inclusive and equitable review of graduation and proficiency requirements” was supported by Foundations for a Better Oregon to change requirement to “reflect what every student needs to thrive in the 21st century.” That appears not to include proven proficiency in being able to write, read, or do simple math. The supporters insist that it is unfair to require students to show knowledge on tests. Charles Boyle, the deputy communications director from Gov. Brown’s office, is quoted as saying that the new standards for graduation will help benefit the state’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.” The “benefit” however is more to the school district in getting kids out the door with a diploma without shouldering the burden to get them to a point of bare proficiency.

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He’ll get away with everything.

• Cuomo’s Legacy: Normalizing Corruption And Lawlessness (Sirota)

The amazing thing about Andrew Cuomo’s announcement this week that he is stepping down as governor of New York is not that he left office, it is that it took this long for him to resign. And among the most troubling parts of the interminable saga is how many crimes he and New York politicians normalized in the process — because so many of these officials were complicit, too. Cuomo resigned in the wake of Attorney General Tish James’ report detailing his sexual crimes. But here’s the truth that’s hard to say aloud: If the New York governor had not been a sex pest, he likely would have gotten away with hiding thousands of people’s deaths in nursing homes and shielding his health care industry donors from any liability — all while profiting off a $5 million book deal and being venerated by liberals and corporate media outlets as a shining star.

In fact, unless things suddenly change, he will get away with those crimes. With U.S. Attorneys so far declining to prosecute Cuomo on those matters — and with New York’s legislature refusing to begin impeachment proceedings on those issues — the federal and state political systems made sure these crimes weren’t considered transgressions at all. Same goes for many New York Democratic voters — a new poll shows that even now, a plurality of them say they approve of the way Cuomo has done his job. To be sure, Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim’s nursing home crusade, and his allegations that Cuomo tried to bully him into silence, created a singular political earthquake that shook the New York political system and media into finally scrutinizing the gubernatorial monster that had long been rampaging through Albany.

But the refusal to prosecute or impeach Cuomo over that epic scandal has further normalized that kind of corruption. Indeed, presiding over a massacre of elderly people and shielding the perpetrators all to ingratiate oneself with political financiers is now just regular politics. That’s now what politicians are allowed — and even expected — to do, everywhere. While President Biden’s former top aide lobbies the White House on behalf of the nursing home industry, the Biden Justice Department recently said it will not open an investigation into nursing home negligence and COVID-related deaths in New York and other states. Case closed. The nursing home massacre is just one of many examples of Cuomo lawlessness that should have elicited a law enforcement response — but didn’t.

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Even more reason to promote electric cars. Bill Gates is here to help you. There is still hope.

• Billionaire-Backed Mining Firm To Seek EV Metals In Greenland (R.)

Mineral exploration company KoBold Metals, backed by billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, has signed an agreement with London-listed Bluejay Mining to search in Greenland for critical materials used in electric vehicles. KoBold, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to hunt for raw materials, will pay $15 million in exploration funding for the Disko-Nuussuaq project on Greenland’s west coast in exchange for a 51% stake in the project, Bluejay said in a statement. Shares in BlueJay traded 26% higher on the news. The license holds metals such as nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum and the funding will cover evaluation and initial drilling.


KoBold is a privately-held company whose principal investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate and technology fund backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. Other KoBold investors include Silicon Valley venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz and Norwegian state-controlled energy company Equinor. BlueJay said previous studies found the area in western Greenland has similarities to the geology of Russia’s Norilsk region, a main producer of nickel and palladium. “This agreement is transformative for Bluejay,” said the comany’s CEO Bo Steensgaard. “We are delighted to have a partner at the pinnacle of technical innovation for new exploration methods, backed by some of the most successful investors in the world.”

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La honte.

• Assange In Court Today (Rozenberg)

Two judges in the High Court will be dealing with a preliminary issue this morning in the extradition case against Julian Assange. The US government wants the Wikileaks founder to face trial in the US on charges of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. In January, District Judge Baraitser ruled that it would be oppressive to extradite him. Last month, Mr Justice Swift granted the US permission to appeal to the High Court on three of the five grounds in its application for permission. I explained what we know of Swift’s reasons last week. Today’s hearing is before Lord Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Farbey. It starts at 10.30 and is expected to conclude before lunch. The judges will be sitting in the largest courtroom in the Royal Courts of Justice in London with a video link to an adjoining courtroom.


The hearing will take place remotely — which I understand to mean that not everyone involved will be present in court. It’s understood that the US will be renewing its request for permission to appeal on the two grounds dismissed by Swift. These related to the evidence of a defence psychiatrist and the risk that Assange would commit suicide. Swift found that Baraitser’s findings were reasonably open to her and her conclusions on the disputed evidence were also reasonable. He said the matters referred to in the application for permission to appeal — we have no idea what these were — “are no more than an attempt to re-run determination of the evidential disputes reached by the district judge”. It’s not known whether Assange’s lawyers will be challenging the grounds on which Swift granted the US permission to appeal.

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Debt Rattle August 8 2021

Aug 082021
 
 August 8, 2021  Posted by at 9:43 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  91 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky The Galata tower by moonlight 1845

 

• Long-Lasting Covid-19 Symptoms Rare In Children (BBC)
• Let’s Talk Delta (Denninger)
• Covid is a Global Propaganda Operation (APT)
• Durable And Broad Immune Memory After SARS-CoV-2 Infection (Cell)
• SF Hospital To Give Supplement mRNA Vaccine To People Who Got J&J (ABC)
• Cholesterol Drug Cuts Coronavirus Infection By 70% (Fox)
• The Unvaccinated: The New COVID Scapegoats (TF)
• Vaccines Are Leaky And Have Poor Durability (Bannon)
• COVID-19 Vaccine To Be Offered To 16 And 17 Year-olds (HART)
• Joe Rogan Blames Jabs For Virus Mutations & Blasts Mandatory Vaccination (RT)
• The Very Fine People of a Civilized Society (Kunstler)
• ‘Apocalyptic’ Scenes Hit Greece As Athens Besieged By Fire (G.)

 

 

“Israel, where ~90% of the adult population is fully vaccinated, reports 3,849 new #COVID19 cases, severe cases spike to 324 (of which 209 are fully vaccinated)” – Ministry of Health

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are entire “long covid in kids” campaigns out there.

• Long-Lasting Covid-19 Symptoms Rare In Children (BBC)

Children who become ill with coronavirus rarely experience long-term symptoms, with most recovering in less than a week, research suggests. King’s College London scientists say that while a small group may experience prolonged illness, they were “reassured” that number was low. Headaches and tiredness were the most common symptoms seen. A Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health expert said the data reflected what doctors saw in clinics. Many who are infected do not develop symptoms and those that do, tend to have a mild illness. This peer-reviewed study, published in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health journal, wanted to understand how Covid affected children and how it compared to other respiratory diseases. It used data provided by parents or carers to the UK Zoe Covid Study app.

The study looked at 1,734 children, aged between five and 17, who were reported to have developed symptoms and tested positive for Covid between September 2020 and February 2021. The researchers say it’s very difficult to know how many children were infected during this time period as the four UK nations record data differently, but they estimate more than 400,000 children and young people tested positive. Fewer than one in 20 (4%) were found to have experienced symptoms for four weeks or more, with one in 50 (2%) having symptoms for more than eight weeks. The most common symptoms reported were headaches and tiredness. Others included a sore throat and loss of smell. On average, older children were typically ill for slightly longer than primary school children, with those aged between 12 and 17 taking a week to recover while for younger children the illness lasted five days.

It’s the scientists hope that these findings will reassure families, while also validating those who have experienced prolonged illness. ‘The team also looked at an equal number of children who had symptoms but tested negative for Covid. Only a few children – 15 out of 1,734 – had symptoms for at least 28 days, fewer than one in 100. Emma Duncan, professor of clinical endocrinology at King’s College London who worked on the research, said the “takeaway message” was: “Can children have prolonged illness after Covid-19? Yes they can, but it’s not common and most of these children get better with time. “Children can also have prolonged symptoms from other illnesses as well. We need to be looking after all children who have protracted illnesses, irrespective of whether that illness is Covid-19 or anything else.”

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The obvious questions that are forbidden.

• Let’s Talk Delta (Denninger)

I’ll try to make it simple. Before the first jab went into the first arm and could do anything Covid-19 had peaked in the United States in most areas. Remember that the rule is “two weeks from first shot to second, then two weeks to have protection.” The CDC, Trump and then Biden all took credit for something that the vaccines did not do. What did it? Covid originally had an R0 of about 3. That means you need 1 – (1/3) or about 66% of the people to be immune by either infection of vaccination before the case rate would fall. The CDC claimed we had about 33 million infections and somewhere between 4 and 11 not diagnosed for each one that was. Well, it wasn’t 11 because that’s more people than exist in the US.


But if it’s six, more or less up the middle, then we were for all intents and purposes at herd immunity. Rah-rah-rah-rah vaccines are the reason we’re saved. Nice try; the evidence is that the vaccines don’t work well at all. They might work to some degree to prevent infection and transmission but not very well. In fact on the evidence coming out of Israel it appears that they’re about 20% effective which is damn close to worthless. What proved this? Delta. Again, if you believe the CDC, then Delta has an R0 of somewhere between 5-9. Let’s take the middle; 7. 1 – 1/7 = 85% must be immune. Again, it doesn’t matter how their immune, just that they are. The CDC claims in a new MMWR that the shots are “very” effective as a booster if you previously had Covid. I disagree, looking at their alleged “study.”


check the Delta fatality rate

But frankly, I don’t care what their MMWR says because the data says its wrong. See, 70% of Americans have had at least one shot and half are fully vaccinated, that is, allegedly protected. Now let’s look at the data again. The CDC stupidly did not segregate and hive off those who were previously infected; we’ll thus, given their advocacy, assume that the previously-infected, which are about 60% of the population, are equally divided into those who got the stabs. Well, if that’s true then 60 + 25 = 85% — which is herd immunity for Delta with an R0 of 7! Clearly, however, it isn’t given the infection rate. There is only one logical conclusion: The jabs do not work to stop either infection or transmission. If you can’t stop infection and transmission you also can’t stop people from getting sick.

So when does this end? When enough people get naturally infected that we have actual herd immunity. Which is what I said back in March of 2020. What does this mean for you? Well, it makes for a problem right now, because we know that during the four weeks between the first jab and immunity building you’re more likely to get infected. We’ve seen this repeatedly all over the world. Into the maw of a spike getting vaccinated is dangerous because it temporarily suppresses immune response. It probably doesn’t increase the risk of bad outcomes but it definitely increases the risk of infection itself. The very difficult question for people now is whether that risk is worth the nebulous claims of “preventing severe disease and death.” UK’s data, along with Israel’s, strongly suggests that might be a bad bet. The majority of their admissions into the hospitals are now vaccinated. So much for “prevents severe disease” eh?

[..] BTW the data out of the UK continues to show Delta is less dangerous. A lot less-dangerous. It’s about one fifth as likely to kill you overall, and about half as likely if you’re over 50. It is also less-likely to send you to the hospital. This is the expected progression of a respiratory pandemic virus. While it appears on that data the vaccines confer some personal protection it is by no means perfect and nowhere near the 95%+ claimed, especially in people over 50. Further there is no evidence Delta is more-transmissible; its secondary attack rate in household and non-household settings is nearly identical to Alpha. This STRONGLY implies the CDC is lying about Delta’s R0 and the real problem driving the spike is that the jabs not only do not work against Delta they destroy the victim’s immune response in some percentage of those previously infected.

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We badly need such perspectives.

• Covid is a Global Propaganda Operation (APT)

Dr Piers Robinson is an expert on communication, media and world politics, focusing on conflict and war and especially the role of propaganda He is presently Co-Director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, Convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media and Associated Researcher with the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 ‘War on Terror’ From 2016 – 2019, he was Professor and Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of Sheffield. Dr Robinson has served on the boards of several academic journals. He has lectured at the NATO Defense College in Rome and briefed senior UK military commanders and diplomats.


His Research interests focus on Organised Persuasive Communication and Contemporary Propaganda and his current projects include Propaganda and the Syrian conflict; Propaganda and the 9/11 Global War on Terror and Covid19. Dr Robinson’s books include the Routledge Handbook of Media, Conflict and Security (2016), Pockets of Resistance: British news media, war and theory in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, (2010) and The CNN Effect: the myth of news, foreign policy and intervention.(2002).

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No-one with a positive antibody test should be vaccinated. Where are those tests?

• Durable And Broad Immune Memory After SARS-CoV-2 Infection (Cell)

Ending the COVID-19 pandemic will require long-lived immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Here, we evaluate 254 COVID-19 patients longitudinally up to 8 months and find durable broad-based immune responses. SARS-CoV-2 spike binding and neutralizing antibodies exhibit a bi-phasic decay with an extended half-life of >200 days suggesting the generation of longer-lived plasma cells. SARS-CoV-2 infection also boosts antibody titers to SARS-CoV-1 and common betacoronaviruses. In addition, spike-specific IgG+ memory B cells persist, which bodes well for a rapid antibody response upon virus re-exposure or vaccination.


Virus-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells are polyfunctional and maintained with an estimated half-life of 200 days. Interestingly, CD4+ T cell responses equally target several SARS-CoV-2 proteins, whereas the CD8+ T cell responses preferentially target the nucleoprotein, highlighting the potential importance of including the nucleoprotein in future vaccines. Taken together, these results suggest that broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients.

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New definition of booster.

• SF Hospital To Give Supplement mRNA Vaccine To People Who Got J&J (ABC)

Even though the CDC is not recommending a booster shot at this time, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and San Francisco’s Department of Public Health have decided to allow an extra coronavirus vaccine for people who got the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The new dosing allowance seems to be unique to San Francisco. The hospital’s chief of staff does not know of any similar guidance elsewhere at this time. ZSFG says people who got J&J will be able to get a second shot of either Pfizer and Moderna by the end of the week at their vaccine clinic. But “booster” is not the word health officials are using to describe it – instead San Francisco’s Department of Public Health is calling it a “supplemental dose.”


“It’s not a booster because it’s not specific for some of the variants, which the booster ultimately will be,” said Dr. Chris Colwell, chief of emergency medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General. On Monday, Dr. Colwell voted to allow the hospital’s vaccine clinic to give a supplemental mRNA vaccine to somebody who had the J&J shot. “Potential benefit, no downside. To me, as we look at the future of this virus and now we’re facing a fourth surge, it does make sense,” he explained.

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Another study that will be suppressed.

• Cholesterol Drug Cuts Coronavirus Infection By 70% (Fox)

A drug meant to treat cholesterol was found to reduce coronavirus infection by 70% in lab studies, with researchers calling for additional clinical trials among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. A team of researchers from the U.K. and Italy published findings in the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal Friday, finding that fenofibrate and fenofibric acid resulted in a significant reduction in coronavirus infection in human cells when the drug was used in safe and approved concentrations, according to a news release posted Friday. “Our data indicates that fenofibrate may have the potential to reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms and also virus spread,” Dr. Elisa Vicenzi of the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan and co-author, said in the release.

“Given that fenofibrate is an oral drug which is very cheap and available worldwide, together with its extensive history of clinical use and its good safety profile, our data has global implications.” The team called for added clinical trials to explore use of the drug as a potential COVID-19 therapy, while noting studies are ongoing at the University of Pennsylvania and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Farhat Khanim of the University of Birmingham and corresponding study author, cited viral variants spurring rising infection rates and deaths in countries around the world. “Whilst vaccine programmes will hopefully reduce infection rates and virus spread in the longer term, there is still an urgent need to expand our arsenal of drugs to treat SARS-CoV-2-positive patients,” Khanim wrote.

[..] The drug was suggested to work by inhibiting the harmful overproduction of cytokines tied to coronavirus infection, and also treat airway inflammation. Additional properties could prevent blood clotting seen in late-stage disease in many COVID-19 patients, study authors noted.

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Pay attention to the René Girard quote.

• The Unvaccinated: The New COVID Scapegoats (TF)

The press revels in condemning conservatives for not getting the vaccine. Self-loathing conservatives like David French say Evangelical vaccine hesitancy is a “spiritual problem.” Conservative governors – those with low COVID death rates in their states – are attacked for not doing enough to encourage vaccination. Paul Krugman takes these arguments to the next level, arguing that conservatives seeking personal autonomy are really trying to preserve their while male Christian “privilege” while making minorities pay the price. The government – including officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins – must be happy with the blame-shifting. Just imagine their delight, after having potentially contributed to the creation of COVID-19, that the unvaccinated are now the accused.

Never one to miss a media appearance, Dr. Fauci is out there saying the unvaccinated are “propagating” the latest outbreak, that we need to “do something to get them to be vaccinated.” This duty that Dr. Fauci advances is the purported obligation to do something to protect others. (One has to ask whether millions of lives would have been saved had they followed this same duty with taxpayer dollars at Wuhan.) We believe this is just the start. If persuasion has reached its limit (and there is evidence it has), then please, trust them at their word when they advocate restricting your rights and inflicting punishment if you remain unvaccinated. And in considering the institutions of power setting their sights on the unvaccinated – those whose purported crime is of inaction – I leave you with the words of René Girard:

“The crowd tends toward persecution since the natural causes of what troubles it and transforms it into a turba cannot interest it. The crowd by definition seeks action but cannot affect natural causes. It therefore looks for an accessible cause that will appease its appetite for violence. Those who make up the crowd are always potential persecutors, for they dream of purging the community of the impure elements that corrupt it, the traitors who undermine it.”

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The vaccines are leaky and they make the blood vessels leaky. Wonderful.

• Vaccines Are Leaky And Have Poor Durability (Bannon)

COVID is a disease of hyperinflammation and hypercoagulation. Now finally Dr. Malone is trying to drive that home after 18 months. We can treat this early. Many doctors were saying this in March 2020.

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Criminal.

• COVID-19 Vaccine To Be Offered To 16 And 17 Year-olds (HART)

On Tuesday, there was a quiet mention from the BBC and several newspapers that the government was likely to announce routine vaccination of 16 and 17 year-olds following updated advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI). This announcement duly came on Wednesday. An urgent letter is being prepared to the JCVI to ask what new information they have to inform this decision. On 19 of July, they highlighted the very low risk to children from COVID-19 and the emergence of rare but serious side-effects. They stated: “Any decision on deployment of vaccines must be made on the basis that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks to those people who are vaccinated.” They concluded: “JCVI is of the view that the health benefits of universal vaccination in children and young people below the age of 18 years do not outweigh the potential risks”.

Only two things appear to have changed in the two weeks since that announcement. First, there has been a dramatic fall in cases demonstrating how wrong the government advisors have been. Secondly, the membership of the JCVI has changed and Professor Robert Dingwall — who has raised concerns around the ethics of vaccinating children — is no longer a member. It has been revealed that other members of the JCVI Covid-19 sub-committee have also been ‘let go’. In attempting to defend the shift away from this position, JCVI Chair Professor Wei Shen Lim was entirely unconvincing in his reasoning for this change of heart. We note that he has a substantial conflict of interest: he has direct responsibility for material levels of funding received by his department from Pfizer.

The JCVI’s current position is that the second dose is too dangerous for children but the first dose is safe enough. The evidence upon which they base the latter hypothesis is based only on data of short-term effects collected by the voluntary reporting systems such as VAERS, which is acknowledged to underestimate by a wide margin. It begs the question, why would it be necessary to vaccinate children with a single dose when the government has already argued via the national campaign that the first dose is not sufficient to be effective and that everyone must get their second dose? Public Health England estimates that a single dose of vaccine is only 35% effective against the Delta variant.

We were told in the press conference that the rollout would come in the next week or two but now there are targeted sessions at nightclub venues, so no chance for adolescents to take time to consider their ‘choice’ and a very clear message that you will need ‘the jab’ to get your life back. The plea to ‘do the right thing’ and protect your friends and family seems rather hollow with new data from PHE suggesting the Delta variant is as easily transmitted by vaccinated as unvaccinated, with vaccine effectiveness down to 17% and no reduction in infectiousness. Meanwhile news of the planned rollout to 12-15s has appeared even though approval is yet to be given.

Neil Oliver

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“the very sort of environment that we’re creating by having so many people vaccinated with a vaccine that doesn’t kill off the virus, it actually can lead to a more potent virus. Try finding that story anywhere.”

• Joe Rogan Blames Jabs For Virus Mutations & Blasts Mandatory Vaccination (RT)

Angry Twitter users called for Joe Rogan to be canceled and Spotify held accountable for giving him a platform after he claimed vaccines may cause virus mutations and labeled mandatory jabs a step towards ‘dictatorship.’ Rogan’s controversial statements have caused online frenzy on multiple occasions since he moved his super-popular podcast from YouTube to Spotify in a $100 million-plus exclusive deal last year to avoid censorship. The show instantly became one of the most viewed on the platform, with Spotify saying it was performing “above expectations.” Back in April, the stand-up comedian and UFC commentator was trending on social media after suggesting young and healthy people didn’t need to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, and warning that giving into cancel culture could eventually lead to a situation in which “straight white men aren’t allowed to talk.”

He addressed the issue of vaccination once again in the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, saying that, by trying to inoculate as many people as possible, the US government might actually be making the virus stronger and more dangerous. He based his claim on the findings of a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the PLOS Biology magazine in 2015. Its authors said “anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.” Speaking about the so-called ‘breakthrough cases’ of inoculated people becoming infected with Covid-19, Rogan suggested that “the very sort of environment that we’re creating by having so many people vaccinated with a vaccine that doesn’t kill off the virus, it actually can lead to a more potent virus. Try finding that story anywhere.”

However, the US authorities insist that vaccination is the best way to stop the coronavirus pandemic, with President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, reiterating last week that those, who avoid getting the jab “are the ones that are propagating this outbreak.” According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, more than 70% of adult Americans have so far received at least one shot of the vaccine. Rogan previously acknowledged he was “not a doctor” and his audience shouldn’t look to him as a reliable source of scientific information. He also claimed he was “not an anti-vaxx person.” During the latest episode, the 53-year-old also said those pushing for mandatory vaccination to be introduced in the US, “are dumb. They don’t understand human history.”

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US politics? Boring.

• The Very Fine People of a Civilized Society (Kunstler)

Now, the very fine president “Joe Biden” has appointed a very fine fellow named Merrick Garland to be Attorney General of the civilized society called the USA. Mr. Garland is chief enforcement officer of federal law. He attended the very fine Harvard Law School, but he apparently missed the seminar course in constitutional law titled Advanced Issues in Administrative Law and Theory. Mr. Garland has been sending letters to officers of the Arizona state government threatening to punish and even imprison anyone in that state who moves further to investigate the balloting results and the conduct of the 2020 election in that jurisdiction. Mr. Garland, having missed that crucial course (above), is apparently unaware that the US constitution assigns authority over elections to each state — with the reserve clause that the US Congress can legislate changes to that order of things, which they haven’t done.

Therefore, Mr. Garland is out-of-order. Will he actually move to interfere with an effort currently underway in the state of Arizona to conduct a full forensic investigation of the 2020 vote? Elected officials of that state have counter-threatened to throw Mr. Garland’s very fine ass in an Arizona jail if he attempts to interfere. Meanwhile the forensic investigators of said election hired by the Arizona State Senate have completed phase one of their task, close examination of the paper ballots, and are moving on to phases two and three: canvassing street addresses from which mail-in ballots originated, and full examination of the Dominion vote-tallying machines.

There is reason to suppose that the investigation will reach conclusions that might distress the very fine people of the Progressive Left who maintain that the 2020 election was the “most secure in history” — that is, without any significant errors. If that were so, why would they hesitate to examine the evidence? Might it raise questions that would be difficult to answer, for instance: what to do if very large errors happen to be discovered? Is it an affront to their very fine-ness? Is the US government not fit to manage such a result? Or are the people of this land not resourceful or fair-minded enough to work through such a development? It will be interesting to find out.

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Not enough firemen, not enough equipment. All been budgetted away by the EU. But still an overdose of policemen and policecars.

The Monastiraki kitchen has been feeding 1000s every day this week, including firemen whom the government doesn’t take care of.

• ‘Apocalyptic’ Scenes Hit Greece As Athens Besieged By Fire (G.)

Little had prepared any of us on the Athens-bound flight for the sight of the great fire-induced clouds that swept either side of the plane as it made its descent on Friday. News of the extreme heat engulfing Greece had spread beyond its borders all week, packaged in increasingly desperate language. Temperatures were breaking records few had ever imagined. If Monday was bad, then Tuesday was worse. In some parts of the country, the mercury had hit 47C (117F), with thermal cameras on drones recording the ground temperature in downtown Athens at 55C. By Wednesday, we were hearing that entire tracts of suburban forest on the Greek capital’s northern fringes had gone up in flames. Infernos seemingly redolent of Dante’s hell had incinerated everything in their path; friends had lost homes; thousands had been evacuated with residents and tourists fleeing blighted zones by any means possible.

Terraces, an Athenian’s respite against the blazing heat, had been transformed into ash-laden no-go zones. “It’s been crazy over here. Between the extreme heat and the wildfires, it feels apocalyptic,” Eleni Myrivili, a friend recently appointed to the role of Athens’ first chief heat officer, wrote in an email on Thursday as the army was deployed to assist firefighters. “Ash is raining down on us here in Athens.” From the sky, it was frighteningly clear that the city was under siege, caught in a cycle of insufferable heat fuelling conflagrations on terrain so parched it was ready to ignite at any moment.

Fires, some big, some small, some extinguished and then rekindled, were raging nationwide, the country’s civil protection chief, Nikos Hardalias, told reporters. Conditions were not only “extremely dangerous” but unprecedented, he said, estimating that firefighters trying to protect populated areas, electricity installations and historic sites had battled 154 wildfires over the space of the week. More than 60 conflagrations were still raging on Saturday.


Beach on Evia island

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Debt Rattle August 7 2021

Aug 072021
 
 August 7, 2021  Posted by at 9:06 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  93 Responses »


René Magritte The human condition 1935

 

• Fauci: ‘Flood’ Of Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates After Full FDA Approval (USAT)
• Covid19 Vaccine Efficacy & Effectiveness – The Elephant (Not) In The Room (L.)
• Leaky Blood Vessels: An Unknown Danger of COVID-19 Vaccination (D4CE)
• Early Signs Covid-19 Vaccines May Not Stop Delta Transmission (R.)
• In England, Hundreds Of Vaccinated People Hospitalised With Delta (AlJ)
• Greater Antibody Response In Recovered COVID Patients Than Vaccinated (Fed.)
• Swedish Professor Says 5 Shots of COVID Vaccine May be Necessary (SN)
• CDC Director Makes Case Vaccination Passports are Futile (CTH)
• White House: No More Lockdowns Of Schools Or Economy Despite Covid Rise (JTN)
• UK Draws Up Contingency Plans For ‘Firebreak’ Covid Lockdowns (iN)
• Australia’s ‘Covid Zero’ Days May Be Numbered (ST)
• Indiana University Students Appeal Vaccine Mandate To US Supreme Court (JTN)
• US Last In Health Care Among Richest Countries Despite Spending Most (Hill)
• Dems’ Crusade Against Trump Does Real Harm To Presidency, Constitution (Fox)

 

 

 

 

Yeadon

 

 

 

 

They’re planning the approval in early September. That will be the last of the FDA’s credibility.

“This is a dystopian world we’re living in,” he said. The public is awash in lies and misinformation about COVID-19 and the vaccines, “they are being misled.”

“Americans, he hopes, will say, “I’m not going to take any of this. I’m seeing everybody around me get sick and dying. Let me just go ahead and get vaccinated.'”

• Fauci: ‘Flood’ Of Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates After Full FDA Approval (USAT)

As soon as the Food and Drug Administration issues a full approval for a COVID-19 vaccine, there will be “a flood” of vaccine mandates at businesses and schools across the nation, Dr. Anthony Fauci told USA TODAY’s editorial board on Friday. Mandates aren’t going to happen at the federal level, but vaccine approval will embolden many groups, he predicted. “Organizations, enterprises, universities, colleges that have been reluctant to mandate at the local level will feel much more confident,” he said. “They can say, ‘If you want to come to this college or this university, you’ve got to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this plant, you have to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this enterprise, you’ve got to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this hospital, you’ve got to get vaccinated.'”

Fauci doesn’t see more lockdowns in the nation’s future. They were issued early in the pandemic to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, known as “flattening the curve.” “The rationale for shutting down was that the hospital system would not be able to handle the surge of cases because everybody was getting sick,” he said. With upwards of 70% of adults having had at least one dose of vaccine, the epidemic has shifted to one of the unvaccinated, he said. “When you walk into a hospital, what you’re going to see is a lot of young people, some of whom are seriously ill, but you’re not seeing an overwhelming outstripping of the capability of the hospitals throughout the country,” he said. While he’s attacked online and in conservative media every day, Fauci said he worries less about himself than for the nation as a whole.

“This is a dystopian world we’re living in,” he said. The public is awash in lies and misinformation about COVID-19 and the vaccines, “they are being misled.” With COVID-19 cases rising among the unvaccinated as the highly contagious delta variant spreads, Fauci hopes people’s “better angels” will prevail over the sea of lies on social media. Americans, he hopes, will say, “I’m not going to take any of this. I’m seeing everybody around me get sick and dying. Let me just go ahead and get vaccinated.'”

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Absolute Risk Reduction = 1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.

• Covid19 Vaccine Efficacy & Effectiveness – The Elephant (Not) In The Room (L.)

Vaccine efficacy is generally reported as a relative risk reduction (RRR). It uses the relative risk (RR)—ie, the ratio of attack rates with and without a vaccine—which is expressed as 1–RR. Ranking by reported efficacy gives relative risk reductions of 95% for the Pfizer–BioNTech, 94% for the Moderna–NIH, 91% for the Gamaleya, 67% for the J&J, and 67% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccines. However, RRR should be seen against the background risk of being infected and becoming ill with COVID-19, which varies between populations and over time. Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population. ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs: 1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.

ARR is also used to derive an estimate of vaccine effectiveness, which is the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one more case of COVID-19 as 1/ARR. NNVs bring a different perspective: 81 for the Moderna–NIH, 78 for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 108 for the Gamaleya, 84 for the J&J, and 119 for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines. The explanation lies in the combination of vaccine efficacy and different background risks of COVID-19 across studies: 0·9% for the Pfizer–BioNTech, 1% for the Gamaleya, 1·4% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·8% for the J&J, and 1·9% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccines. ARR (and NNV) are sensitive to background risk—the higher the risk, the higher the effectiveness—as exemplified by the analyses of the J&J’s vaccine on centrally confirmed cases compared with all cases:8 both the numerator and denominator change, RRR does not change (66–67%), but the one-third increase in attack rates in the unvaccinated group (from 1·8% to 2·4%) translates in a one-fourth decrease in NNV (from 84 to 64).

There are many lessons to learn from the way studies are conducted and results are presented. With the use of only RRRs, and omitting ARRs, reporting bias is introduced, which affects the interpretation of vaccine efficacy.10 When communicating about vaccine efficacy, especially for public health decisions such as choosing the type of vaccines to purchase and deploy, having a full picture of what the data actually show is important, and ensuring comparisons are based on the combined evidence that puts vaccine trial results in context and not just looking at one summary measure, is also important. Such decisions should be properly informed by detailed understanding of study results, requiring access to full datasets and independent scrutiny and analyses.

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Doctors 4 Covid Ethics: “Are we about to witness the birth of an entirely new world of autoimmune disease?”

• Leaky Blood Vessels: An Unknown Danger of COVID-19 Vaccination (D4CE)

Dear colleague: Six months ago, we laid out the reasons for our fears that gene-based vaccines were potentially dangerous [1]. These concerns were based primarily on the expectation that the vaccine would through lymphatic transport soon enter the circulation, where it would be taken up by the endothelial cells. These cells would then start producing the spike protein, which would cause them to be attacked and destroyed by cytotoxic Tlymphocytes. The resulting lesions would give rise to platelet activation and blood clot formation. Since then, clotting abnormalities have indeed taken center stage as propagators of adverse events following vaccinations.

Rapid entry of the vaccine into the bloodstream has been confirmed, as has rapid appearance of expressed spike protein in the bloodstream. Activation of clotting is very common even in those without characteristic or lasting symptoms, but the number of grave adverse events caused by this mechanism—heart attack, stroke, cerebral sinus venous thrombosis, and others—is very high. With this letter, your attention is directed to a second autoimmune pathway that will be triggered simultaneously with the activation of cytotoxic T-lymphocytes. We predict that this pathway will cause damage to and leakiness of blood vessels, with consequences that are far-reaching and profound, particularly upon repeated vaccination. This second autoimmune pathway will render booster shots uniquely dangerous.

1. The proposed mechanism
The first injection will induce the expression of spike protein, and the formation of specific antibodies to it. Re-vaccination will lead to a second round of spike protein production, including in endothelial cells. The antibodies, now already present, will bind to these spikes and will direct attack of the complement system to these cells. Neutrophil granulocytes, too, will be activated by antibodies bound to the endothelial cells. Vascular damage and leakage will ensue.

1.1. Evidence that SARS-CoV-2 spikes provoke complement attack on vessels
Investigations published last year by Jeffrey Laurence and colleagues [2] have establishedthat spike proteins direct complement attack to the inner vessel lining. The authors showed that spike proteins released from the lungs of COVID-19 patients travelled via the circulation to attach at distant sites to the inner vessel lining, i.e. the endothelial cells. Leukocytes and the complement system became activated precisely at those sites, which resulted in damage and leakiness of the vessels. Why this occurred became evident only recently, through several discoveries that we have discussed in a previous letter to physicians [3]. Specifically, the immune system of all individuals is already primed to respond to coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2, most likely through cross-immunity with widespread respiratory human coronavirus strains. This immunological memory causes antibody production to commence early on during SARS-CoV-2 infection [4–7]. Thus, antibodies will already be there to bind the spike proteins when these become stranded in the vessel linings. This inevitably triggers activation of the complement cascade.

1.2. The effect of booster shots
Repeat injections of gene-based “vaccines” are bound to intensify and reproduce this basic event wherever the newly expressed spike protein appears on the vessel lining. Spike protein-induced complement attack on vessels has been shown to evoke a plethora of skin lesions in COVID-19 patients [8]. These show a striking resemblance to some of those which are now being reported in vaccinated individuals [9]. Complementmediated vascular injury occurring at multiple sites throughout the body will have potentially devastating effects not only on the health of the vaccinated individual, but also on pregnancy and fertility. Complement will also likely potentiate coagulation abnormalities via yet another pathway. Spike protein molecules, known to be released into the bloodstream shortly after vaccination [5] will bind to platelets, marking them as targets for antibody binding. Subsequent attack by complement must be expected to cause platelet destruction, possibly culminating in immune thrombocytopenic purpura. This, too, has been clinically observed after vaccination [10–13]. With regard to long term effects of re-vaccination, what will happen when the “vaccines” seep out of damaged blood vessels and reach the organs of the body? Will gene uptake and spike production then mark each and every cell type for destruction by killer lymphocytes? Are we about to witness the birth of an entirely new world of autoimmune disease?

1.3. Conclusion
It is beyond question that repeated vaccinations carry serious and unprecedented risks as outlined above. While government officials, authorities and vaccine manufacturers may remain ignorant of the medical implications of such findings, any physician in possession of this knowledge cannot administer repeated COVID-19 vaccination in good conscience, nor in good faith. Under no circumstances is it acceptable for a doctor to knowingly inflict harm on a patient. ALL PHYSICIANS ARE HEREWITH CALLED ON TO RECONSIDER THE ETHICAL ISSUES SURROUNDING COVID-19 VACCINATION.

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Not THAT early…

• Early Signs Covid-19 Vaccines May Not Stop Delta Transmission (R.)

There are early signs that people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 may be able to transmit the Delta variant of the virus as easily as those who have not, scientists at Public Health England (PHE) said on Friday. The findings chime with those from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which last week raised concerns that vaccinated people infected with Delta could, unlike with other variants, readily transmit it. read more The highly infectious Delta variant has become the dominant coronavirus type globally, sustaining a pandemic that has already killed more than 4.4 million people, including over 130,000 in Britain. Vaccines have been shown to provide good protection against severe disease and death from Delta, especially with two doses, but there is less data on whether vaccinated people can still transmit it to others.

“Some initial findings … indicate that levels of virus in those who become infected with Delta having already been vaccinated may be similar to levels found in unvaccinated people,” PHE said in a statement. “This may have implications for people’s infectiousness, whether they have been vaccinated or not. However, this is early exploratory analysis and further targeted studies are needed to confirm whether this is the case.” PHE said that of confirmed Delta cases that had ended up hospitalised since July 19, 55.1% were unvaccinated, while 34.9% had received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. Nearly 75% of the British population has had two vaccine doses, and PHE said that “as more of the population gets vaccinated, we will see a higher relative percentage of vaccinated people in hospital”.

Separately, PHE said another variant, known as B.1.621, first detected in Colombia, had shown signs of evading the immune response triggered by either COVID-19 vaccines or previous infection. PHE has labelled the variant “under investigation” but has not declared it a “variant of concern” – a designation that can trigger strong policy responses. “There is preliminary laboratory evidence to suggest that vaccination and previous infection may be less effective at preventing infection with (B.1.621),” it said, adding there had been 37 confirmed cases of the variant in England.

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How to redefine “rare”: “..34.9 percent had received two doses..”

• In England, Hundreds Of Vaccinated People Hospitalised With Delta (AlJ)

Hundreds of fully vaccinated people in England have been hospitalised with the highly contagious Delta coronavirus variant, scientists said on Friday. In its latest COVID-19 update, Public Health England (PHE) also warned there were early signs that people who have been inoculated may be able to transmit the Delta strain as easily as those who have not received any jabs. From July 19 to August 2, 55.1 percent of the 1,467 people hospitalised with the Delta variant were unvaccinated, PHE said, while 34.9 percent – or 512 people – had received two doses. Dubbed “freedom day”, July 19 was the date England significantly eased lockdown restrictions. All vaccines in use in the United Kingdom – those produced by AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech – require recipients to receive two doses to be fully inoculated.


About 75 percent of the UK’s adult population has received two shots to date. “As more of the population gets vaccinated, we will see a higher relative percentage of vaccinated people in hospital,” PHE said. Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, said the hospitalisation figures showed “once again how important it is that we all come forward to receive both doses of the vaccine as soon as we are able to do so”. “Vaccination is the best tool we have in keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe from the serious disease risk COVID-19 can pose,” Harries said in a statement. “However, we must also remember that the vaccines do not eliminate all risk: it is still possible to become unwell with COVID-19 and infect others.”

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“..such infection simultaneously assists in offering protection against developing variants.”

• Greater Antibody Response In Recovered COVID Patients Than Vaccinated (Fed.)

A new study has found that individuals that have previously contracted COVID-19 show a more potent antibody response than those who were solely vaccinated for the respiratory virus. Conducted by a research team at Rockefeller University in New York, the analysis found “that between a first (prime) and second (booster) shot of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, the memory B cells of infection-naïve individuals produced antibodies that evolved increased neutralizing activity against SARS-CoV-2,” but also that “no additional increase in the potency or breadth of this activity was observed thereafter.” Meanwhile, researchers determined that not only do recovered COVID-19 patients possess neutralizing antibodies up to a year after infection, but that such infection simultaneously assists in offering protection against developing variants.

“Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection produces B-cell responses that continue to evolve for at least one year,” the study read. “During that time, memory B cells express increasingly broad and potent antibodies that are resistant to mutations found in variants of concern.” The analysis later goes on to conclude, “Memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination.” Moreover, the results suggest that “boosting vaccinated individuals with currently available mRNA vaccines would produce a quantitative increase in plasma neutralizing activity but not the qualitative advantage against variants obtained by vaccinating convalescent individuals.”

The study’s findings add to further mounting evidence detailing the level of protection natural immunity offers previously infected COVID-19 patients. Last month, Emory University published an extensive investigation describing the efficiency of long-term immunity against the respiratory virus. Similar discoveries have also been identified in research released by the Cleveland Clinic and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, respectively.

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Every next shot is more dangerous.

• Swedish Professor Says 5 Shots of COVID Vaccine May be Necessary (SN)

While many people have bragged about being “fully vaccinated” after taking two COVID-19 jabs, a Swedish professor says that as many as five shots may be needed to combat falling immunity. “We don’t know how long the vaccine protects against serious illness and death,” said Karolinska Institute Professor Matti Sällberg. “This means that you pick the safe before the unsafe.” Numerous European countries are planning a 3rd round of COVID “booster shots” in September, and the FDA also indicated that vaccinated individuals will be given another shot in the fall. However, Sällberg suggests this probably won’t be enough and that “recurring shots” will be necessary. “After receiving the second dose, the immune response slowly subsides. Within a year, many may have lost their protection. We do not know yet, but if you get a third dose, it will be activated again,” he said. “Biology says that a fading immune response is not unlikely. Then it’s time for a third, fourth, maybe fifth dose”.


One wonders whether Sällberg holds a conflict of interest given that he is also chairman of the board at vaccine company SVF. Meanwhile, in Israel, a doctor warned that “the effectiveness of the vaccine is waning/fading out” and that “85-90% of the hospitalizations are in fully vaccinated people.” Dr. Kobi Haviv also chillingly pointed out that 95% of the patients in hospital with the most severe symptoms are vaccinated. The meme below is already coming true, and with vaccine passports seemingly on the way, people will have to keep taking recurring vaccinations simply to maintain access to basic lifestyle activities. Whether vaccine side-effects or the hassle of continually having to return for more jabs will put some people off remains to be seen.

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“..both the vaxxed and non-vaxxed person walking into a restaurant, store, group, venue or workplace present the exact same risk to other people there, so how does the presentation of proof of vaccine make any difference?”

• CDC Director Makes Case Vaccination Passports are Futile (CTH)

They are just making up narratives now, and the media are not calling them out on it…. The Director of the CDC made an important admission during an interview today on CNN. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated the vaccine does not prevent COVID-19 infection, nor does it stop the vaccinated person from transmitting the infection or the delta variant. According to Director Walensky, the only benefit from the vaccine now is presumably that it reduces the severity of symptoms. If a vaccinated and non-vaccinated person have the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus – with or without symptoms – then what difference does a vaccination passport or vaccination ID make? According to the CDC TODAY, both the vaxxed and non-vaxxed person walking into a restaurant, store, group, venue or workplace present the exact same risk to other people there, so how does the presentation of proof of vaccine make any difference?

Additionally, her entire statement makes no sense. There is no evidence that vaccinated asymptomatic carriers are asymptomatic because of the vaccine. There are likely just as many asymptomatic non-vaccinated carriers. The data shows an equally distributed infection rate regardless of vaccination rate, which is simultaneously admitted by Direcor Walensky, which, as an outcome, is an admission that undercuts the entire argument for compulsory vaccines. The reverse is also evident in the data. There are just as many vaxxed carriers who are symptomatic (ie. sick), as there are un-vaxxed carriers who are symptomatic (ie. sick). The percentage of vaxxed and non-vaxxed people hospitalized it identical to the vaxxed/non-vaxxed population around the hospital.

In regional populations with extremely high vaccination rates, the COVID infection rate continues unabated. The percentage of vaccinated people hospitalized is identical to the percentage of people vaccinated in the community. In Gibraltar, 99% of the population vaccinated; COVID infection rate climbs. In Iceland over 75% of population vaccinated; infection rate climbs. Singapore and Israel show the same thing [Data Sets Here]. So what value is the vaccination passport?

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Does Fauci agree?

• White House: No More Lockdowns Of Schools Or Economy Despite Covid Rise (JTN)

The Biden White House insisted Friday that American schools and the economy will not shut down again even as COVID-19 infections rise with the new Delta variant. “We are not going back. We are not turning back the clock,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “This is not March 2020 or even January 2021,” she added. “We’re not going to lock down our economy or our schools because our country’s in a much stronger place than when we took office.” The promise came as some teachers unions aligned with the Democratic Party call for the school year to begin with virtual classes, not in-classroom learning.

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No lockdowns in US, but the UK knows better.

• UK Draws Up Contingency Plans For ‘Firebreak’ Covid Lockdowns (iN)

The government has put contingency plans in place for further Covid-19 lockdowns should the NHS be forced back to the brink over winter, i can reveal. While No10 is confident that the vaccine rollout will prevent Covid hospitalisations rising to the levels that led to previous lockdowns, there remains concern that the NHS could be put under intense pressure from issues such as a large resurgence in patients suffering serious flu symptoms. A senior government source has told i that the Prime Minister authorised planning for “firebreak” lockdowns if a number of factors combine to push the NHS to breaking point in the autumn and winter months. There are also said to be concerns at a sharp increase in the number of NHS staff taking sick leave following 18 months fighting on the front line of the pandemic.


“The Government believes it has got to grips with the pandemic following the vaccine rollout,” said the Government advisor. “Barring a new vaccine-beating strain, fears over a rise in infections similar to that seen last autumn are actually outweighed by other issues like an NHS staffing crisis and the likely resurgence in flu infections, and other respiratory diseases. On top of Covid infections these factors could tip the NHS back to the brink and force more lockdowns.” However, the source added the Government is determined to avoid the long lockdowns the UK has endured since the pandemic struck in March 2020. = “Should more lockdowns be necessary, the plan is for them to be short, and preferably during the school holidays in late October and over Christmas. Firebreaks rather than lasting for months at a time.”

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Zero covid is a really stupid idea. So, ideal for Australia.

• Australia’s ‘Covid Zero’ Days May Be Numbered (ST)

Australia’s coveted status as a haven from the pandemic could be at an end, with experts warning that a sustained Delta outbreak makes a return to “Covid zero” unlikely. After long stretches with zero local cases – what Australians once jokingly referred to as “doughnut days” – a Sydney outbreak has now grown to 4,610. Record numbers of new cases are being reported each day despite widespread lockdowns. Slowly but surely, some local authorities have shifted to talking about containing the virus rather than beating it. “Given where numbers are, given the experience of Delta overseas, we now have to live with Delta one way or another, and that is pretty obvious,” said New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian. After 18 months of advocating “Covid zero”, that represents a step-change in the country’s approach.

For experts like Emma McBryde, an infectious diseases and statistical modelling expert at James Cook University, the shift in tone is a reflection of the new reality that Delta has brought. “We’re buying time, not getting back to Covid zero,” she told AFP. Like most experts she agrees that Australia’s old virus toolbox – aggressive tracing and testing, snap lockdowns and extensive travel restrictions – while less effective, is still essential to stop exponential virus spread. But, she said: “The goal now should be keeping Covid in check for long enough to get vaccinated.” Dr Tony Blakely, an epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne, echoed those comments, telling public broadcaster ABC that Australia will “probably never” get back to zero transmission.

Barring a few isolated Pacific islands and neighbouring New Zealand, few countries weathered the first 18 months of the coronavirus quite as well as Australia. As the rest of the world hunkered down, got sick and lost loved ones, Australians flocked to bars, restaurants and the beach. Occasionally, the virus jumped from hotel quarantine facilities into the community but aggressive tracing and testing, snap local lockdowns and domestic travel restrictions kept it in check. Then came Delta.

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“An admitted IU student’s right to attend IU cannot be conditioned on the student waiving their rights to bodily integrity and autonomy..”

• Indiana University Students Appeal Vaccine Mandate To US Supreme Court (JTN)

First Amendment attorney Jim Bopp filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday on behalf of eight Indiana University students, asking the nation’s top court to stop the university from enforcing its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. “Continuing our fight against this unconstitutional mandate is necessary to guarantee that IU students receive the fair due process they’re owed by a public university,” Bopp said in a statement sent to the media. “An admitted IU student’s right to attend IU cannot be conditioned on the student waiving their rights to bodily integrity and autonomy and to consent to medical treatment like IU has done here. The emergency application for writ of injunction was sent to Associate Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is assigned to review cases coming out of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bopp is requesting she issue a decision by Aug. 13, 10 days before the start of IU’s fall semester Aug. 23. Indiana University announced its COVID-19 vaccine mandate May 21, outlining what it called “strong consequences” for all those who did not comply – students would have their classes canceled and email accounts cut off, the university said, and employees would be fired if they hadn’t gotten the vaccine by the start of the fall semester. The university said exemptions would be “strictly limited to a very narrow set of criteria, including medical exemptions, and documented and significant religious exemptions.” Students were told they needed to get their first dose of the vaccine by July 1 in order to be fully vaccinated by the start of school.

In response to angry calls from parents and a letter signed by the majority of Indiana’s state senators (all Republicans) expressing concerns with the mandate, IU softened its position, and began to grant all religious exemptions. But those students were told they would need to continue to wear masks, would likely be prohibited from attending certain events on campus and would be subjected to frequent testing. Then in mid-July, the university introduced an ethical exemption, allowing students and employees who don’t qualify for a medical exemption and do not want to object on religious grounds to cite personal ethics as a reason for not choosing to get the vaccine. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana upheld the mandate in July, and a three-judge panel with the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals also sided with IU, saying if IU students didn’t want to get the vaccine, they could go elsewhere. Bopp said his firm filed suit “to preserve students’ rights to bodily integrity and autonomy and the right to consent to medical treatment.”

Read more …

The Hill labels it a “Stunning new report”. They must be the only ones who didn’t know yet.

• US Last In Health Care Among Richest Countries Despite Spending Most (Hill)

The U.S. health care system ranked last among 11 wealthy countries despite spending the highest percentage of its gross domestic product on health care, according to an analysis by the Commonwealth Fund. Researchers behind the report surveyed tens of thousands of patients and doctors in each country and used data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Health Organization (WHO). The report considered 71 performance measures that fell under five categories: access to care, the care process, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes. Countries analyzed in the report include Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the U.S. Norway, the Netherlands and Australia were the top-performing countries overall, with the U.S. coming in dead last.


The U.S. ranked last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes despite spending 17 percent of GDP on health care, but came in second on the measures of care process metric. The nation performed well in rates of mammography screening and influenza vaccination for older Americans, as well as the percentage of adults who talked with their physician about nutrition, smoking and alcohol use. Half of lower-income U.S. adults in the report said costs prevented them from receiving care while just more than a quarter of high-income Americans said the same. In comparison, just 12 percent of lower-income residents in the U.K. and 7 percent with higher incomes said costs stopped them from getting care. The U.S. also had the highest infant mortality rate and lowest life expectancy at age 60 compared with other countries.

Read more …

Obsessed with power.

• Dems’ Crusade Against Trump Does Real Harm To Presidency, Constitution (Fox)

The progressive crusade to bring down Donald Trump by any means necessary continues to damage the Office of the President and the Constitution’s separation of powers. New York prosecutors succeeded in subpoenaing a sitting president — and thereby interfering with his ability to carry out his duties — all for the sake of indicting a single Trump Organization official for under-reporting taxes. Now the Biden administration has inflicted even more damage on the Presidency by waiving Trump’s constitutional right to confidential communications with his closest aides. On January 23, 2021, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats sent a letter to the Department of Justice demanding production of documents concerning meetings and communications between Trump and high-ranking Justice Department officials regarding election fraud.

House and the Senate committees subsequently followed up with subpoenas for a slew of top former Justice Department officials, such as Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, assistant attorney general Jeffrey Clark, and U.S. Attorneys in Georgia and New York. In normal times, the Justice Department would immediately reject these demands. Article II of the Constitution specifies, after all, that the President “may require the Opinion” from his principal officers “upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective offices.” Ever since President George Washington refused to share documents with the House about the Jay Treaty, the Executive Branch has asserted the need to keep confidential documents and information that reflect presidential decision-making and deliberation.

In Nixon v. United States, the Supreme Court recognized that the President must enjoy an executive privilege in order to receive the full and frank advice of top officials in order to effectively discharge his constitutional duties. More recently, the D.C. federal court has recognized that “history and legal precedent teach that documents from a former or an incumbent President are presumptively privileged.” The Supreme Court has only recognized an exception when a criminal defendant’s own constitutional right to information conflicts with the President’s right to confidentiality. Then—and only then—has the Court sought to balance the two competing rights by intruding only as necessary on the claim of privilege. Congress’s demands for documents and subpoenas for testimony are more far-reaching and much more destructive to the separation of powers.

While Congress has a right to investigate the events leading to the terrible riot of January 6, it does not have a right to override the constitutional prerogatives of an independent branch of government. If Congress has the right to demand presidential documents and discussions at will, it could just as easily force the Justices of the Supreme Court to reveal their deliberations about the electoral fraud cases brought after the November 3 elections, too. Imagine the howls from Capitol Hill if the Trump Justice Department had issued subpoenas to Nancy Pelosi to obtain internal documents and communications between her and her top legislative advisors about threat assessments provided in the run-up to the January 6 joint meeting of Congress.

Read more …

 

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Debt Rattle August 5 2021

Aug 052021
 
 August 5, 2021  Posted by at 9:07 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  182 Responses »


Jacques-Louis David Erasistratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus’ Disease 1774

 

• A Conversation with Dr. Fauci on the Antiviral Program for Pandemics (CSIS)
• Pfizer Covid-19 Vaccine Linked To Rare Cases Of Eye Inflammation (JPost)
• Israel’s Covid Cabinet Contemplating Lockdown In 2 Weeks (JPost)
• Chinese Cities Enter Lockdown As Delta Variant Spreads (LS)
• Biden Admin To Require All Foreign Travelers To US Be Vaccinated (JTN)
• Boston Mayor Bashes NYC For Vaccine Mandate, Compares It To Slavery (JTN)
• Biden Admin To Make Vaccination Mandatory For All Active Duty Soldiers (PM)
• LA City Council To Consider Requiring Vaccinations To Enter Indoor Spaces (Kusi)
• Biden’s ‘Independence From The Virus’: ‘Mission Accomplished’? (JTN)
• China’s “Social Credit” System Has Arrived In America (Black)
• Biden Pushes China-Style ‘Social Credit’ System (Ron Paul)

 

 

 

 

Joy Reid Cult

 

 

 

 

Think he was talking to someone he knows and let his guard down. Strange things come out.

• A Conversation with Dr. Fauci on the Antiviral Program for Pandemics (CSIS)

[..] the approach that we are taking right now is really what we call a two-tiered approach, two fundamental pillars. And the fundamental pillars address what you had alluded to in that the drugs that are already out there, the molnupiravir, the protease inhibitor, the Atea-Roche product, and even others that have not gotten as much visibility but are still somewhere along the early pipeline. That falls into what we are referring to as the developmental pillar of the APP, which is the Antiviral Pandemic Preparedness Program. Those drugs have already gotten a head start with the companies that were involved – you know, Merck and Pfizer and Roche-Atea, and others. We will partner with those pharmaceutical companies to further the advanced development of those products, number one; number two, to be available for other companies, biotech as well as pharma, who might have similar products.

But the one part of the two-pillared approach that I think looks in the long term as part of – and I want to take the opportunity, Steve, to mention this – that this is all part of a comprehensive pandemic preparedness plan that is associated with an even broader and larger pandemic preparedness plan for vaccines, which I know we’ll get a chance to talk about at another time in another setting, namely the prototype pathogen approach for the development of vaccines rapidly against any pathogen of any family. That program, together with this antiviral program, together with an extension of the diagnostics program, is part of the broader comprehensive plan to prepare for pandemics. Just wanted to mention that it isn’t in a vacuum with antivirals.

But let’s get back to the antivirals. You know, because we’ve spoken about this over the years multiple times, Steve, of the extraordinary and, in fact, spectacular success of the targeted antiviral program that we have had with HIV, which we’ll get a chance to talk about a little bit later. But that same approach of developing molecules right from the beginning by using the replication cycle of, in this case, the SARS coronavirus to identify vulnerable targets, that program we’re putting FOAs out right now – funding opportunity announcements – to get people stimulated and interested in doing that from the ground-up development of molecules together and simultaneously with the developmental component of this two-pillared process. So we’re very excited about it.

And I think that we are going to get both, as you said, early wins easy on. Hopefully, one of the candidates that you mentioned will turn out to be as good if not better than the monoclonal antibodies in remdesivir, which are the two approaches that we have right now. And then, hopefully, as we go on into 2022, when we’ll start putting out some money for the discovery component of this two-pillared process, we’re going to start seeing some long-term action and results.

Read more …

Add up all the “rare” and what have you got?

• Pfizer Covid-19 Vaccine Linked To Rare Cases Of Eye Inflammation (JPost)

The Pfizer coronavirus vaccine may be linked to a form of eye inflammation called uveitis, according to a multicenter Israeli study led by Prof. Zohar Habot-Wilner from Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center. The research was conducted at Rambam Health Care Campus, Galilee Medical Center, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Kaplan Medical Center and Sourasky. It was accepted for publication by the peer-reviewed ophthalmology journal Retina. Habot-Wilner, head of the Uveitis Service at the hospital, found that 21 people (23 eyes) who had received two shots of the Pfizer vaccine developed uveitis within one to 14 days after receiving their first shot or within one day to one month after the second.

Twenty-one people developed anterior uveitis, and two developed Multiple Evanescent White Dot Syndrome (MEWDS). “All the patients in the study met the World Health Organization and Naranjo criteria linking the onset of uveitis to the vaccination,” Habot-Wilner said. “This time frame is consistent with other reports of uveitis following various vaccines.” She said that any patients that had other systemic diseases that could have been related to uveitis were under control before vaccination. In addition, none of the patients had any changes in their systemic treatments for at least six months before getting the shots. Eight of the patients had a prior history of uveitis, but no less than one to 15 years prior.

Specifically, most cases were mild – only three were severe – and all anterior uveitis cases were able to be treated by topical corticosteroids and eye drops for pupil dilation. MEWDS cases, as accepted, were not addressed. “Only one case worsened after receiving the second dose,” according to Habot-Wilner, but she said that with appropriate treatment the disease also resolved for that individual.

Read more …

Clairvoyant.

• Israel’s Covid Cabinet Contemplating Lockdown In 2 Weeks (JPost)

he possibility of imposing a lockdown in two weeks’ time was discussed in Israel’s corona cabinet, Channel 13 reported on Wednesday evening. Construction and Housing Minister Ze’ev Elkin is reportedly in favor of the move, as infection models have predicted a lockdown will be necessary in any case by September. It is also reported that officials in the Health Ministry are supportive of a lockdown, in order to motivate Israelis who have not yet received a third vaccine dose to get the jab. Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz stated earlier on Wednesday that a lockdown is “a last resort” and described a fourth lockdown as a “dramatic move with dire consequences.”

Read more …

How often do the WH and Beijing talk about lockdowns?

• Chinese Cities Enter Lockdown As Delta Variant Spreads (LS)

Amid China’s worst COVID-19 outbreak since the early days of the pandemic, officials have locked down several cities, ordering residents to stay in their homes until they can be tested or vaccinated, according to news reports. After subduing the initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan last year, China maintained strict border controls, as well as quarantining and physical distancing measures to squash new outbreaks before they could spread, The Associated Press (AP) reported. But now, the country is contending with a large outbreak linked to an international airport in Nanjing, located in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

On July 20, nine airport workers tested positive for COVID-19, and in the following two weeks, 360 new domestic cases cropped up across China, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported. Upon detecting the cases in airport workers, the government immediately launched a testing campaign to screen the 9.2 million residents of Nanjing and instituted strict lockdowns in parts of the city, according to BBC News. However, new COVID-19 cases soon popped up in other provinces; as of now (Aug. 4), the outbreak has reached at least 17 provinces, the AP reported. After analyzing virus samples gathered from infected people, authorities reported that the outbreak is being driven by the highly transmissible delta variant, The Guardian reported.

In the city of Zhuzhou, located in central Hunan province, 1.2 million residents were ordered to remain in their homes starting Monday (Aug. 2) so that a mass testing and vaccination campaign could be organized, according to AFP. Similarly, Zhangjiajie, located in northwest Hunan, locked down residential communities over the weekend, the AP reported. As of Aug. 3, China reported that 1.71 billion vaccine doses have been distributed to its 1.4 billion residents, but it’s unclear exactly how many people are now fully vaccinated, according to the AP. Earlier reports suggest that at least 40% of the population has received two shots; that said, Chinese companies have not shared any real-world data about how their vaccines hold up against the delta variant, the AP noted.

Cases of infection in the country’s capital, Beijing, and the Sichuan, Liaoning and Jiangsu provinces have been traced back to Zhangjiajie through extensive contact tracing, according to The Global Times; and this entire chain of transmission seems to stem from the outbreak at Nanjing Lukou International Airport.

Read more …

Except at the southern border.

• Biden Admin To Require All Foreign Travelers To US Be Vaccinated (JTN)

The Biden administration is planning to require almost all foreign travelers to the U.S. to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, a White House official reported said on Wednesday. The official, who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity, said the requirement would be part of the administration’s easing up on travel restrictions for foreign citizens entering the United States. A timeline has not been determined yet, as working groups within federal agencies are studying how to best resume normal travel. But all foreign travelers, with a few exceptions, will be expected to have received the COVID-19 vaccine to enter the country, according to the AP.


Currently, travel restrictions are still in place, as any residents from outside the U.S. who have visited Brazil, Ireland, the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, China, and the European Schengen area in two weeks prior to traveling to the United States are prevented from entering, the AP reported. All air travelers to the U.S. must provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within the prior three days, regardless of vaccination status, to enter the country.

Read more …

“Here we want to make sure that we are not doing anything that would further create a barrier..”

• Boston Mayor Bashes NYC For Vaccine Mandate, Compares It To Slavery (JTN)

Acting Mayor of Boston Kim Janey compared New York City’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate to slavery, the Jim Crow era, and “birtherism,” but noted that she wants people to get the vaccine. Janey responded to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandate for indoor venues, restaurants, and gyms, WCVB reported. “We want to make sure that we are giving every opportunity for folks to get vaccinated. When it comes to what businesses may choose to do, we know that those types of things are difficult to enforce when it comes to vaccine,” she told WCVB.

“There’s a long history in this country of people needing to show their papers,” Janey continued. “During slavery, post-slavery, as recent as you know what immigrant population has to go through here. We heard Trump with the birth certificate nonsense. Here we want to make sure that we are not doing anything that would further create a barrier for residents of Boston or disproportionally impact BIPOC [black, indigenous and people of color] communities.” She added: “Instead, you want to lean in heavily with partnering with community organizations, making sure that everyone has access to the lifesaving vaccine. As it relates to people who want to encourage their workforce to get vaccinated. We certainly support that.”

Janey, the first woman and first African American to serve as Boston’s mayor, received criticism from other mayoral candidates, who she is running against for a full term. “When we are combating a deadly virus & vaccine hesitancy, this kind of rhetoric is dangerous. Showing proof of vaccination is not slavery or birtherism. We are too close to give ground to COVID. Science is science. It’s pretty simple – Vax up and mask up,” City Councilor Andrea Campbell tweeted.

Read more …

Easy pickings.

• Biden Admin To Make Vaccination Mandatory For All Active Duty Soldiers (PM)

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is likely to make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory for all active-duty troops this week. This comes after President Joe Biden asked the military to examine how and when to make that happen on July 29. The Pentagon decision on how to proceed could come this week, said several officials. The Pentagon said troops could be among the first to receive mandatory vaccines before upcoming deployments, according to CNN. They previously said they would like to wait for FDA approval despite Biden’s push for greater vaccination levels that could lead to them requesting a presidential waiver. Pending a presidential waiver, troops could receive the vaccine before full approval by the Food and Drug Administration.


A Justice Department memo dated July 6 said that, “because DOD has informed us that it understandably does not want to convey inaccurate or confusing information to service members —that is, telling them that they have the ‘option’ to refuse the COVID-19 vaccine if they effectively lack such an option because of a military order — DOD should seek a presidential waiver before it imposes a vaccination requirement.” Austin consulted with military medical authorities, said a defense official, who added he “[seeks] authorization to make it mandatory.” The decision comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a 64 percent spike in COVID-19 cases nationwide over the past week, reported Fox News. Austin said “we won’t let grass grow under our feet. The President directed us to do something and we’ll get after it.”

Read more …

They, too, have been propagandized for 20 months.

• LA City Council To Consider Requiring Vaccinations To Enter Indoor Spaces (Kusi)

Proof of at least partial vaccination against COVID-19 would be required to enter public indoor spaces in the city of Los Angeles, including restaurants, bars, gyms, concert venues, movie theaters and even “retail establishments,” under a proposal introduced Wednesday by City Council President Nury Martinez. “Enough is enough already,” said Martinez, who co-introduced the motion with Councilman Mitch O’Farrell. “Hospital workers are exhausted, moms who have put aside their careers are tired, and our kids cannot afford the loss of another school year. We have three vaccines that work and are readily available, so what’s it going to take?”

The proposal is similar to a policy announced this week in New York City, but it would be more restrictive with the inclusion of retail establishments, potentially limiting access to some basic necessities. The New York policy restricts access only to more entertainment-oriented venues such as indoor restaurants, fitness centers and theaters. According to O’Farrell’s office, the exact businesses that would fall under the restrictions would be determined during the drafting of the ordinance by city attorneys. No determination has yet been made on whether such retail restrictions would extend to grocery stores. The motion, if passed by the City Council, would instruct the city attorney to prepare an ordinance requiring “eligible individuals” to have received at least one dose of the vaccine before entering indoor spaces in the city.

The motion would also instruct the Community Investment for Families Department to report immediately on how to expand the Vax UP L.A. campaign and what resources are needed for a citywide outreach and education program in an effort to expand vaccine coverage. If the motion is approved, the Chief Legislative Analyst would work with other city departments to create an implementation strategy for the requirement and the city attorney would report to council with a course of action for ensuring compliance. “Hard-working Angelenos, their customers and the general public deserve to be safe in public spaces,” O’Farrell said. “The vaccines are our most effective form of protection, and the time to act is now.”

Read more …

“It was a long winter, but the clouds have broken,” declared Jill Biden in Philadelphia on the 4th of July.”

• Biden’s ‘Independence From The Virus’: ‘Mission Accomplished’? (JTN)

Little over a month ago, President Joe Biden was looking forward to an American celebration of the 4th of July with “independence from the virus” and, beyond, a “summer of joy and freedom.” No sooner had the administration begun taking bows for having effectively vaccinated its way to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic than reports began multiplying of surging case numbers of the Delta variant. Suddenly, mission accomplished became the mission continues for the Biden administration. “President Biden absolutely declared a victory too soon,” former Baltimore public health commissioner Dr. Leana Wen told Yahoo News recently.

Will the media and political elite hold Biden accountable for a premature end zone dance the way their predecessors a generation ago relentlessly needled President George W. Bush for celebrating “Mission Accomplished” in the Iraq War on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003? Or are the renewed COVID-related challenges mere speed bumps on Biden’s road to decisive ultimate victory over the mutating virus? “America is starting to look like American again,” read a White House fact sheet released in mid-June. Despite falling just shy of its goal to get 70% of adults at least partly vaccinated by Independence Day, the president maintained a sunny outlook as thousands of guests gathered on the South Lawn to celebrate the nation’s birthday.

“It was a long winter, but the clouds have broken,” declared Jill Biden in Philadelphia on the 4th of July. “We’re not at the finish let yet, but summer has never felt more full of possibility. And doesn’t the air smell so much sweeter without our masks?” A few short weeks later, the clouds are massing again. Just as the reality of the Iraq War set in after Bush’s famous speech, the new normal of the Delta variant is beginning to take shape in Biden’s America, and rules that were established just weeks ago are already obsolete.

Breakthrough cases of the coronavirus variant are surging — though among the vaccinated those numbers comprise mostly asymptomatic cases and cases with very mild symptoms. Hospitalization and fatality numbers are mere handfuls on the thousand compared to what last spring and summer brought. But mask mandates are also back (for vaxxed and unvaxxed alike) in so-called “substantial” risk COVID-19 spots. The president has made vaccines — or, failing that, regular testing — mandatory for all federal employees and contractors, and NIH Director Francis Collins is urging private sector employers to follow suit.

Read more …

Oh yes.

• China’s “Social Credit” System Has Arrived In America (Black)

If you protest lockdowns, you are an extremist putting lives in danger. If you burn down police stations and flip cars in the name of social justice, you are a mostly peaceful protester. And these days, anything from the “Ok” hand gesture to cheese is considered racist. PayPal is not going to keep this research to itself. It intends to be the tip of the social justice warrior’s spear: “The intelligence gathered through this research initiative will be shared broadly across the financial industry and with policymakers and law enforcement.” So the Big Banks will be able to use this same intelligence to blacklist “extremists” peddling “hate speech.” Just last month Wells Fargo closed the accounts of two different conservative activists, without explanation. In 2019, JP Morgan Chase did the same thing.

And the CEO of the alternative social media website Gab had four banks in four weeks ban the company’s account, allegedly because the platform harbors “extremist content.” All of this looks eerily like a back door for a Chinese-style ‘social credit system’ in the United States. Vaccine passports are an obvious example. If certain people have their way, the unvaccinated will be unable to board an airplane and banned from restaurants. Some people even say the unvaccinated should lose their health insurance for making an unpopular personal health decision. During the pandemic, governments across the world set up reporting systems to rat out your neighbors for having family over for the holidays. Bad Citizen! Vermont’s governor even asked students to snitch on their own parents who might have invited extended family over for Thanksgiving 2020.

And now the US government is leading the charge— with the help of the Big Tech companies, of course— by providing new, easy ways to report your ‘radical’ friends and family to the government. What exactly constitutes radical? Anything they don’t want you to do, or believe. This is the problem when just a handful of powerful centralized institutions controlling society. And it is the reason a solid Plan B gives you options to ensure that you’re not entirely reliant on one country’s government, one country’s banking system, or one country’s public health policies. I’m actually an optimist, and I have strong hope that humanity will overcome authoritarianism, as it always has before. But hope is not a course of action. Optimism is not a viable strategy. To truly become more secure from threats like America’s version of the Chinese social credit system, it’s important to give deliberate consideration to Plan B options that will put you in a position of strength.

Read more …

How many Americans would recognize it for what it is? How many Europeans?

• Biden Pushes China-Style ‘Social Credit’ System (Ron Paul)

In televised remarks yesterday, President Biden urged private businesses and universities to institute a China-style “social credit” system whereby some individuals are denied basic rights and privileges if they hold “wrong” views on matters such as health and medicine. How far will this go? Also today, NIH Director urges parents to wear masks in front of their children…in the home! And, major European newspaper editor apologized to readers over his publications of hysterical Covid coverage.

Read more …

 

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Gym Bro

 

 

Feynman.

 

 

A single drop of sea water under a microscope

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 1 2021

Aug 012021
 
 August 1, 2021  Posted by at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  51 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky Lac Maggiore 1892

 

• Two Weeks (Denninger)
• Vaccinated And Unvaccinated Individuals Have Similar Viral Loads (Medrxiv)
• US Reports Almost 200,000 New Covid Cases In Worst Spike Since January (F.)
• Why Are Globalists, Governments So Desperate For 100% Vaccination Rates? (AM)
• Twitter Suspends Berenson For Postsing Results Of Pfizer Clinical Test (Turley)
• Vaccine Mandates May Be Coming – But Will They Be Legal? (Turley)
• French Protests Grow Against Extended Health Pass Scheme (R.)
• Rare Earth Metals Have Become A Thorn In The Side Of The Green Agenda (RT)
• CDC Still Baffled People Are Paying Attention To Them (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Delta Variant: They have NO idea what COVID variant anyone has unless they take a sample, grow the virus in a suitable cell line, and go through the sequencing process to find out what amino acids mutations have happened. Are they doing that in every patient across the world?

 

 

Must see.

Don’t Get Jabbed : JRickey Productions Studio


 

 

Vaccine Truth
@VaccineTruth2 – We think over 500K may have died from the vaccines in the first 6 months of 2021. But there isn’t an excess death bump in the weekly CDC data. But there is a bump in mortician data. So someone isn’t telling the truth. Can anyone help us confirm the anecdote below?

 

 

 

 

Sounds about right. In Britain they already have no idea what to say about falling numbers.

Except for: it’s the vaccines!. But we know it’s not.

• Two Weeks (Denninger)

That’s about all their scheme has left, which is why the screaming and threats now. Note that I got jailed by Twatter for wishing that organizations mandating jabs go broke and starve when, in point of fact, they were advancing the very same thing toward their staff: Take a drug or be fired, go broke and starve. Why is this option for them about to expire? They’re about to get lynched and they know it. In another dispiriting setback for the nation’s efforts to stamp out the coronavirus, scientists who studied a big COVID-19 outbreak in Massachusetts concluded that vaccinated people who got so-called breakthrough infections carried about the same amount of the coronavirus as those who did not get the shots. The problem here is profound: The public was sold on these jabs as a solution; you will neither get seriously ill nor will you spread the virus to others if you get a “breakthrough”, therefore if you take the jab you get your life back.

[..] I was asked for evidence when my daughter started kindergarten that her “childhood” series was done, but never again. Not once. Now is it possible that the school had some “back door” access? Maybe. But never was I specifically asked to provide it beyond original enrollment for kindergarten. Never. It would have been stupid, however, for me not to have her get those shots. Why? Because there I can (and did) look at the data and it was trivially obvious that (1) the protection from them was durable, lasting decades if not life-long, (2) the disease(s) in question were in fact truly dangerous to healthy people and (3) the risk of a bad outcome from the jabs were trivially small. That makes the decision easy and you have to be somewhere off into crazyland to have a serious debate otherwise.

We can debate on the sequencing and timing, but not on a serious statistical level as to the rest. I argued before the first jab went into the first arm that none of this was true for this specific jab. There simply was no data to support the first point; three months is not enough time to determine durability and no amount of arm-waving can change that. The disease, by that time, was proved to be of trivial to statistically zero risk when it comes to healthy individuals, especially young healthy individuals, and there are effective and immediate treatments you can choose to use if infected (despite the screaming of many.) And third, the risk of adverse outcomes from the jabs was wildly higher, by several hundred times, that of other commonly used vaccines and this was with active interference in reporting the adverse effect rate.

Those who point to “flu shot mandates” in certain occupations are lying about their effectiveness too. We know that the morbidity and mortality profile from influenza has not been materially altered with the widespread use of flu vaccines. Yes, the CDC claims otherwise, but systemic review has repeatedly found confidence intervals that cross null. Cherry-picking results when statistical significance is not demonstrated with a strong “p” value is fraud. In other words the “mandates”, which in other than health-care workers are all “soft” and always have been (recommendations rather than actual mandates) all stand on the basis that statistically-speaking the flu shot has a vanishingly small risk of doing harm; therefore you can argue that since it’s almost never dangerous there’s no argument against it. That’s very different, however, than making an argument for it.

Finally, the history of attempting coronavirus vaccination is that it never works. We have tried before in both men and beast. We’ve never succeeded. Coronaviruses are notorious for both evading vaccination attempts and with their vaccine candidates being non-sterilizing, which in all viruses put evolutionary pressure on them and result in mutations that evade the protection. The problem with viruses in this regard is that their replication is exponential; while mutational evasion of protection for bacteria with antibiotics typically takes years or even decades to occur because bacteria replicate in a binary fashion, that is 1 becomes 2, which becomes 4 and so on with viruses 1 becomes 1,000 and if that one winds up in recombination due to cross-infection with something else at the same time then while the odds of a productive mutation are no higher than they are with any other the outcome when you get a productive mutation is much more-likely to result in escape and transmission because the replication factor is so large.

Read more …

Vaccines are useless.

• Vaccinated And Unvaccinated Individuals Have Similar Viral Loads (Medrxiv)

SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.617.2 (delta) is associated with higher viral loads [1] and increased transmissibility relative to other variants, as well as partial escape from polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies [2]. The emergence of the delta variant has been associated with increasing case counts and test-positivity rates, indicative of rapid community spread. Since early July 2021, SARS-CoV-2 cases in the United States have increased coincident with delta SARS-CoV-2 becoming the predominant lineage nationwide [3]. Understanding how and why the virus is spreading in settings where there is high vaccine coverage has important public health implications.

It is particularly important to assess whether vaccinated individuals who become infected can transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others. In Wisconsin, a large local contract laboratory provides SARS-CoV-2 testing for multiple local health departments, providing a single standard source of data using the same assay to measure virus burdens in test-positive cases. This includes providing high-volume testing in Dane County, a county with extremely high vaccine coverage. These PCR-based tests provide semi-quantitative information about the viral load, or amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA, in respiratory specimens.

Here we use this viral load data to compare the amount of SARS-CoV-2 present in test-positive specimens from people who self-report their vaccine status and date of final immunization, during a period in which the delta variant became the predominant circulating variant in Wisconsin. We find no difference in viral loads when comparing unvaccinated individuals to those who have vaccine “breakthrough” infections. Furthermore, individuals with vaccine breakthrough infections frequently test positive with viral loads consistent with the ability to shed infectious viruses. Our results, while preliminary, suggest that if vaccinated individuals become infected with the delta variant, they may be sources of SARS-CoV-2 transmission to others.

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Worldometer reported fewer than 100,000 cases on the same day. And newsnodes.com has 59,000. Cui bono?

• US Reports Almost 200,000 New Covid Cases In Worst Spike Since January (F.)

There were 194,608 new Covid cases reported around the U.S. on Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University, bringing the seven-day rolling average for new cases above 103,000, the highest it’s been since Feb. 7. More than 48,000 people are now hospitalized with Covid in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which remains well below the more than 130,000 who were hospitalized during January’s record peak. The seven-day rolling average for deaths is around 300, according to the New York Times, up from an average of 175 deaths a day earlier this month.

A number of counties and cities across the U.S. have reversed course after easing restrictions earlier in the pandemic, with several reinstating mask mandates, while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control urged people in places with high transmission rates to wear masks in public indoor spaces, regardless of vaccination status, which could lead to more mask mandates. President Joe Biden announced Thursday that his administration will require all federal workers, contractors and members of the military to get vaccinated against coronavirus or submit to frequent testing — a precedent that could add to the momentum for vaccine mandates at private companies and the local government level.

The highly contagious delta variant is now responsible for nearly all Covid-19 cases in the U.S., leading to what public health officials have called a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But while the vast majority of those being hospitalized and dying from Covid-19 are unvaccinated, concerns are growing over how easily the fully vaccinated might unwittingly spread the virus. A CDC study released Friday found that 74% of cases in a recent outbreak of the delta variant in Massachusetts were among vaccinated people, and they had viral loads as high as unvaccinated people who were infected. The study was a factor in the CDC’s tightening of its masking guidelines.

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I’m not buying into the scary Great Reset thing. They may have the money, but they ain’t got the brains.

• Why Are Globalists, Governments So Desperate For 100% Vaccination Rates? (AM)

My concern is that Klaus Schwab’s reset agenda is impossible to enforce in a permanent way unless the human population is greatly reduced over a short period of time (a generation or two). Globalists are constantly talking about population control and reduction. Elites like Bill Gates are famous for it. Is it any wonder that they would devise a plan to institute it? What if, as many experts have suggested, the vaccine side effects create this condition of a diminishing population? What if they are meant to? We will not know for certain for a couple of years at least as autoimmune disorders and infertility take time to become visible in a population. The average timeline for actually diagnosing an autoimmune disorder is 4.5 years. Infertility can take six months to a year to diagnose.

If a large population of millions of people remain unvaccinated after the next couple of years, then they will represent a sizable and undeniable control group. A control group is a group of subjects that act as a pure sample untouched by a drug or vaccine experiment. If the vaccinated group becomes ill or dies from specific conditions and the control group does not have those same conditions, then that is a pretty good sign that your vaccine or drug is poison. The 50% of Americans and smaller percentages in other nations are a control group for the experimental vaccines. If something goes wrong with the vaccines, then we will be the proof. I suspect this is what the elites are really afraid of.

They have to force us to be vaccinated as well – ALL of us, so that there is no control group and thus no proof os what they have done. They could simply blame mass health disorders on covid itself, or some other false culprit. If the vaccines are a Trojan horse that causes widespread illness or infertility, and the globalists get caught because a control group exists, then it will mean outright rebellion along with ropes and lampposts for them. Their “Great Reset” will fall apart. To be sure, this might happen anyway. Vaccine passports are the line in the sand for most people. We are even seeing extensive protests and riots in places like Italy, France, UK and Australia over the draconian passport scheme. The US, though, is where the biggest fight will take place, in my opinion.

We have an armed population, millions upon millions of trained combat veterans and civilians, a military with around 70% conservatives and independents and a historical understanding of asymmetric warfare. As we have seen in places like Afghanistan, tanks, jets, missiles and drones are no guarantee of victory against a guerrilla force. Vaccine passports are not going to happen here. We simply won’t allow it.

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Some things take more than a purely legal view.

• Twitter Suspends Berenson For Postsing Results Of Pfizer Clinical Test (Turley)

Just yesterday, we discussed the censoring of a commentator by Twitter for merely expressing an opinion over the need for a “pause” on any federal mandates on Covid-19 as new research is studied. Now, a former New York Times science reporter, Alex Berenson, has been suspended for simply quoting the results from a clinical trial by Pfizer and raising questions over any vaccine mandate. In the meantime, the White House accused both the Washington Post and New York Times of irresponsible reporting on Covid, but surprisingly Twitter has not suspended those accounts. It is the license of the censor. Twitter is unwilling to let people read or discuss viewpoints that it disagrees with as a corporation. Many on the left, however, have embraced the concept of corporate speech and censorship.

It turns out that the problem with censorship for many was the failure to censor views that they opposed. With the “right” censors at work, the free speech concerns have been set aside. I have little ability to judge the science on such questions. However, I welcome the debate. Yet, rather than answer such critics and refute their arguments, many people focus on silencing anyone with dissenting viewpoints like Berenson. Berenson has been effectively confined to Substack by Big Tech due to his discussing dissenting views on the science surrounding Covid-19. His latest offense against Big Tech came when he posted the results published by Pfizer of its own clinical data. He claimed that the research showed little difference in morality between those in the trial with a vaccine and those given a placebo.

[..] Now all three posters (Berenson, The Post, and The Times) were citing studies and accused on not putting them into context. However, only Berenson was suspended. Obviously, none of these posters should be suspended and Twitter should not be enforcing one of the largest censorship programs in history. However, the silence of free speech supports, academics, and journalists to this hypocrisy is deafening. The rise of corporate censors has combined with a heavily pro-Biden media to create the fear of a de facto state media that controls information due to a shared ideology rather than state coercion. That concern has been magnified by demands from Democratic leaders for increased censorship, including censoring political speech, and now word that the Biden Administration has routinely been flagging material to be censored by Facebook.

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No, but there’ll always be a judge who says they are.

• Vaccine Mandates May Be Coming – But Will They Be Legal? (Turley)

There clearly are good reasons why many companies and schools demand vaccinations to rejoin workplaces or classrooms. As expected, those rules have been upheld, including a recent favorable ruling for Indiana University. More concerning are those calls to use mandates to make life miserable for anyone who still has doubts. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told her citizens that they will have fewer “freedoms” until they consent. Some in the media have echoed these calls, and some private organizations are following the same strategy. The NFL, for example, has been openly making life “a living hell” for NFL players who prefer to be tested but not vaccinated.

For the most part, the motivation behind government and private mandates are hard to litigate. Courts tend to defer to measures ostensibly protecting others from risk of illness; even in criminal cases, the government has been allowed to conduct “pretextual traffic stops” if it can cite an objective basis. There may be new legal challenges ahead, however. First, those with religious or medical concerns can challenge mandated vaccination programs. CNN’s Don Lemon this week called for barring unvaccinated people from offices and businesses, insisting “It has nothing to do with liberty. You don’t have the freedom and the liberty to put other people in jeopardy.” In truth, there are constitutional questions when you force people to take medications or vaccinations that violate their religious beliefs or that fail to satisfy a rational basis.

States also are moving to counter private mandates or to bar mandatory masking rules; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) just signed an executive order allowing parents to ignore masking orders for their children in the state’s public schools. That could force the hand of the Biden administration on implementing federal mandates or executive orders — a conflict that would raise core federalism issues. The federal government is on shaky ground in mandating hood behavior or inactivity. In 2012 in NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that “Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority.”

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Hot August for Macron.

• French Protests Grow Against Extended Health Pass Scheme (R.)

Thousands of people have protested in Paris and other French cities over a mandatory coronavirus health pass for entry to many public venues, introduced by the government as it battles a fourth wave of infections. Protesters injured three police officers in Paris, a police spokesperson said. The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said on Twitter that 19 demonstrators were arrested, including 10 in Paris. It was the third weekend in a row that people opposed to President Emmanuel Macron’s new Covid-19 measures have taken to the streets. The number of demonstrators has grown steadily since the start of the protests, echoing the “yellow vest” movement that started in late 2018 against fuel taxes and the cost of living.


An interior ministry official said 204,090 had demonstrated across France, including 14,250 in Paris. This is about 40,000 more than last week. “We’re creating a segregated society and I think it is unbelievable to be doing this in the country of human rights,” said Anne, a teacher who was demonstrating in Paris. She declined to give her last name. “So I took to the streets; I have never protested before in my life,” she added. “I think our freedom is in danger.” Visitors going to museums, cinemas or swimming pools are already denied entry if they cannot produce the health pass showing they have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 or have had a recent negative test. Parliament approved a new law this week that will make vaccinations mandatory for health workers and extend the health pass requirement to bars, restaurants, trade shows, trains and hospitals.

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No, they’ll destroy the entire agenda. Green equals dumb these days.

• Rare Earth Metals Have Become A Thorn In The Side Of The Green Agenda (RT)

Many regions, including within the EU, do indeed have an abundance of these resources. However, they either lack the expertise in extraction and processing, or perhaps more wisely, lack the willingness to destroy and blacken their landscape and poison their citizens. And that brings us to the highly ironic price of the proposed ‘green initiative’ – that of extreme pollution and abject environmental disaster. There are many highly toxic derivatives that come from the extraction and processing of these metals. It is highly disruptive to ecosystems, while releasing hazardous acidic and radioactive by-products into the atmosphere and the water table.

Rare earth ore often contains radioactive thorium, but in order to process, the metal requires an even deadlier cocktail of toxins. Processing a single ton produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste. In Baotou, there is now the world’s largest mine tailings pond. It is a vast death-lake of poisonous, grey, slime, and for 20 years it has been leaking its toxic contents into the groundwater supply. In Bayan Obo, where the Baotou rare earths are processed, sheep grow abnormally (they grow extra rows of teeth, are unable to close their mouths and their wool is ugly). Crops wither and the drinking water has a horrid smell which blackens gums and teeth. Locals die from cancer at an inordinate rate. The mine itself is a massive, apocalyptic black crater – much larger than the lonely nearby apartment block – 1,000 metres deep and spanning 48 sq km. It is a landscape of smoky smelters and dark, lifeless, mud.

China has introduced new, stricter environmental regulatory policies as of late, and is showing signs of simply becoming sick of poisoning its own land and people in pursuit of these minerals. It has attempted to outsource its own production to corporate-colony-mines in Africa, where no doubt – if successful – invaluable rare wildlife already nearing extinction can look forward to poisoned water, radioactive waste, and smoke-stack horizons. Looking at the rare-earth metals situation brings up many tricky and politically unwelcome questions about our supposed low-carbon future. How will we handle waste water for that level of demand? Who exactly will be willing to poison themselves and their land, at the lowest prices going? How can a limited mineral resource be considered a sustainable solution? And how can it be considered environmental when it is one of the most polluting processes imaginable?

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“The CDC is a group of bureaucrats used to working a 9-to-5 job of complete pointlessnes..”

• CDC Still Baffled People Are Paying Attention To Them (BBee)

The CDC has once again changed course, recommending that people wear masks indoors, even those who have received the COVID-19 vaccination. Many people have reacted angrily to this decision—greatly confusing the CDC, which is used to being completely ignored. “This whole pandemic has been bizarre for us,” said CDC spokesman Dexter Park. “Normally, we put out recommendations like only cook a steak well-done and only fry eggs over-hard, and people don’t even pay enough attention to make fun of us, so people acting like what we say during the pandemic matters is really confusing.”


The CDC is a group of bureaucrats used to working a 9-to-5 job of complete pointlessness, making lists of recommendations that are fated to be crumpled up and thrown in a wastepaper basket. Thus, the pandemic turning them into experts whose opinions matter has caught them completely by surprise. “People keep saying our suggestions on masking are dumb and make no sense,” said CDC regulator Lyle Howell. “But that’s all of our suggestions on everything. We have to keep making recommendations, though, to justify our existence and get a budget. But no one listens to them—not even us. So can’t you all just go back to ignoring us and stop yelling at us? I’m just here until I get my pension.”

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