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Debt Rattle September 25 2021

Sep 252021
 
 September 25, 2021  Posted by at 8:27 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  61 Responses »


Winslow Homer Salt Kettle, Bermuda 1899

 

• The Spartacus Letter (DocDroid)
• Once Upon A Time… (Denninger)
• UK Report: Case-Hospitalisation Rate 49% Higher Among Fully Vaccinated (TE)
• Biden Breaking Bad (Kunstler)
• 10+ Years to Stop the Spread (Paige)
• Barricaded From Covid Reality By Government And Media (Hodgkinson)
• The Vaccinated Superspread Hypothesis (Gato Malo)
• A New Oral Antiviral Drug For Covid-19 Is Being Tested In Humans
• Suspended Jail Sentence For Greek Father Who Ignored School Covid Rules (K.)
• National Security Advisor Jack Sullivan May Be Guilty Of Perjury (DM)

 

 

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

 

 

Joe Rogan

 

 

They live in the same country. He hasn’t been able to see his mother in 2 years.

 

 

Oz 100% of covid cases are vaccinated.

 

 

“My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough.”

Must read.

• The Spartacus Letter (DocDroid)

COVID-19 is not a viral pneumonia. It is a viral vascular endotheliitis and attacks the lining of blood vessels, particularly the small pulmonary alveolar capillaries, leading to endothelial cell activation and sloughing, coagulopathy, sepsis, pulmonary edema, and ARDS-like symptoms. This is a disease of the blood and blood vessels. The circulatory system. Any pneumonia that it causes is secondary to that.In severe cases, this leads to sepsis, blood clots, and multiple organ failure, including hypoxic and inflammatory damage to various vital organs, such as the brain, heart, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and intestines.Some of the most common laboratory findings in COVID-19 are elevated D-dimer, elevated prothrombin time, elevated C-reactive protein, neutrophilia, lymphopenia, hypocalcemia, and hyperferritinemia, essentially matching a profile of coagulopathy and immune system hyperactivation/immune cell exhaustion.

COVID-19 can present as almost anything, due to the wide tropism of SARS-CoV-2 for various tissues in the body’s vital organs. While its most common initial presentation is respiratory illness and flu-like symptoms, it can present as brain inflammation, gastrointestinal disease, or even heart attack or pulmonary embolism.COVID-19 is more severe in those with specific comorbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. This is because these conditions involve endothelial dysfunction, which renders the circulatory system more susceptible to infection and injury by this particular virus. The vast majority of COVID-19 cases are mild and do not cause significant disease. In known cases, there is something known as the 80/20 rule, where 80% of cases are mild and 20% are severe or critical. However, this ratio is only correct for known cases, not all infections. The number of actual infections is much, much higher.

Consequently, the mortality and morbidity rate is lower. However, COVID-19 spreads very quickly, meaning that there are a significant number of severely-ill and critically-ill patientsappearing in a short time frame.In those who have critical COVID-19-induced sepsis, hypoxia, coagulopathy, and ARDS, the most common treatments are intubation, injected corticosteroids, and blood thinners. This is not the correct treatment for COVID-19. In severe hypoxia, cellular metabolic shifts cause ATP to break down into hypoxanthine, which, upon the reintroduction of oxygen, causes xanthine oxidase to produce tons of highly damaging radicals that attack tissue. This is called ischemia-reperfusion injury, and it’s why the majority of people who go on a ventilator are dying. In the mitochondria, succinate buildup due to sepsis does the same exact thing; when oxygen is reintroduced, it makes superoxide radicals. Make no mistake,intubation will kill people who have COVID-19.

Read more …

“The jab train must continue, you see. So must the ventilator train. So must the money train, the mask train and the rest of the BS we have endured for the last 18+ months.”

• Once Upon A Time… (Denninger)

… in a not-so-tiny nation called Spain, a nursing home had a nasty virus get into it. It was March of 2020. The nasty virus was called Covid-19. And this nursing home, like so many others all over the world, was full of elderly, morbid people. The mean age of residents was 85 and 48% were over 80 years old. It was a killing field, like so many others….. Within three months 100% of the residents had caught the virus. Not presumed to have — proved to have. How do we know this? Because almost every one of them seroconverted. All but three out of 84 of them, to be precise. Think about that last sentence for a second. Almost every one of them seroconverted. How’s that possible? Many of them died, right? You can’t seroconvert if you’re dead.

No. Not only did nearly none die none went to the hospital either because they rapidly figured out how to stop the virus from killing people — and did exactly that. You would have thought this would have been all over the news. In point of fact not one mention of it was made. Further, not one write-up was made in medical journals either until January of 2021, which I missed. My bad — out of the several hundred medical journal pieces, I missed this one. It was brought to my attention on my forum and my jaw immediately hit the floor. The jab train must continue, you see. So must the ventilator train. So must the money train, the mask train and the rest of the BS we have endured for the last 18+ months. So must the slaughter for money, the fear, and the lies. So what did these few nursing homes do that nobody has done since and nobody reported out at the time?

1. Early start of treatment, regardless of the severity of patient symptoms.
– Antihistamines every 12 h: dexchlorpheniramine 2 mg, cetirizine 10 mg or loratadine 10 mg.
– Azithromycin 500 mg orally every 24 h for 3 days if there is rapid improvement, and for 6 days if the duration of symptoms is prolonged.
– If pain or fever, acetaminophen 650 mg/6–8 h.
– Nasal washing and gargling with sodium bicarbonate water (half a glass of warm water with half a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate).
2. Patients with mild or recent-onset symptoms (cough, fever, general malaise, anosmia, polymyalgia):
– Antihistamines + Azithromycin (see mild treatment management)
– Levofloxacin 500 mg/12 h, up to 14 days of antibiotic treatment from diagnosis.
– Mepifilin solution, 50 mg/8 h as a bronchodilator, until subjective improvement. Patients with previous lung disease (asthma or COPD) used their usual bronchodilators.
– If the patient experienced increased breathing difficulty, prednisone 1 mg/kg/day divided into two doses until clinical improvement, and then it was slowly tapered down.
3. If symptoms of severity (dyspnea, breathing difficulty, mild or moderate chest pain, with SpO2 >80%, heart rate <100 beats per minute at any time of the process):
4. Prophylactic treatment for close contacts, including all asymptomatic residents:
– Antihistamines at the same dose as symptomatic patients.

Read more …

Prevents severe disease. Sure.

• UK Report: Case-Hospitalisation Rate 49% Higher Among Fully Vaccinated (TE)

If you wish to argue that the reason the vaccinated account for the majority of Covid-19 deaths is because the majority of the population are vaccinated, then you need to explain why Covid-19 deaths are 11 times higher than this time last year when there wasn’t a Covid-19 vaccine available that allegedly reduces the risk of death due to Covid-19 by 95%. Because this is precisely the predicament the United Kingdom is in right now. Between August 23rd 2020 and September 19th 2020 there were allegedly 275 deaths recorded that were associated with Covid-19, by associated we mean that they died within 28 days of testing positive for the virus. However, fast forward precisely one year and between August 23rd 2021 and September 19th 2021, there were allegedly 3,125 deaths associated with Covid-19, and the vast majority of those deaths were people who had been fully vaccinated.


This represents a 1,036% increase in the number of deaths associated with Covid-19 on the previous year, meaning Covid-19 deaths are currently 11.3 times higher than the same period in 2020 despite 80% of the UK population now having had a Covid-19 vaccine, and having summer on our side to keep all respiratory viruses at bay. Public Health England’s (PHE) latest ‘Covid-19 Vaccine Surveillance’ report, published 23rd September, also shows that the majority of Covid-19 cases between the 23rd August 2021 and 19th September 2021 have been recorded among the fully vaccinated population, with 277,474 cases being recorded over a period of four weeks.

There were also a further 54,183 cases among people who had received a single dose of a Covid-19 vaccine more than 21 days prior to testing positive, 13,004 cases among people who had received a single dose of a Covid-19 vaccine less than 21 days prior to testing positive, and 275,845 cases among the unvaccinated population. This means the vaccinated accounted for 55.5% of Covid-19 cases between August 23rd 2021 and September 19th 2021. The same can be said for hospitalisations. Between August 23rd and September 19th a total of 8,160 people presented to emergency care resulting in overnight inpatient admission within 28 days of a positive test for Covid-19. Of these 4,557 were fully vaccinated, 383 were partly vaccinated, and 3,220 were unvaccinated.

This means the vaccinated account for 60.5% of hospital admissions between August 23rd 2021 and September 19th 2021.It should be noted here that the percentage of fully vaccinated people hospitalised is higher than the number of fully vaccinated people to have tested positive for Covid-19, and this trend unfortunately continues when it comes to Covid-19 deaths. Table 4 of PHE’s Covid-19 Vaccine Surveillance report shows that between 23rd August and 19th September 2021 there were 3,125 deaths associated with Covid-19, and 76.64% of them were among the vaccinated population.

According to the above 730 deaths occurred among the unvaccinated, 111 deaths occurred among the partly vaccinated, and 2,284 deaths occurred among the fully vaccinated. But what does all this mean? Well, there were a very similar number of cases recorded among the unvaccinated (275,845) and fully vaccinated (277,474) population between 23rd August and 19th September 2021. This proves that the Covid-19 vaccines definitely do not prevent infection or transmission, as has been confirmed by three separate studies conducted by the CDC, UK Government, and Oxford University.


However, because the Covid-19 vaccines allegedly reduce the risk of hospitalisation and death by up to 95% you would expect to see far less hospitalisations and deaths among the fully vaccinated population than the number of hospitalisations and deaths among the unvaccinated population. But as the above tables show, this isn’t the case. For instance, the case-hospitalisation rate, based on the numbers presented in PHE’s report, among the unvaccinated population equates to 1.1%. Whereas the case-hospitalisation rate among the fully vaccinated population equates to 1.64%. Therefore, the case-hospitalisation rate is 49% higher among the fully vaccinated population.

Read more …

“The reported official numbers are all lies of one kind or another, issued by agencies primarily concerned not with public health but with covering asses at the highest level..”

• Biden Breaking Bad (Kunstler)

The Attorney General was probably forced to approve John Durham’s recent indictment of Hillary Clinton errand-boy, lawyer Michael Sussmann, from the DC Lawfare Central outfit called Perkins Coie. I say forced because it was an open-and-shut case, and denial by Mr. Garland would have been seen as just another RussiaGate ploy by an agency hopelessly tainted by years of official criminal misconduct — and let’s assume that Mr. AG Garland does not want to be dragged into that mess, especially as Mr. Durham is unraveling it. And the Special Counsel signaled that he is doing just that by implicating a wheel of culpable public figures in a 27-page indictment for Mr. Sussmann’s simple crime of lying to the FBI, which could have been accomplished in two concise paragraphs. That is, expect the Sussmann indictment to not be the end of a matter that could be tending toward a massive RICO indictment against the entire DNC wax museum of liars and seditionists.

Coincidentally — and on rather a separate track — we have China’s latest export to the advanced economies of the world: the meltdown of its bond market as signified in the wreck of super-gigantic real estate conglomerate Evergrande. Behold the broken daisy-chain of obligations stretching to the furthest reaches of global finance and the deleterious effect of that on capital markets everywhere to follow. The central banks are pulling out the last stops now to prevent a general meltdown of hallucinated “wealth” around the world and you can probably measure the success of that last-ditch effort in days as we enter the cursed month of October, when skeletons dance on the graves of lost fortunes. The stage-managers behind “Joe Biden” look forward to that as they would to so many stakes driven through their degenerate hearts.

Speaking of hearts, there is the current heart-of-the-matter, the Covid-19 engineered bioweapon being used internationally to suppress formerly free citizens of formerly democratic republics. It becomes more obvious each day that everything connected to this extravaganza is other than it appears to be. Chiefly, the vaccine is not a vaccine and it will probably end up killing more people than the Covid-19 disease and its variants. A lot of those deaths will be caused in the months ahead by damage to people’s hearts and other organs from spike proteins generated via mRNA shots. The reported official numbers are all lies of one kind or another, issued by agencies primarily concerned not with public health but with covering asses at the highest level, so do not trust them. If you haven’t had a vax shot, better seriously consider steering clear of your government’s desperate attempts to get the job done.

Read more …

“We’re not getting out of this pandemic anytime soon.”

• 10+ Years to Stop the Spread (Paige)

We’re not getting out of this pandemic anytime soon. The government has no idea what they’re doing, they manipulate the numbers of cases and deaths, they lie to us constantly, they’re rationing therapeutics and they’ve allowed more than a million illegal aliens into the country this year during a pandemic. It’s obvious that the democrats don’t want COVID-19 going anywhere. And who can blame them? It helped them get rid of Trump by cheating in an election and has allowed them to be able to rule over us tyrannically in every facet of government – federal, state, county, city, townships, health departments, school boards, OSHA, licensing boards and more.

Everyone and their brother (and sister) in government has been trying to control what we do and take away our freedoms – presidents, governors, mayors, attorney generals, health directors, and local commissioners. The democrats have also been able to control us with school boards, leftist businesses, social media and the fake news on their side. COVID-19 was a gift to the democrats and it’s a gift that keeps on giving. They have no intention to let it go. At this point, it really doesn’t matter how many vaccines and therapeutics we come up with because we can’t end a pandemic with open borders and a democrat president who ships these people all over the country. So we’re going to have to learn to live with the pandemic for a long long time – and different variants of the virus.

Because of this, I have a kind of apocalyptic prediction that this will end up being an extinction level event. I’m not sure what the timeline is. Five years, ten years, maybe more if we slow it down a bit here and there. But I’m starting to believe that the virus will stop spreading when a large percentage of the people on the planet stop breathing. There are too many leftists around the world keeping this thing going.But the democrats will be okay with that because it means a lot less carbon dioxide being emitted into the air from that breathing. A lot less cows will needed for food, a lot less cars will be driving around and a lot less airplanes will be flying in the skies.So it’s pretty much a winning situation if the virus goes on for a while and destroys a lot of people in its path. The only way the democrats DON’T win is if the virus is beaten. And the democrats NEVER want to lose. Think about that.

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“Under the leadership of the US ‘Aids czar’ Anthony Fauci, now playing a similar role with Covid, HIV/Aids became a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars..”

• Barricaded From Covid Reality By Government And Media (Hodgkinson)

In the early years of Aids, I joined media colleagues in raising the alarm about a virus that we were told put all sexually active people at risk because of a long time lag between infection and illness. We were happy to feel we were contributing to the public health effort. But thanks to the work of ‘dissident’ scientists in the USA and Australia, I gradually learned that ‘HIV’ was not a genuine pathogen. ‘HIV/Aids’ was a concept, marketed with skill and urgency by American government scientists with support from colleagues in the UK and elsewhere, after a period in which the plight of early Aids victims had been cruelly neglected. The virus theory democratised the illness and brought compassion in place of condemnation.

Gay Lib leaders had fought for years to end discriminatory laws and attitudes and when Aids came along, its early characterisation as a ‘gay plague’ linked to promiscuous anal sex and heavy drug use threatened to derail the movement. Then big money, combined with political correctness, created a monolithic belief system, never fully dismantled, that caused enormous harm. Under the leadership of the US ‘Aids czar’ Anthony Fauci, now playing a similar role with Covid, HIV/Aids became a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars, supporting countless well-meaning NGOs as well as science journals and researchers. The use of unvalidated test kits bequeathed poor African countries with a false belief that the continent was in the grip of a terrible epidemic.

A lethal, hugely expensive, US government-sponsored drug marketed by Burroughs Wellcome killed and tortured thousands of gay men, as well as ‘HIV’-positive children, and patients with the blood clotting disorder haemophilia. (See PoIson By Prescription – The AZT Story, by John Lauritsen, published by Asklepios, New York, 1990.) A futile search for a vaccine to a non-existent virus continues to this day – 35 years on! The scientific community fiercely resisted challenge and never owned up to the mistakes at the heart of the HIV paradigm, which I have summarised here. When the then Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil persisted in publishing Aids heresies, the response was censorship, suppression and ridicule. Other mass media, notably the BBC, Guardian, Independent and Observer, bayed for our blood. The Health Education Council started an Aids journalism award specifically in our dishonour. The science journal Nature contemplated picketing the ST offices.

This was despite challenges from top scientists, including Nobel laureates such as Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR test widely used in Aids research and now (grossly misused) in purportedly diagnosing Covid, who insisted there was zero scientific evidence of HIV being the cause of the collapse of the immune system seen in the syndrome. I learned at that time that the bigger the evidence vacuum, the greater the intolerance of dissenting views and the tighter the attempted mind control.

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“..if this hypothesis proves out, then calling this an “epidemic of the unvaccinated” is 180 degrees wrong.”

• The Vaccinated Superspread Hypothesis (Gato Malo)

Grab a seat, because i have an idea to inject into the debate, i sincerely hope that i am wrong, and i suspect a fair few folks are not going to like hearing it, but it’s the best fit i can find for the data.So here we go: The current surge in covid deaths is caused by the vaccinated. The covid vaccines are extremely leaky and may well accelerate contracting and carrying covid. They allow for very high viral loads to go unnoticed and generate a new and severe asymptomatic spread vector to where none existed before.The high viral loads lead to greater contagion. They may lead to greater severity (but this data is iffy and contested). Vaccine campaigns cause superspread events because vaccination leads to a 2 week window of 40-100% more covid risk that then gets counted as “unvaccinated” because the definitions are bad.

This combination makes those vaccinated with one dose or more into superspread bombs. You get a surge of spread that gets misallocated (and used to inflate ve) and then you get the later breakthrough cases (because the vaccines do not stop infection and just mitigate severity) These BT cases have massively high VL in often asymptomatic superspreaders that pass on high loading doses to the unvaccinated and greatly worsen the overall pandemic. This further inflates apparent VE by subjecting the unvaccinated to a more profligate and severe disease vector than they would have been had no vaccination campaign ever been undertaken. It moves the whole system to a a different valence. Perversely, if the vaccinated comprise a spread vector that accelerates deaths in the unvaccinated, that would make it look like vaccines work.

Ouch. (told you you weren’t going to like it). In the longer run, this would also select for hotter, deadlier strains because that’s what leaky vaccines do. (more HERE) this would really make life worse for everyone. i want to stress, this is a hypothesis and a work in progress. it’s just the best fit to the facts i can find right now and i REALLY hope it’s wrong because if it’s right, this vaccination campaign is probably the worst health blunder in human history and the epidemiology and politics of that will get stunningly, surreally bad. But if this hypothesis proves out, then calling this an “epidemic of the unvaccinated” is 180 degrees wrong.

It would mean that the unvaxxed are being assaulted by the vaccinated because this vaccine program was incredibly ill conceived and the vaccines are not suited to task and that it, quite literally, was the vaccination programs themselves that have re-intensified what should have been a waning pandemic.

Leana Wen
https://twitter.com/i/status/1441168908354875395

Read more …

IVM in disguise?

• A New Oral Antiviral Drug For Covid-19 Is Being Tested In Humans

Despite the effectiveness of vaccines, we still need drugs to treat COVID. Even people who have been double vaccinated stand a small chance of getting COVID and ending up moderately or even severely ill. There are drugs to treat COVID, but they have to be given in hospital. One promising drug that could improve things is molnupiravir, an antiviral that’s moving into the final stages of testing in humans. Researchers are hoping it can be used both to treat and prevent COVID. Importantly, it can be taken as a pill – meaning people wouldn’t need to be hospitalised to receive it. This drug reduces the ability of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, to replicate. It works by mimicking one of the building blocks of the virus’s genetic material.

When the virus reproduces, it builds a new copy of its RNA, and the drug ends up being incorporated into it. When the virus then reproduces, the molnupiravir causes mutations to accumulate in the virus’s RNA, which increase every time it replicates. Eventually, this causes an “error catastrophe”, where excessive mutations stop the virus from being able to reproduce altogether, and it dies off. How well does it work? So far, a small trial has looked at the effects of molnupiravir in 202 COVID patients (not in hospital) who had started having symptoms. Participants were randomly allocated to receive molnupiravir or a placebo, with different doses of the antiviral being tested.

The trial’s results have been published as a preprint, meaning they are yet to be formally reviewed by other scientists. Still, the trial showed that after three days of treatment, infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus was found significantly less often in participants taking 800mg of molnupiravir (2%) compared to those taking a placebo (17%). By day five, the virus was not detected in any participants receiving 400mg or 800mg of molnupiravir, but was still found in 11% of those taking a placebo. The trial, therefore, suggests that molnupiravir can reduce and eliminate infectious SARS-CoV-2 in patients with mild COVID. Indeed, it’s the fact that molnupiravir speeds up the clearance of the virus that suggests it could be useful not just for treating COVID but also lessening the chance of it spreading.

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Just made him a symbol of resistance.

• Suspended Jail Sentence For Greek Father Who Ignored School Covid Rules (K.)

A father who threatened teachers and a school principal after his son was forbidden from going to school because he had not completed the mandatory Covid self-test and was not wearing a mask has been handed a 15-month prison sentence, suspended for three years, by a Thessaloniki court. The 37-year-old was found guilty of illegally entering a public building and of defamation. On Tuesday, he barged into the premises, refusing to leave, while allegedly preventing other students from entering. Judges ordered that he be removed from the courthouse and be issued with a 300-euro fine for failing to wear a mask at his trial.

Read more …

“If Sullivan is found to have lied to congress, he could be charged with a felony and be sentenced to up to 5 years imprisonment.”

• National Security Advisor Jack Sullivan May Be Guilty Of Perjury (DM)

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan might have lied under oath to investigators who were probing whether his former boss Hillary Clinton used federal agencies to smear Donald Trump as colluding with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Sullivan – who served as Clinton’s chief foreign policy adviser during her failed presidential bid – was identified by his campaign position in a grand jury indictment handed down last week against Michael A. Sussmann, a partner in a law firm that represented Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The criminal complaint alleged Sullivan was briefed about a mission to gather intelligence about Trump’s alleged ties with a Russian bank ahead of the election.

If the indictment is accurate, it contradicts Sullivan’s 2017 congressional testimony during which he claimed to have no knowledge of the company that helped lead the research mission. Sussman was indicted for allegedly telling the FBI in September 2016 that he was not doing work ‘for any client’ when he requested a meeting with the FBI’s general counsel to warn them of concerns from cybersecurity researchers of potentially suspicious contact between Russia and the Trump team. The grand jury said the blame doesn’t end with Sussman: In its 27-page indictment, it referenced Sullivan as being involved in an effort to trick the FBI into investigating Trump for Russian collusion. He’s not named, but Sullivan in the indictment is referred to as Clinton’s ‘foreign policy advisor,’ who communicated with Sussman’s law partner Marc Elias ‘concerning the Russian bank allegations.’

Sullivan was briefed on evidence that suggested Trump was using a secret server to communicate with the Moscow-based Alfa Bank, sources told RealClearInvestigations.com. He was others participating in Clinton’s research team, including the Washington-based Fusion GPS. Sullivan was briefed on Fusion’s data, the outlet reported.However, during congressional testimony in December 2017, Sullivan claimed under oath that he knew nothing of the research. “Marc [Elias] … would occasionally give us updates on the opposition research they were conducting, but I didn’t know what the nature of that effort was – inside effort, outside effort, who was funding it, who was doing it, anything like that,” Sullivan said. If Sullivan is found to have lied to congress, he could be charged with a felony and be sentenced to up to 5 years imprisonment.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 24 2021

Aug 242021
 
 August 24, 2021  Posted by at 9:31 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  89 Responses »


George Caleb Bingham The verdict of the people 1854

 

• Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine Becomes First To Win FDA’s Full Approval (USAT)
• Does The FDA Think These Data Justify Approval Of A Covid-19 Vaccine? (BMJ)
• Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Carry 251 Times Viral Load (McCullough)
• FDA Ignores Both Science and Law (Denninger)
• Pfizer and Moderna Lost The Clinical Trial Control Group (CTH)
• Everything You Need to Know About Informed Consent (21CW)
• Statistical Fraud in the FDA Vaccine Approval Process (JoshM)
• The More Masks Fail, The More We Need Them (Ian)
• Pentagon To Mandate Covid-19 Vaccinations For All Military Personnel (RT)
• NYC Orders 150,000 Teachers & School Staff To Get Vaccinated (ZH)
• Truckers Threaten To Shut Down Australia Due to Covid Insanity (OI)
• Keeping Fear Alive (Tierney)
• Throwdowns and Showdowns (Kunstler)

 

 

It’s been an insane 24 hours. You’d think a full approval of a vaccine would be a straightforward event, but the FDA just made things more, and extremely, complicated. First, a few bits and pieces from what they issued:

 

 

“COMIRNATY is the first COVID-19 vaccine to be granted FDA approval ”
also:
“These may not be all the possible side effects of the vaccine. Serious and unexpected side effects may occur. THE VACCINE IS STILL BEING STUDIED IN CLINICAL TRIALS.”

 

 

On August 23, 2021, FDA approved the biologics license application (BLA) submitted by BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH for COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older…

…the EUA will remain in place for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for the previously-authorized indication and uses, and to authorize use of COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) under this EUA for certain uses that are not included in the approved BLA…

COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) is the same formulation as the PfizerBioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and can be used interchangeably with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to provide the COVID-19 vaccination series…

 

 

C. There is no adequate, approved, and available [see Note 9] alternative to the emergency use of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine to prevent COVID-19.

[Note 9:] Although COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) is approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 16 years of age and older, there is not sufficient approved vaccine available for distribution to this population in its entirety at the time of reissuance of this EUA. Additionally, there are no products that are approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals age 12 through 15, or that are approved to provide an additional dose to the immunocompromised population described in this EUA.

 

 

Conditions Related to Printed Matter, Advertising, and Promotion

X. All descriptive printed matter, advertising, and promotional material, relating to the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine shall be consistent with the authorized labeling, as well as the terms set forth in this EUA, and meet the requirements set forth in section 502(a) and (n) of the FD&C Act and FDA implementing regulations.

Y. All descriptive printed matter, advertising, and promotional material relating to the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID 19 Vaccine clearly and conspicuously shall state that:

” This product has not been approved or licensed by FDA, but has been authorized for emergency use by FDA, under an EUA to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) for use in individuals 12 years of age and older; and

” The emergency use of this product is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of the medical product under Section 564(b)(1) of the FD&C Act unless the declaration is terminated or authorization revoked sooner.

 

 

The original documents. Just check the dates. What happened to those?

 

 

Two high vaccination rates: Iceland Full Vaxxed 74%, Israel 62%

 

 

“The Pfizer-BioNTech emergency use authorization was based on clinical trials involving about 37,000 people.”

Well, not really, because they stopped those trials.

• Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine Becomes First To Win FDA’s Full Approval (USAT)

Eight months after authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration issued its full stamp of approval. Now that the companies’ detailed, so-called biologics license application has been granted, it’s likely that vaccination will be required by many companies, schools and other entities. The FDA decision clears the way for the companies to market their vaccine, which is not permitted without full licensure. And it may launch a race for booster shots, allowing doctors to prescribe extra Pfizer-BioNTech shots “off label” to anyone they think should get one. The FDA confirmed late last year through a more streamlined evaluation process that the vaccine, from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its partner, German startup BioNTech, was safe, effective and could be reliably produced.

The review of the 340,000-page license application was completed in just 97 days by FDA staff working “night and day,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which approves vaccines “We completed this in about 40% of the normal clock time for a submission of this magnitude,” he said. The license application was three times the size of the emergency use authorization submission, which weighed in at 110,000 pages. The companies have manufactured more than 2 billion doses, more than 200 million of which were administered in the USA, the most of any of the three vaccines allowed for use in the country. The full license includes four more months of efficacy and safety data, confirming trial results and detailing manufacturing processes.

The Pfizer-BioNTech emergency use authorization was based on clinical trials involving about 37,000 people. The full approval was based on study results involving more than 44,000 people followed for six months. The license applies only to those 16 and over, but the vaccine is allowed for those 12 to 15 under the previous authorization. “Based on the longer-term follow-up data that we submitted, today’s approval for those aged 16 and over affirms the efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine at a time when it is urgently needed,” Pfizer chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “I am hopeful this approval will help increase confidence in our vaccine, as vaccination remains the best tool we have to help protect lives and achieve herd immunity.”

Read more …

Not sure it’s a great idea for the FDA to have pissed off Peter Doshi, senior editor at The BMJ, one of the most reputable magazines around. Much more at the original (link).

• Does The FDA Think These Data Justify Approval Of A Covid-19 Vaccine? (BMJ)

On 28 July 2021, Pfizer and BioNTech posted updated results for their ongoing phase 3 covid-19 vaccine trial. The preprint came almost a year to the day after the historical trial commenced, and nearly four months since the companies announced vaccine efficacy estimates “up to six months.” But you won’t find 10 month follow-up data here. While the preprint is new, the results it contains aren’t particularly up to date. In fact, the paper is based on the same data cut-off date (13 March 2021) as the 1 April press release, and its topline efficacy result is identical: 91.3% (95% CI 89.0 to 93.2) vaccine efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 through “up to six months of follow-up.” The 20 page preprint matters because it represents the most detailed public account of the pivotal trial data Pfizer submitted in pursuit of the world’s first “full approval” of a coronavirus vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration. It deserves careful scrutiny.

[..] The elephant named “waning immunity”…“Waning immunity” is a known problem for influenza vaccines, with some studies showing near zero effectiveness after just three months, meaning a vaccine taken early may ultimately provide no protection by the time “flu season” arrives some months later. If vaccine efficacy wanes over time, the crucial question becomes what level of effectiveness will the vaccine provide when a person is actually exposed to the virus? Unlike covid vaccines, influenza vaccine performance has always been judged over a full season, not a couple months. And so the recent reports from Israel’s Ministry of Health caught my eye. In early July, they reported that efficacy against infection and symptomatic disease “fell to 64%.” By late July it had fallen to 39% where Delta is the dominant strain. This is very low. For context, the FDA’s expectation is of “at least 50%” efficacy for any approvable vaccine.

Delta may not be responsible Enter Pfizer’s preprint. As an RCT reporting “up to six months of follow-up,” it is notable that evidence of waning immunity was already visible in the data by the 13 March 2021 data cut-off… And it’s hard to imagine how the Delta variant could play a real role here, for 77% of trial participants were from the United States, where Delta was not established until months after data cut-off. Waning efficacy has the potential to be far more than a minor inconvenience; it can dramatically change the risk-benefit calculus.

The “six month” preprint based on the 7% of trial participants who remained blinded at six months Despite the reference to “six month safety and efficacy” in the preprint’s title, the paper only reports on vaccine efficacy “up to six months,” but not from six months. This is not semantics, as it turns out only 7% of trial participants actually reached six months of blinded follow-up (“8% of BNT162b2 recipients and 6% of placebo recipients had ≥6 months follow-up post-dose 2.”) So despite this preprint appearing a year after the trial began, it provides no data on vaccine efficacy past six months, which is the period Israel says vaccine efficacy has dropped to 39%. It is hard to imagine that the <10% of trial participants who remained blinded at six months (which presumably further dwindled after 13 March 2021) could constitute a reliable or valid sample to produce further findings.

Severe disease And on preventing death from covid-19, there are too few data to draw conclusions—a total of three covid-19 related deaths (one on vaccine, two on placebo). There were 29 total deaths during blinded follow-up (15 in the vaccine arm; 14 in placebo). The crucial question, however, is whether the waning efficacy seen in the primary endpoint data also applies to the vaccine’s efficacy against severe disease. Unfortunately, Pfizer’s new preprint does not report the results in a way that allows for evaluating this question.

Approval imminent without data transparency, or even an advisory committee meeting? …But here we are, with FDA reportedly on the verge of granting a marketing license 13 months into the still ongoing, two year pivotal trial, with no reported data past 13 March 2021, unclear efficacy after six months due to unblinding, evidence of waning protection irrespective of the Delta variant, and limited reporting of safety data. (The preprint reports “decreased appetite, lethargy, asthenia, malaise, night sweats, and hyperhidrosis were new adverse events attributable to BNT162b2 not previously identified in earlier reports,” but provides no data tables showing the frequency of these, or other, adverse events.) It’s not helping matters that FDA now says it won’t convene its advisory committee to discuss the data ahead of approving Pfizer’s vaccine. (Last August, to address vaccine hesitancy, the agency had “committed to use an advisory committee composed of independent experts to ensure deliberations about authorization or licensure are transparent for the public.”)

Read more …

“..the jab allows vaccinated individuals to carry unusually high viral loads without becoming ill at first, potentially transforming them into presymptomatic superspreaders.”

• Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Carry 251 Times Viral Load (McCullough)

A groundbreaking preprint paper by the prestigious Oxford University Clinical Research Group, published Aug. 10 in The Lancet, includes alarming findings devastating to the COVID vaccine rollout. The study found vaccinated individuals carry 251 times the load of COVID-19 viruses in their nostrils compared to the unvaccinated. While moderating the symptoms of infection, the jab allows vaccinated individuals to carry unusually high viral loads without becoming ill at first, potentially transforming them into presymptomatic superspreaders. This phenomenon may be the source of the shocking post-vaccination surges in heavily vaccinated populations globally. The paper’s authors, Chau et al, demonstrated widespread vaccine failure and transmission under tightly controlled circumstances in a hospital lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam.

The scientists studied healthcare workers who were unable to leave the hospital for two weeks. The data showed that fully vaccinated workers — about two months after injection with the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine (AZD1222) — acquired, carried and presumably transmitted the Delta variant to their vaccinated colleagues. They almost certainly also passed the Delta infection to susceptible unvaccinated people, including their patients. Sequencing of strains confirmed the workers transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to one another. = This is consistent with the observations in the U.S. from Farinholt and colleagues, and congruent with comments by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conceding COVID-19 vaccines have failed to stop transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

On Feb. 11, the World Health Organization indicated the AZD1222 vaccine efficacy of 63.09% against the development of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. The conclusions of the Chau paper support the warnings by leading medical experts that the partial, non-sterilizing immunity from the three notoriously “leaky” COVID-19 vaccines allow carriage of 251 times the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 as compared to samples from the pre-vaccination era in 2020. Thus, we have a key piece to the puzzle explaining why the Delta outbreak is so formidable — fully vaccinated are participating as COVID-19 patients and acting as powerful Typhoid Mary-style super-spreaders of the infection.

Vaccinated individuals are blasting out concentrated viral explosions into their communities and fueling new COVID surges. Vaccinated healthcare workers are almost certainly infecting their coworkers and patients, causing horrendous collateral damage. Continued vaccination will only make this problem worse, particularly among frontline doctors and nurses workers who are caring for vulnerable patients. Health systems should drop vaccine mandates immediately, take stock of COVID-19 recovered workers who are robustly immune to Delta and consider the ramifications of their current vaccinated healthcare workers as potential threats to high risk patients and coworkers.

Read more …

“..prior infection and recovery produces durable and stable immunity in essentially everyone who has a competent immune system..”

• FDA Ignores Both Science and Law (Denninger)

So the FDA has “fully approved” the Pfizer jab for Covid. In doing so standing alone they have broken the law and thus have irrevocably destroyed their authority and any reason for anyone to ever do anything based on them ever again. Let me explain. Under black letter law an EUA is illegal if there is an alternative that is considered safe, effective and available. This was the reason the FDA did not (for 18 months!) run the studies and evaluate them on other early-intervention drugs for Covid-19. We all know what they are. I’m living proof they work too, as are millions of others worldwide. But, more-importantly, this “full approval” voids all other vaccine EUAs for Covid-19. That is, under the law the Moderna and J&J instantly became illegal to offer or use within the United States.

The makers can apply for full authorization, of course, but the EUAs are void as of this morning and under black letter law cannot be administered to anyone in the United States as they are now unlicensed and unlawful products in human beings until and unless they are given full approval themselves. No medical provider can offer or administer any other than the Pfizer Covid-19 shot in the United States as of the moment of that approval. You can bet the law will be ignored; note MRNAs stock price this morning. It should have instantly been cut in half. In addition the FDA broke the law itself when it issued the “approval.” The law requires a full hearing and the data from the full set of trials; the trials are not capable of being completed until early 2022 by the original submissions and they deliberately did not hold the hearing. This is a black letter violation of the law as well, but nobody cares.

As for me, I don’t give a crap. I’ve been infected, 98% certain it was Delta (because that’s all that’s circulating right now in the US where the index case I got infected by came from, and I know who it was) and am recovered. I hit it with meds immediately and I’m fine. I know, scientifically, it was Covid-19 and not some other virus as I now have IgG antibodies and did not for the previous 18 months which I know factually as I repeatedly tested myself. There is thus exactly zero medical benefit I can derive from the jabs. I will walk without fear into a Covid-19 ICU unit right now without any PPE on whatsoever.

I have no fear of this virus because as with every other viral infection of note including those that are much more-dangerous than Covid, such as measles, prior infection and recovery produces durable and stable immunity in essentially everyone who has a competent immune system, and I do. Those of you who trust the jabs to be equally effective to an active infection and recovery are free to come with me. I will bet my life that I’m sterile immune to the virus as a result of said infection and recovery. Are you willing to place the same bet, given the many known failures to protect by the shot, including Jesse Jackson and his wife, both of whom are in the hospital with Covid-19 despite being vaccinated in a very public spectacle in January of this year? There you have it.

Read more …

“..the FDA will grant approval on results that were intentionally constructed to produce only one outcome.”

• Pfizer and Moderna Lost The Clinical Trial Control Group (CTH)

According to the New York Times and multiple media outlets, Pfizer is expected to get full FDA approval today. “The move would make it the first Covid vaccine to go from emergency use authorization to full FDA approval.” With that in mind, it is worth a reminder that both Pfizer and Moderna stopped the clinical trials the FDA was using in their review: The Moderna and Pfizer vaccine tests were conducted, as customary, with a control group; a group within the trial who were given a placebo and not the test vaccine. However, during the trial -and after the untested vaccines were given emergency use authorization- the vaccine companies conducting the trial decided to break protocol and notify the control group they were not vaccinated. Almost all the control group were then given the vaccine.

Purposefully dissolving the placebo group violates the scientific purpose to test whether the vaccine has any efficacy; any actual benefit and/or safety issues. Without a control group there is nothing to compare the vaccinated group against. According to NPR, the doctors lost the control group in the Johnson County Clinicial Trial (Lexena, Kansas) on purpose: “(Via NPR) […] “Dr. Carlos Fierro, who runs the study there, says every participant was called back after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine. “During that visit we discussed the options, which included staying in the study without the vaccine,” he says, “and amazingly there were people — a couple of people — who chose that.” He suspects those individuals got spooked by rumors about the vaccine. But everybody else who had the placebo shot went ahead and got the actual vaccine. So now Fierro has essentially no comparison group left for the ongoing study. “It’s a loss from a scientific standpoint, but given the circumstances I think it’s the right thing to do,” he says.

People signing up for these studies were not promised special treatment, but once the FDA authorized the vaccines, their developers decided to offer the shots. Just so we are clear, the final FDA authorization and approval for the vaccines are based on the outcome of these trials. As noted in the example above, the control group was intentionally lost under the auspices of “the right thing to do”, so there is no way for the efficacy, effectiveness or safety of the vaccine itself to be measured. There’s no one left within the control group, of a statistically valid value, to give an adequate comparison of outcomes for vaxxed -vs- non-vaxxed. This is nuts. That NPR article is one to bookmark when people start claiming the vaccination is effective. How can the vaccine not be considered effective when there is no group of non-vaccinated people to compare the results to?

Good grief, the entire healthcare system is operating on a massive hive mindset where science, and the scientific method, is thrown out the window in favor of ideological outcomes and self-fulfilling prophecies. The fact that the researchers and doctors, apparently under the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies that have a vested financial interest in the vaccine outcome, lost the control group on purpose is alarming. Of course, Big Pharma will promote the vaccine as beneficial, and the controlled media will promote that message with a complete disconnect from the clinical trial details, and the FDA will grant approval on results that were intentionally constructed to produce only one outcome.

Read more …

Another video on informed consent is way below. Also from Canada.

• Everything You Need to Know About Informed Consent (21CW)

In Canada, informed consent to medical interventions – including vaccines – is the law. The same is true in the US, UK, EU, Australia, and New Zealand. But these governments, along with corrupt drug regulators, are now running roughshod over what were once sacrosanct laws prohibiting misleading and coercive medical procedures, and instead have unleashed a multibillion dollar media campaign of fear and mass-panic designed to pave-over the right to informed consent.

Read more …

“Vaccine A is quite safe, and vaccine B is extremely dangerous. And yet the formula for PRR will produce the same result for vaccine A and B!”

• Statistical Fraud in the FDA Vaccine Approval Process (JoshM)

There are several systems for reporting vaccine reactions, including deaths, but the only one available to the public is VAERS. It is incomplete, because it relies on voluntary reporting, there is no incentive to report to VAERS, and it is a cumbersome process. We may compare reports of the COVID vaccines to past years, when there were also hundreds of millions of vaccinations, including annual flu shots and childhood vaccine schedules. The comparison is dramatic. There were more than twice as many deaths related to the COVID vaccines this year as the sum total of all vaccine deaths in the 30-year history of VAERS. Given this safety record, how is there any possibility of approval? Here is where the statistical fraud comes in. [I am grateful to have been alerted to this situation by Matthew Crawford]

The safety criterion they have chosen is an obscure computation called PRR for Proportional Reporting Ratio. As the name implies, it is based on RATIOS of different event types and is utterly blind to the ABSOLUTE RATE of such events. PRR measures the distribution of different kinds of adverse events, e.g. blood clots, heart attacks, and deaths. If those ratios are severely out of line with the great variety of vaccine reactions in the past, PRR would detect that. For example, if the new vaccines caused an extraordinary risk of myocarditis, but everything else was low, then PRR would flag that. But if myocarditis was just one risk among many that have been reported from past vaccines, then PRR would not pick that up.

The real scandal is that PRR is blind to the absolute risk numbers. PRR is defined in such a way as to look for unusual PATTERNS of adverse events, but it is completely insensitive to unusual RATES of adverse events. Of course, it is the rates and not the patterns that are of primary concern, and the PRR is designed NOT to reflect that.

For example, suppose we have 2 vaccines:

Vaccine A has 1 reported death per million vaccinations, 3 reported heart attacks per million, and 20 reported headaches per million.

Vaccine B has 1 reported death per hundred vaccinations, 3 reported heart attacks per hundred, and 20 reported headaches per hundred.

Vaccine A is quite safe, and vaccine B is extremely dangerous. And yet the formula for PRR will produce the same result for vaccine A and B!

Clearly, PRR is not an appropriate criterion for evaluating safety of any particular vaccine. Someone has arranged to cook the books.

Read more …

“Regardless of the anti-science, despicable pieces regularly appearing in those outlets, such as suggesting that actually, masking kids is good for their learning ability.”

• The More Masks Fail, The More We Need Them (Ian)

The push for masking, as always, boils down to a combination of incompetence, cowardice, fear, and political pressure. Experts enjoy the ability to be seen as “doing something,” and must never appear to be “anti-mask,” since it would immediately discredit them in the eyes of their peers, the greater scientific community and their ideological compatriots. Politicians want the “get out of jail free” card that masking provides; the opportunity to blame others for poor results. The “it would have worked if you’d all just listened to me” line of defense. The media simply outsources all critical thinking to like-minded ideologues and refuses to acknowledge or take seriously the few brave experts willing to tell the truth.

And as a result, corporations, whose decision makers are exclusively influenced by the same media sources, like The New York Times, follow right along. Regardless of the anti-science, despicable pieces regularly appearing in those outlets, such as suggesting that actually, masking kids is good for their learning ability. But everywhere you look, the cultural groupthink is dramatically failing. Counties and states following the CDC’s new guidance are not succeeding, and those ignoring it are faring no worse. Locations that never removed masks, such as Hawaii and Japan, are seeing their highest numbers of the pandemic, but manage to escape the vitriol and hatred leveled at Ron DeSantis because they’re following orders and implementing what the hive mind of acceptable opinion mandates.


The dramatic, predictable failure resulting from the CDC’s science-ending reversal would, in a sane world, be cause for intellectually honest experts to revisit their guidance and accept that their efforts to “control” infections is always doomed to fail. But naturally, we’re seeing the exact opposite. The more masks fail, the more we need them.

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One third has said they won’t comply. Maybe this is where the real fight will happen.

• Pentagon To Mandate Covid-19 Vaccinations For All Military Personnel (RT)

The Pentagon has said it will update its own guidance on Covid-19 vaccinations, mandating the jab for all military personnel, following the US drug regulator’s decision to fully approve the Pfizer vaccine. Speaking on Monday, US Department of Defense spokesman John Kirby said the military was aware of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to fully approve the Pfizer vaccine for use in people over 16, and was preparing to issue updated guidance to all service personnel. “We’re going to move forward making that vaccine mandatory,” Kirby told reporters. “We’re preparing the guidance to the force right now,” he stated, adding that the exact timetable for mandating the jab was still being worked out. Earlier on Monday, the FDA announced that the Pfizer jab had been fully approved for use in the US.


The shot has been administered under emergency-use authorization since mid-December 2020. The FDA added that the Pfizer vaccine will retain its emergency-use authorization for use in adolescents and for those requiring a third dose due to other health conditions. Earlier in August, the Washington Post reported that around 65% of active-duty military personnel were fully vaccinated, compared to around 59% of eligible Americans. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has previously encouraged all military personnel to get vaccinated against Covid. “To defend this nation, we need a healthy and ready force. I strongly encourage all DoD military and civilian personnel – as well as contractor personnel – to get vaccinated now and for military service members to not wait for the mandate,” Austin stated earlier in August.

Read more …

“I do not expect a staffing shortage,” Porter said.”

• NYC Orders 150,000 Teachers & School Staff To Get Vaccinated (ZH)

As the NYT explained, education staffers are the first group of city workers to face a full vaccine mandate. The announcement also opens the door to a broader vaccine mandate of city workers, which the mayor said Monday the city was considering. Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio issued a mandate for city workers that allowed for those unvaccinated to submit for weekly coronavirus testing. “We know this is going to help ensure that everyone is safe,” Mr. de Blasio said during a news conference on Monday, adding that city schools had extremely low virus transmission last year. The mandate, the mayor said, will help the city “build on that success.”

While the mayor’s push is likely to prove unpopular with many rank-and-file members; the city’s teacher’s unions, and unions representing other DoE staff, have signed off on the new mandate (though they’re still negotiating about what might happen to workers who continue to refuse). UFT President Michael Mulgrew acknowledged that the city had the legal right to impose the mandate, but he told reporters details were still being hashed out. The city announced last month that any teacher who failed to comply with both the vaccination requirement, and the required weekly testing for those who didn’t get the jab, would be suspended without pay.

“While the city is asserting its legal authority to establish this mandate, there are many implementation details, including provisions for medical exceptions, that by law must be negotiated with the U.F.T. and other unions, and if necessary, resolved by arbitration,” Mr. Mulgrew said in a statement. Mayor de Blasio has insisted that even if negotiations stall, the mandate will still be implemented. Meisha Porter, the chancellor of NYC’s schools, said she expects a high level of compliance from school staff on the mandate. “I do not expect a staffing shortage,” Porter said.

Read more …

No clue how serious this is, but it’s a good idea.

• Truckers Threaten To Shut Down Australia Due to Covid Insanity (OI)

Australia seems to be in the grips of COVID-induced insanity as people across the country are vigorously protesting against the lockdown measures imposed to curb the spread of the renewed bout of coronavirus outbreak. After violent ruckus witnessed on the streets of major Australian cities, including Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and dogs shot dead by a rural council in New South Wales to prevent volunteers from travelling during Covid restrictions, Australian truck drivers have threatened to shut down major highways across the country as a mark of protest against Covid lockdowns. Social media websites are awash with a video of a truck driver who said in his video that truck drivers are ‘planning to shut down the country’ to ‘remove the s*** government’.


He further warned the Aussies that their demonstration could end up choking supply chains and urged them to stock up on groceries to get them through the next couple of weeks. “It’s on. The truckies are doing it. The truckies are going to shut down the country,’ the man says in the video. What that means is you need to go shopping now, get what you can for the next week or two, load your fridge, freezers,” the truck driver could be seen saying in the video.

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“The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor..”

• Keeping Fear Alive (Tierney)

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end. So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust.

Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with. But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.

The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”

Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year—and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.

“I’m an anesthesiologist,” he tweeted last weekend. “And a dad. And I can assure you in both capacities that your child will be far more comfortable if they’re in a face mask, than on a ventilator. If you’re making a choice on behalf of a child, please choose based on their comfort, vs yours.” He offered no new evidence that children are at heightened risk from the virus, much less any evidence that a mask would make any difference, but he did make sure to include a gruesome photograph of a child on a ventilator. It was a new low in public-health demagoguery, but unfortunately not so different from the fearmongering of other officials, the press, and social-media platforms. They lament that a minority of the public remains reluctant to get vaccinated without recognizing that their own tactics are a likely a chief cause of this reluctance. They have been misleading people for so long—and censoring challenges to their misinformation—that it’s no wonder polls show that an overwhelming majority of unvaccinated Americans say they don’t trust Fauci or the CDC.

Read more …

“Britain and France managed to get their nationals out last week, only to be rebuked by American brass for “making us look bad.” That helped, I’m sure.”

• Throwdowns and Showdowns (Kunstler)

Notice, there are two sets of hostages in this phase of what looks like an engineered US collapse: the thousands of stranded Americans who can’t get out of Afghanistan thanks to the history-rockin’ ineptitude of “Joe Biden,” Tony Blinken, and General Mark Milley, and the millions of We-the-People back home whose minds are hostage to the narratives concocted in a shadowland of sinister governance. Welcome to a week of throwdowns and showdowns, a force majeure of mind change. A strange paralysis in the Pentagon has prevented the use of US power to clear an escape corridor to Kabul’s airport and establish order in the facility — this, after the tactically mystifying decision to abandon the US Bagram military airfield, a good twenty miles outside of festering Kabul, and surrounded by more easily-securable empty desert.

Britain and France managed to get their nationals out last week, only to be rebuked by American brass for “making us look bad.” That helped, I’m sure. And then how long can the stranded Americans even stay hidden and alive? They have to eat. Either they come out of their hidey-holes and get to some market, or they would (theoretically) have to send some Afghani servants to fetch them supplies, But, what Afghani in his right mind would want to be caught in service to the Americans by the Taliban? That quandary must have a pretty short time-horizon on it. Standing by to see how it works out….

Next in this week’s throwdown parade is the FDA’s imminent approval of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, without any of the usual extensive trials. How does that even happen, with an efficacy rate of 39 percent maximum and a runaway train of vicious side effects ranging from brain and heart damage to infertility? The so-called mRNA “vaccines” are also implicated in the ongoing mutation of the disease, producing a cavalcade of variants. Is that, perhaps, on-purpose, to keep the pandemic going, preventing it from burning-out?

Read more …

 

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Debt Rattle July 23 2021

Jul 232021
 
 July 23, 2021  Posted by at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  74 Responses »


Edward Hopper Cape Cod morning 1950

 

• Data From India Continues To Blow Up The ‘Delta’ Fear Narrative (Blaze)
• Here It Comes (Denninger)
• ‘Pingdemic’ Triggers Widespread Panic Hoarding At UK Supermarkets (ZH)
• List Of UK Venues That Could Mandate “Vaccine Passports” Already Expanding (SN)
• Italy Will Start Requiring Covid Vaccine Passes For Many Activities (JTN)
• Thousands Protest as Italy Mandates Health Pass (GP)
• 49 Fully Vaccinated People In New Jersey Have Died From Covid-19 (Blaze)
• 42 People Quarantined At San Antonio Assisted Living Facility (Ksat)
• Toka, the Most Dangerous Israeli Spyware Firm You’ve Never Heard Of (Webb)
• The Trillion-Dollar Lie (Taibbi)
• Facebook Cracks Down On Discussing ‘Hoes’ In Gardening Group (NYP)

 

 

 

 

Vaccine safety McCullough

 

 

Santorini

 

 

Big Pharma: 25% of US economy

 

 

“About the whole “vaccines don’t stop transmission but they stop severe disease thing”:
Number of new severe cases in Israel (where 95% of the population over 60 and 80+% over 20 is fully vaccinated):
Week of 6/22-6/29: 3
Week of 7/15-7/21: 81
That’s a mere 2600% increase.”

• Data From India Continues To Blow Up The ‘Delta’ Fear Narrative (Blaze)

The prevailing narrative from Fauci, Walensky, and company is that Delta is more serious than anything before, and even though vaccines are even less effective against it, its spread proves the need to vaccinate even more people. Unless we do that, we must return to the very effective lockdowns and masks. In reality, India’s experience proves the opposite true; namely: • Delta is largely an attenuated version, with a much lower fatality rate, that for most people is akin to a cold. • Masks failed to stop the spread there. • The country has come close to the herd immunity threshold with just 3% vaccinated. • Most people are now getting cold-like symptoms from Delta, but to the extent countries hit by Delta suffered some deaths and serious illness, they could have been avoided not with vaccines and masks, but with early and preventive treatment like ivermectin.

In other words, our government is learning all the wrong lessons from India, and now Israel and the U.K. Let’s unpack what we know occurred in India and now in some of the other countries experiencing a surge in cases of the Indian “Delta” variant. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) recently conducted a fourth nationwide serological test and found that 67.6% of those over 6 years old in June and July had antibodies, including 85% of health care workers. This is a sharp increase from the 24.1% level detected during the December-January study. What we can conclude definitively is that strict mask-wearing (especially among health care workers) failed to stop the spread one bit. Yet now they have achieved herd immunity and burned out the virus with just 3% vaccination (now up to 6%) with roughly one-sixth the death rate of the U.S. and the U.K. and less than one-half that of Israel.

[..] If you look at any chart from Scotland, which is now mainly over the curve, there is a complete decoupling of deaths from cases. The same thing is being observed in Israel, which is slightly behind the curve. The country has had just 20 deaths so far in July, but again, 15 of them were of vaccinated individuals. However, to the extent that there are cases, and the relatively rare serious cases, the vaccines have proven to be a bust in preventing them. The Western countries are relying on an exponentially higher vaccination rate than India with a much lower seroprevalence rate from infection. It’s simply not working. According to Israel’s Ministry of Health, the Pfizer vaccine efficacy against infection dropped 42% since the start of the inoculation drive in Israel, and efficacy against severe illness has dropped 60% among those vaccinated early on. Ditto for the United Kingdom.<

[..] the experience from India and the Delta variant teaches us the exact opposite of what the panic-mongers are pushing. Natural immunity, not vaccination, is king.

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“This was not an “accident” since the studies were published and known — it was deliberate blindness undertaken in the interest of speed and money before human safety and indeed human life.”

• Here It Comes (Denninger)

The “spike unit” that the jabs are all constructed around, it has developed, something known to the NIH and the pharmaceutical companies before Covid-19 was claimed to exist in January of 2020. There is a transfer agreement from the NIH to a university dated prior to that time, and some evidence that the exact spike configuration found in Covid-19 was being discussed in scientific papers long before that. How can you have a scientific discussion, write papers on and transfer technology related to something that isn’t known to exist yet? Fauci was grilled on this the other day by Congress, asked directly if the spike in Covid-19 was identical to that in said paper, and refused to answer with a yes or no. He knows damn well what the answer is and if he lied that would be proved 4perjury and a criminal offense.

If he tells the truth then the etiology of Covid-19 is conclusively known to wildly pre-date the so-called “discovery” and now we must start asking all sorts of other questions; said questions degenerate very rapidly into criminal culpability on the part of many including a whole bunch of people right here in the US. Fauci looked very nervous in that hearing — exactly like a man who has been caught bull****ting since the start, there’s a half-million bodies piled up as a result and his neck is itching. When the jab trials started, in short, we knew that severe disease from Covid-19 was primarily a thrombotic event. We also knew that roughly 80% of the population had decent if not excellent resistance and would get nothing more than a mild or moderate cold or flu from it. That proof goes all the way back to Diamond Princess.

Hell, a couple reasonably well-known to me got hit by the ‘Ro in the early months, both elderly and quite morbid. He was dead in five days while she never even sneezed, a flat impossibility for two people who are married and sleeping with each other if everyone is susceptible as we were told. We investigated and learned why that has repeatedly happened; the science was published in June, peer-reviewed by September and published in Nature — long before the first jab went into the first arm. These are facts. We also knew, from decades of trying, that coronavirus vaccines had always failed in the past. We deliberately did not look at the thrombotic profile of the trial participants in the vaccines; specifically, we did not pull d-Dimer and troponin tests (both cheap) on the participants before the jab, and then sequentially on intervals (e.g. 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks) to detect whether we were in fact inducing damage similar to the disease.

The drugmakers did not look because quite-obviously they did not want to know; if that showed up in the trials in any sort of statistically relevant percentage of the enrollees it would have instantly shut down the trials and freaked out the thousands in said trials who put themselves at risk. I remind you that in September of 2020 the first scientific paper was published indicating that the “Spike” was quite possibly the direct cause of the serious damage and virtually all Covid-19 deaths. Several papers followed starting in December of 2020, prior to mass-distribution of the jabs, confirming that the spike was directly capable of causing pathology — that is, severe damage — without the rest of the virus being present at all. Failing to halt the roll-out to prove that the vaccines, which all cause production of said spike in your body, would not cause the same effects was criminally insane and grossly negligent given the science at the time. This was not an “accident” since the studies were published and known — it was deliberate blindness undertaken in the interest of speed and money before human safety and indeed human life.

Antibodies
https://twitter.com/i/status/1418191279578656771

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The NHS app goes Ping when you’ve been close to a “case”: you need to self-isolate for ten days. Last week, it did that half a million times. Entire industries come to a halt.

• ‘Pingdemic’ Triggers Widespread Panic Hoarding At UK Supermarkets (ZH)

Britain’s supermarkets are struggling to ensure adequate food supply after reports of panic hoarding due to what the British press calls “ping-demic” – a reference to being “pinged” by the NHS test-and-trace system. We noted on Monday that ping-demic was likely to “lead to food shortages,” and that is precisely what is happening today. The Independent reports UK’s largest supermarkets are experiencing shortages after the number of people getting “pinged” on the NHS Test and triggered mass confusion. The NHS app sent a half-million alerts last week, notifying users they have to quarantine for ten days because of possible close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. This has caused a supply chain shock and disruptions as hundreds of thousands of people panic buy food and fuel to survive the quarantine.

British newspapers and social media users published pictures of empty supermarket shelves. “We’re very concerned about the situation,” Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told Sky News when asked about panic hoarding at supermarkets. “We’re monitoring the situation.” Sainsbury’s, Britain’s second-largest supermarket group, warned about supply shortages: “We are working hard to ensure customers can find what they need. “While we might not always have the exact product a customer is looking for in every store, large quantities of products are being delivered to stores daily and our colleagues are focused on getting them onto the shelves as quickly as they can,” a Sainsbury’s spokesperson told Reuters.

The ping-demic comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson lifted the remaining COVID-linked restrictions on movement and business at midnight on Monday, finally allowing people to move about more or less freely, even as new COVID cases are climbing in the UK and much of the EU. A meat industry body warned that Britain’s food supply chains are on the cusp of “failing” due to labor shortages. British supermarket Iceland had to close several stores in recent weeks due to staff shortages. Rabobank’s Michal Every points out that ping-demic is hugely disruptive to businesses as crucial staff suddenly don’t turn up to work when there are already labor shortages.

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ha ha ha

• List Of UK Venues That Could Mandate “Vaccine Passports” Already Expanding (SN)

The list of attractions that could be forced to mandate vaccine passports as a condition of entry is already growing, with minister Nadhim Zahawi listing other “crowded venues” that may have to ban the unvaccinated. On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a mockery of ‘freedom day’ – when all coronavirus restrictions were supposed to be lifted – by announcing that nightclubs would be made to check for vaccine status on the door. Despite widespread backlash to the idea and the potential for a defeat when it comes to a vote in Parliament, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi indicated today that the program could be extended further. During a speech to the Commons, Zahawi said sporting and business events, churches, music venues and festivals would also be subject to the rules, which are expected to come into force at the end of September. “We reserve the right to mandate its use in the future,” he said.


Zahawi also asked venues to make providing evidence of taking the jab or a negative test a condition of entry before September despite the fact that it’s not the law. “Although we don’t encourage its use in essential settings like supermarkets, other businesses and organisations in England can adopt the pass as a means of entry where it is suitable for their venue or premises when they can see its potential to keep their clients or their customers safe,” he said. As we previously highlighted, some nightclub owners are already saying they will refuse to follow the law because the system will be unworkable and wipe out profit margins. It remains to be seen whether the entire issue is just a PR stunt to bully younger people into taking the vaccine or whether it will actually be implemented. The government previously assured the public that vaccine passports would not be introduced for domestic purposes, even going so far as to label the practice “discriminatory.”

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“to keep economic activity open.”

• Italy Will Start Requiring Covid Vaccine Passes For Many Activities (JTN)

Italian officials approved a decree Thursday that would require Italians to carry passes that reflect their vaccination status to access various public places. Premier Mario Draghi approved the system called “green pass.” The system will start being implemented on Aug. 6, according to the Associated Press. The passes will start being required if Italians want to go to gyms, museums, movie theaters, and the inside of businesses such as restaurants. Draghi said that the passes are needed so that people can enjoy activities “with the assurance they won’t be next to contagious people.” The premier argued that the passes, which people can get if they can prove they received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine within the last nine months, are needed “to keep economic activity open.” Health Minister Roberto Speranza noted that approximately 40 million Italians have already downloaded a “green pass.”

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Thousands is not enough. Big protest weekend coming up in many places.

• Thousands Protest as Italy Mandates Health Pass (GP)

Italy mandated their version of a vaccine passport today, called the ‘green pass.’ This gross violation of freedom sparked a wave of massive protests across the country. Just like the tens of thousands of French citizens who have been demonstrating in the streets for the past week, the Italian people were immediately outraged. Large crowds stayed well into the night and chants for freedom and “no green pass” rang out loudly. Protesters plan to continue the demonstrations throughout the weekend. The new measure forces people to show proof of vaccination if they want to engage in any of a wide range of day to day activities like eating indoors at restaurants. It also makes getting the jab compulsory for healthcare workers.


The Italian government issued the authoritarian mandates despite recent reports out of the UK and Israel that show the vaccinated account for 47% and 84% of all new covid cases, respectively. Democrats and their drooling media sycophants love to claim that America’s vaccine hesitancy is because of ‘wild right wing conservative disinformation’ that is ‘literally killing people.’ In reality, there is a worldwide resistance to this experimental vaccine. The mass uprisings in France, UK, Taiwan, Italy, Cuba, and many other countries, have sent that message loud and clear.

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That’s just the official number.

• 49 Fully Vaccinated People In New Jersey Have Died From Covid-19 (Blaze)

Forty-nine fully vaccinated individuals in New Jersey have passed away from COVID-19 through July 12, Garden State health officials informed NJ Advance Media on Wednesday. The outlet reported that according to New Jersey Department of Health spokesperson Donna Leusner, over half of the people who passed away had at least one underlying medical issue. “Of the 27 deaths of people with underlying conditions, 17 had cardiovascular disease, seven had diabetes and nine had cancer or other immunocompromised conditions, she said,” according to the outlet. “Five had chronic lung conditions, three had chronic kidney disease, one had chronic liver disease and five others are listed as ‘other chronic diseases,'” the outlet reported, noting that some individuals who passed away suffered from more than one underlying issue.


“All of the deaths were people over age 50, with 30 of them over age 80,” the outlet reported. “Thirteen of the deaths were people between the ages of 65 and 79, and six were between the ages of 50 and 64, Leusner said,” according to NJ Advance Media. The CDC reports that 48.8% of the total U.S. population have been fully vaccinated, while 56.3% have received at least one dose. [..] The CDC says that a small proportion of people who have been fully vaccinated will still become ill. “Vaccine breakthrough cases are expected,” according to the CDC. “COVID-19 vaccines are effective and are a critical tool to bring the pandemic under control. However, no vaccines are 100% effective at preventing illness in vaccinated people. There will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19.”

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Here, the fully vaccinated drag some innocent unvaccinated down with them.

• 42 People Quarantined At San Antonio Assisted Living Facility (Ksat)

Forty-two people are now in isolation after testing positive for COVID-19 at a San Antonio assisted living facility, a management company for the facility confirms. The positive cases were reported among 31 residents and 11 staff members last week at Heartis San Antonio Assisted Living and Memory Care on the far North Side. All 31 residents are fully vaccinated; four staff members are fully vaccinated, three have their first doses and four have not been vaccinated, officials said. In Bexar County, as of Wednesday, July 21, city COVID-19 records show the seven-day average of new cases is at 363.


Although the hospital stress locally is deemed “mild,” the city website also indicates that the risk level of contracting the virus is “worsening.” Heartis San Antonio said it is testing all staff and residents weekly, and they are also conducting health screenings on a daily basis. The first employees that tested positive for COVID-19 were “exhibiting symptoms at work and were immediately sent home,” according to officials. All of those who tested positive for COVID-19 are out of the assisting living facility and were relocated to a nearby partnered facility, officials said.

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No politician will put a halt to this. They’d be run out of town.

• Toka, the Most Dangerous Israeli Spyware Firm You’ve Never Heard Of (Webb)

This past Sunday, an investigation into the global abuse of spyware developed by veterans of Israeli intelligence Unit 8200 gained widespread attention, as it was revealed that the software – sold to democratic and authoritarian governments alike – had been used to illegally spy on an estimated 50,000 individuals. Among those who had their communications and devices spied on by the software, known as Pegasus, were journalists, human rights activists, business executives, academics and prominent political leaders. Among those targeted political leaders, per reports, were the current leaders of France, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Iraq. [..] While the NSO Group has become infamous, other Israeli companies with even deeper ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus have been selling software that not only provides the exact same services to governments and intelligence agencies but purports to go even farther.

Originally founded by former Israeli Prime Minister and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ehud Barak, one of these companies’ wares are being used by countries around the world, including in developing countries with the direct facilitation of global financial institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank. In addition, the software is only made available to governments that are “trusted” by Israel’s government, which “works closely” with the company. Despite the fact that this firm has been around since 2018 and was covered in detail by this author for MintPress News in January 2020, no mainstream outlet – including those that have extensively covered the NSO Group – has bothered to examine the implications of this story.

Toka was launched in 2018 with the explicit purpose of selling a “tailored ecosystem of cyber capabilities and software products for governmental, law enforcement, and security agencies.” According to a profile of the company published in Forbes shortly after it launched, Toka advertised itself as “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain.” Toka launched with plans to “provide spy tools for whatever device its clients require,” including not only smartphones but a “special focus on the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).” Per the company, this includes devices like Amazon Echo, Google Nest-connected home products, as well as connected fridges, thermostats and alarms.

Exploits in these products discovered by Toka, the company said at the time, would not be disclosed to vendors, meaning those flaws would continue to remain vulnerable to any hacker, whether a client of Toka or not. Today, Toka’s software suite claims to offer its customers in law enforcement, government and intelligence the ability to obtain “targeted intelligence” and to conduct “forensic investigations” as well as “covert operations.” In addition, Toka offers governments its “Cyber Designers” service, which provides “agencies with the full-spectrum strategies, customized projects and technologies needed to keep critical infrastructure, the digital landscape and government institutions secure and durable.”


Julian Assange

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Good story telling.

• The Trillion-Dollar Lie (Taibbi)

Stefanie Gray explains why, as a teenager, she was so anxious to leave her home state of Florida to go to college. “I went to garbage schools and I’m from a garbage low-income suburb where everyone sucks Oxycontin all day,” she says. “I needed to get out.” She got into Hunter College in New York, but both her parents had died and she had nowhere near enough to pay tuition, so she borrowed. “I just had nothing and was poor as hell, so I took out loans,” she says. This being 2006, just a year after the infamous Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 was passed, she believed news stories about student loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She believed they would be with her for life, or until they were paid off. “My understanding was, it’s better to purchase 55 big-screen TVs on a credit card, and discharge that in a court of law, then be a student who’s getting an education,” she says.

Still, she asked for financial aid: “I was like, ‘My parents are dead, I’m a literal fucking orphan, I have no siblings. I’m just taking out this money to put my ass through school.” Instead of a denial, she got plenty of credit, including a slice of what were called “direct-to-consumer” loans, that came with a whopping 14% interest rate. One of her loans also came from a company called MyRichUncle that, before going bankrupt in 2009, would briefly become famous for running an ad disclosing a kickback system that existed between student lenders and college financial aid offices. Gray was not the cliché undergrad, majoring in underwater basket-weaving with no plan to repay her loans. She took geographical mapping, with the specific aim of getting a paying job quickly. But she graduated in the middle of the post-2008 crash, when “53% of people 18 to 29 were unemployed or underemployed.”

“I couldn’t even get a job scrubbing toilets at a local motel,” she recalls. “They told me straight up that I was over-educated. I was like, “Literally, I’ll do your housekeeping. I don’t give a shit, just let me make money and not get evicted and end up homeless.” The lender Sallie Mae at the time had an amusingly loathsome policy of charging a repeating $150 fee every three months just for the privilege of applying for forbearance. Gray was so pissed about having to pay $50 a month just to say she was broke that she started a change.org petition that ended up gathering 170,000 signatures. She personally delivered those to the offices of Sallie Mae and ended up extracting a compromise out of the firm: they’d still charge the fee, but she could at least apply it to her balance, as opposed to just sticking it in the company’s pocket as an extra. This meager “partial” victory over a student lender was so rare, the New York Times wrote about it.

Gray still owed a ton of student debt — it had ballooned from $36,000 to $77,000 — and collectors were calling her nonstop, perhaps with a little edge thanks to who she was. “They were telling me I should hit up people I know for money, which was one thing,” she recalls. “But when they started talking about giving blood, or selling plasma… I don’t know.” Sallie Mae ultimately sued Gray four times. In doing so, they made a strange error. It might have slipped by, but for luck. “By the grace of God,” Gray said, she met a man in the lobby of a courthouse, a future state Senator named Kevin Thomas, who took a look at her case. “Huh, I’ve got some ideas,” he said, eventually pointing to a problem right at the top of her lawsuit.

Sallie Mae did not represent itself in court as Sallie Mae. The listed plaintiff was “SLM Private Credit Student Loan Trust VL Funding LLC.” As was increasingly the case with mortgages and other forms of debt, student loans by then were typically gathered, pooled, and chopped into slices called tranches, to be marketed to investors. Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight. When Thomas advised her to look up the plaintiff’s name, she discovered it wasn’t registered to do business in the State of New York, which prompted the judge to rule that the entity lacked standing to sue. He fined Sallie Mae $10,000 for “nonsense” and gave Gray another rare victory over a student lender, which she ended up writing about herself this time, in The Guardian.

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The Onion and Babylon Bee need to take a serious look at their business model. What was crazy yesterday no longer is today.

• Facebook Cracks Down On Discussing ‘Hoes’ In Gardening Group (NYP)

Facebook’s censors are digging deep — flagging the word “hoe” in a western New York gardening group because they apparently confused the tool for a disparaging term for women. A group called WNY Gardeners has been repeatedly flagged by the social network for “violating community standards,” when its more than 7,500 members discussed the long-handled bladed implement, which is spelled with an “e,” unlike the offensive term. When one member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post about preferred weeding tools, Facebook sent a notification that read, “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying,” a moderator said.

“And so I contacted Facebook, which was useless. How do you do that?,” Elizabeth Licata said. “You know, I said this is a gardening group, a hoe is gardening tool.” Licata said she never a response from the company, but a Facebook representative told The Associated Press that some of the enforcements had been corrected, and an actual person will check supposedly offensive posts in the future before the group is sanctioned or deleted. “We have plans to build out better customer support for our products and to provide the public with even more information about our policies and how we enforce them,” Facebook said in an emailed statement.

The extra set of eyes did not prevent a subsequent post in the group from being automatically disabled because of “possible violence, incitement, or hate in multiple comments,” Licata said. “Kill them all. Drown them in soapy water,” and “Japanese beetles are jerks,” were some comments Facebook deemed offensive, according to the moderator. The gardening group snafu was not Facebook’s first hoe faux pas. This winter, the social network apologized to residents of Plymouth Hoe, an area of the coastal city of Plymouth in England, for repeatedly flagging posts that referenced the seaside attraction. “These posts were removed in error and we apologize to those who were affected. We’re looking into what happened and will take steps to rectify the error,” Facebook said at the time.

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Debt Rattle June 26 2021

Jun 262021
 
 June 26, 2021  Posted by at 8:43 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  53 Responses »


John French Sloan South Beach Bathers 1908

 

• Half Of New Israel Covid-19 Cases In Last Month Were Fully Vaccinated (INN)
• Covid Success Stories Australia, Israel Impose New Curbs (Y!)
• Long-lived Macrophage Reprogramming And Inflammasome Activation (Embo)
• Canadian Group Calls for Off-Label Use of Early Treatment Drugs (CovExit)
• Ivermectin: Can a Drug Be “Right-Wing”? (Taibbi)
• Most Americans Believe Vaccinated Should Be Required To Wear Masks At Work (F.)
• US Doesn’t Have the Data to Calculate Transmissibility Or ‘Herd Immunity’ (TSN)
• Children Using Fruit Juice For ‘False Positive’ Covid Tests (LEcho)
• Some GB Olympic Athletes Still Refusing To Have Covid Vaccine (G.)
• Narrative Soup (Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

Mercola-Seneff

 

 

“..an additional 3,133 people contracted Covid-19 from those vaccinated individuals.”

• Half Of New Israel Covid-19 Cases In Last Month Were Fully Vaccinated (INN)

Israel’s campaign to promote the coronavirus vaccine – now focusing on young teens – is going full steam ahead, in spite of statistics presented by government officials showing that half of those recently infected with Covid-19 were fully vaccinated, Behadrey Haredim reports. Head of Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Alray-Price, revealed the disturbing facts at a media presentation on Wednesday. According to her data, of the 891 cases of coronavirus confirmed in the last month alone, half had received both doses of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. According to a report on Channel 12, in the months since the vaccines were rolled out, 6,765 people who received both shots have contracted coronavirus, and epidemiological tracing has revealed that an additional 3,133 people contracted Covid-19 from those vaccinated individuals.

The 6,765 represent a little more than one percent of the total number of those vaccinated, which now stands at over 5,100,000. It is clear that officials were already aware that the vaccine does not provide sufficient protection, as quarantine regulations for those returning from abroad have recently been changed, requiring even those fully vaccinated to self-isolate upon return from certain countries. In addition, military intelligence has been warning of such a scenario at least since January, when a report was published that suggested a mass vaccination campaign would lead to vaccine-resistant strains of Covid-19 emerging. Also on Wednesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett convened a panel of experts together with the heads of the various health service organizations in the country.

“Our aim at the present moment, first and foremost, is to protect Israeli citizens from the Delta strain that is running amok around the world,” Bennett said at the meeting. “As we do so, we will endeavor to limit the impact this has on daily life in Israel. Therefore, we have decided to take immediate action in order to avoid paying a heavier price at a later stage. It all depends on us. If we are meticulous in adhering to the guidelines and behaving responsibly, we will overcome this – together.”

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Success is relative.

• Covid Success Stories Australia, Israel Impose New Curbs (Y!)

Australia and Israel, which had been successful in fending off Covid-19, reimposed restrictions on Friday as cases surged of the highly contagious Delta variant which also threatened Africa with a brutal third wave. The centre of Australia’s largest city Sydney entered lockdown, a shock for a population that had returned to relative normality after months of recording very few local cases, while vaccination success story Israel reimposed indoor mask-wearing less than two weeks after it lifted the measure. And in Fiji, another country that saw early successes against the virus, health authorities admitted for the first time that Covid transmission is widespread in the community.


While vaccination campaigns have helped bring down infections in numerous — mostly wealthy — countries, the rise of the Delta variant which first emerged in India has led to fears of new waves of a virus that has already killed nearly 3.9 million people. In Australia, which has been one of the most successful nations in containing the coronavirus after shutting its borders, around a million people in four eastern and central Sydney neighbourhoods were ordered to stay home for at least a week. Sixty-five infections have been reported in a flare-up linked to a limousine driver infected about two weeks ago when he transported an international flight crew from Sydney airport to a quarantine hotel. The premier of the state of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, called it the “scariest period” since the pandemic began.

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Walter M Chesnut @Parsifaler:

“A paper published on June 16, 2021 proves my hypothesis that the spike protein therapies are sensitizing recipients to the Spike Protein super-allergen of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The SARS-CoV-2 S-protein, a surface exposed viral receptor binding protein and important as vaccine antigen triggers NLRP3 inflammasome activation and cytokine secretion selectively in COVID-19 patient-derived macrophages. SARS-CoV-2 infection leads to reprogramming of human macrophages providing an intracellular landscape that allows for rapid inflammasome assembly.

The findings reveal that SARS-CoV-2 infection causes profound and long-lived reprogramming of macrophages resulting in augmented immunogenicity of the SARS-CoV-2 S-protein, a major vaccine antigen and potent driver of adaptive and innate immune signaling. The implications are that when the virus reemerges in the fall (and perhaps even as soon as this summer, with new variants circulating) the host will have a devastating NLRP3 inflammasome activation, resulting, I believe, in the hospitilization and death of millions of individuals throughout the world. I urgently implore that the sensitization of the world population to the S-Protein be stopped immediately.”

• Long-lived Macrophage Reprogramming And Inflammasome Activation (Embo)

Innate immunity triggers responsible for viral control or hyperinflammation in COVID-19 are largely unknown. Here we show that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S-protein) primes inflammasome formation and release of mature interleukin-β (IL-β) in macrophages derived from COVID-19 patients but not in macrophages from healthy SARS-CoV-2 naïve individuals. Furthermore, longitudinal analyses reveal robust S-protein-driven inflammasome activation in macrophages isolated from convalescent COVID-19 patients, which correlates with distinct epigenetic and gene expression signatures suggesting innate immune memory after recovery from COVID-19.


Importantly, we show that S-protein-driven IL-β secretion from patient-derived macrophages requires non-specific monocyte pre-activation in vivo to trigger NLRP3-inflammasome signaling. Our findings reveal that SARS-CoV-2 infection causes profound and long-lived reprogramming of macrophages resulting in augmented immunogenicity of the SARS-CoV-2 S-protein, a major vaccine antigen and potent driver of adaptive and innate immune signaling.

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Common sense.

• Canadian Group Calls for Off-Label Use of Early Treatment Drugs (CovExit)

A new Canadian group, the Canadian Covid Care Alliance, has issued an information package for doctors and patients, geared at facilitating the off-label prescription of early treatment drugs for COVID-19. This call is made despite guidelines, at the federal and provincial levels, recommending against most forms of early treatment of the disease. “Health Canada, and the provincial Colleges of Physicians, do not prohibit physicians from prescribing any medications that are “off-label”. Many physicians fear that prescribing ivermectin or any medication for COVID-19 is not permitted. We would like to assure you that this is not the case. Informed consent is the process by which physicians may prescribe any medication deemed appropriate. To assist you with that, we have provided a sample “Informed Consent” form that you may use or modify as per your discretion.”

After reviewing how Ivermectin can be used in early treatment protocols, the letter addressed to doctors comments on the question of drug availability and on safety. “Ivermectin can be obtained from some compounding pharmacies. The branded version of ivermectin (StromectolTM) is on long- term backorder in Canada. Thus, most pharmacies will not have supply. If you do not know of a local compounding pharmacy, contact the Canadian Covid Care Alliance ([email protected]) and we may be able to assist you. …” “Ivermectin has an exceptional safety profile, being used for approximately 40 years in billions of patients. It is on the list of essential medicines by the World Health Organization. Physicians who have been treating COVID-19 patients with early therapies can all attest to its efficacy and safety, with dramatic reductions in hospitalizations. We feel that all primary care physicians should feel comfortable treating their patients early. Recovered patients are grateful patients.”

There are two consent forms included, one for Ivermectin and one for Fluvoxamine. Both consent forms include the following introductory paragraphs: “In Canada, there are currently no recognized standard outpatient therapies for persons infected by SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 disease. The current standard of outpatient care is supportive: i.e., stay home and isolate, drink fluids, take acetaminophen for fever. Should one’s condition progress with worsening symptoms such as difficulty breathing, then one should go to the hospital.” “There are numerous studies suggesting benefit with the use of certain medications that have been on the market for many years, but do not have an official indication for COVID-19 disease.”

After providing info on the drugs, including potential side effects, the proposed consent forms conclude: “Because use of ivermectin(/fluvoxamine) is “off-label”, meaning Health Canada does not officially recognize the use of this medication for the treatment of COVID-19, signed written consent is required before taking this medication. Your signed consent indicates that you understand you are taking the medication “off-label” for COVID-19, and that beneficial results are not guaranteed.”

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Has Taibbi read any of the scientific reports? Or is this just about politics?

• Ivermectin: Can a Drug Be “Right-Wing”? (Taibbi)

Hospitals fought hard, hiring expensive law firms, at times going to extraordinary lengths to refuse treatment even with dying patients who’d exhausted all other options. At Edward-Elmhurst hospital in Chicago, a 68 year-old named Nurije Fype was admitted, put on a ventilator, and again, as all other treatments failed, her family got a judge to order the use of ivermectin. Lorigo claims the hospital initially refused to obey the court order, which led to the filing of a contempt motion, which in turn led to a pair of counter-motions and another confrontation before another befuddled Judge named James Orel. “Why wouldn’t this be tried if she’s not improving?” the Chicago Tribune quoted Orel as saying. “Why does the hospital object to providing this medication?”

“He basically said, ‘What do you have left?’” Lorigo recounts. “No one would administer the ivermectin. It’s as safe as aspirin, for Christ’s sake. It’s been given out 3.7 billion times. I couldn’t understand it.” Stories like these aren’t proof the drug works. They don’t even really rise to the level of evidence. People recover from diseases all the time, and it doesn’t mean any particular treatment was responsible. Short of the gold standard of randomized controlled trials, there’s no proof. However, anecdotes have a power all their own, and in the Internet age, ones like these spread quickly. Lorigo estimates he now gets “10, 15, 20” calls and emails a day. At this level, at the bedside of a single Covid-19 patient who’s already received the full official treatment protocol and is failing anyway, the decision to administer a drug like ivermectin, or fluvoxamine, or hydroxychloroquine, or any of a dozen other experimental treatments, seems like a no-brainer. Nothing else has worked, the patient is dying, why not?

Telescope out a little further, however, and the ivermectin debate becomes more complicated, reaching into a series of thorny controversies, some ridiculous, some quite serious. The ridiculous side involves the front end of Lorigo’s story, the same story detailed on this site last week: the censorship of ivermectin news that, no matter what one thinks about the evidence for or against, is clearly in the public interest. Anyone running a basic internet search on the topic will get a jumble of confusing results. YouTube’s policies are beyond uneven. It’s been aggressive in taking down videos containing interviews with people like Kory and doling out strikes to independent media figures like Bret Weinstein, but an interview with Lorigo on TrialSite News containing basically all of the same information is still up, as are clips from a just-taped episode of the Joe Rogan Experience that feature both Weinstein and Kory.

Moreover, all sorts of statements at least as provocative as Kory’s “miraculous” formulation in the Senate still litter the Internet, many in reputable research journals. Take, for instance, this passage from the March issue of the Japanese Journal of Antibiotics: “When the effectiveness of ivermectin for the COVID-19 pandemic is confirmed with the cooperation of researchers around the world and its clinical use is achieved on a global scale, it could prove to be of great benefit to humanity. It may even turn out to be comparable to the benefits achieved from the discovery of penicillin…” There clearly is not evidence that ivermectin is the next penicillin, at least as far as its effects on Covid-19. As is noted in nearly every mainstream story about the subject, the WHO has advised against its use pending further study, there have been randomized studies showing it to be ineffective in speeding recovery, and the drug’s original manufacturer, Merck, has said there’s no “meaningful evidence” of efficacy for Covid-19 patients.

However, it’s also patently untrue, as is frequently asserted, that there’s no evidence that the drug might be effective. This past week, for instance, Oxford University announced it was launching a large-scale clinical trial. The study has already recruited more than 5,000 volunteers, and its announcement says what little is known to be true: that “small pilot studies show that early administration with ivermectin can reduce viral load and the duration of symptoms in some patients with mild COVID-19,” that it’s “a well-known medicine with a good safety profile,” and “because of the early promising results in some studies, it is already being widely used to treat COVID-19 in several countries.”

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“..although 66% of Americans believe employees have a right to know if their co-workers have been vaccinated, 60% assert their vaccine status is “no one’s business but my own.”

• Most Americans Believe Vaccinated Should Be Required To Wear Masks At Work (F.)

More than half of U.S. adults (57%) believe masks should be mandated for employees working at on-site locations, even if they have been vaccinated against Covid-19, according to an American Staffing Association survey released Thursday. Compared to white Americans (50%), both Hispanics (64%) and Blacks (70%) are more likely to feel that face coverings should be required at the workplace. Younger adults and parents of children under 18 are also more supportive of mask requirements at on-site locations. The survey also discovered that although 66% of Americans believe employees have a right to know if their co-workers have been vaccinated, 60% assert their vaccine status is “no one’s business but my own.” The survey was conducted from June 10–14 by the Harris Poll among 2,066 U.S. adults.

“While government officials are rolling back Covid-19 requirements throughout the country, many workers aren’t ready to give up their masks just yet,” said Richard Wahlquist, president of the American Staffing Association. “As brick-and-mortar workplaces reopen, workers are anxious about being around their colleagues once again. Employers must clearly communicate what steps they are taking to make their workplaces safe for their employees as they reopen.” In mid-May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that fully vaccinated Americans no longer need to wear masks indoors or socially distance in most cases.

At a White House briefing explaining the modified recommendations, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, cited a range of studies showing the vaccines are highly effective at stopping the spread of the virus and preventing severe illness. However, Thursday’s ASA survey reinforces the findings from a Monmouth University poll released Wednesday, which found 38% of Americans, including 41% of respondents who are already vaccinated, said their masking habits remain largely unchanged despite the updated guidance from the CDC advising it was safe to abandon masks in most places. [..] 0.8%. That’s the percentage of the Americans killed by the coronavirus last month who were fully vaccinated, according to an AP analysis of available government data.

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“..American society is driving to “Herd Immunity” collectively with each jab. But how can this be the case when the actual effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing transmission of the virus (transmissibility) isn’t actually known?”

• US Doesn’t Have the Data to Calculate Transmissibility Or ‘Herd Immunity’ (TSN)

Again, the premise in the 70% POTUS directive: that American society is driving to “Herd Immunity” collectively with each jab. But how can this be the case when the actual effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing transmission of the virus (transmissibility) isn’t actually known? That’s right; at present, it’s not known just how effective the vaccines are at preventing transmission. If in fact transmissibility was known, that is to say that based on extensive study scientists could measure the COVID-19 vaccines’ were 50%, or 70% or 20% effective, then biostatistical calculations can be programmed into algorithms which will predict the segment of the populace that would need to have been inoculated to reach that milestone called herd immunity.


However, to actually achieve this goal necessitates granular data heretofore not known nor currently available. That is, what is the reduction in viral transmissibility rates for each vaccine? Scientists must be able to measure, quantitatively as well as aggregate mean calculations concerning just how effective each vaccine actually is in preventing person-to-person transmission. But presently, these data aren’t known. Moreover, these vital underlying data (transmissibility rates), a fundamental prerequisite to perform the calculations that could lead to the herd immunity target assessment, were not required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for neither clinical studies nor licensure. Rather, the FDA was concerned with disease prevention as an urgent endpoint, with an emphasis on hospitalization and death.

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The Science.

• Children Using Fruit Juice For ‘False Positive’ Covid Tests (LEcho)

A school has sent a warning message to parents after children “discovered” using fruit juice created a false positive on coronavirus tests. Gateacre School in Belle Vale sent out an email to parents on Wednesday, June 24, warning them to be “vigilant” whilst their children are taking lateral flow Covid tests. The email was sent after it came to the attention of teachers, pupils had “discovered” placing droplets of orange juice or other fruit juice on a lateral flow test gave a false positive result. On Monday, June 21, Gateacre School told pupils in Year 7, 8, 9 and 10 not to attend school while staff carried out track and trace work after a number of students tested positive for Covid-19 over the weekend. The school told the ECHO there is no evidence their pupils have been misusing the tests.


The email read: “Nationally, some school students have discovered that placing droplets of orange juice or other fruit juice on an LFD test gets a false ‘positive’ result. In light of this, can you be extra vigilant when your child is doing their LFD tests. Also, remind them that a positive LFD test must be followed by a confirmatory PCR test.” One parent said they received the email and a text message from Gateacre and were left concerned after knowing the school had “a few positive tests lately”. The parent added: “Makes you think, are some of the children doing this ?” Headteacher Gareth Jones insisted the message was sent after they were made aware of students in “other schools in the country” obtaining void or positive results by pouring orange juice onto Covid tests.

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Logic: human rights are not helpful.

“People have got the right to choose, and we have to respect that. But it’s not necessarily that helpful.”

• Some GB Olympic Athletes Still Refusing To Have Covid Vaccine (G.)

The British Olympic Association is still trying to convince some athletes to get vaccinated against Covid-19 before the Tokyo Olympics next month, the BOA chief executive, Andy Anson, said. The BOA said this month that it was on track to ensure all athletes and staff were fully vaccinated before the Olympics. The Tokyo Games, delayed last year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, will begin on 23 July. “We’re trying to convince them it’s the right thing to do,” Anson told the BBC on Friday. “People have got the right to choose, and we have to respect that. But it’s not necessarily that helpful.” Japan has largely avoided the kind of Covid-19 outbreaks that have devastated other countries, but its vaccine rollout was initially slow and the medical system has been pushed to the brink in some places.


Many Japanese remain sceptical about the possibility of holding even a scaled-down Games safely during the pandemic. Organisers have excluded foreign spectators and limited the number of domestic ones for the event. Anson said the Athletes’ Village in Tokyo will be “probably the toughest environment in sports at this time”. “We are putting in place very strict protocols along with the organisers to make sure, to the fullest extent possible, we follow the rules of isolation, distancing, and just keeping in our own ‘semi bubbles,’” he said. On Wednesday, a second member of Uganda’s Olympic delegation, an athlete, tested positive for Covid-19 after arriving in Japan.

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“Joe Biden”

• Narrative Soup (Kunstler)

In fact, there is one legal review of the 2020 balloting currently underway in Arizona, at the order of the Arizona State Senate, as it should be because, according to the US constitution, elections are a prerogative of the fifty states’ legislatures. It’s not “a narrative.” It’s as official as can be, and they have every right to do it, and there’s a fair chance that it will uncover both ballot fraud and voting machine fraud. I suppose all that seems “baseless” if you refuse to look. Also, this week a judge in Georgia approved a process to unseal roughly 145,000 mail-in ballots in Fulton County (the Atlanta metro region) to inspect them for fraud. The ruling stems from a lawsuit against the county that alleges evidence of fraudulent ballots and improper counting. “Joe Biden” won the state by a mere 12,000 votes.

Other states, notably Pennsylvania, are taking action toward their own 2020 vote audits, and through the proper legislative channels. The “incontrovertible evidence” of a fair and honest election is the fraud at issue. There are only assertions that it would be wrong to even look for it, and it’s hard to imagine a weaker argument. So, the politburo behind “Joe Biden” is running scared. The New York court’s action against Mr. Giuliani is just a peevish act of political desperation aimed at disabling a legal adversary. That and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s threat to shut down the Arizona audit on specious “civil rights” grounds are just attempts to create distractions for a regime that begins to apprehend it is whirling around the drain.

As “Joe Biden” fades altogether from the scene, the country will have to grapple with the real problems it faces, not hobgoblins of racism, misogyny, white supremacy but how to cope with a dwindling energy supply and a falling standard of living, and how to remain civilized. We’re doing a good job of destroying the institutions that make civilization possible, especially law and the courts.

Kamala

Read more …

 

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Science? What Science?

Apr 042021
 
 April 4, 2021  Posted by at 2:31 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  19 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Lilac Bush 1889

 

 

Granted, there are various levels of dumb acts and theories being passed as science. Spain mandating a law that says people have to wear a face mask when swimming in the sea is a extreme example. That not only has nothing to do with science, though undoubtedly they will say it’s based on it, it’s acutely dangerous. But there’s so much more.

I was reading the following for the New York Times (through local paper Kathimerini) this morning, and it gave me just about the right amount of anger. There are so many clowns out there that tell you they base their measures and restrictions on “the science”, but have no idea what that is. Injecting millions with untested substances is not science, it’s the opposite of science. Science would require evidence that such substances do not do harm (Hippocrates), and there is no such evidence.

And now we’re going to let those who have been “fully vaccinated” with these so-called vaccines, loose upon the world. What could go wrong? Well, thing is, we have no idea. The CDC is not alone in grossly botching their job, but they’re at the vanguard.

 

CDC Says Travel Is Safe For Those Fully Vaccinated, But Issues Caution

Americans who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can safely travel at home and abroad, as long as they take basic precautions like wearing masks, federal health officials announced Friday, a long-awaited change from the dire government warnings that have kept many millions home for the past year.

In announcing the change at a White House news conference, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stressed that they preferred that people avoid travel. But they said growing evidence of the real-world effectiveness of the vaccines — which have been given to more than 100 million Americans — suggested that inoculated people could do so “at low risk to themselves.”

The shift in the CDC’s official stance comes at a moment of both hope and peril in the pandemic. The pace of vaccinations has been rapidly accelerating across the country, and the number of deaths has been declining.

Yet cases are increasing significantly in many states as new variants of the coronavirus spread through the country. Just last Monday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, warned of a potential fourth wave if states and cities continued to loosen public health restrictions, telling reporters that she had feelings of “impending doom.”

Some public health experts were surprised by Friday’s announcement and expressed concern that the government was sending confusing signals to the public.

“It’s a mix of ‘please don’t travel’ at the same time this is easing travel for a subset of people,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. “I think it’s very confusing and goes counter to the message we heard earlier this week to ‘stay put,’ ‘hold on,’ ‘be patient.’ And that worries me. Public health messaging has to be very clear, very consistent, and it has to be very simple.”

 

Walensky herself seemed to acknowledge the apparent mixed messaging during Friday’s news conference. “The science shows us that getting fully vaccinated allows you to do more things safely, and it’s important for us to provide that guidance even in the context of rising cases,” she said.

[..] Federal officials remained adamant that people who have not been fully vaccinated should not travel at all, a position widely supported by public health experts.

“If you are fully vaccinated, you can return to travel, but if you are not, there is still a lot of virus circulating, and it is still a risky undertaking, and you should defer until you get vaccinated or the situation improves,” said Caitlin Rivers, a public health researcher and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

If unvaccinated people must travel, the CDC recommends they be tested for coronavirus infection one to three days before their trip and again three to five days after it is over. They should self-quarantine for seven days after a trip if they get tested and for 10 days if they do not get tested, the agency said.

People are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after receiving the single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine or two weeks after receiving the second dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shot. Some 58 million people in the US, 22% of the adult population, have been fully vaccinated, according to the latest numbers from the CDC.

Just over a fifth of Americans have been fully vaccinated, and most of those people are too old and frail or otherwise compromised to do much traveling. Great moment to come with travel guidance. Moreover, as this little table from the Lancet shows, 40% of people are protected by their antibodies for only 90 days, and 70% for only 125 days. And that’s not the worst of it: according to the Forbes article I drew that graph from,

Though the correlates for protection weren’t exactly cut and dry, a handful stood out as potentially significant. Most salient among these was disease severity, meaning the price of admission to the persistent group was poorer health outcomes overall. The more robust a patient’s antibody response, the greater the chance they previously developed pneumonia, needed supplemental oxygen, spent time in the intensive care unit, and so on. A more technical determinant was the avidity, or binding strength, between SARS-CoV-2 and IgG antibodies, which typically help form the basis of a longer-term immune protection.


Table 1. A table based on data from the persistent antibody study. “DYNAMICS OF SARS-COV-2 NEUTRALISING ANTIBODY RESPONSES AND DURATION OF IMMUNITY: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY” HTTPS://WWW.THELANCET.COM/JOURNALS/LANMIC/ARTICLE/PIIS2666-5247(21)00025-2/FULLTEXT

 

That’s not a definitive word on antibodies, far from it, but that is exactly the problem. We simply don’t know, but some of us do pretend we do. Back to the “science”:

Scientists are still not certain whether vaccinated people may become infected, even briefly, and transmit the virus to others. A recent CDC study suggested such cases might be rare, but until that question is resolved, many public health officials feel it is unwise to tell vaccinated Americans simply to do as they please. They say it is important for all vaccinated people to continue to wear masks, practice social distancing and take other precautions.

How does that rhyme with Walensky’s “The science shows us that getting fully vaccinated allows you to do more things safely, and it’s important for us to provide that guidance even in the context of rising cases”? It is nonsense, that’s not what the science shows. All we have is a handful of experiments, theories and assumptions.

Under the new CDC guidance, fully vaccinated Americans who are traveling domestically do not need to be tested for the coronavirus or follow quarantine procedures at the destination or after returning home. When they travel abroad, they only need to get a coronavirus test or quarantine if the country they are going to requires it.

However, the guidance says they must have a negative coronavirus test before boarding a flight back to the United States, and they should get tested again three to five days after their return.

The recommendation is predicated on the idea that vaccinated people may still become infected with the virus. The CDC also cited a lack of vaccine coverage in other countries and concern about the potential introduction and spread of new variants of the virus that are more prevalent overseas.

The new advice adds to CDC recommendations issued in early March saying that fully vaccinated people may gather in small groups in private settings without masks or social distancing and may visit with unvaccinated individuals from a single household as long as they are at low risk for developing severe disease if infected with the virus.


Travel has already been increasing nationwide as the weather warms and Americans grow fatigued with pandemic restrictions. Last Sunday was the busiest day at domestic airports since the pandemic began. According to the Transportation Security Administration, nearly 1.6 million people passed through the security checkpoints at US airports.

If governments and their health boards like the CDC were actually interested in science, they would have campaigned starting a year or more ago, to boost the immune systems of their citizens. That is science. The impact of vitamin D on immune systems is science. The impact of healthy food is. The extra boost from ivermectin is. This could have saved millions of lives.

But your government did none of all that, so you’re on your own. Follow the science, not your goverment. They’re potentially dangerous for you, as are the “vaccines”. And yes, we get the notion of “fatigued with pandemic restrictions”, but stop calling your political calculations vis a vis that, science.

 

 

 

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