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Debt Rattle October 28 2021

Oct 282021

October 28, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:19 am Finance Tagged with: AIDS orphans, Fauci, Fed, Instagram, ivermectin, Japan, Merck, OSHA, Poland, property bubble 74 Responses »

M. C. Escher Drawing hands1948

• Fauci’s NIH Also Funded Medical Experiments on AIDS Orphans in NYC (GP)

• Congress Didn’t Give OSHA Authority to Impose Vaccine Mandates (HF)

• Japan Drops Vax Rollout, Goes To Ivermectin, Ends Covid Almost Overnight (HTRS)

• Two Indian Drugmakers to End Trials of Generic Merck Pill (R.)

• Minnesota Surgeon Fired After Saying Parents Should Decide On Kids’ Masks (JTN)

• Instagram Censors Popular Animal Rescuer for Slamming Fauci (GP)

• Revolt of the Essential Workers (Tab)

• Biden’s Nominee Omarova Wants to Move All Bank Deposits to the Fed (Martens)

• China Cannot Offset Its Property Bubble Easily (Lacalle)

• EU Fines Poland €1 Million Per Day Over Judicial Reforms (DW)

• Pfizer Vaccine To Lower Child Deaths From Almost Zero To Almost Zero (BBee)

Wait, so we can’t use Ivermectin because “We don’t have enough data,” But..
“Let’s vaccinate children to see how safe the vaccine is because we don’t have enough data.”

Tucker FDA
https://twitter.com/i/status/1453180072937107456

Such a fine man.

• Fauci’s NIH Also Funded Medical Experiments on AIDS Orphans in NYC (GP)

In August Gateway Pundit contributor Cassandra Fairbanks broke the story on Dr. Fauci’s use of taxpayer money to torture beagles in barbaric animal testing. Dr. Fauci funded a study in Tunisia where beagle dogs were eaten alive by parasite-infected flies. Dr. Fauci also spent over $16 million in taxpayer funds on disturbing “toxic brain injection” experiments on monkeys in 2018. And Dr. Fauci was more recently caught funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China laboratory blamed for the production and leak of the coronavirus. Fauci lied about his funding of the lab under oath numerous times. Now this… Dr. Fauci’s NIH was also caught funding experiments on AIDS orphans at a New York City hospital in 2004.

The Fauci NIH approved experiments on hundreds of New York City orphans. Government agencies and pharmaceutical companies used the orphans in deadly AIDS drug trials. In 2005, the city of New York hired the VERA Institute to form a final report on the drug trials. VERA was given no access to medical records for any of the children used in trials. Their report was published in 2008. They reported that twenty-five children died during the drug studies, that an additional fifty-five children died following the studies (in foster care), and, according to Tim Ross, Director of the Child Welfare program at VERA (as of 2009), 29% of the remaining 417 children who were used in drug studies had died (out of a total 532 children that are admitted to have been used). [LINK]

The WIKIPEDIA writers cover up all details, as is expected. No payment or compensation has been paid to any of the children used in the trials, or to their families. A hospital nurse later spoke out to reporters about the testing. She reported that children would immediately get sick, break out or throw up during the testing. They were orphans at the Incarnation Children’s Center in New York City. The ICC Investigation website offers several documents and interviews with children and childcare workers at the hospital who participated in the research.

“OSHA will issue the order. And then get sued.”

• Congress Didn’t Give OSHA Authority to Impose Vaccine Mandates (HF)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is about to require 80 million working Americans to get vaccinated. You may be among them. There’s just one catch: OSHA lacks the legal authority to impose a vaccine mandate. Declaring that his patience was “wearing thin” with unvaccinated Americans, President Joe Biden on Sept. 9 announced that OSHA would require companies with at least 100 employees to mandate that workers either get vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID-19 tests. OSHA sent a draft mandate to the White House on Oct. 8. Once the White House completes its review, OSHA will issue the order. And then get sued. As we detail in our legal analysis, the courts will almost certainly strike down the OSHA vaccine mandate. Here are a few reasons why:

Congress did not place vaccines within OSHA’s purview. OSHA is establishing the vaccine mandate through an “emergency temporary standard.” This highly unusual process allows OSHA to bypass public notice and comment. Federal agencies, including OSHA, typically must submit major rules to public scrutiny before finalizing them. To take the “emergency temporary standard” shortcut, the agency must persuade a court that workers are in “grave danger” and that it is “necessary” to protect them against that danger. The “grave danger” that an emergency temporary standard must address must come from “exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or new hazards.” A toxic substance or agent is a poisonous element or compound. A substance or agent can be “physically harmful” because it is flammable, explosive, or carcinogenic.

The danger a virus causes, by contrast, derives from its ability to replicate within a living organism. Congress created OSHA to promote workplace safety. OSHA inspectors look for hazards that can potentially harm employees, such as improperly stored chemicals, inadequately lighted or ventilated workstations, or lack of protective equipment (e.g., gloves and hard hats). Vaccines against viruses are an entirely different form of protection and are beyond the scope of OSHA’s mandate. Congress tasked the Department of Health and Human Services with determining the safety, efficacy, and appropriate use of vaccines. Congress authorized the Food and Drug Administration to determine whether vaccines should be allowed in interstate commerce. It empowered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend who should receive such vaccines. Both agencies are within HHS. OSHA resides in the Department of Labor. Congress has given neither OSHA nor the Labor Department authority over vaccines.

Are US, EU even studying this?

• Japan Drops Vax Rollout, Goes To Ivermectin, Ends Covid Almost Overnight (HTRS)

The European Medicines Agency said Thursday that new preliminary data from the Nordic countries supports a warning the agency adopted in July that inflammatory heart conditions called myocarditis and pericarditis can occur in very rare cases following vaccination with Covid-19 shots made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. By far, however, the absolute superstar among foreign nations dealing with COVID is Japan. Japan has PULLED the vaccines and substituted Ivermectin – and in one month, wiped COVID out in that country! [..] By September deaths from the COVID-19 Vaccine jabs were being investigated. At roughly that time, the vials were under scrutiny and metal “magnetic” material was found in them.

Very shortly thereafter, the Japanese minister of health announced doctors could prescribe Ivermectin. A month later, the Western press is shocked that COVID has all but disappeared from the island. [..] This is what it looks like in a country that still has rule of law. The governemnt responds to reports of death and contaminated vaxes, moves to real treatment, people get better, and the virus disappears. Now compare that to what is happening in the United States and in Australia and New Zealand. All three countries are in dismal failure in their handling of COVID-19, and that failure has resulted in staggering loss of freedom and destruction of commerce. This is the biggest news story right now Japan has ended COVID. It did it after it stopped the vax rollout and went to Ivermectin.

Rogan IVM

Joe Rogan: 200 congress people took Ivermectin.

Watch: pic.twitter.com/FeQIbrscJv

— Zach Vorhies (@Perpetualmaniac) October 27, 2021

Why do they call it generic?

• Two Indian Drugmakers to End Trials of Generic Merck Pill (R.)

Two Indian drugmakers have requested permission to end late-stage trials of their generic versions of Merck & Co’s promising experimental oral antiviral drug molnupiravir to treat moderate COVID-19, a week after Merck said its own trial had succeeded for mild-to-moderate patients. Merck earlier this year suspended its own development of molnupiravir as a treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients since many of them have reached a phase of the disease that is too late for an antiviral drug to provide much help. The Indian companies – Aurobindo Pharma Ltd and MSN Laboratories – did not exclude hospitalized patients in designing their moderate COVID-19 trials, according to study documents, although it was not known if the trials ultimately included people in the hospital.

Merck spokesperson Melissa Moody said Merck and the Indian companies had defined “moderate” disease differently. Merck’s trials are based on U.S. Food and Drug Administration definitions, which for moderate COVID-19 describe blood oxygen levels as no lower than 93%. It defines blood oxygen levels for severe COVID-19 as 93% or lower. The trials in India define moderate COVID-19 blood oxygen levels as 90% to 93%, according to the trial documents for the two companies.Aurobindo and MSN are continuing to conduct studies of molnupiravir in patients with mild COVID-19 who have not been hospitalized, according to trial documents and the website of the Indian drug regulator’s internal expert committee.

Merck and partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics last week said molnupiravir had nearly halved the risk of hospitalization or death in at-risk non-hospitalized patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19, results hailed by experts as potentially a major advance in fight against the illness. The Indian drug regulator’s committee also disclosed on its website that Aurobindo and MSN had presented interim clinical trial data for moderate COVID-19 patients and asked to end the trials.

“.. it’s still their responsibility. It’s not yours. God gave it to them. Honor their wishes, either side of the fence.”

• Minnesota Surgeon Fired After Saying Parents Should Decide On Kids’ Masks (JTN)

A Minnesota surgeon was fired from his job earlier this month for giving a speech to school officials in which he advocated for parents to decide whether their children should wear masks. According to Fox News, Dr. Jeffrey Horak spoke before the Fergus Falls School Board on Oct. 11, arguing that parents should have the final decision concerning the health of their children. Dr. Horak’s comments were in response to a district-wide mask mandate that went into effect the day prior. “Who does God put in charge of these kids? Their parents,” Horak said during the meeting. “God gave each one of these kids… to their parents and they speak for them. They may be wrong, they may be dumb, they may be perfect in their decisions. But it’s still their responsibility. It’s not yours. God gave it to them. Honor their wishes, either side of the fence.”

Horak reportedly said that more than a week later, he was dismissed from his position at Lake Region Healthcare because his “views were no longer congruent” with that of the hospital. A spokesperson for Lake Region confirmed that Horak no longer works there as of Wednesday. The spokesperson went on to say that Lake Region’s didn’t make the decision concerning Horak’s employment, rather it was the “Medical Group Board who made the decision about discontinuing Dr. Horak’s practice.”

Fauci is a protected species.

• Instagram Censors Popular Animal Rescuer for Slamming Fauci (GP)

Instagram has censored the founder of SPARTN Monkey Rescue for blasting Dr. Anthony Fauci over experimental COVID vaccines being injected into sanctuary primates. Michael Robison, a primate expert and rescuer, had stated that Fauci “just helped fund a $37M experimental vaccine trial on 77 chimps via a partnership with Zoetis/Pfizer at a Georgia sanctuary!” “Chimps that were rescued from this mess and other abuse… are now part of the largest animal testing trial in history at his guidance,” Robison continued. Robison added that the use of the experimental vaccines in these rescued primates is a violation of the Endangered Species Act and the CHIMPS Act, both of which are federal laws, “for a version of the vaccine meant for kids!”

The comments were flagged by Instagram for possibly “containing racist language or other content that goes against our community guidelines.” Robison is a well-respected rescuer who has developed quite a following on social media for his charming videos of monkeys and other animals that he has saved. Robison was also recently censored on Twitter for speaking out about his own regrets about getting the vaccine after suffering severe side effects — making his desire to defend the chimps even more urgent. As Gateway Pundit previously reported, one of the largest vaccine testing trials in history will be taking place at Project Chimps — a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals allied “sanctuary” for great apes. Project Chimps was founded in 2014 following the end of National Institutes of Health funding for biomedical research on these animals.

“About 70% of the chimpanzees at Project Chimps have been trained to receive voluntary injections, and the staff is working on preparing the rest,” Science Magazine reports. The nonhuman COVID-19 vaccine was created by Zoetis, a U.S. company that was originally the animal division of Pfizer. It has only been authorized for experimental use in animals. Testing experimental vaccines on these chimps, many of whom were already used for animal research in the past, does appear to be a direct violation of the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Management and Protection (CHIMP) Act and the Endangered Species Act. Under the CHIMP Act, which passed in 2007, chimpanzees that are retired from biomedical research are prohibited from being returned to laboratories or used for experimentation.

Wishful thinking. They don’t even protest a jab for their kids.

• Revolt of the Essential Workers (Tab)

Back before the COVID-19 pandemic started, the year 2019 saw anti-government demonstrations in Paris, Manila, La Paz, Port-au-Prince, Bogotá, Prague, Quito , Beirut, Hong Kong, London, Baghdad, Barcelona, Budapest, Santiago, New Delhi, Jakarta, Buenos Aires and more, earning the title “the year of the protest.” It was also a year of resurgent labor activity in the United States. After decades of declining union participation, the country saw 25 major work stoppages involving 425,500 workers, the highest number since 2001.

The economic discontent that propelled both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders to popularity had been building for many years. As a recent article in the journal American Affairs noted, $34 trillion of real equity wealth, in 2017 dollars, was created between 1989 and 2017. Nearly half that sum (44%) consisted of a reallocation of corporate equity to shareholders at the expense of worker compensation, while economic growth accounted for just 25% of that increase in wealth. In other words, despite the advent of seemingly near-miraculous, time- and space-saving digital technologies, the post-Cold War “economic boom” consisted mainly of America’s wealthy shareholders taking money from its increasingly insecure workforce.

America, and other Western societies, had moved from a model of real growth and expanding benefits for all to a model where the rich got richer by impoverishing the less wealthy orders of society—and the lower orders were fighting back. However, after lockdowns were imposed in March 2020, the balance of power abruptly shifted back toward billionaire oligarchs and large corporations. Tech-based U.S. monopolies widened their profit margins as workers and their children were confined to their homes and the Fed pumped money into Wall Street. As the Fed provided unlimited purchases of corporate debt and securities, millions of people filed for unemployment, nearly 1 in 4 households experienced food insecurity, and 200,000 small businesses closed. The result was an estimated loss of $1.3 trillion in household wealth for American workers. Meanwhile, U.S. billionaires gained $1 trillion.

Have nothing and be happy.

• Biden’s Nominee Omarova Wants to Move All Bank Deposits to the Fed (Martens)

This month, the Vanderbilt Law Review published a 69-page paper by Saule Omarova, President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal regulator of the largest banks in the country that operate across state lines. The paper is titled “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.” The paper, in all seriousness, proposes the following: (1) Moving all commercial bank deposits from commercial banks to so-called FedAccounts at the Federal Reserve; (2) Allowing the Fed, in “extreme and rare circumstances, when the Fed is unable to control inflation by raising interest rates,” to confiscate deposits from these FedAccounts in order to tighten monetary policy;

(3) Allowing the most Wall Street-conflicted regional Fed bank in the country, the New York Fed, when there are “rises in market value at rates suggestive of a bubble trend,” such as with technology stocks today, to “short these securities, thereby putting downward pressure on their prices”; (4) Eliminate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that insures bank deposits; (5) Consolidate all bank regulatory functions at the OCC – which Omarova has been nominated to head. Republican Senator Pat Toomey has been running a Red Scare campaign against Omarova, who was born in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (now Kazakhstan) and attended Moscow State University on a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.

The real threat that Omarova poses to U.S. financial stability, that Democrats should be calling out, is that she wants to further concentrate all major aspects of the U.S. banking system in the hands of the Federal Reserve, a captured regulator whose 12 regional bank tentacles are, literally, owned by the banks. Omarova offers not one scintilla of a suggestion about restructuring the Fed so that it is not owned by or controlled by the banks. In her paper, Omarova characterizes the current relationship between the Fed and the banks as the Fed running a “franchisor ledger” to assist its franchisee-banks.

But as the Fed’s secret $29 trillion bailout of the mega banks on Wall Street and their foreign derivative counterparties proved following the financial crash in 2008, it’s actually the banks that are cracking the whip and the Fed amicably doing their bidding. That means that the mega banks are the franchisor and they’ve shifted their faux bank examinations and faux stress tests to the Fed, for appearances sake. This point is further demonstrated by the fact that during the Fed’s 2007-2010 bailouts, most of the Fed’s emergency lending programs were farmed out in no-bid contracts to the very banks being bailed out. JPMorgan Chase, a five-count felon, continues to have a contract with the Fed to serve as custodian of more than $2 trillion of the Fed’s agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS).

“..four times larger than China’s GDP.”

• China Cannot Offset Its Property Bubble Easily (Lacalle)

No economy has been able to ignore a property bubble and, even less so, offset it and continue to grow, replacing the bust of the real estate sector with other parts of the economy. Heavily regulated economies from Iceland to Spain have failed to contain the negative impact of a real estate sector collapse. It will not be different in China. China has three real estate problems: the massive size of the sector, its excessive leverage, and the amount of developer debt in the hands of average households and retail investors. According to China researcher George Magnus, writing in The Guardian, “China’s real estate market has been called the most important sector in the world economy. Valued at about $55tn, it is now twice the size of its U.S. equivalent, and four times larger than China’s GDP.”

Considering construction and other real estate services, the sector accounts for more than 25 percent of China’s GDP. Just to consider other previous examples of property bubbles, the average size of the sector was somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of a country’s GDP. And none of those economies managed the excess of the property sector. Of course, the problem of a real estate bubble is always excessive leverage. Developers take on too much debt, and the smallest decrease in housing prices makes their equity vanish and their solvency ratios collapse. In the case of China, the level of debt is simply staggering. According to the Financial Times, the ratio of net debt of 19 of the largest Chinese developers stands at over 60 percent to equity. Evergrande is not even the most indebted.

Two developers stand at more than 120 percent net gearing. The top 10 most indebted Chinese developers amply surpass the level of debt-to-assets that made Spain’s Martinsa-Fadesa collapse. Chinese and foreign retail investors are also heavily exposed to the real estate and construction market. Evergrande was the biggest issuer of commercial paper, and developers’ debt was sold to small investors in different packages. Furthermore, Chinese families have around 78 percent of their wealth tied up in property, more than double the United States, according to a 2018 report by Chengdu’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and China Guangfa Bank.

Bully. All your base are belong to us.

• EU Fines Poland €1 Million Per Day Over Judicial Reforms (DW)

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Poland to pay a fine of €1 million ($1.2 million) per day on Wednesday over its decision to ignore an EU ruling on Warsaw’s judicial reforms. The top EU court imposed the penalty as Poland has not suspended the disciplinary chamber of the Supreme Court. The ECJ had ruled in July that the chamber did not guarantee impartiality. The ECJ said in a press release the fine was “necessary in order to avoid serious and irreparable harm to the legal order of the European Union and to the values on which that Union is founded, in particular that of the rule of law.” The European Commission had requested “financial penalties” be levied on September 9 after Poland failed to comply with the July ruling. On Twitter, Poland’s Deputy Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta called the fine “usurpation and blackmail.”

The disciplinary chamber was set up in 2018 and is able to dismiss judges and prosecutors. The ECJ fears this could be abused to inflict punitive sanctions on those who show independence in not bowing to political will. Earlier this month, Poland’s constitutional court ruled Polish law supersedes EU law when there is a conflict between the two. Last week, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told the European Parliament the disciplinary chamber will be abolished, but he gave no timeline for when that would occur and no draft law has been introduced. Poland has been accused of backsliding when it comes to the independence of the judiciary and press freedom by other EU member states. The EU asserts Poland has politicized the judiciary with the placement of judges loyal to the ruling Law and Justice Party.

“We’re excited to start giving it to them so we can find out.”

• Pfizer Vaccine To Lower Child Deaths From Almost Zero To Almost Zero (BBee)

In a moment celebrated by all hard-working lobbyists, Pfizer announced that the COVID-19 vaccine will reduce average daily child COVID deaths from almost zero all the way down to almost zero. “These are phenomenal results. Our internal studies have proven a microscopic benefit to an even more microscopic risk to children,” stated Dee Pimbly, head of Pfizer’s Department of Propaganda to a crowd of journalists who have not allowed their own children to bask in the warm glow of sunlight, or interact with other children for almost no reason whatsoever.

FDA officials praised Pfizer for fighting a virus that is the leading killer of children after cancer, vehicular accidents, suicide, heart disease, drowning, suffocation, the flu, meteors from space, and slipping on a banana peel. Experts say the vaccine will probably kill more kids than it saves, but it’s ok because science. When asked about any safety concerns, an FDA official replied, “We’re excited to start giving it to them so we can find out.”

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Debt Rattle October 27 2021

Oct 272021

October 27, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:09 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, CDC, Celente, children, Fauci, FDA, ivermectin, semantics 70 Responses »

Paul Klee Angelus Novus 1920

• FDA Experts Ask Why Kids Are “Dropping Like Flies” Right After Getting Vaccine (TE)

• CHD to Sue FDA for ‘Recklessly Endangering’ Children (CHD)

• China Forcing Jabs On Children As Young As 3 (ZH)

• ERs Swamped With Seriously Ill Patients — But Most Don’t Have Covid (NPR)

• Pediatric COVID Hospitalizations Plunge As Schools Reopen (ZH)

• CDC Greenlights Fourth Covid Vaccine Jab For ‘Immunocompromised’ Americans (RT)

• Why Did It Take An Old Story To Convince People It’s Time To #ArrestFauci? (RT)

• Ivermectin and The Soul of Medicine (Hope)

• The Slippery Semantics of Anthony Fauci (Miller)

• NIH Removes Language on ‘Gain-of-Function’ From Website (ET)

• Join The Universal Church Of Freedom, Peace And Justice (Celente)

• 5 Ways the US Has Misled UK Courts on Assange’s Health (CN)

Risch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1452754240678551560

Steve Kirsch talked at the FDA meeting yesterday that decided, with just one abstention, to start jabbing kids.

He had 30 slides, here’s a few.

• FDA Experts Ask Why Kids Are “Dropping Like Flies” Right After Getting Vaccine (TE)

On October 26th 2021, the Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) held a meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) to review the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer mRNA Covid-19 injection and decide whether or not to extend the Emergency Use Authorisation of the Pfizer vaccines for children aged 5 to 11. Steve Kirsch, Executive Director of the Covid-19 Early Treatment Fund was invited to speak at the meeting and due to the short time frame given to speak he felt it was best to prepare 30 slides which asked some extremely serious questions on the safety of giving an experimental injection to children. Every question asked by the Executive Director of the Covid-19 Early Treatment Fund were questions that he feels need to be answered before any vote to authorise Covid-19 vaccination for 5 to 11-year-old children, and they were as follows…

No court will touch it.

• CHD to Sue FDA for ‘Recklessly Endangering’ Children (CHD)

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) today said it will take legal action against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) if the agency grants Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for children aged 5-11. In a letter signed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., CHD chairman and chief legal counsel, and Dr. Meryl Nass, member of the CHD Scientific Advisory Committee, Kennedy and Nass wrote: “CHD will seek to hold you accountable for recklessly endangering this population with a product that has little efficacy but which may put them, without warning, at risk of many adverse health consequences, including heart damage, stroke, and other thrombotic events and reproductive harms.”

The letter was addressed to Dr. Arnold Monto, chairman of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), committee members and all FDA staff. VRBPAC members are set to meet Tuesday to consider and likely vote on whether to grant EUA for the Pfizer vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds. In May, the FDA authorized Pfizer’s vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have not yet been authorized for children under 18. The letter outlines 12 reasons the FDA should not authorize the pediatric vaccine and provides supporting evidence to back up each argument.

Is this a competition?

• China Forcing Jabs On Children As Young As 3 (ZH)

The notion – oft-repeated in western media – that China has successfully managed to bring COVID to heel using the tools unique to an authoritarian state couldn’t be further from the truth. Earlier this month, leaked CCP documents revealed that China’s leadership has commanded local officials to be on alert for another large-scale COVID outbreak, before ordering them to complete two tasks: One is to build central isolation sites, with local authorities required by the end of October to create facilities of not less than 20 rooms per 10,000 people. The second: the scale of each isolation site must be more than 100 rooms.

But that’s not all. As outbreaks continue to flare up across the world’s most populous country, Beijing has warned that local officials should prepare for COVID outbreaks flaring up in certain areas to get even worse in the coming days, and that the virus might spread to affect more cities in towns across China. In an attempt to get ahead of the next major COVID wave (potentially driven by the delta variant or its “sub-variant” delta-plus) local media reports cited by Bloomberg attest that China has started giving COVID jabs to children as young as three, despite the fact that China has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 75% of its 1.4 billion people already vaccinated. Multiple places across China are rolling out vaccines to children aged between three and 11, according to reports in local media.

The shots, developed by homegrown drugmakers Sinovac Biotech Ltd and state-owned Sinopharm, have already been administered to those aged 12 and above, with the country green-lighting their use in those aged over three in June. Compare this to the US, where President Biden (guided by his top advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci) is pushing for FDA approval of jabs for children as young as 5 (recent data showed jabs are “safe” for children between ages of 5 and 11) by the end of the year (despite the fact that serious infections involving young, healthy children are extremely rare). But China’s decision to expand its vaccination program (with its own home-made vaccines that just aren’t as effective as their foreign peers) comes as the CCP braces for another even more deadly round of COVID infections.

NPR is not ready for looking at vaccine damage.

• ERs Swamped With Seriously Ill Patients – But Most Don’t Have Covid (NPR)

Inside the Emergency Department at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Michigan, staff are struggling to care for patients who are showing up much sicker than they’ve ever seen. Tiffani Dusang, the ER’s nursing director, practically vibrates with pent-up anxiety, looking at all the patients lying on a long line of stretchers pushed up against the beige walls of the hospital hallways. “It’s hard to watch,” she says in her warm Texan twang. But there’s nothing she can do. The ER’s 72 rooms are already filled. “I always feel very, very bad when I walk down the hallway and see that people are in pain, or needing to sleep, or needing quiet. But they have to be in the hallway with, as you can see, 10 or 15 people walking by every minute.”

It’s a stark contrast to where this emergency department — and thousands others — were at the start of the pandemic. Except for initial hot spots like New York City, in the spring of 2020 many ERs across the country were often eerily empty. Terrified of contracting COVID, people who were sick with other things did their best to stay away from hospitals. Visits to emergency departments dropped to half their normal levels, according to the Epic Health Research Network, and didn’t fully rebound until the summer of 2021. But now, they’re too full. Even in parts of the country where COVID isn’t overwhelming the health system, patients are showing up to the ER sicker than they were before the pandemic, their diseases more advanced and in need of more complicated care.

Months of treatment delays have exacerbated chronic conditions and worsened symptoms. Doctors and nurses say the severity of illness ranges widely and includes abdominal pain, respiratory problems, blood clots, heart conditions, and suicide attempts, among others. But there’s nowhere to put them all. Emergency Departments are ideally meant to be brief ports in a storm, with patients staying just long enough to be sent home with instructions to follow up with their primary care physicians, or sufficiently stabilized to be transferred “upstairs” to inpatient units or the ICU. Except now, those long-term care floors are full too, with a mix of COVID and non-COVID patients.

That means people coming to the ER are being warehoused for hours, even days, and forcing ER staff to perform long-term care roles they weren’t trained to do. At Sparrow, space is a valuable commodity in the ER: a separate section of the hospital was turned into an overflow unit. Stretchers stack up in halls. They’ve even brought in a row of brown reclining chairs, lined up against a wall, for patients too who aren’t sick enough for a stretcher but are too sick to stay in the main waiting room. Still, some of the patients in the brown recliners are hooked up to IVs, while others talk quietly with medical specialists, who sit across from them holding clipboards, perched on wheeled stools.

Well well. Who knew? Let’s jab them. Get those numbers up.

• Pediatric COVID Hospitalizations Plunge As Schools Reopen (ZH)

All summer long, Dr. Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and other unelected federal bureaucrats have been warning that COVID cases will explode as soon as teachers and students return to classrooms in person this fall, which is why Dr. Fauci has been one of the loudest voices cheering on politicians like NYC’s de Blasio and others who have imposed such mandates on teachers and school employees (which has since been expanded to cover most, if not all, city employees). But just as Pfizer, Moderna and their allies in the federal bureaucracy prepare to declare mRNA vaccines safe for all students between the age of 5 and 11, Bloomberg has just pointed out a remarkable shift: hospitalizations involving US children (already extremely rare compared with the adult population) have fallen sharply as schools reopen.

The number of children who have been hospitalized or died in the US due to COVID has remained extremely small: while the number of US minors who have been confirmed positive with COVID has numbered about 5MM since the start of the pandemic, fewer of 700 of those people have died. When it comes to hospitalizations, the difference between infected adults and children is pretty dramatic. Despite this, many are pushing for children to also be required to get the vaccine as soon as it’s approved for their age group (or face the same kind of alienation that their parents are currently being subjected to). The disagreements have turned communities against one another.

But while the Big Pharma machine gears up to shove vaccines down the throats of children and their parents, the phenomenon of falling hospital positions simply can’t be ignored, even by the MSM, which is quite practiced at that particular skill. Daily pediatric admissions with confirmed Covid have fallen 56% since the end of August to an average of about 0.2 per 100,000, according to Department of Health and Human Services data. Among adults, new admissions fell 54% to 2.1 per 100,000 in the same period, the data show. Here’s a visualization for those who prefer to be shown, not told.

It’s no secret that America’s school board meetings have transformed into battle grounds used by people either demanding masks be worn by students, and concerned parents who worry the masks will impact that education. Battles over vaccine mandates and whether CRT should be taught in school have also set off battles in communities across the country.

In some GOP-led states, schools have dropped their school-related mandates, sometimes under pressure from the governor. The Delta variant and its new sub-variant were supposed to trigger the worst phase of the outbreak yet. Instead, it looks like COVID numbers truly are moving down and staying down, especially in states like Florida, which were once heavily criticized for their lack of mandatory precaution.

The ‘Immunocompromised’ should be the last to take an experimental vaccine.

• CDC Greenlights Fourth Covid Vaccine Jab For ‘Immunocompromised’ Americans (RT)

The CDC has approved a fourth Covid-19 vaccine shot for adults with compromised immune systems, allowing for yet another dose amid concerns of waning immunity, as some pharma firms even hint at yearly boosters for all Americans. Those who are “moderately and severely immunocompromised” may receive a total of four vaccine doses, including an initial two-shot inoculation, one additional dose followed by yet another booster, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an updated guidance on Tuesday. The immunocompromised were the first to receive authorization for vaccine boosters back in August, with US health agencies subsequently approving additional doses for people in other high-risk categories, such as those aged 65 and older and adults more likely to be exposed to the virus.

However, for the immunocompromised, the CDC classifies a third shot as an “additional dose,” which uses the same amount of vaccine as the previous two, while the fourth jab approved on Tuesday is defined as a “booster” proper. The fourth dose uses only half the volume of the others. The amended guidelines come soon after US health agencies gave the nod to a “mix and match” approach to boosters for all adults. The move allowed those who received one brand for their initial round of vaccination to select another for their booster dose, meaning that someone who originally took the Moderna jab, for example, could choose Pfizer-BioNTech for their booster. The debate over booster shots kicked off as data emerged that vaccine-induced immunity wanes over time, suggesting the need for additional doses to ensure prolonged protection.

However, with boosters now formally approved for an ever-broadening group of Americans, the exact definition of “fully vaccinated” has slowly blurred. In September, top White House Covid adviser Anthony Fauci acknowledged that a booster dose would “likely” be needed for an American to qualify as “fully vaccinated” in the future – a point echoed last week by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who noted “We may need to update our definition of ‘fully vaccinated’” due to boosters. With immunocompromised adults now authorized to receive a fourth vaccination and US health officials increasingly talking up the need for additional doses, some Big Pharma firms are now predicting a “continuous need for boosting,” with Moderna Chairman Noubar Afeyan saying on Tuesday that the company’s jab “may well need an annual booster.”

It’s still just a few people.

• Why Did It Take An Old Story To Convince People It’s Time To #ArrestFauci? (RT)

One must ask why the popular outrage against Fauci over animal cruelty is not matched by an equal (if not more forceful) outrage over the doctor’s crimes against humanity. From his enthusiastic support of gain-of-function studies to his efforts to sideline a cheap, effective drug that could have saved thousands of lives during the AIDS epidemic in favor of a highly toxic alternative, Fauci’s hands are covered in the blood of humans as well as that of canines. Indeed, Fauci’s behavior during the Covid-19 outbreak – trashing cheap but effective treatments in favor of expensive alternatives lacking proof of efficacy – eerily mirrors his actions during the early years of AIDS. Thousands of people have died in both cases after Fauci pushed deadly or ineffective medications – most notably the failed cancer drug AZT in the 1980s and the failed Ebola drug remdesivir in the last two years – while safer and more efficacious remedies sat on the shelf.

Indeed, the high-priced antiviral remdesivir, which has been pushed for Covid-19 despite no clinical proof it saves lives, has instead been associated with multiple organ failure in several studies. Discoveries that members of the National Institutes of Health, parent of Fauci’s NIAID, had hefty investments in Gilead, maker of remdesivir, as well as in Moderna, one of the manufacturers of an mRNA vaccine for Covid-19, have only raised more questions about Fauci’s motives during the coronavirus pandemic. Fauci has also been caught lying repeatedly about his involvement in gain-of-function research aimed at making bat coronaviruses more infectious in humans.

Despite his profuse denials of even funding such research in recent months, he previously defended the work by arguing that any knowledge gained from bolstering the infectious potential of such pathogens was “worth the risk” of unleashing a pandemic. Whether or not his NIAID-funded research played a part in the Covid-19 outbreak has not been proven, but Fauci’s furious tap-dancing around any questions regarding the Wuhan lab or gain-of-function research in general does him no favors. [..] Ultimately, Fauci being arrested is an endpoint that animal rights activists, human rights activists, and the normally comatose members of Congress – 24 of whom actually signed a letter demanding answers from the once-untouchable Coronavirus Pope – should see eye-to-eye on. But the diminutive doctor must not be permitted to skate on his real crimes – whether it’s pandemic profiteering, bankrolling gain-of-function research in China that was at the time illegal to perform in the US, or allegedly perjuring himself in congressional testimony. Fauci has much to answer for. Dozens of dead puppies are just the tip of the iceberg.

You don’t have to idolize these people.

• Ivermectin and The Soul of Medicine (Hope)

This kindly family doctor was voted the Physician of the Year, and he went on a mission to save humanity from the pandemic. He teamed up with Yale’s Dr. Harvey Risch to tell the world about Hydroxychloroquine – and later about Ivermectin. He traveled to the Senate to inform the public that there was a better way. He openly criticized Dr. Fauci and his failed pandemic policies. The good doctor even wrote a book about his patient experiences. A Godly man, he remains true to humanitarian values, relationships, and people. He lives by ethics and his sacred Hippocratic oath. It was not enough for him to save his local small-town patients; he was duty-bound to share his ideas. Despite saving many lives, the State Medical Board threatened him.

His license to practice was jeopardized, not because of poor care but because his actions threatened corporate profits. He went far above and beyond what was required. And as with many men of courage, this doctor’s actions were rewarded, and he was vindicated. Beyond being named Physician of the Year, this man of medicine deserves greater accolades. Because he placed patient interests above his own, he became a hero. By now, you must be familiar with the man who accomplished all this. With his associate, Dr. Brian Tyson, Dr. George Fareed is that heroic doctor, a physician’s physician, now a role model not just for today’s doctor but also for all time. Dr. George Fareed will go down in history as one of the dominant symbols of morality and ethics in the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, today the physician on whom I shine the spotlight is another hero, a soft-spoken man like Dr. Fareed who shares many of the same experiences and accomplishments – another doctor’s doctor, and another man deserving the pages of history. Today I refer not just to my mentor, the distinguished Harvard graduate, former professor, and NIH researcher who participated in saving 7,000 patients from COVID-19. Instead, today I also call attention to the actions of Dr. Scott Jensen, a small-town family physician who practices in Watertown, Minnesota, a community of some 4,000 people. However, unlike Dr. Fareed, Dr. Jensen did not graduate from an Ivy League Medical School. Instead, he is a graduate of the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, where he also taught.

In addition, Dr. Jensen is more than a tiny bit religious; he attended Luther Northwest Theological Seminary for a year before he found his calling in medicine. He graduated class valedictorian from his high school. Later, he was named a Bush Fellow in Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Minnesota. However, the parallels between Drs. Fareed and Jensen are uncanny and illustrate exactly what a great physician can accomplish against rising forces of evil. Both doctors won their state’s Physician of the Year awards; the California Medical Association named Fareed the 2015 California Rural Physician of the Year. Jensen was selected Minnesota’s 2016 Family Physician of the Year by the Minnesota Academy of Family Physicians. Both criticized Dr. Fauci for being captured by Big Pharma and not acting in patients’ best interests.

Scott Jensen 2

If it can happen to me, it can happen to you… My medical license is being investigated for the FIFTH time. pic.twitter.com/dDvycUjDJG

— Scott Jensen (@drscottjensen) October 26, 2021

“..now, that funding did not directly fund “gain-of-function of concern.” “Of concern” is the new caveat Fauci has added to get around answering the question.”

• The Slippery Semantics of Anthony Fauci (Miller)

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again: the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded ‘gain-of-function’ research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” That was Dr Anthony Fauci during a May 2021 congressional hearing. It kicked off a months-long national media effort to frame questions around gain-of-function research and US-taxpayer-funded virus manipulation as a Royal Rumble between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul. When he testifies or sits for friendly network interviews, Fauci depends on semantics. He relies on the naivety of the interviewer and the audience, employing terminology and definitions he believes only he understands.

But like the ponytailed Chad in Good Will Hunting attempting to flex his big brain, Fauci’s arguments fall apart in front of the initiated. Last week, Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director of the NIH, sent a letter to Congress saying that EcoHealth Alliance failed to report certain aspects of the experimental work it had been conducting in China on bats and bat-borne viruses. Tabak pledged that the NIH and Fauci’s NIAID would take administrative action, but not much more than that. So Fauci’s absolutist answer from May has proven to be false. At the very least, the doctor needs to answer directly why he chose to deflect questions on gain-of-function research, something his own agency is claiming it had no idea was happening. How could have Fauci have denied back in May something so “categorically” if EcoHealth Alliance, run by Fauci ally Peter Daszak, had failed to report the full extent of their experiments?

When Fauci sat for a cozy Sunday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, he once again deployed his semantic game on the interviewer. Stephanopoulos framed the revealing letter from Tabak as “critics pouncing”: “Some critics and analysts have seized on that to say you and others have misled the public about US funding of this so-called gain-of-function research. The NIH says that’s false.” Fauci addressed Senator Rand Paul directly by responding, “The framework under which we have guidance about the conduct of research that we fund, the funding at the Wuhan Institute was to be able to determine what is out there in the environment, in bat viruses in China. And the research was very strictly under what we call a framework of oversight of the type of research.”

Fauci then went on to say “And under those conditions which we have explained very, very clearly, does not constitute research of gain-of-function of concern.” In his answer, Fauci hedges by admitting that there was US funding directed to the Wuhan Institute, but, now, that funding did not directly fund “gain-of-function of concern.” “Of concern” is the new caveat Fauci has added to get around answering the question. He had never used the terminology “gain-of-function of concern” in prior interviews or testimony. He just slipped it in there because hardly anyone notices. Furthermore he knows that the general public and most of the press has no idea what “of concern” means.

More semantics.

• NIH Removes Language on ‘Gain-of-Function’ From Website (ET)

The National Institutes of Health altered a key portion of its website last week around the time it disclosed to Congress that experiments it funded in China met the definition of gain-of-function. The federal agency, known as the NIH, had a detailed explanation of gain-of-function research on its site, noting that the term refers to any research that modifies a biological agent in a way that confers new or enhanced activity to that agent. But the explanation was wiped between Oct. 19 and Oct. 21—possibly ahead of the NIH’s most recent disclosures on Oct. 20 about research it funded in China that increased the potency of a virus by modifying it. The updated page now says, in its only referral to type of research, that research involving enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs) “is a type of so called ‘gain-of-function’ (GOF) research.”

It claims that “the vast majority of GOF research does not involve ePPP and falls outside the scope of oversight required for research involving ePPPs.” Oversight involving research on ePPPs is governed by a framework issued by the U.S. government in late 2017, on the same day the NIH lifted its yearslong funding pause on most gain-of-function research. There’s no definition of gain-of-function inside the framework. The only mention of it refers people to a list of examples of activities that would and would not be considered to involve ePPPs. That list was last available in May 2017, according to an Epoch Times review. An NIH spokeswoman confirmed that the webpage, a “backgrounder” on the framework, was altered last week, around the same time the disclosures were made.

The information concerning gain-of-function “was being misused/used incorrectly (and still is) and creating confusion (and still is),” the spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in an email. “The backgrounder was updated to provide clarity on the scope of the framework,” she added.

Now offering a Medical Exemption for all those who join the Church.

• Join The Universal Church Of Freedom, Peace And Justice (Celente)

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Hearing starts today.

• 5 Ways the US Has Misled UK Courts on Assange’s Health (CN)

“Professor Kopelman considered that, if housed in conditions of segregation and solitary confinement, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate substantially resulting in persistently severe clinical depression and the severe exacerbation of his anxiety disorder, PTSD and suicidal ideas,” Baraitser wrote. This is the man the U.S. is trying to portray as a malingerer and not suicidal. Jame Lewis QC, the lead prosecutor for the U.S., sought to undermine Kopelman’s credibility during his oral testimony from the witness stand at Old Bailey on Sept. 22, 2020. On cross examination Lewis questioned Kopelman’s credentials, saying he was not a forensic psychiatrist, who work in prisons. Kopelman retorted that he had spent time in many prisons and that even Lewis had once urgently called upon him for his expert testimony in an extradition case.

That brought laughter in the courtroom, even from Baraitser. To have Kopelman’s testimony thrown out, the U.S. will argue this week that he was not an impartial witness because he deceived the court by having concealed his knowledge of Assange’s two children with his partner and lawyer Stella Moris. Kopelman failed to mention Moris or the children in his December 2019 preliminary submission to the court but did in his written testimony in August 2020, a month before Assange’s extradition hearing resumed. The U.S. knew about it as early as April 2020 in time for the September extradition hearing. The U.S. argues that initially concealing the children misled the court because having small children makes it less likely Assange would take his life. This was based on Kopelman’s preliminary report in which he wrote that Assange told him his family kept him from killing himself.

“Professor Kopelman was aware that Mr. Assange’s children were a significant factor in the assessment of his risk of suicide, as Mr. Assange had told him in August 2019 ‘The only things stopping [me] from suicide were the ‘“small chance of success”’ in his case, and an obligation to his children.’” Despite this, Baraitser’s judgement on Jan. 4 of this year showed that he was still highly likely to commit suicide. Moris, and by extension Kopelman, hid her and the children’s identities in light of revelations that a Spanish security company working for the CIA had spied on Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, including on visits with his lawyers, doctors, Moris and their first child. UC Global employees testified in a court case in Madrid against the company’s CEO (and later at Assange’s extradition hearing) that the CIA wanted to nab one of their baby’s diapers to prove Assange’s paternity through DNA testing.

Moris was forced to reveal the identity of the children in April 2020 when a bail application required information about with whom Assange would live if he were released. Moris had asked the court to keep that information sealed but Baraitser refused “in the interest of open justice.” That same month Moris then publicly revealed to the Daily Mail and Australia’s 60 Minutes her relationship with Assange as well as alarming details of what had been happening to the family at the embassy. Moris said she’d been worried that British tabloids would make her life hell if they found out she was the mother of Assange’s children. Moris and Assange had been aware they were being filmed and tried to conceal their relationship. She lived elsewhere and had a “decoy dad” bring their infant son Gabriel to the embassy, pretending the child was his. Moris was distressed when an embassy guard warned her the baby should not be brought back. It’s not clear what might have happened to the child if it were proven he was Assange’s son.

Oxi day

The day that #Greece said no to fascism: Here's the history behind the day that changed the course of #History! Full story: https://t.co/3JheJdJ3C8 #Oxi #OxiDay pic.twitter.com/klayiNJjwO

— Greek Reporter (@GreekReporter) October 26, 2021

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Debt Rattle October 21 2021

Oct 212021

October 21, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:11 am Finance Tagged with: adenovirus, Biden, child deaths, Hillary, ivermectin, Libya, Moderna, Pfizer, unvaxxed, USPS 71 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Man with arms crossed 1909

• Child Deaths Are 52% Higher Since They Were Offered The Covid-19 Vaccine (TE)

• White House Details Plan To “Quickly” Vaccinate 28M Children Age 5-11 (ZH)

• Pfizer, Moderna to Rake in $93 Billion in 2022 COVID Vaccine Sales (CHD)

• Adenovirus Covid-19 Vaccine Shows Lower But ‘Stable’ Immunity (RT)

• Repositioning Ivermectin For Covid-19 Treatment (SD)

• The FDA’s War Against The Truth On Ivermectin (AIER)

• Washington State Patrol Staff Shortage, Officers Quit Over Vaccine Mandate (RT)

• Why Are Thousands Of Postal Workers Still Unvaxxed? (WND)

• Djokovic Claims It Would Be ‘Inappropriate’ To Say If He Is Vaccinated (RT)

• Dewey, Cheat’em And Howe (Denninger)

• “The Bidens”: Is the First Family Corrupt, or Merely Crazy? (Taibbi)

• Hillary’s Secretive, Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers (Maté)

• The Killing Of Gaddafi 10 Years Ago Led To The Death Of The Nation Of Libya (RT)

https://twitter.com/BarryESharp/status/1450924047034826756

Sign at Chick-Fil-A

Just

Show someone who is still asleep this 2 min video. Even if it doesn’t resonate with them at this moment, they just might recall his words of things that are yet to come. #WakeUpAmerica pic.twitter.com/HpiUchudh2

— the girl who questions everything (@freethinkerbabe) October 12, 2021

The Exposé feels a little chaotic at times, but they do the work.

• Child Deaths Are 52% Higher Since They Were Offered The Covid-19 Vaccine (TE)

Chris Whitty advised the UK Government to roll-out the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to all children over the age of 12 in week 37 of 2021. Thanks to preparations already being made by the NHS to intrude on education in schools and administer the jab to children the programme got underway the following week (week 38). Official Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that between week 38 and week 40, the five-year-average number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 17. However, the latest data available from the ONS shows that between week 38 and week 40, the number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 26. This represents a 52% increase on the five-year average.

Sixteen of those deaths were among boys, representing a 60% increase on the five-year-average in which there had been 10 deaths among boys between week 38 and week 40. Whilst 10 of those deaths were among girls, representing a 43% increase on the five-year-average in which there had been 7 deaths among girls between week 38 and week 40. What’s even more concerning about the above numbers though is that deaths among children aged between 10 and 14 were significantly lower than the five-year-average up to the point Chris Whitty advised the Government to offer all children over the age of 12 a Covid-19 vaccine.

Official Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that between week 1 and week 37, the five-year-average number of deaths occurring among children aged between 10 and 14 was 207. However, the 2021 dataset from the ONS shows that between week 1 and week 37 of 2021 there were just 178 deaths among children aged between 10 and 14. This means deaths among children aged week 10 and 14 were 14% down on the five-year-average prior to being offered the Covid-19 injection.

However, it is known that children deemed to be vulnerable to Covid-19 due to certain underlying conditions were already being offered a Covid-19 injection prior to Chris Whitty’s decision to overrule the JCVI and offer the jab to all healthy children. [..] we assessed the numbers from the ONS five-year-average dataset on deaths (found here) and the ONS 2021 dataset on deaths and discovered that there had also been a notable increase in deaths among children since vulnerable kids had first been given the Covid-19 vaccine. We’ve compiled the following table on the ONS data:

Child Deaths Are 52% Higher?! Let’s jab all the kids.

• White House Details Plan To “Quickly” Vaccinate 28M Children Age 5-11 (ZH)

The Biden administration on Wednesday unveiled its plan to ‘quickly’ vaccinate roughly 28 million children age 5-11, pending authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The jab – which doesn’t prevent transmission of Covid-19 will be available at pediatricians, local pharmacies, and possibly even at schools, according to the White House, which expects FDA authorization of the Pfizer shot for children – the least likely to fall seriously ill or die from the virus, in a matter of weeks, according to the Associated Press. “Federal regulators will meet over the next two weeks to weigh the benefits of giving shots to kids, after lengthy studies meant to ensure the safety of the vaccines. Within hours of formal approval, expected after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory meeting scheduled for Nov. 2-3, doses will begin shipping to providers across the country, along with smaller needles necessary for injecting young kids, and within days will be ready to go into the arms of kids on a wide scale”. -AP

According to the announcement, the White House has secured enough to supply more than 25,000 doses for pediatricians and primary care physicians who have already signed up to deliver the vaccine, while the country now has enough Pfizer vaccine to jab roughly 28 million kids who will soon be eligible, meaning this won’t be a slow roll-out like we saw 10 months ago when doses and capacity issues meant adults had to wait. Meanwhile, the White House is rolling out an ‘advertising’ campaign to convince parents and kids that the vaccine is safe and effective. According to the report, “the administration believes trusted messengers — educators, doctors, and community leaders — will be vital to encouraging vaccinations.” “COVID has also disrupted our kids lives. It’s made school harder, it’s disrupted their ability to see friends and family, it’s made youth sports more challenging,” said surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy in a Wednesday statement to NBC. “Getting our kids vaccinated, we have the prospect of protecting them, but also getting all of those activities back that are so important to our children.”

Why jab the kids? Well…

• Pfizer, Moderna to Rake in $93 Billion in 2022 COVID Vaccine Sales (CHD)

Vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna are projected to generate combined sales of $93.2 billion in 2022 nearly twice the amount they’re expected to rake in this year, said Airfinity, a health data analytics group. Airfinity put total market sales for COVID vaccines in 2022 at $124 billion, according to the Financial Times. Pfizer vaccine sales are predicted to reach $54.5 billion in 2022, and Moderna’s will hit $38.7 billion. The estimates blow the earlier figures — $23.6 billion for Pfizer and $20 billion for Moderna — out of the water. “The numbers are unprecedented,” Rasmus Beck Hansen, CEO of Airfinity, told the Financial Times. Sales of the mRNA shots will continue to rise in 2022 due to boosters and countries stockpiling to ward off variants, Airfinity said.

Pfizer will generate 64% of its sales, and Moderna 75% of its sales, from high-income countries in 2022, the analysts predicted. In April, Pfizer predicted 2021 COVID vaccine sales of $26 billion. After second-quarter results were reported, Pfizer upped the figure to $33.5 billion. Bernstein analyst Ronny Gal said the company could ring up an additional $10 billion in vaccine sales in 2021. Gal wrote: “The numbers are going to be much higher. The guidance of $33.5B reflects contracts signed to today which reflect total commitment to sell 2.1 million doses (at average price of $15.95). Pfizer notes they expect to manufacture 3 million doses. Presumably much of those will be sold as well, albeit at lower average price as consumption shifts to emerging markets. This is probably another $10 billion.”

“The second quarter was remarkable in a number of ways,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said. “Most visibly, the speed and efficiency of our efforts with BioNTech to help vaccinate the world against COVID-19 have been unprecedented, with now more than a billion doses of BNT162b2 having been delivered globally.” On a conference call, Bourla said that while “it’s very early to speak” about the company’s sales expectations for next year, he put Pfizer’s 2022 production capacity at 4 billion doses.

“..mRNA jabs’ initially higher number of antibodies “declines sharply” over the same period..”

• Adenovirus Covid-19 Vaccine Shows Lower But ‘Stable’ Immunity (RT)

Different effects of the world’s Covid injection types are revealed in new study that shines light on ‘Adenovirus v mRNA’ debate The one-shot adenovirus J&J Covid-19 vaccine provides stable but low-level immunity that stays for months, a new study has found, while mRNA jabs’ initially higher number of antibodies “declines sharply” over the same period. An immune response induced by Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen adenovirus vaccine appears to show “minimal-to-no evidence of decline” over eight months, the fresh study in the US reports, detailing the dynamics of the antibody response in the “follow-up period” after immunizations with each of the three American vaccines.

Apparently, Pfizer and Moderna cannot boast a similar durability in their mRNA vaccines’ efficacy, the study shows. Antibody titer levels (a term of measurement) elicited by both of them tend to decline “sharply by six months after vaccination” and fall even further by eight months, according to the data collected by the specialists from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The two mRNA vaccines apparently still greatly outperform the one-shot Johnson & Johnson jab during the “peak immunity” period, between two and four weeks after full immunization, the study admits. In the long run, however, they quickly lose their sizeable lead in efficacy and eventually land at the same antibody response level as that of the Johnson & Johnson jab based on the adenovirus vector principle – the same as the ones used by the UK’s AstraZeneca and by Russia’s Sputnik V.

The study also demonstrated that the Johnson & Johnson jab supposedly even somewhat outperforms both mRNA vaccines when it comes to antibody responses eight months after full immunization. Its live-virus neutralizing antibody response and a certain type of T-cell response appeared to be higher than those of Pfizer and Moderna jabs at that time. Whether it is indeed better in the long run is difficult to ascertain, though, since the data obtained from just over 60 participants, including only eight immunized with a Johnson & Johnson jab, appear to be somewhat “lacking,” Maxim Skulachev, a leading research associate at the Belozersky Institute at Moscow State University (MSU), believes.

“..a marked reduction of 93% of released virion and 99.98% unreleased virion levels upon administration of IVM..”

• Repositioning Ivermectin For Covid-19 Treatment (SD)

Drug repositioning is a useful and effective idea for Covid-19 antiviral discovery. • Ivermectin has proven effective for HIV-1, Adenovirus, Influenza virus, SARS-CoV, and many more, in the past.• Due to genomic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and the SARS-CoV, the role of the IMPα/β1 complex for viral protein (NSP12-RdRp) shuttling between the nucleus and cytoplasm holds great potential. • Ivermectin also exhibits great potential in reducing SARS-CoV-2 viral replication via numerous modes of action, such as the disruption of the Importin heterodimer complex (IMPα/β1)

Ivermectin (IVM) is an FDA approved macrocyclic lactone compound traditionally used to treat parasitic infestations and has shown to have antiviral potential from previous in-vitro studies. Currently, IVM is commercially available as a veterinary drug but have also been applied in humans to treat onchocerciasis (river blindness – a parasitic worm infection) and strongyloidiasis (a roundworm/nematode infection). In light of the recent pandemic, the repurposing of IVM to combat SARS-CoV-2 has acquired significant attention. Recently, IVM has been proven effective in numerous in-silico and molecular biology experiments against the infection in mammalian cells and human cohort studies. One promising study had reported a marked reduction of 93% of released virion and 99.98% unreleased virion levels upon administration of IVM to Vero-hSLAM cells.

IVM’s mode of action centres around the inhibition of the cytoplasmic-nuclear shuttling of viral proteins by disrupting the Importin heterodimer complex (IMPα/β1) and downregulating STAT3, thereby effectively reducing the cytokine storm. Furthermore, the ability of IVM to block the active sites of viral 3CLpro and S protein, disrupts important machinery such as viral replication and attachment. This review compiles all the molecular evidence to date, in review of the antiviral characteristics exhibited by IVM. Thereafter, we discuss IVM’s mechanism and highlight the clinical advantages that could potentially contribute towards disabling the viral replication of SARS-CoV-2. In summary, the collective review of recent efforts suggests that IVM has a prophylactic effect and would be a strong candidate for clinical trials to treat SARS-CoV-2.

“The FDA waits for a deep-pocketed sponsor to present a comprehensive package that justifies the approval of a new drug or a new use of an existing drug.”

• The FDA’s War Against The Truth On Ivermectin (AIER)

The FDA judges all drugs as guilty until proven, to the FDA’s satisfaction, both safe and efficacious. By what process does this happen? The FDA waits for a deep-pocketed sponsor to present a comprehensive package that justifies the approval of a new drug or a new use of an existing drug. For a drug like ivermectin, long since generic, a sponsor may never show up. The reason is not that the drug is ineffective; rather, the reason is that any expenditures used to secure approval for that new use will help other generic manufacturers that haven’t invested a dime. Due to generic drug substitution rules at pharmacies, Merck could spend millions of dollars to get a Covid-19 indication for ivermectin and then effectively get zero return. What company would ever make that investment?

With no sponsor, there is no new FDA-approved indication and, therefore, no official recognition of ivermectin’s value. Was the FDA’s warning against ivermectin based on science? No. It was based on process. Like a typical bureaucrat, the FDA won’t recommend the use of ivermectin because, while it might help patients, such a recommendation would violate its processes. The FDA needs boxes checked off in the right order. If a sponsor never shows up and the boxes aren’t checked off, the FDA’s standard approach is to tell Americans to stay away from the drug because it might be dangerous or ineffective. Sometimes the FDA is too enthusiastic and these warnings are, frankly, alarming. Guilty until proven innocent.

There are two reasons that Merck would warn against ivermectin usage, essentially throwing its own drug under the bus. Once they are marketed, doctors can prescribe drugs for uses not specifically approved by the FDA. Such usage is called off-label. Using ivermectin for Covid-19 is considered off-label because that use is not specifically listed on ivermectin’s FDA-approved label. While off-label prescribing is widespread and completely legal, it is illegal for a pharmaceutical company to promote that use. Doctors can use drugs for off-label uses and drug companies can supply them with product. But heaven forbid that companies encourage, support, or promote off-label prescribing. The fines for doing so are outrageous.

During a particularly vigorous two-year period, the Justice Department collected over $6 billion from drug companies for off-label promotion cases. Merck’s lawyers haven’t forgotten that lesson. Another reason for Merck to discount ivermectin’s efficacy is a result of marketing strategy. Ivermectin is an old, cheap, off-patent drug. Merck will never make much money from ivermectin sales. Drug companies aren’t looking to spruce up last year’s winners; they want new winners with long patent lives. Not coincidentally, Merck recently released the clinical results for its new Covid-19 fighter, molnupiravir, which has shown a 50% reduction in the risk of hospitalization and death among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. Analysts are predicting multi-billion-dollar sales for molnupiravir.

While we can all be happy that Merck has developed a new therapeutic that can keep us safe from the ravages of Covid-19, we should realize that the FDA’s rules give companies an incentive to focus on newer drugs while ignoring older ones. Ivermectin may or may not be a miracle drug for Covid-19. The FDA doesn’t want us to learn the truth. The FDA spreads lies and alarms Americans while preventing drug companies from providing us with scientific explorations of existing, promising, generic drugs.

“..The former officers laid their boots and hats on the steps of the Capitol building in a stunt meant to represent “what the state’s lost..“

• Washington State Patrol Staff Shortage, Officers Quit Over Vaccine Mandate (RT)

Some 127 Washington State Patrol employees, more than half of them officers, were terminated after a vaccination deadline passed this week, with the force now bracing for staff shortage in critical areas and major costs. 74 commissioned officers – including 67 troopers, six sergeants and a captain – as well as 53 civil servants were “separated from employment” as they missed the October 18 deadline to provide proof of vaccination, the Washington State Patrol (WSP) reported earlier this week. The WSP stated that the employees quit the force “for varying reasons and in varying ways,” with chief John R. Batiste declaring that “we will miss every one of them.” “I extend a hardy thanks to those who are leaving the agency. I truly wish that you were staying with us,” he said.

The mass exodus from the 2,200-strong force is set to put a strain on the depleted ranks. Speaking to the Oregonian, WSP spokesman Chris Loftis said that in some cases, such as vehicle collisions that result in no casualties or obstruction to traffic, the affected drivers might be told to figure out the incident on their own and “clear the area rather than wait for a trooper to show up,” as would happen under normal circumstances Some employees fired over the vaccine requirement successfully received exemptions from the order, but that did not prevent them from being terminated. Loftis said that over 400 people were granted such exemptions, but not all of them were offered alternative employment due to the nature of the agency’s work. Still, he stressed that the 74 troopers that were effectively forced out “were people that we knew and cared about.”

This wasn’t a situation where 74 troopers left one day because they did something bad – they left in standing opposition to the vaccine mandate, based on their personal principles and convictions. Some of the terminated troopers turned out at the state Capitol on Tuesday in a symbolic protest against the mandate. The former officers laid their boots and hats on the steps of the Capitol building in a stunt meant to represent “what the state’s lost,” one of the participants, ex-trooper Bill Jordan, told local media. Jordan claimed that he received a religious exemption from the mandate, but WSP failed to accommodate him regardless. While Loftis said that the agency would step up its recruitment efforts by filling up new academy classes, the training of would-be troopers will come with a hefty price tag.

It is estimated that the mass exodus could cost taxpayers some $12.4 million, as about $168,000 per year is needed to train just a single cadet – the WSP has lost 67. The Washington State Patrol has not been the only agency to see resistance from state employees to compulsory vaccination orders. More than 1,800 workers in Washington state have been fired, resigned or retired due to the mandate, according to official data released on Tuesday. This amounts to about 3% of the state’s workforce that falls under the mandate, and those numbers could yet rise, as the cases of some 2,887 state employees are still pending.

“They don’t have to. They have friends in the White House.”

• Why Are Thousands Of Postal Workers Still Unvaxxed? (WND)

After spending several futile hours rummaging through media accounts and the United States Postal Service (USPS) website, I still had no answer to the question I set out to address: Are postal workers subject to a vaccine mandate? Wanting the straight skinny, I decided not to call USPS headquarters but to visit a facility and talk to the workers loading and unloading mail. To my good fortune I found a well-spoken, straightforward supervisor who told me, through his mask, what I wanted to know. “We are encouraged to get vaccinated, but we do not face a vaccine mandate like the military does,” he volunteered. “But,” he added helpfully, “we do have an indoor mask mandate.”

Two questions emerge from this encounter. The first is: Why are postal workers exempt from a mandate that is stripping other public service entities, including the military, of thousands of needed personnel? The second, why did I have to ask a postal worker to get the truth? The answer to the second question is the easier of the two – the media don’t want you to know. In mid-September there was a flurry of questions around the status of the USPS. On Sept. 16, the USA Today fact checker put those questions to rest. On that same day, the USPS put out an impressively ambiguous statement on COVID-19 vaccines. After much self-serving blather about the hard work of its 650,000 employees, management concluded:

“We are working closely with our union leadership so that once OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) is issued we can move quickly to determine its applicability to our employees and how best to implement.” Translation: “We are in no big hurry.” The ETS represents the fulfillment of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Action Plan announced on Sept. 9. The OSHA ETS runs a perversely long 44 pages and includes any number of useless admonitions, such as: “An employer with one or more employees working in a physical location controlled by another employer must notify the controlling employer when those employees are exposed to conditions at that location that do not meet the requirements of this section.”

On Oct. 12, OSHA submitted the ETS to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for approval, which is where it stands as of this writing. USPS brass might argue that their hands are tied until the OSHA ETS is formalized, but unlike many private and public employers, they are making no obvious efforts to prepare their workers for this eventuality. They don’t have to. They have friends in the White House.

“People go too far these days in taking the liberty to ask questions and judge a person. “Whatever you say – ‘yes, no, maybe, I am thinking about it’ – they will take advantage.”

• Djokovic Claims It Would Be ‘Inappropriate’ To Say If He Is Vaccinated (RT)

Novak Djokovic says people are “taking the liberty” to ask questions about vaccine status and “judge a person”, speaking as an Australian head of government warned that unvaccinated players will face a struggle to receive visas. World number one Djokovic has repeatedly expressed his reservations about players being pressured to take a Covid jab, and the reigning Australian Open champion insists his decision is a “private matter” amid a string of controversies surrounding the likes of NBA star Kyrie Irving, who has been left out by the Brooklyn Nets because he is not vaccinated. Djokovic rival Stefanos Tsitsipas found himself at the center of a political row after he made a wide range of remarks about Covid and vaccines, and the Greek – whose own government seemed to distance themselves from views which appeared to include a suggestion that spreading the virus could have positive effects – now appears to be willing to be vaccinated.

Russian contender Andrey Rublev has become the latest player to drop their apparent reluctance because of the logistical issues not being vaccinated could cause, but Djokovic is yet to openly say he has had the treatment. “Things being as they are, I still don’t know if I will go to Melbourne,” Djokovic told Blic, speaking ahead of a first Grand Slam of the year in January which is likely to take place under tight restrictions. “I will not reveal my status, whether I have been vaccinated or not – it is a private matter and an inappropriate inquiry. “People go too far these days in taking the liberty to ask questions and judge a person. “Whatever you say – ‘yes, no, maybe, I am thinking about it’ – they will take advantage.”

“If you mandate, as a private employer, “vaccination” against Covid-19 any and all adverse events as a result of said jabs are now chargeable to you..”

• Dewey, Cheat’em And Howe (Denninger)

Oh, you’re a woke-poke employer eh? You think hiding behind OSHA — or the threat to issue a mandate by the government — in some way prevents you from being liable for injuries and/or deaths related to the vaccines? Uh, how would you like to defend that position in court given all of the following are true: The PREP act has no provision giving you legal immunity and cannot be amended by executive order as it is law, so you would need both houses of Congress to pass such a thing — and they have not. The producing firms and health care providers are immune from damages under that same PREP Act. Therefore under the general principle of joint and several liability guess who gets all of it: You do. You could have tried to claim that the Federal Government refused liability (and got away with it) for direct employees, and that would have been a pretty decent argument….. except, oops, that just went up in a puff of smoke.

“The Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) covers injuries that occur in the performance of duty. The FECA does not generally authorize provision of preventive measures such as vaccines and inoculations, and in general, preventive treatment is a responsibility of the employing agency under the provisions of 5 U.S.C. 7901. However, care can be authorized by OWCP for complications of preventive measures which are provided or sponsored by the agency, such as adverse reaction to prophylactic immunization. See PM 3-0400.7(a). Further, deleterious effects of medical services furnished by the employing establishment are generally considered to fall within the performance of duty. These services include preventive programs relating to health. See PM 2-0804.19. However, this executive order now makes COVID-19 vaccination a requirement of most Federal employment. As such, employees impacted by this mandate who receive required COVID-19 vaccinations on or after the date of the executive order may be afforded coverage under the FECA for any adverse reactions to the vaccine itself, and for any injuries sustained while obtaining the vaccination.”

Oops. If you mandate, as a private employer, “vaccination” against Covid-19 any and all adverse events as a result of said jabs are now chargeable to you, as the Federal Government itself has deemed that “mandated” vaccinations are indeed injuries that occurred while performing the job in question, irrespective of where the jab took place. Oh by the way your insurance firm has likely inserted a “pandemic exemption” into your liability coverage. That’s shown up in a whole lot of those policies over the last year or so, and it’s odds-on that’s the case for you as well. Incidentally there is plenty of evidence that these jabs will be eventually found to be responsible for a whole host of serious problems, and those do not end within a couple of weeks of the jab itself.

Indeed, the evidence is mounting rapidly (see the all-cause “excess death” rates for various age groups, particularly cardiac and circulatory related, among young people now showing up in places like Scotland and England for examples) that there is a causal link between both strokes and heart attacks. I remind you that the FDA and pharmaceutical industry claimed, not all that long ago, that no such link existed for Vioxx. It was only after about 60,000 Americans had heart attacks and died, and several hundred thousand had non-fatal heart problems caused by it, that it was withdrawn from the market — five years later. Moderna and Pfizer may be immune from lawsuit but you are not, and further, the precedent by the Federal Government itself now exists based on their own public statement that if an employee gets screwed by the jab you demanded they take you’re on the hook whether that injury is evident five minutes afterward or five years later. Good luck *******s; you just got ****ed and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

“..one somehow feels bad for Hunter Biden. He’s not just a wreck, but a wreck with spectacularly bad luck.”

• “The Bidens”: Is the First Family Corrupt, or Merely Crazy? (Taibbi)

Schreckinger is young, and The Bidens was clearly written in a bit of a hurry, but he’s a skilled storyteller. The initial framing is clever, with a first first chapter titled, “Chekhov’s Laptop,” a reference to Russian playwright’s famous dictum that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.” Having primed the reader to look for that metaphorical gun on the wall, he opens with a scene that’s bananas even by the outré standards of first son Hunter Biden’s “tumultuous” life. Hunter in October of 2018 had gotten in an argument with his then-girlfriend, Hallie, who according to the funhouse physics of the first family was of course the widow of his late brother Beau.

In the course of that dispute, Hallie had taken his .38 revolver and thrown it out of Hunter’s pickup truck (a pickup truck?) into a trash can outside “Janssen’s, a high-end grocery store near Wilmington the family had long frequented.” When Hunter found out the gun was gone, he chivalrously sent Hallie back into the trash to get it. This turns out to be the first of many moments in The Bidens where despite a seemingly tireless instinct for indulgent selfishness, and a maximally unattractive profile as the coddled scion of political privilege, one somehow feels bad for Hunter Biden. He’s not just a wreck, but a wreck with spectacularly bad luck. In this case, not only has his dead brother’s widow taken advantage of his trusting nature and thrown away his pistol (the one a person with his recreational leanings probably shouldn’t have anyway, but does, and moreover has left unattended), she picked the one bin that’s both across the street from a high school and in a spot where an old man hunting for recyclables somehow finds it.

Now the thing is missing and poor Hunter, who if nothing else has a keen sense of his own potential for disaster, must be imagining the worst, which in his family is likely a headline: Boy, 13, Uses Gun Registered to Dickhead Senator’s Son to Kill Parents, Neighbor, Dog, Self. The Delaware State Police are called, the FBI for some instantly suspicious reason also shows up, the Secret Service also reportedly appears at the store where Hunter bought the gun (I say reportedly because the Secret Service denies this, the first of many details in The Bidens that ends up receding in a fog of conflicting accounts), and the ATF even makes an appearance. The gun was eventually found after a few days, when the old man turned it in. By that point Hunter had already skipped town and begun setting in motion a preposterous chain of events that have ramifications in national politics to the present day.

If a country is not capable of digging up the truth in matters like this (and the Bidens), it is a failed nation.

• Hillary’s Secretive, Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers (Maté)

The indictment of Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly lying to the FBI sheds new light on the pivotal role of Democratic operatives in the Russiagate affair. The emerging picture shows Sussmann and his Perkins Coie colleague Marc Elias, the chief counsel for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, proceeding on parallel, coordinated tracks to solicit and spread disinformation tying Donald Trump to the Kremlin. In a detailed charging document last month, Special Counsel John Durham accused Sussmann of concealing his work for the Clinton campaign while trying to sell the FBI on the false claim of a secret Trump backchannel to Russia’s Alfa Bank. But Sussmann’s alleged false statement to the FBI in September 2016 wasn’t all. Just months before, he helped generate an even more consequential Russia allegation that he also brought to the FBI.

In April of that year, Sussmann hired CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that publicly triggered the Russiagate saga by lodging the still unproven claim that Russia was behind the hack of Democratic National Committee emails released by WikiLeaks. At the time, CrowdStrike was not the only Clinton campaign contractor focusing on Russia. Just days before Sussmann hired CrowdStrike in April, his partner Elias retained the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump and the Kremlin. These two Clinton campaign contractors, working directly for two Clinton campaign attorneys, would go on to play highly consequential roles in the ensuing multi-year Russia investigation. Working secretly for the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS planted Trump-Russia conspiracy theories in the FBI and US media via its subcontractor, former British spy Christopher Steele.

The FBI used the Fusion GPS’s now debunked “Steele dossier” for investigative leads and multiple surveillance applications putatively targeting Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. CrowdStrike, reporting to Sussmann, also proved critical to the FBI’s work. Rather than examine the DNC servers for itself, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics as mediated by Sussmann. The FBI’s odd relationship with the two Democratic Party contractors gave Sussmann and Elias unprecedented influence over a high-stakes national security scandal that upended U.S. politics and ensnared their political opponents. By hiring CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie lawyers helped define the Trump-Russia narrative and impact the flow of information to the highest reaches of U.S. intelligence agencies.

“Libyans enjoyed free healthcare, free education, and a high standard of living.”

“We came, we saw, he died,” she said.

• The Killing Of Gaddafi 10 Years Ago Led To The Death Of The Nation Of Libya (RT)

During his 42 years in power, he increased the country’s literacy rate from 25% to 88%. Libyans enjoyed free healthcare, free education, and a high standard of living. Basic necessities such as electricity and gas were cheap, and the country was guaranteed a strong social safety net and welfare programs. Libya is 90% desert. Gaddafi sought to provide fresh water to all Libyans for consumption and agriculture – an endeavor in which he succeeded. He built the world’s largest irrigation project, the ‘Great Man-Made River’ in the 1980s. Boasting the world’s largest pipe network, it provides 70% of all the fresh water in Libya. Gaddafi called it the “Eighth Wonder of the World”. Costing over $25 billion, the project was entirely self-financed, without any loans or credits from foreign banks. Libya had grown to be a very wealthy country and had no external debt. NATO bombed the Great Man-Made River in July 2011, destroying key civilian infrastructure: a war crime.

[..] Instead of an abundance of water, gold and oil in a thriving country with great infrastructure, Libya now has open slave-trade markets. Smugglers and human traffickers take advantage of migrants and refugees passing through to Europe, selling them off into bondage. Rival tribes and political factions fight over oil and other precious resources, determined to seize power for themselves. Meanwhile, pockets of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), Al-Qaeda and other jihadist fighters lurk in the shadows, plaguing the war-torn country and its neighbors – groups who wouldn’t have dared establish a presence in Gaddafi’s Libya. Once a prosperous nation, since his fall, it has been taken over by terrorists, opportunists and thieves, and has plunged into chaos. This is what has become of Libya these last 10 years. This is what NATO created.

[..] In the 1970s, he tried to merge Libya with Egypt and Syria to form a unified Arab state. In 2009, he proposed that African nations adopt a single currency: the gold dinar. The Libyan Central Bank, which was 100% state-owned, had reserves of 144 tons of gold that he intended to use for this purpose. Gaddafi proposed that African countries buy and sell their resources exclusively in this new pan-African currency. This would enable them to transition away from the US dollar and the Central Africa (CFA) franc – a colonial currency used in 14 countries and controlled entirely by France. This was Gaddafi’s biggest sin. In wanting African nations to adopt a single currency, to control their own resources and have true independence, he posed a threat to Western monetary hegemony, so he had to go.

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Debt Rattle October 18 2021

Oct 182021

October 18, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:50 am Finance Tagged with: Christmas, DOJ, hospitalizations, Israel, ivermectin, metaverse, Pentagon, unvaxxed, vaxxed 55 Responses »

M. C. Escher Meeting (Encounter) 1940

• Covid Infection In Vaxxed 40-49 Yr Olds Double The Unvaxxed Rate (DS)

• Over 90% Of A Hospital’s Admissions Were Vaccinated For Covid-19 (Siri)

• What Happens If Israel Fails The Stress Test? (Geert)

• White House Tells Governors to Get Ready to Vaccinate Young Kids (CHD)

• 40% Of California State Workers Are Unvaccinated Despite Newsom’s Order (ZH)

• Pentagon Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over Vaccine Mandates (ET)

• Ron Johnson Slams DOJ Probe Of Parents’ School Board Protests (JTN)

• Facebook Announces 10,000 EU Jobs To Build ‘Metaverse’ (Y!)

• MPs Back Challenge To Boris Johnson On Vaccine Passports (Exp.)

• Bare Shelves, No Holidays… At Last, A Biblical Kind Of Christmas (Cumming)

• Who Do You Blame When You’ve Killed The Scapegoat? (Fintan O’Toole)

Ivermectin works in Tokyo..

And in Indonesia.

Indonesia ramped up ivermectin production and the government assured national distribution and fair prices. IVM is considered by the government a COVID medicine.

But Singapore has the same pattern as Taiwan: very low infection rates, but then the vaccines came…

McCullough
https://twitter.com/i/status/1448336581358665733

Effectiveness Hits Minus-109%

• Covid Infection In Vaxxed 40-49 Yr Olds Double The Unvaxxed Rate (DS)

In the latest Vaccine Surveillance report from Public Health England (PHE) the Covid infection rate in double-vaccinated people in their 40s went above 100 per cent higher than in the unvaccinated for the first time, reaching 109 per cent. This translates to an unadjusted vaccine effectiveness of minus 109 per cent.

Vaccine effectiveness continues to drop fast in all over-18s, hitting minus 85 per cent for those in their 50s, minus 88 per cent for those in their 60s and minus 79 per cent for those in their 70s. Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation and death continues to hold up in all age groups, though with some signs of decline, particularly among older people. There is still nothing from Government sources acknowledging this failure of the vaccines against infection, its implications for policy and analysing what might be behind it.

We’ve seen Deborah Conrad.

• Over 90% Of A Hospital’s Admissions Were Vaccinated For Covid-19 (Siri)

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

One would think that after an association was identified by a healthcare professional, our health authorities would at least review this finding, right? Sadly, when Ms. Conrad reached out to health authorities herself, she was ignored. My firm then sent a letter to the CDC and FDA on July 19, 2021 on Ms. Conrad’s behalf (see letter below), yet neither agency has responded. Even worse, when doctors came to Ms. Conrad for assistance with filing VAERS report for their patients, the hospital prohibited her from filing these reports. That the CDC and FDA failed to respond is arguably not surprising – they have been cheerleading this vaccine for months. Admitting almost any harm now would be akin to asking them to turn a gun on themselves. This again highlights the importance of never permitting government coercion and mandates when it comes to medical procedures.

“..it is reasonable to expect booster injections to only enable the virus to more rapidly evolve resistance to the vaccines..”

• What Happens If Israel Fails The Stress Test? (Geert)

It is well known that, regardless of any induced antigen (Ag)-specific adaptive immune response, all vaccines (including mRNA vaccines) have an adjuvant effect: they stimulate innate immune effectors, some of which have antiviral activity and/or facilitate adaptive immunity (2, 3, 4). Without going into mechanistic detail, there is no doubt that some of these innate, nonAg-specific immune responses have a short-lived antiviral effect. This could already explain why booster doses in the population described above can prevent viral infection while recalling anti-spike Abs. It may also be tempting to assume that these recalled Abs are now responsible for enhanced protection from both infection and disease.

However, from an immunological viewpoint, it is difficult to understand how a rapid recall of the very same anti-S Abs in a previously vaccine-primed population would now all of a sudden enable better protection from infection and disease. If innate immunity is indeed the confounder, then the outcome of long-term surveillance studies would look very different. Given the more potent neutralizing Abs booster shots are generating against variants (5), the S(pike)-directed immune pressure in the population will only continue to rise while still failing to curtail the spread of the predominantly circulating highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant (e.g., Delta variant). On the contrary, it would be reasonable to assume that upon an additional booster shot the more potent Abs further contribute to selecting S-directed immune escape variants and, therefore, turn the previously primed population in an even more fertile breeding ground for the highly infectious Delta variant.

As vaccine-elicited Ab responses have a much longer duration (and can be memorized) than that induced by short-term innate immune activation, and as vaccinal Abs suppress the functional capacity of pre-existing CoV-reactive innate Abs, short-term vaccine-mediated innate immune protection against viral infection or disease does not automatically imply a positive effect of the vaccine on viral infection or morbidity rates in the longer term. Interpretations from scientists who only conduct short-term surveillance studies in vaccinees, the majority of whom are adults or elderly, lead to erroneous, although peer-reviewed conclusions such as: ‘Although vaccines are less effective against asymptomatic disease (*) or against transmission than against severe disease, even in populations with fairly high vaccination rates the unvaccinated are still the major drivers of transmission and are themselves at the highest risk of serious disease’ (6).

This clearly illustrates their lack of understanding of the contribution of innate immunity in providing short-term protection after vaccination, and in the more durable protection of young and healthy unvaccinated age groups. Based on all of the above, it is reasonable to expect booster injections to only enable the virus to more rapidly evolve resistance to the vaccines. This evolution would be dramatically expedited by vaccinating and boosting more and more younger age groups.

No FDA approval, but “..the Biden administration has already purchased 65 million doses of pediatric COVID vaccines..”

• White House Tells Governors to Get Ready to Vaccinate Young Kids (CHD)

In a private phone call Tuesday with the nation’s governors, the White House told states to prepare to vaccinate children as young as 5 by early November. A White House official said the call was made in anticipation of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine being cleared for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in the coming weeks for children ages 5 to 11. According to NBC News, the Biden administration purchased 65 million pediatric doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine — enough to vaccinate an estimated 28 million children who would be eligible should the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve Pfizer’s request to vaccinate the younger age group. In anticipation of a green light from the FDA, the administration began planning vaccination efforts with states, pharmacies and medical groups.

The administration told providers in a planning document last week the vaccine for children will be delivered to thousands of sites within one week of FDA authorization. The pediatric Pfizer vaccine will be distributed in 100-dose packs. Each dose is one-third of what is given to adults, and will be free through sites enrolled in a federal program that guarantees the shots are provided at no cost. Some states are planning to provide the vaccine through schools. “We’ve secured plenty of supply, and we’ll be putting in place an allocation, ordering and distribution system similar to what we’ve used for the other vaccines,” said Biden’s White House COVID coordinator, Jeff Zients, on a phone call, obtained by ABC News, with governors.

“It is distressing to hear that the Biden administration has already purchased 65 million doses of pediatric COVID vaccines,” said Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, pediatric physician and CEO of the Rimland Center for Integrative Medicine. “Vaccinating children is not the way out of the pandemic.” In an email to The Defender, Mumper said she hopes the White House will consider the following data:

• 99.998% of patients under the age of 18 survive COVID
• COVID “vaccines” have not undergone adequate long-term safety studies
• According to the latest available data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, as of Oct. 1, there have been a total of 21,298 reports of adverse events, including 1,284 rated as serious and 22 reported deaths (two of the 22 deaths were suicides) in the 12- to 17-year-old age group
• healthy adolescents given COVID “vaccines” have experienced blood clots, myocarditis, abnormal menses, neurologic symptoms and extreme fatigue
• most COVID cases are spread from adults to children — children are not a significant threat to the elderly and vulnerable

“..a third of all hospitals in the state are experiencing critical staffing shortages because engineers, janitorial staff, respiratory therapists, nurses, midwives, physical therapists, and technicians have either staged strikes or have left the job over the mandate.”

• 40% Of California State Workers Are Unvaccinated Despite Newsom’s Order (ZH)

This might come as a surprise, but 40% of California state employees are unvaccinated despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s directive to mandate the jab or be subjected to regular testing. Newsom issued this new directive in July following a surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. At the time, he said, “We are now dealing with a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and it’s going to take renewed efforts to protect Californians from the dangerous Delta variant.” Still months later, less than two-thirds of state workers, or 62%, were vaccinated, according to The Sacramento Bee. The figure is much lower than the state’s overall rate of 72%. Human Resources Department spokeswoman Camille Travis said her agency has only compiled 89% of state employee vaccination status.

She said the data so far suggests some state employees weren’t compelled to get jabbed after Newsom’s directive. Some of the state’s largest departments shared vaccination rates: 52% of California Highway Patrol employees, 60% of Department of Motor Vehicles employees, and 60% of prison employees have received the shots. California Department of Transportation has the highest with 70%. Newsom’s mandatory jab, or be forced to regular testing for state employees, is less stringent than those of health care workers who have been forced to get the vaccine unless they had a medical exemption or religious claim.

One emerging drawback of mandatory jabs, with no consideration for regular testing nor naturally-acquired immunity, are reports that a third of all hospitals in the state are experiencing critical staffing shortages because engineers, janitorial staff, respiratory therapists, nurses, midwives, physical therapists, and technicians have either staged strikes or have left the job over the mandate. Director of Medical Ethics, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty of the University of California, Irvine, challenged the constitutionality of the hospital’s vaccine mandate regarding individuals who have recovered from COVID and have naturally acquired immunity and was immediately placed on leave. There’s no room to debate science as only the government can decide what’s best for state employees.

“..Attorneys argued in the suit that no COVID-19 vaccine is available in the United States that has received full licensing and approval..”

• Pentagon Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over Vaccine Mandates (ET)

Service members from all five branches of the U.S. military, federal employees, and federal civilian contractors have joined in a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Defense over its COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The 24 plaintiffs “face a deadline under the Federal COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate to receive a COVID-19 vaccine that violates their sincerely held religious beliefs, and have been refused any religious exemption or accommodation,” according to Liberty Counsel, the Christian legal firm that filed the lawsuit. The lawsuit (pdf), filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, lists President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as defendants.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to issue a temporary restraining order (pdf) to prevent the COVID-19 vaccine mandates from taking effect, and ultimately issue an injunction to prevent the Pentagon from enforcing the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Biden on Sept. 9 issued an executive order requiring almost all federal employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of employment. Regular testing isn’t an option. Civilian federal employees and contractors have until Nov. 22 to be fully vaccinated. Austin issued a memorandum on Aug. 24 saying that all military service members must receive a COVID-19 vaccine, after which all the branches of the military announced various deadlines for its troops to be fully vaccinated, regardless of whether they had previously survived a bout of COVID-19, and threatening suspensions or other disciplinary actions if service members don’t have a pending exemption request or fail to comply.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have set a Nov. 28 deadline for their active-duty service members; reservists have until Dec. 28. For the Army and the Air Force, the deadlines for active-duty service members are Dec. 15 and Nov. 2, respectively, and deadlines for National Guard and Reserve members are June 30, 2022, and Dec. 2, 2021, respectively. U.S. Coast Guard members have until Nov. 22 to be fully vaccinated. [..] Attorneys argued in the suit that no COVID-19 vaccine is available in the United States that has received full licensing and approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and as such, cannot be mandated.

Austin, in his memo on Aug. 24 (pdf), stated that the mandatory vaccinations “will only use COVID-19 vaccines that receive full licensure from the [FDA] in accordance with FDA-approved labeling and guidance,” attorneys noted, arguing that “additional military documents reveal that the Department of Defense is not following its own directive” and is using vaccines under emergency use authorization [EUA] “because there is no FDA approved vaccine available.” Austin’s memo came a day after the FDA issued full approval for future Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines, which will bear the Comirnaty label. The latter vaccine wasn’t available in the United States as of Oct. 12, The Epoch Times reported previously.

“Show up peacefully. Be respectful. But be insistent. Demand that the school boards follow your wishes. Not the wishes of Joe Biden and his cast of characters.”

• Ron Johnson Slams DOJ Probe Of Parents’ School Board Protests (JTN)

Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin says Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s order to have the FBI investigate parent protests of school policies is “outrageous” and a “method of intimidation.” “He is saying they are intimidating school board members. No, it is the attorney general of the United States that is intimidating people exercising their rights to free speech and the right to petition their government,” Johnson said in an interview aired Sunday on the Cats Roundtable with John Catsimatidis show on WABC radio in New York. Garland announced recently the FBI would be investigating comments made by parents during contentious school board meetings over curriculum issues such as critical race theory and transgender pronouns.

The Wisconsin Republican, who is up for reelection next year, encouraged parents not to be intimidated and to continue to press for the policies they want for their children. “I tell people in Wisconsin, if you don’t want critical race theory; if you don’t want the 1619 project taught to your children, don’t let it be,” he said. “Show up peacefully. Be respectful. But be insistent. Demand that the school boards follow your wishes. Not the wishes of Joe Biden and his cast of characters.”

“..meetings in a virtual room where they all appear as cartoonish 3D versions of themselves..”

• Facebook Announces 10,000 EU Jobs To Build ‘Metaverse’ (Y!)

Facebook on Monday announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the “metaverse”, a virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been a leading voice in Silicon Valley hype around the idea of the metaverse, which would blur the lines between the physical world and the digital one. The technology might, for example, allow someone to don virtual reality glasses that make it feel as if they’re face-to-face with a friend — when in fact they are thousands of miles apart and connected via the internet. “The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities. And Europeans will be shaping it right from the start,” Facebook said in a blog post.

“Today, we are announcing a plan to create 10,000 new high skilled jobs within the EU over the next five years.” The European hires will include “highly specialised engineers”, but the company otherwise gave few details of its plans for the new metaverse team. “The EU has a number of advantages that make it a great place for tech companies to invest — a large consumer market, first class universities and, crucially, top quality talent,” the blog post said. [..] Facebook bought Oculus, a company that makes virtual reality headsets, for $2 billion in 2014 and has since been developing Horizon, a digital world where people can interact using VR technology. In August it unveiled Horizon Workrooms, a feature where co-workers wearing VR headsets can hold meetings in a virtual room where they all appear as cartoonish 3D versions of themselves.

“If we start down this road the future is dark.”

• MPs Back Challenge To Boris Johnson On Vaccine Passports (Exp.)

Campaigners for the Together Declaration petition, already signed by almost 110,000 people including more than 200 church leaders and representatives of businesses and groups, fear that the UK Government will be pushed into agreeing to a so-called plan B to bring in new restrictions over the winter. It follows warnings by chief medical officer Chris Whitty last week that the NHS will “experience an exceptionally difficult winter” this year. Already this has been taken as an indication that pro-lockdown scientists working for the government will push for vaccine passports which have been introduced by Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland and the Labour government in Wales. Already, Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, which represents backbench Conservative MPs has signed the declaration.

He said: “‘Vaccine passports would set an alarming precedent where our medical records become public and some people are subjected to discrimination as they seek to go about their everyday lives. Surely that isn’t the kind of society that we want to create?” Another senior Tory MP, Sir Desmond Swayne added: “It is contrary to all our values and traditions to have to prove that we have undergone a medical procedure to go about our lawful business. “It is coercive and discriminatory, the abandonment of liberal values; a frightful precedent to set. I am appalled that a Conservative government could contemplate such a measure. If we start down this road the future is dark.” Campaigners will meet former minister Steve Baker, deputy chairman of the powerful Covid Recovery Group (CRG), and other Parliamentarians tomorrow before unfurling a 40m banner in Parliament Square.

[..] Robert Dingwall, former government advisor, and professor of sociology from Nottingham Trent University, who has carried out extensive research on the use of vaccine passports said: “Vaccine passports are a tech industry idea in search of a problem. In terms of public safety, they have little to offer. “Vaccinated people have a high degree of protection from their own vaccination. They also still have a potential to infect other people. By now, anyone who wants to be vaccinated has had an opportunity to do so.

“There won’t be any turkeys, or at least not dead ones.”

• Bare Shelves, No Holidays… At Last, A Biblical Kind Of Christmas (Cumming)

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” says Jo at the start of Little Women. BoJo is going one better. This Christmas, not only will there be no presents, but there will be no anything. After cancelling Christmas altogether last year, this time around he is creating a kind of half-Christmas, Christmas methadone, to ease us back into the festival. There is nothing the man will not do to get himself compared to Churchill. Thanks to his foresight and the happy accidents of the global economy, we will be able to wallow in our beloved blitz spirit, making do and mending, with a safe low dosage of consumerism to tide us over.

There will be no PlayStation 5 under where the Christmas tree used to be. There will be no jokes in Mrs Brown’s Boys, as usual, but none in the Christmas crackers either. There’s no petrol or HGV drivers, of course, but correspondents also report shortages of tennis balls, merlot, white bread, sardines, M&S chicken kievs, fish sauce, frozen apple strudel, tinned sardines, spring onions, fire alarms, an effective opposition, chocolate Hobnobs, cat vaccines, cat worming pills, bubble bath, Leon fish-finger wraps, marmalade, butter beans, dog-poo bags, goats, crisps, decaf coffee, bulbs (plant), bulbs (light), pigs, blankets, pigs-in-blankets, roofing lead and Harry Potter merchandise, especially wands. The last is hard to take; usually there are more wands than you can shake a stick at.

On the off-chance you manage to get to 25 December with a full tank and are able to dodge Insulate Britain’s armed roadblocks, you’ll arrive at houses that are too expensive to heat. The environmentalists ought to be encouraging the free movement of cars this Christmas; there are few people more persuasive on the subject of double-glazing than a chilly mother-in-law. There won’t be any turkeys, or at least not dead ones. There are plenty waddling around in barns, but there’s nobody to slaughter them. For the handful that do make it to Bernard Matthews’ big barn in the sky, there’s nobody to drive them to the shops. In a delicious irony, there are shortages of everything except shortages. Like it or not, this is what leadership looks like.

“Frost demanded that the EU agree to rewrite completely the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal treaty that Johnson hailed in October 2019 as a “fantastic deal for all of the UK”.

• Who Do You Blame When You’ve Killed The Scapegoat? (Fintan O’Toole)

Last week, Boris Johnson, with his paintbrush and easel at his holiday villa in Marbella, touched up his self-portrait as the reincarnation of Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, another bodysnatcher, Johnson’s Brexit tsar, David Frost, was also in sunny Iberia. In Lisbon on Tuesday evening, he channelled the intellectual father of modern conservatism, the 18th-century Irish writer and politician Edmund Burke. Frost demanded that the EU agree to rewrite completely the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal treaty that Johnson hailed in October 2019 as a “fantastic deal for all of the UK”. His speech was entitled, in imitation of a famous Burke pamphlet, “Observations on the present state of the nation”.

In case his audience somehow failed to make the connection between the former chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association and one of the greatest political thinkers these islands has produced, Frost reminded them – how could they have forgotten? – that he had previously given a speech entitled “Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe”. Geddit? For those who did indeed get it, the first response was surely to sigh, like the ghost in Shakespeare’s tragedy, “O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there”. The second was the dizzying feeling that the “present state of the nation” is that of a skydiver, free-falling downwards from Burkean conservatism into pure Tory anarchism. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote that “good order is the foundation of all good things”.

Somehow, when his soul was transmigrating to be born again in Brexit Britain, that bit got lost in translation. Disorder is now the royal road to all the good things that will come to those who keep the Brexit faith. Tearing up international treaties is, like the mass culling of pigs and fruit rotting in the fields, merely a manifestation of the creative chaos from which the new universe of “Global Britain” will emerge. It is rather unfortunate that the ground on which this big bang is set to explode, Northern Ireland, is a place that knows all about big bangs and the misery of chaos. And even more so that it is a place held together by one of those documents that Johnson and his government now hold in such contempt: an international treaty, the Belfast agreement of 1998.

Before Frost gave his speech on Tuesday, he knew full well that the EU was about to put forward a generous, sensible and very helpful set of proposals to deal with the difficulties in the practical implementation of the protocol. These proposals, unveiled on Wednesday, give civic and business leaders in Northern Ireland pretty much everything they have asked for to make the new arrangements work smoothly. Anticipating this EU move to calm everything down, however, Frost and Johnson chose to pre-empt the solutions by creating a new problem, one they know to be insoluble. They have hyped up an issue that no one in business or trade in Northern Ireland gives a damn about: the role of the European court of justice (ECJ) in any potential disputes about the interpretation of EU law. Deprived of the movement of sausages as a casus belli, they grasped another dubious foodstuff – the red herring.

Earplugs
https://twitter.com/i/status/1449965542916374529

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Debt Rattle October 17 2021

Oct 172021

October 17, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:34 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, bare shelves, Biden, Deep State, Fauci, inventory, ivermectin, supply chain, terrorism 60 Responses »

Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Triumph of Death 1562

• A Desperate Biden Administration Turns to Terrorism (Daniel McAdams)

• Horse-Bleep (Rescue)

• The Antiviral Effects of Ivermectin on RNA Viruses (Nature)

• Appeals Court Refuses to Stop Maine Vaccine Mandate (ET)

• Covid Vaccine Stand-off Between Chicago Mayor, Police Hits Courts (Y!)

• Alarm Bells Ringing Over Poor Greek Vax Rate (K.)

• IMDB Steps In To Prop Up Audience Rating Of Fauci Documentary (JTN)

• DHS Seeks To Track Biometric Data Of Workers (JTN)

• Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State (Taibbi)

• Relentless Retail Inventory Squeeze amid Shortages & Supply Chain Chaos (WS)

• Stella Moris On Her Secret Family With Julian Assange (G.)

Bare Shelves Biden

RIP
https://twitter.com/i/status/1449207395926745092

Daniel is Ron Paul’s right hand man.

• A Desperate Biden Administration Turns to Terrorism (Daniel McAdams)

For Americans watching the shocking re-Nazification of Germany – where once again the ability to even buy food depends on a person’s physiological/medical status – it may be tempting to downplay the re-emergence of a nasty German political virus and scoff that, “it can’t happen here!” But it is happening here. The Biden Administration is sinking under the weight of its feeble figurehead, who is clearly living in a world of his own creation rather than living on planet reality. As Biden’s approval ratings plummet to near-historic depths, the people who run his administration – some say it’s really led by demon Susan Rice – are not backing off their hyper-authoritarian approach to…well, everything. In fact they’re doubling down.

Nurse shortage? Tough – get your shot. Billions of containers waiting to be unloaded and trucked to fill empty shelves? Tough – get your shot. Murder alley Chicago facing 50 percent less cops because those who don’t want the vax are being fired? Tough – get your shot. No one to fly the plane? Tough – get your shot. No teachers? Tough – get your shot! Into this explosion of malevolent incompetence staggers US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Department Wally Adeyemo – second-highest ranker in the entire Department. The Nigerian-born Adeyemo, who previously served as director of African American outreach for the inspiring John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign and as a senior advisor to corrupt “woke” multi-gazillionaire Larry Fink, should be given credit for at least being honest about the intentions of his bosses in the Biden Administration.

Sometimes they tell the truth by accident. Interviewed on ABC News on Thursday, Adeyemo was asked about the thousands of container ships anchored offshore in California and elsewhere as US store shelves begin to look like Bulgaria circa 1975 – and even Santa Claus is sweating “supply chain” strangulation as Christmas quickly approaches. It’s not because Newsom’s California is a Marxist hellhole, where the religious fundamentalism of the Green New Deal fanatics has taken massive numbers of truckers off the road. Nope. It’s not Biden’s vax mandate which has unleashed a massive outflux of workers from their jobs – quitting or fired – at a time of severe labor shortages. Nope. The problem is you. You unwashed vermin who refuse to have a cocktail of experimental goop jabbed into your arm.

In the ABC interview Adeyemo admitted what we all know: inflation is beating the hell out of middle America (though Biden’s multi-millionaire chief-of-staff laughed it off as “high class problems”). “We are seeing high prices for some of the things that people have to buy,” Adeyemo told ABC’s Stephanie Ramos. But it’s not the Administration’s fault. Shelves bare? Treasury’s Number Two tells America it’s all the fault of those who have not yet succumbed to his boss’s demand that you take the jab: “The reality is that the only way we’re going to get to a place where we work through this transition is if everyone in America and everyone around the world gets vaccinated.” There is a word for this and it’s not actually blackmail. It’s terrorism. Until that part of America which has to this point decided that it does not want to take an unproven medical treatment is browbeaten – or worse – into submission to Fauci’s needle, the rest of the country will continue to suffer through empty shelves and a crappy Christmas. Too strong a word? Here’s how the dictionary defines terrorism:

Threat: You will eat nothing and you will be happy. Political objective: Get the shot! It’s terrorism plain and simple and the Biden Administration’s “War on Us” is taking a dangerous turn. The millions who have taken the shot are being baited to attack those who have for whatever reason – including the medically sound acquisition of natural immunity through contracting and defeating the virus – declined to take the medical procedure. In reality both groups should unite against the past two Administrations which have lied and intimidated Americans over the virus from nearly day one. But that would threaten the elites, who rule by divide-and-conquer tactics.

Duress
https://twitter.com/i/status/1449519642033197058

“Within two days, 23.7 million people had seen that Pulitzer-worthy bit of Twitter talk.”

• Horse-Bleep (Rescue)

In a hokey tweet on August 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told Americans the obvious: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” Everyone knew what “it” was: an animal form of the drug ivermectin that folks were said to be using, widely, for covid-19. Don’t, said FDA. Within two days, 23.7 million people had seen that Pulitzer-worthy bit of Twitter talk. Hundreds of thousands more got the message on Facebook, LinkedIn, and from the Today Show’s 3 million-follower Instagram account. “That was great!” declared FDA Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock in an email to her media team. “Even I saw it!” For the FDA, the “not-a-horse” tweet was “a unique viral moment,” a senior FDA official wrote to Woodcock, “in a time of incredible misinformation.”

There was one problem, however. The tweet was a direct outgrowth of wrong data—call it misinformation—put out the day before by the Mississippi health department. The FDA did not vet the data, according to our review of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and questions to FDA officials. Instead, it saw Mississippi, as one email said, as “an opportunity to remind the public of our own warnings for ivermectin.” The story behind the tweet that went ’round the world shows how a myth was born about a safe, if now controversial, human drug that was FDA-approved for parasitic disease in 1996 and bestowed the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. It is a story in which the barest grain of truth morphed into an anything-goes media firestorm.

It began with one sentence in a Mississippi health alert on reports to the state’s poison control center: “At least 70% of the recent calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers.” In the thick of a fierce covid wave in the American South, no official at the FDA, or reporter for that matter, seemed to ask: 70 percent of what? Instead, government and media joined forces against a public health threat that, in retrospect, was vastly exaggerated. Amid dozens of articles that ensued, Rolling Stone told of Oklahoma hospitals so jammed with ivermectin overdoses that gunshot victims had to wait for care—except it wasn’t true. Twice, The New York Times printed corrections of the same false information from Mississippi, which it described in one article and later removed, as “a staggering number of calls.” The Associated Press, Washington Post and, twice, the The Guardian in London also corrected its reporting on the alert. The Times’ correction summed it up: “This article misstated the percentage of recent calls to the Mississippi poison control center related to ivermectin. It was 2 percent, not 70 percent.”

This is where you go: ”any questions?” No? Then let’s roll!

“..a 5000-fold reduction in viral RNA compared with control was found..”

• The Antiviral Effects of Ivermectin on RNA Viruses (Nature)

In a recent in vitro study, the Vero/hSLAM cells infected with the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 virus were exposed to 5 μM ivermectin in 48h, and a 5000-fold reduction in viral RNA compared with control was found. The results showed that treatment with ivermectin effectively kills almost all viral particles within 48h. The study was the first to assess the antiviral effect of ivermectin on COVID-19. The authors acknowledged that the drug may have antiviral effects by inhibiting the importin (IMP) α/β receptor, which is responsible for transmitting viral proteins into the host cell nucleus. The authors proposed human studies to confirm the potential benefits of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19. Although this study was the first to confirm the antiviral effect of ivermectin on COVID-19, other studies examined the antiviral effects of the drug on both RNA and DNA viruses..

“We look forward to a decision from the Court of Appeals. If that decision is not favorable, we will request emergency relief from the Supreme Court..”

• Appeals Court Refuses to Stop Maine Vaccine Mandate (ET)

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday refused to issue an emergency injunction to stop Maine’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The three-judge panel of the Boston-based court issued a one-sentence statement saying the request was denied without an explanation, The Bangor Daily News reported. A final ruling will likely be issued next week, according to Liberty Counsel, an organization representing more than 2,000 health care workers across the state in the lawsuit. “We look forward to a decision from the Court of Appeals. If that decision is not favorable, we will request emergency relief from the Supreme Court,” Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said in a statement. Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey applauded the decision.

“We are pleased with the decision and will continue to vigorously defend the requirement that health care workers in Maine be vaccinated against COVID-19,” he said in a statement obtained by The Hill. Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, announced her state’s mandate on Aug. 12 that workers have until Oct. 29 to comply. Exemptions were allowed for medical reasons. Unlike most states, Maine does not allow for religious or philosophical exemptions to vaccine requirements. The plan was challenged by a group of healthcare workers who said they opposed COVID-19 vaccines because some vaccines were developed from cell lines of aborted fetuses. The workers also sued several healthcare companies where they work.

U.S. district judge Jon Levy ruled on Wednesday that Maine can bar religious exemptions to its requirement that healthcare workers in the state get vaccinated against COVID-19. Levy, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, said the healthcare workers who brought the case have not been prevented from staying true to their religious beliefs, although refusing the vaccine will cost them their jobs.

“The Chicago stand-off comes as the city once again leads the United States in murders, with 639 homicides this year through October 13 — up 55 percent from two years ago.”

• Covid Vaccine Stand-off Between Chicago Mayor, Police Hits Courts (Y!)

A Chicago judge on Friday banned a police union president from making public statements on the city’s Covid-19 policy as a stand-off over vaccine mandates sparked dueling lawsuits. The dispute between mayor Lori Lightfoot and police union head John Catanzara has made the city the latest flashpoint in a deeply polarized debate over vaccines and whether governments have the right to mandate them. Lightfoot sought and received an injunction against Catanzara Friday when the judge issued a 10-day restraining order that bans him from making statements that encourage members not to report their vaccination status.

The police union filed its own lawsuit Friday against Lightfoot and Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown that seeks to force arbitration over the matter. Like all city employees, Chicago police officers have been mandated to report their vaccine status to an online portal by midnight Friday. Those not vaccinated will be subject to twice-weekly testing. Those who refuse to disclose their status have a few days’ grace to explain themselves — but face being placed on unpaid leave and eventually fired. In two videos released this week, Catanzara urged police officers to ignore the order and risk loss of pay. On Tuesday, he predicted that if a large number of officers refused to be tested or report their vaccinations, Chicago would have a “police force at 50 percent or less for this weekend.”

Lightfoot responded by saying: “I cannot and will not stand idly by while the rhetoric of conspiracy theorists threatens the health and safety of Chicago’s residents and first responders.” She also said Catanzara was “encouraging a work stoppage or strike.” Both state law and the union contract prohibits Chicago police from striking. The union responded with a tweet Friday saying: “President John Catanzara has never engaged in, supported, or encouraged a work stoppage.” [..] The Chicago stand-off comes as the city once again leads the United States in murders, with 639 homicides this year through October 13 — up 55 percent from two years ago. With shootings also up 68 percent over the period and carjackings heading for a record, the threat of losing much of the police force, even temporarily, has caused a deep sense of unease.

Nobody I know believes the 62% vaccination rate.

• Alarm Bells Ringing Over Poor Greek Vax Rate (K.)

Authorities are feeling increasingly uneasy about the pace of the country’s vaccination program, which is moving even slower in October than September, which had also seen a drop. As a result the aim to vaccinate at least 70% of the population to create the coveted wall of immunity is being further delayed, with winter just around the corner. In early September, after the summer holidays, there was a slight increase compared to the August break, with an average of about 20,000 shots being administered per day. The goal was to gradually increase this number in October so that by the end of the month or the beginning of November an additional million people would be vaccinated.

However, this was not meant to be, as in the first two weeks of October, there was a dip in appointments for the first dose – less than half compared to September. According to data.gov.gr, 62% of the population has received a single dose. The average daily rate of single dose shots in October was 5,500, while in September it was almost 13,000. By the time Greece reached the peak of the vaccination program in June, there was an average of 93,130 vaccinations per day being administered, of which 39,707 were first doses. This was because there was still a large proportion of the population which was positively inclined to the vaccine but wanted to wait a while before going ahead with it.

Currently, the percentage that has not been vaccinated is about the same as the percentage that indicated in the polls they would not get a jab or expressed caution about it. Bearing this in mind, targeted campaigns may be launched in the near future. Getting results, however, will be a tall order.

Ha ha ha! Brilliant.

• IMDB Steps In To Prop Up Audience Rating Of Fauci Documentary (JTN)

A documentary film tracking Dr. Anthony Fauci’s medical career from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19, is creating controversy away from the big screen. “Fauci,” from NatGeo and Magnolia Pictures, hit select theaters Sept. 10 before getting a Disney+ release earlier this month. The documentary lets disparate figures like President George W. Bush, U2’s Bono and Bill Gates praise the Infectious disease specialist. The studios failed to make the documentary’s box office figures available to film industry sites or JustTheNews.com. The vast majority of studios, large and small, routinely share that data, as NatGeo and Magnolia have done on previous releases.

Movie fans then noticed RottenTomatoes.com, arguably the biggest review aggregator site on the web, didn’t initially feature any “audience” reviews of the film. Mainstream film critics saluted “Fauci,” although most admitted the film served up a hagiography of the 80-year-old bureaucrat. Once audiences started weighing in on the film at Rotten Tomatoes, though, the results were withering. Professional critics gave “Fauci” a 92% “fresh” score, while audiences gave it just a 2% — or “rotten” — rating. A similar pattern emerged at IMDB.com, a major film and TV reference destination. “Fauci’s” audience rating, on a scale from 1-10, hovered around 1.8. This week, however, the site altered its review algorithm. Now, the audience review tally is a more robust 5.8.

A quick glimpse at the review breakdown, provided by the site, shows the overwhelming number of audience critics gave the film a one-star rating. The site now features this explanation: “NOTE: Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.”

Next step after the Green Pass.

• DHS Seeks To Track Biometric Data Of Workers (JTN)

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is seeking proposals for a new system that will allow it to track the biometric data of its workers in order to monitor their physical and mental well-being. DHS said in a call for proposals this week that it is looking to “find innovative technological solutions that will improve the overall health and wellness of those consistently placed in high-stress and dangerous conditions” under DHS employment. “DHS is seeking capabilities that not only promote intervention action when necessary, but preemptively and in real-time optimize DHS personnel performance and resilience,” the agency added. The window for proposals for the project extends until next April.

“Carollo looks like he’s about six, and I say that fully conceding jealousy over his full head of hair.”

• Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State (Taibbi)

On The Young Turks the other night, during a segment called — this is not a joke — “RebelHQ,” commentator Ben Carollo extolled the virtues of the CIA. In one section, he described how intelligence officials responded to “Donald Trump trying to plan some ridiculous scheme to maintain himself as president”: “It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that these government officials wanted to listen to congress and cared about Democratic norms and respected the constitutional structure of the way the United States is today.” When I first heard Carollo talking about the desire of intelligence officials to “listen to congress,” I thought he was being literal.

Maybe, I thought, he meant that time in 2014, when the CIA spied on the the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into its torture program, wiring up Senate computers and reading staffers’ emails. Or perhaps he meant that time in 2015, when the Obama administration was using the NSA to listen to Israeli critics of his Iran deal, and ended up with “inadvertent” access to phone calls back and forth with political opponents in the U.S. congress, on both sides of the aisle. Or, maybe Carollo also meant that time when the CIA intercepted communications between the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and congressional staff, about pending whistleblower complaints. As the ICIG put it in one of its declassified notifications, “CIA security compiled a report that includes excerpts of these whistleblower-related communications, and this report was eventually shared with CIA management.” This way, the CIA bosses could know ahead of time who was going to congress with complaints about abuses! Good times.

Alas, Carollo didn’t mean intelligence officials are listening to congress in that sense. His video essay entitled, “Fact-checking Glenn Greenwald’s stunt on Fox News,” was designed to refute the apparently ridiculous notion that “there’s some sort of secret deep state working behind the scenes.” A central part of his argument is that unlike agencies like Homeland Security, formed under the Republican administration of George W. Bush and designed to be “far more shielded from congressional oversight,” the CIA reports to congress and basically does what it’s told. The agencies with the real power to color outside the lines, Carollo tells us, are DHS-sub-operations, “specifically ICE, and Customs and Border Control,” which “have far less congressional oversight and far less structure in place for there to be those checks and balances.” Because of that, Carollo says, “Donald Trump was more than capable of enacting an extremely racist border policy.”

Even the Pentagon and the defense intelligence agencies are less of a concern, he said, because “when it comes to something like the military, there’s a long history of deep congressional oversight,” and “many checks and balances that are put into place.” Carollo looks like he’s about six, and I say that fully conceding jealousy over his full head of hair. It’s relevant only because he’s representative of a generation of young, left-leaning intellectuals who grew up in the Trump years believing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other such agencies to be trusted, straight-and-narrow defenders of democratic “norms.” These credulous kids with piercings and chin-beards who think the secret services are on their side are the fruits of one of the great P.R. campaigns of our time.

Great Reset.

• Relentless Retail Inventory Squeeze amid Shortages & Supply Chain Chaos (WS)

The holiday selling season is approaching, and a whole litany of weird shortages is ricocheting through the economy. Stuff suddenly gets hung up somewhere, on a ship, or in a port, and then ends up somewhere else, or it’s on backorder for months, as manufacturers are struggling with material shortages and in in Asia with Covid outbreaks that shut down factories for weeks at a time. And stimulus-fueled demand in the US has been huge and relentless, while retailers are struggling with inventories, some more than others. Auto dealers, particularly new-vehicle dealers, are experiencing catastrophic shortages of popular models, as automakers have been getting blasted by semiconductor shortages that simply refuse to abate, leading to rotating shutdowns of assembly plants globally.

Auto dealers are the largest retailer segment, with their sales normally accounting for over 20% of total retail sales, and with their inventories normally accounting for 33% of total retail inventories. Inventories at auto dealers, measured in dollars, declined to a new multi-year low of $151 billion in August, according to data released by the Commerce Department on Friday. The long-term dollar-increase in inventory levels that you can see in the chart above is a reflection of higher costs per vehicle in inventory. But the number of vehicles in inventory has been in the same range for two decades, as unit sales have mostly been below the peak achieved in the year 2000.

It’s even worse during the current shortages: Inventory in dollars – though it collapsed – is being inflated by the shift to high-end models as automakers are prioritizing the biggest money makers. Sales of new and used vehicles also collapsed as there hasn’t been enough to sell. The industry-standard Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) of sales plunged five months in a row and is down by 33% from May:

And so the inventory-sales ratio – inventories divided by sales, a standard metric of supply that cancels out the impact of price increases – has been ticking up over the past three months from the May low, which had been the lowest in the data going back to 1992. The upticks were driven by sales that collapsed even faster than inventories. Following the Lehman bankruptcy, new vehicle sales plunged, and the US was suddenly drowning in inventory, and the inventory-sales ratio spiked. During the pandemic, the opposite occurred: Fueled by huge amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus, retail demand surged and collided with production woes due at first to Covid issues and then the semiconductor shortage. And prices have spiked, with many new vehicles being sold at prices well above sticker, which is nuts.

Really, Stella, talk to the Guardian? They were only ever going to smear Julian even more, while washing their hands of their role in his misery,

• Stella Moris On Her Secret Family With Julian Assange (G.)

In May 2012, the UK’s supreme court ruled he should be extradited to Sweden. In June, Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy, where he could not be arrested because of the international legal protection afforded diplomatic premises, and refused to come out. In doing so, he breached his bail conditions. Two months later, Ecuador granted Assange political asylum, stating that they feared his human rights would be violated if he were extradited. By now, Assange had fallen out with former colleagues at WikiLeaks and collaborators at mainstream news organisations. His relationship with the Guardian soured over the decision to bring the New York Times into the collaboration, and he was angered that the Guardian investigated the Swedish allegations, rather than supporting him unquestioningly.

He was also furious about details published in a Guardian book, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. Meanwhile, all five media partners condemned his decision to publish Cablegate unredacted, potentially endangering the lives of thousands of activists and informers in countries including Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan. The situation could not have been messier. He fell out with so many people: WikiLeaks staff, his lawyer Mark Stephens, the writer Andrew O’Hagan, who had been contracted to ghost a book out of him, which Assange never delivered. Laura Poitras’s film about Assange, Risk, is particularly poignant because she had started the project as a fan. In it, Assange comes across as vain, sexist, arrogant and messianic.

The allegations of hypocrisy were most damaging: Poitras reveals that Assange told her the film was a threat to his freedom and demanded scenes be removed. “He was really angry and he tried to intimidate,” Poitras told me at the time of Risk’s release. James Ball, global editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and former Guardian journalist, briefly worked for WikiLeaks. He talks about the “incredible intensity” of his time at Ellingham House. “We were in the middle of nowhere in Norfolk, and we couldn’t bring phones because they could be tracked, so we were cut off from friends and family.” Ball challenged Assange when he was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, with a £12m penalty clause, that would have prevented him saying anything about WikiLeaks for two decades.

“Julian basically told everyone not to let me go to bed till I agreed to sign,” Ball says. Eventually, he did get to bed without signing. “I was woken up by Julian who was sitting on my bed, pressuring me again. He was prodding me in the face with a cuddly toy giraffe. I managed to get out, and then I got really angry for several months. A friend suggested I look into cult deprogramming. I don’t think Julian necessarily meant to build a cult, but WikiLeaks did operate like one.” Moris dismisses all the criticism of Assange as character assassination. Does she think his reputation for being difficult is fair? “How many publishers, editors, CEOs have a reputation for being nice and agreeable?” she asks. “Julian doesn’t like people who are deceitful, Julian doesn’t like opportunists, and he can be quite direct. Also people who are on the autism spectrum don’t score particularly high on the agreeableness scale.” (A psychiatrist confirmed a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome in last year’s extradition hearing.)

Major league weird.

Many advocates for freedom started extremely cautious when this started. By now, those awake should realize it's a unique moment in world history. NO TIME FOR MORE CAUTION. Even if we are wrong in some claims, it's more than legitimate to present them for proper investigation. pic.twitter.com/ARr3wv7jt7

— Wake Up From COVID (@wakeupfromcovid) October 16, 2021

Leonardo da Vinci’s self-supporting bridge.

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

Debt Rattle October 16 2021

Oct 162021

October 16, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:02 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, CDC, CNN, court martial, FDA, ivermectin, Joe Rogan, Kirsch, spiking prices, vaccine coercion, vaccine safety, VanDen Bossche 48 Responses »

Paul Gauguin Contes barbares 1902

• Proof That The CDC Is Lying To The World About Covid Vaccine Safety (Kirsch)

• The FDA’s BIG Mistake (Steve Kirsch)

• Risk Of Covid-19 Vaccines Worsening Clinical Disease (PubMed)

• Want To Get Covid Many Times? (Denninger)

• Looking At Snapshots, You’ll Never See Where This Pandemic Is Headed (Geert)

• Doctors Covid Collective Doubts Usefulness Of Mass Vaccination, Coronapass (AC)

• Ivermectin And The Probability Of Hospitalization Due To Covid-19 (Cdmx)

• “Expert” Calls To Deny Life-Saving Hospital Treatment to the Unvaccinated (SN)

• Army Doctor To Soldier With Medical Issue: Vaccine Shot Or Court Martial (PM)

• NBA Player Claims Covid-19 Vaccine Ended His Season (SBN)

• The Worst Is Yet To Come From Biden’s Vaccine Coercion (U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson)

• Poster Boy (Jim Kunstler)

• Free-Money-Blow-Off Spike in Retail Sales Got Refueled by Spiking Prices (WS)

France, Ireland, Ukraine, Romania

What’s going on in Scotland?

FCCC

Today, PayPal suddenly shut down our donation platform. Then FB restricted our posts, our ability to add followers, & threatened to unpublish our page.

Big tech must think we’re having a big impact. We are.

Read more:https://t.co/N1sKJdMAo1

Donate: https://t.co/viYmBYeY1u pic.twitter.com/o944gMoSbL

— Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care (@Covid19Critical) October 16, 2021

Lobbyists

Pfizer currently has 92 lobbyists in Washington, D.C.

Johnson & Johnson has 67

Merck has 53

Gilead has 46

Natural immunity has zero.https://t.co/bmo3GqNmxq

— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.substack.com (@JordanSchachtel) October 15, 2021

Nebraska Attorney General ruling on IVM & HCQ : “Allowing physicians to consider these early treatments will free them to evaluate additional tools that could save lives, keep patients out of hospitals, & provide relief for our already strained healthcare system.”

Taiwan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1448622309917478915

“We kill 15 people to maybe save 1. Are we nuts?“

• Proof That The CDC Is Lying To The World About Covid Vaccine Safety (Kirsch)

Furthermore, if we use the same methodology as used by the CDC in their paper to determine the actual underreporting factor for this year, but we use a much more accurate reference, we find that the best estimate for the minimum URF is 41. For less serious events you’d use a higher number since healthcare workers and consumers are far less likely to report less serious events. So using 41 is always “safe” in that it will not overestimate any event. This means that we’ve killed well over 150,000 Americans so far, and all of those deaths had to be caused by the vaccine because there is simply no other explanation that fits all the facts. See this paper for the details. The paper also details 7 other ways that the number was validated and none of those methods used the VAERS data at all. This makes it impossible for anyone to credibly attack the analysis. Nobody wants to debate us on this.

And Pfizer’s own Phase 3 study showed that we save only 1 COVID death for every 22,000 people we vaccinate (you have to see Table S4 in the supplement to learn that 2 people died from COVID who were unvaccinated and 1 person died from COVID who got the vaccine, so a net savings of 1 life). We have fully vaccinated almost 220M Americans which means we may save an estimated 10,000 lives from COVID per the Pfizer study which is the most definitive data we have (since “real scientists” ONLY trust the data in the double-blind randomized controlled trials).

Yet the VAERS data shows we killed over 150,000 Americans from the vaccine to achieve that goal. In other words, we killed 15 people for every COVID life we might save. But it’s worse than that because the Pfizer study was done pre-Delta. The Pfizer vaccine was developed for Alpha variant and is less effective against Delta. So our numbers are even more extreme. This means of course that the FDA, CDC, and their outside committees are all incompetent in their ability to spot safety signals. They couldn’t even spot the death safety signal. It also means that the vaccine mandates are immoral and unethical.

“They developed ESP:VAERS which was fantastic, but they canned the project because it was too good: uncovered lots of safety signals. So they pulled the plug on it 10 years ago.”

• The FDA’s BIG Mistake (Steve Kirsch)

The FDA has been assuming that nearly all of the adverse events reported in VAERS have been due to “over-reporting” of “background events.” In short, there is nothing to see here: it’s all noise. This video proves that that assertion is impossible. It shows compelling evidence that VAERS is actually UNDER-reported by a factor of 4 compared to previous years and the under-reporting factor is 41 for this year. The video also discloses that the FDA and CDC never bothered to compute the two key factors (the URF and PTR) that reveal the truth. They simply assumed everything was fine. This was the BIG mistake. The VAERS data shows, without a doubt, that these vaccines are a train wreck because they kill more people than they save and should have been halted in January 2021 when VAERS was first throwing off extreme safety signals.

However, everyone in the mainstream media, Congress, and the medical community is afraid confronting the truth as it would erode all trust in these institutions. So the deception MUST continue, just like a Ponzi scheme cannot be stopped. NOBODY will debate my team of experts on this. Pfizer will not defend the safety of their own drug. Also, if you ask the FDA or the CDC for the analysis they did to determine the URF and PTR, you will be ignored because they never did the analysis that is needed to properly interpret the VAERS data to spot safety signals. VAERS has been around for 30 years, so you’d think that by now that they should know this stuff. They do know it, but they don’t do it to cover up the safety signals.

They developed ESP:VAERS which was fantastic, but they canned the project because it was too good: uncovered lots of safety signals. So they pulled the plug on it 10 years ago. Naturally, nobody in the medical community has called them out on it because otherwise they would lose their NIH grants. So that’s why I made the video… because I don’t have an NIH grant and someone has to be the truth teller here that points out that the emperor has no clothes. All the mainstream media “fact checkers” will focus on attacking me with ad hominem attacks, because they can’t attack the data or the methodology. None of the “fact checkers” will actually ask the FDA or CDC the embarrassing questions they refuse to answer like “where is the analysis of the URF and PTR?”

NOTE: There is a typo on the slide in the video on the PTR definition. The numerator and denominator should be reversed. So a higher URF this year means a lower propensity to report. The presentation link above has the corrected formula.

Study aimed at Informed Consent. Published March 2021 at the NIH. They’ve known about the risks all along.

• Risk Of Covid-19 Vaccines Worsening Clinical Disease (PubMed)

Aims of the study: Patient comprehension is a critical part of meeting medical ethics standards of informed consent in study designs. The aim of the study was to determine if sufficient literature exists to require clinicians to disclose the specific risk that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus.

Methods used to conduct the study: Published literature was reviewed to identify preclinical and clinical evidence that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus. Clinical trial protocols for COVID-19 vaccines were reviewed to determine if risks were properly disclosed.

Results of the study: COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.

Conclusions drawn from the study and clinical implications: The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for the trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standard of patient comprehension for informed consent.

“Covid may never stop “breaking through” in the jabbed. If you took the jab you may well be stuck for life with repeated infections..”

• Want To Get Covid Many Times? (Denninger)

How would you like to get Covid-19 more than once? All you have to do is get vaccinated before you get Covid-19. You should build “N” antibodies after a natural infection. So…… with all these vaccine failures where are the N antibodies? They’re……. not there. Indeed, as the vaccinated percentage went up the slope of that line decreased until it….. was flat. This very strongly implies that getting Covid-19 after being vaccinated, which we now know adjusted for vaccination population percentage is more-likely now if you’re vaccinated than if you’re not appears to give you zero “N” antibody protection. That is, it appears the jabs program your immune system to fight it off without building those antibodies at all.

But we know from past experience with coronaviruses that it is the “N” antibodies that are conserved across mutations and thus are critical, over time, to prevent severe outcomes. How long this disabling of “N” antibody production is sustained nobody knows, but that it appears to be entirely suppressed in people who have been vaccinated and then get infected seems to be substantiated in that data. Now we have an explanation for why, when someone who is jabbed gets hammered, they get hammered fast and hard. Oh, and here’s the even-better news: Covid may never stop “breaking through” in the jabbed. If you took the jab you may well be stuck for life with repeated infections, and while protection may well be 50%, 60% or 80% against hospitalization and death for any given single infection if you roll those dice enough times they will come up snake eyes and you’re screwed.

The only good news is that since Delta appears to escape the jabs sufficiently to infect the mutational pressure may be insufficient to continue generating more strains with even better escape potential. If you got jabbed you better hope that’s true; if its not, well…. Oops.

“..the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic..”

• Looking At Snapshots, You’ll Never See Where This Pandemic Is Headed (Geert)

An increase in infectious pressure leads to a higher risk of rapid viral re-exposure in the population. As far as previously asymptomatically infected unvaccinated individuals are concerned, rapid re-exposure to SARS-CoV-2 may lead to viral replication on a background of suboptimal spike (S)-directed immune pressure (due to suboptimal, short-lived anti-S antibodies [Abs] of low affinity) and even to enhanced susceptibility to disease (due to suppression of functional innate Ab capacity by the afore-mentioned suboptimal anti-S Abs).

When such suboptimal anti-S immunity occurs in a substantial part of the population it is likely to further increase natural immune selection pressure on viral infectiousness and, therefore, promote further expansion of more infectious variants, thereby giving rise to additional waves of infectious cases and morbidity. As the evolutionary dynamics of the virus in highly vaccinated countries/regions are now placing huge immune selection pressure on the viral fitness landscape, it is fair to postulate that the highly diversified spectrum of evolutionary trajectories of this pandemic seen in different highly vaccinated countries will now rapidly narrow down to a more uniform path characterized by the following, prognostically unfavorable features:

• Waning of vaccine efficacy as mirrored by a relative increase of morbidity and mortality rates in vaccinees over time

• A relative increase of morbidity and mortality rates over time in vaccinees as compared to the unvaccinated

• A relative increase in suboptimal immunity over time in both the vaccinees and unvaccinated individuals (due to diminished vaccine efficacy and suboptimal naturally elicited Abs, respectively), which may translate into a relative increase in cases of ADE (Ab-dependent enhancement of Covid-19 disease pathology)

• A relative increase in the base-line infectivity rate over time

• Continuing waves of increased infection, morbidity, and mortality rates

• A relative increase in frequency of more infectious viral variants with immune-resistant phenotypes over time

Conclusion: All experts and public health authorities seem to agree that the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic are very complex and shaped by an interplay between infectious pressure exerted by the virus on the host immune system and immune pressure exerted by the host on viral infectiousness, and that a pandemic can only come to an end when sufficient herd immunity is developed to control the virus. It is, therefore, surprising that none of these authorities seem to worry about the impact that massive immune intervention could have on the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic that is now characterized by widespread dominance of highly infectious variants. The impact of any human intervention on these dynamics can only be assessed and measured by monitoring changes in population-level infection, morbidity, and mortality rates, and comparing these rates between vaccinees and unvaccinated individuals as a function of time.

Google translate from Holland. The percentages at the end are strangely divergent.

• Doctors Covid Collective Doubts Usefulness Of Mass Vaccination, Coronapass (AC)

They are against the mass vaccination of the entire population, against the coronapas and against testing people without symptoms. The advice of Doctors Covid Collective differs quite a bit from those of the Health Council and the OMT. “We’re trying to counterbalance it.” More than 32,000 “friends” of which 2,100 BIG-registered doctors and medical professionals are members of the Doctors Covid Collective, the website reports. Most affiliated doctors and professors wish to remain anonymous, “given the strong censorship and pressure felt after going public. Several of the doctors affiliated with us have been ordered to remain silent, some of them lost their jobs.”

[..] One of the main criticisms of the collective is the mass vaccination of the population. “Mass vaccination is unnecessary and even harmful. Only those who belong to a risk group might do well to get a vaccine,” explains Felix van der Wissel, a general practitioner in Amersfoort and spokesperson for the collective. “Think of people over 60 and people with, for example, diabetes or the lung disease COPD. I think vaccination could be wise for them.” Van der Wissel is concerned about the many side effects that have been reported at Lareb and worldwide. “I am especially concerned about the more than 500 reports of deaths after vaccination. Also think of reports of miscarriages, menstrual disorders, strokes, heart attacks and thrombosis in different parts of the body. It is important to thoroughly investigate whether there is a relationship between these reported side effects and the vaccines. It is incomprehensible that the vaccination program continues while science does not yet have an answer to this question.”

The GP is vehemently against vaccinating young people. “In the Netherlands, only three children have died from Covid-19. In contrast, some potentially dangerous side effects such as pericarditis, inflammation of the pericardium, have been reported in young people after vaccination. Massively vaccinating young people with so-called vaccines whose long-term effects we do not know means taking an irresponsible health risk.” While the risks of vaccination should not be underestimated, according to Van der Wissel, the coronavirus is not as dangerous for the vast majority of people as is often thought. “The chance that people will die from an infection is extremely small. Only 0.04 percent of people under the age of 70 who become infected die, a professor has calculated for us. The death rate in children is completely negligible.” Researchers from the RIVM came to a higher percentage in February: an average of 1 percent of the Dutch population dies from an infection.

Mexican study of an ivermectin-based Medical Kit, published on May 15, 2021.

• Ivermectin And The Probability Of Hospitalization Due To Covid-19 (Cdmx)

IVERMECTIN AND THE PROBABILITY OF HOSPITALIZATION FOR COVID-19: EVIDENCE OF A QUASI EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS BASED ON A PUBLIC INTERVENTION IN CDMX

Objective To measure the effect of Mexico City’s population-level intervention –an ivermectin-based Medical Kit – – in hospitalizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods A quasi-experimental research design with a Coarsened Exact Matching method using administrative data from hospitals and phone-call monitoring. We estimated logistic-regression models with matched observations adjusting by age, sex, COVID severity, and comorbidities. For robustness checks separated the effect of the kit from phone medical monitoring; changed the comparison period; and subsetted the sample by hospitalization occupancy, Results We found a significant reduction in hospitalizations among patients who received the ivermectin-based medical kit; the range of the effect is 52% – 76% depending on model specification.

Does he smoke? Does he drink? Does he drive a car? Is he fat?

People have never been denied health care for any reason.

• “Expert” Calls To Deny Life-Saving Hospital Treatment to the Unvaccinated (SN)

An “expert” whose work on cybersecurity has been cited by the NY Times and the Washington Post announced on Twitter that the unvaccinated should be denied life-saving hospital treatment because they are “not fit for life on earth.” Chris Vickery, who describes himself as a “data breach hunter” also brags about how his “findings have contributed to investigations conducted by the FTC, FBI, SEC, Secret Service, HHS, SSCI, and more.” During an unhinged Twitter rant, Vickery asserted that a time limit of December 1st should be put on people refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. “Set a date now. After that date, no hospital services for the willingly unvaccinated,” he screeched.

“Then, after the chosen date, anyone choosing to refuse the covid-19 vaccine can deal with the consequences of that choice alone,” added Vickery. After claiming there was no “legitimate” reason for anyone to refuse the shot, Vickery ended his rant with a demented call for such people to “separate from the surviving world.” “Human society isn’t a suicide pact. If you are too dumb to get the covid vaccine, then you are not fit for continued life on Earth.” “That’s your choice, but the consequences of refusing to get the vaccine is you having to wave a fond farewell and separate from the surviving world.” Some joked that this was yet another example of the familiar trend of blue checkmarks on Twitter aggressively displaying their virtue while actually calling for mass genocide.

People want to know the details. Is this true for all soldiers?

• Army Doctor To Soldier With Medical Issue: Vaccine Shot Or Court Martial (PM)

A retiring soldier has been threatened to take the vaccine or face a court-martial. In a shocking leaked audio clip, an Army doctor is heard telling the soldier she must either get the shot or possibly face a court martial. Terminal CWO broke the story and Jack Posobiec broadcast it on his hit podcast Human Events Daily, where he analyzed the entire clip. “If we were civilians and you said, ‘Doctor, do you think it’s reasonable for me to not get the vaccine for a few months until I feel comfortable?’ I’d say, yeah, that’s reasonable, you’re young and healthy, it’s reasonable to wait a few months until you feel more comfortable,” the Army doctor said.

“The Army doesn’t allow me to do that, though. So I recommend that you submit an administrative waiver because I can’t grant you a medical waiver unless you had specific medical conditions such as severe allergic reaction to the first shot, unfortunately.” The soldier, who has Endometriosis, is a medical retiree. She notes in the clip that she is going home in six days, but the doctor says a court-martial would prevent her from doing so. The court-martial would, however, only be used should an administrative waiver be rejected. The doctor explains how the soldier would go through a chapter process, where the military determines what kind of discharge the soldier receives.

“And then after the chapter process is concluded, it would go before the general court-martial convening authority, General Doyle, and he would make the determination,” the doctor explained. He describes how that General would determine whether she separates the Army as a medical retiree or Chapter Separation, which is a process in which soldiers are removed from the military. Such a process is used with soldiers who deal with substance abuse or serious crimes like assault. “So I really recommend applying for administrative labour today or getting the shot just because like you’re so close to being done. I hate it when good people get punished,” concluded the doctor.

“I was fine up until I took the vaccine, I was fine.”

• NBA Player Claims Covid-19 Vaccine Ended His Season (SBN)

Former Atlanta Hawks point guard Brandon Goodwin’s season ended early last year due to “minor respiratory condition,” according to a team report this past May. The Hawks went on a deep postseason run to the Eastern Conference Finals and the team decided not to bring the Norcross graduate back after drafting Sharife Cooper and signing Delon Wright. Goodwin has not signed with another NBA team since. Recently, on a Twitch stream, Goodwin revealed his side of the story, and it all starts with him receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. “I got sick and I never quite recovered from it,” Goodwin said on the stream, as posted on YouTube by Cosign Zee. “I would always have back pain, I was just super tired in the games.”

Goodwin used Atlanta’s back-to-back against the Philadelphia 76ers on April 28 and April 30 as an example. “Bro, I was so tired,” he said. “I felt like I couldn’t run up and down the court. My back was hurting.” The Hawks then had a three-game homestand from May 1-5. “My back really started hurting bad,” Goodwin recalled. “Then, I’m like, ‘OK. I need to go to the doctor. That’s when I found out I had blood clots. That all within the span of a month.” Goodwin then left nothing up to the imagination when he revealed what he believed caused the health issues. “I was fine until then,” Goodwin said. “I was fine up until I took the vaccine, I was fine.”

Blood clots have been reported as rare side effects of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Women under the age of 50 are advised to remain cautious about the rare but increased risks of developing a blood clot from the J&J vaccine, the CDC says, a risk that “has not been seen” in other vaccine options. “People trying to tell you, ‘No. It’s not the vaccine.’ How do you know?” Goodwin asked. “You don’t know.” In seemingly another Twitch streaming clip (same link as above), Goodwin doubled down on his belief the vaccine caused his health issues. “Yes, the vaccine ended my season,” Goodwin said. “One thousand percent.”

If Ron Johnson knows, that means the Senate knows. Where are you, Nancy?

• The Worst Is Yet To Come From Biden’s Vaccine Coercion (U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson)

As we have seen in New York state, many doctors and nurses who refuse to be vaccinated now must leave health care, either voluntarily or involuntarily, due to vaccine coercion. Their decades of medical skill and knowledge will be lost to the mandates. I have been inundated with testimonials from doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers asking for relief from the mandates and indicating they will not succumb to the pressure. New York’s experience will be replicated throughout America, and the negative impact on health care will be profound. I have been in contact with Lt. Col. Theresa Long, an Army flight surgeon. Her affidavit, which was part of an amended filing in a lawsuit against the military regarding vaccine mandates and injuries in the military, was made public in late September and describes only a small portion of the alarming story she has to tell.

As a result of her efforts to alert her superiors, she is now a pariah to her senior command, and her medical license is being attacked merely for speaking out. The day before her superiors canceled all her appointments with patients, two out of five aviators she saw had developed pericarditis shortly after vaccination, only reporting their symptoms because they read an affidavit online. She has much more to tell but is under a gag order imposed by the military. The recent flight delays involving Southwest Airlines are another harbinger of mandate harm. Although Southwest’s CEO and pilot union officially deny that delays are being caused by a worker slowdown in reaction to vaccine mandates, individuals are confirming what most of us view as obvious.

Last week, I received a letter from a Wisconsin constituent who is a pilot for a U.S.-based airline. His testimonial raises serious concerns regarding airline safety and demonstrates why we can add a growing pilot shortage to the self-inflicted harms of the vaccine mandate. The most alarming anecdote in this letter involved a recently vaccinated pilot who “sustained, over a two-day period, partial blindness in one eye and then severe migraine headaches.” His doctor told him he had suffered “micro strokes.” The pilot did not report his medical condition to his Federal Aviation Administration medical examiner because he feared “he would lose his pilot certifications, and hence his livelihood.”

“That is your “Joe Biden” government, from top to bottom, a matrix of fakeness and malice..”

• Poster Boy (Jim Kunstler)

Sanjay Gupta is now the discredited poster boy for American doctors-without-honor and a medical system in abject collapse. All this lying by the government, the doctors, and the news media led to “Joe Biden’s” dastardly “vaccine mandate” — and fake, too, since there is still no actual legal instrument behind it — that is the final insult to medicine as legions of health-care workers ranging from doctors and nurses to janitors quit their jobs rather than submit to forced “vaccinations.” The vax mandate is in-step with the primary motive of the Democratic party’s neo-Jacobin program, which is to push people around, to coerce them to do things that common sense and the instinct for survival argue against, and then to punish the people sadistically when they refuse, and to do it for the sheer pleasure of inflicting harm on their enemies — who happen to be the citizens of the USA.

That is your “Joe Biden” government, from top to bottom, a matrix of fakeness and malice. The vax mandate is doing a steller job of wrecking every other public service from sea to shining sea as police, firemen, EMTs, 911 operators, and soldiers in the US military demur from the shots. And, of course, there are all he private companies going along suicidally with the scheme: the airlines, the railroads, the truckers, the retailers, you name it, all shedding employees and the ability of the companies to function. Naturally, the news media is trying to hide the damage, but in another week the net effect will be of the world’s biggest-ever general strike. Every activity in the country will stand still; some activities will just crash-and-burn; and many will not return to their prior states-of-operation.

This is not just a matter of the kiddies missing their Christmas presents. That’s just a dumb-ass sentimental ruse to divert your attention from the entire armature of American life imploding at warp speed. Christmas presents! How about no food, no gasoline, no heat, no money, and no public safety? That’s where this is taking us, and in the fast lane. And it hardly matters whether the financial markets manage to stay artificially levitated. Reality has already discounted the financial markets because they have forfeited their basic function, which is to signal the true price of everything. The true price of a society lying to itself about everything will be the sickness and death of the society. We must be very close to a clear majority of the people in America recognizing the danger we are in and identifying the source of that danger. When that moment arrives, will we be able to do anything about it? It may take extraordinary measures not seen before in our political history.

Pump it up.

• Free-Money-Blow-Off Spike in Retail Sales Got Refueled by Spiking Prices (WS)

Total retail sales – powered by inflation, seen in magnificent price increases – rose 0.7% in September from August, to $625 billion (seasonally adjusted), just barely below the mind-boggling free-money-blow-off-spike in March and April. Sales were up 13.9% from a year ago, and by 20% from September 2019:

In this monstrously overstimulated economy, demand for goods has surged, triggering all kinds of shortages that are now rippling through the system, as global supply chains and transportation systems have been buckling for a year. This demand was created by $5 trillion in deficit spending by the Federal government and by $4.5 trillion in money printing by the Fed since March 2020. The magnificent price increases, as tracked by the Consumer Price Index, have inflated retail sales. These product groups account for 52% to the retail sales here:

Food prices: +4.6% year-over-year
Restaurant prices: +4.7% year-over-year
Gasoline price: +42.1% year-over-year
Used vehicle prices: +24.4% year-over-year
New vehicle prices: +8.8% year-over-year.

New & used auto dealers and parts stores: Sales ticked up 0.5% in September from August, to $123 billion (seasonally adjusted), after four months in a row of large declines off the free-money-blow-off spike in March and April. This is the largest retail category, in normal times accounting for over 20% of retail sales. The number of vehicles delivered has collapsed in recent months – new vehicle sales in September plunged by 37% from the free-money peak in March – because dealers have run out of inventory to sell, as automakers are having production shortfalls due to the semiconductor shortage. But there’s plenty of demand still, and so prices have shot sky-high, with many new vehicles being sold at prices substantially over sticker, and used vehicles with ridiculous prices.

Short Rogan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1449043088136187907

SUPERCUT!

Media mock @JoeRogan for claim they invented about horse pills pic.twitter.com/D5CuBEKgBw

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 15, 2021

Loggerhead sea turtle

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Debt Rattle October 15 2021

Oct 152021

October 15, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:00 am Finance Tagged with: benefits, Biden, EmptyShelvesJoe, heating, ivermectin, navy, poll workers, Taiwan, Zuckerberg 58 Responses »

Paul Gauguin Christ in the garden of olives 1889

• For the Right to Try (Hope)

• Deaths Following Vaccination in Taiwan Exceed COVID Death Total (BA)

• Go Ahead, Keep Being Stupid (Denninger)

• FDA Panel Recommends Half-dose Boosters For Moderna Vaccine (JT)

• Navy Announces Plans To Expel Those Refusing Vaccine, Revoke Benefits (ZH)

• Workers At Los Alamos Nuclear Lab Sue Over Vaccine Mandate (JTN)

• The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg (Fed.)

• Blackwell: Republicans Should Have Poll Workers At Every Precinct In 2022 (JTN)

• #EmptyShelvesJoe Hits Number 1 Trend On Twitter (PM)

• Joe Biden Could Get Drawn Into The FBI Probe Into His Son Hunter (Fox)

• Americans’ Heating Bills To Soar Up To 50% This Winter (ZH)

Hessen becomes the first federal state in Germany to allow supermarkets to bar unvaccinated persons from entry (BILD).

Highly effective

This is a MUST WATCH video.

Never forget how the government lied every step of the way here your ignorance is the only thing continuing this insanity!!! pic.twitter.com/skSXFxu5cD

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) October 13, 2021

Vermont is the most vaccinated US state

Murder by judge.

• For the Right to Try (Hope)

“A Fairfield Township man with COVID-19 whose wife sued to force West Chester Hospital to treat him with Ivermectin has died, according to his attorney. Jeffrey Smith died Saturday, September 25, said his attorney, Jonathan Davidson of Hamilton. Smith, 51, was diagnosed with COVID-19 in July and was in the intensive care unit at West Chester Hospital.” According to a news report published October 4, 2021, “Jeffrey Smith tested positive for COVID-19 July 9, was hospitalized, and was admitted to the intensive care unit July 15. He was put on the hospital’s COVID-19 protocol of the antiviral drug, Remdesivir, along with plasma and steroids. On July 27, after a period of relative stability, Jeffrey Smith’s condition began to decline. He was sedated and intubated, and placed on a ventilator on August 1.

Smith was in a medically-induced coma on August 20, according to an affidavit his wife filed with her lawsuit. ‘My husband is on death’s doorstep; he has no other options,’ she wrote, adding at another point that her husband’s chances of survival had dropped to less than 30%.” In August, Judge Gregory Howard ordered the hospital, West Chester, to honor the family’s request to treat him with Ivermectin. Judge Howard approved Dr. Fred Wagshul’s prescription of Ivermectin 30 mg daily for three weeks. Dr. Wagshul is a renowned Pulmonary Specialist who reports having treated over 2,000 patients with Ivermectin with 100% success. He heads the Lung Center of America in Dayton, Ohio.

In addition, he is a founding member of the World-Renowned Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a non-profit group of highly-published physicians dedicated to saving lives. By the grace of God and Judge Howard, Jeffrey Smith won the court order to receive the life-saving Ivermectin for which attorney Ralph Lorigo and his team had fought at his wife’s plea. It appeared that Jeffrey Smith would be another in the string of Lorigo’s cases that received court-ordered Ivermectin and went on to enjoy a full recovery. Lorigo’s ICU cases who win court-ordered Ivermectin have more than a 90% recovery rate, unlike their chances with standard care, which is well below 50%, and in this case, less than 30%.

[..] Over thirteen days, Smith faithfully got the Ivermectin, and began to improve, said Dr. Wagshul. It looked like Ralph Lorigo had worked another miracle. And then the unthinkable occurred. A new judge ordered the Ivermectin stopped against the wishes of his wife, his family, and Dr. Wagshul. And soon after that, 51-year-old Jeffrey Smith’s life ended. Judge Michael Oster reversed the ruling before Smith could receive the entire three weeks of court-ordered Ivermectin. As a result, he only received 13 doses out of the 21 mandated by the previous order. According to Ralph Lorigo, lead attorney, “they were planning to begin weaning off the ventilator.”

Taiwan was doing fine. And then the vaccines came.

• Deaths Following Vaccination in Taiwan Exceed COVID Death Total (BA)

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, few nations have been lauded as much for their management of the disease as Taiwan has. Since the first cases of COVID-19 in the country were reported in February 2020, only 16,313 infections and 846 deaths have been recorded. Despite how successfully the nation had managed the outbreak, it still enrolled itself in the World Health Organization-led COVAX exchange program and began its first wave of vaccinations on March 22, 2021. While the nation hadn’t had even a dozen deaths attributed to COVID-19 by the time the first vaccine was administered, 836 of the 846 deaths attributed to COVID-19 have occurred since the vaccination program began. In an even more dubious display concerning the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines administered in Taiwan, the nation’s Central Epidemic Command Center (“CECC”) has stated that 850 deaths have been reported as adverse events following vaccinations. That total eclipses the number of fatalities attributed to the virus itself.

Taiwan’s vaccination campaign began much later than many other nations, a lag which many blame on political interference from China which was best illustrated by the island nation’s difficulties procuring orders of Pfizer-BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines. Despite these hurdles, the country was able to first able to procure 117,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccines. Additional deliveries of 200,000 and 400,000 doses from the same manufacturer arrived the following two months before another 150,000 vaccines from Moderna were delivered in May 2021. It gave emergency approval to a domestically engineered alternative made by Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corporation with shipments from Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson soon following. As of October 11, 4.48 million Taiwanese, about 19% of the population, have been fully vaccinated and 13.7 million, or about 59% of population, have received on dose. The country has stated that it seeks to have 70% of its population fully vaccinated.

Yet, by the time Taiwan had approved those five vaccines for emergency use, an alarming trend began appearing. The highest seven-day average of new cases of COVID-19 observed in Taiwan before its first vaccines were deployed was just 3. By May 28, 2021, that seven-day average exploded to 597. As the rest of the world grappled with an increase in cases despite the global advancement of vaccination efforts, most those countries had record their all-time highs for new cases and deaths before any vaccines were available. One exception to that rule was seen in Israel, where the record for a highest single-day case count was recorded following the beginning of the nation’s campaign to administer third doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines in the wake of concerns of the delta variant’s impact of the efficacy of vaccines. Yet, even though Israel did surpass its previous one-day high, the amount by which it exceeded that paled in comparison to Taiwan. The seven-day average in Taiwan would not fall under 10 new cases again until September 2021. Since then, despite the increase in vaccinations, that national average has never managed to reach its pre-vaccination levels. The lowest seven-day average Taiwan has seen since it began vaccinating its citizens was recorded at 5 on September 5, 2021.

“If your particular “circle of friends and acquaintances” hasn’t seen a spike of severe injuries, disability and mortality yet — I’ll make a prediction: It will.”

• Go Ahead, Keep Being Stupid (Denninger)

Two days of FDA murderfest are on deck with the agenda items being Moderna and J&J “booster” shots. As with the Fraudzer jabs there will be no data deck submitted, no side effect profile, no disclosure of the data the manufacturers have that is not in VAERS, no reconciliation of the VAERS data with clinical experience and zero accountability for any of the people already wounded, including those mortally wounded who don’t know it yet all the way up to those already dead. The screamfest about how Covid-19 infection produces “worse” myocarditis and other cardiac complications than the vaccines will, of course, be maintained. Never mind the clinical study data that says that’s a lie:

“To analyse the impact of COVID-19 pandemics on CVD outcomes in Belo Horizonte (BH), the 6th greater capital city in Brazil, including: mortality, mortality at home, hospitalizations, intensive care unit utilization, and in-hospital mortality; and the differential effect according to sex, age range, social vulnerability, and pandemics phase.” Oh, you mean someone’s done the work? Why yes, yes they have. Oh look, we have a formal study here in Brazil. They have fat people, thin people, old people, young people, you know, humans. And like everywhere else they get cardiovascular disease. Like everywhere else they also have gotten hammered with Covid-19; indeed, they’ve been hammered worse than many other places, largely because they have an extraordinarily-stratified population and a large part of it has jack for medical care, routine or otherwise.

So if Covid-19 was killing people a few weeks to months later via heart attack it would show up in the numbers. This study ran through November of 2020, that is, all through the worst of the first wave, with months of time for those adverse impacts to show up and kill people. By the claims all those who got Covid-19 and recovered contributed massively to CVD deaths, right? The rate was much higher than it would otherwise be. Why, after you got Covid-19 you were much more likely to have a heart attack and die! THIS IS THE CLAIM SO WHAT WERE THE RESULTS? “Results: We found no changes in CVD mortality rates (RiR 1.01, 95%CI 0.96-1.06). However, CVD deaths occurred more at homes (RiR 1.32, 95%CI 1.20-1.46) than in hospitals (RiR 0.89, 95%CI 0.79-0.99), as a result of a substantial decline in hospitalization rates, even though proportional in-hospital deaths increased.”

Oh. What did they find related to this? That people avoided the hospital when in cardiac distress and thus the percentage of such deaths that occurred at home went up. But wait….. is this one indictment or two indictments in one study? You see, if going to the doctor or hospital saves your ass when in such a condition then the death rate from CVD should have gone up. That it was difficult to figure out why it went up is still an open question, but it should have increased, assuming said hospitals and doctors actually improved outcomes. But…. they don’t improve outcomes, do they? Need to read it again? Results: We found no changes in CVD mortality rates So said doctors and hospitals don’t help. That’s a bummer.

What’s a bigger bummer is that the jabs are killing and severely-injuring people, and not a few of them either. If your particular “circle of friends and acquaintances” hasn’t seen a spike of severe injuries, disability and mortality yet — I’ll make a prediction: It will.

Protection for 6 weeks? Or do we have to subtract the first two here as well?

Oh, and your booster can be another vaccine too, I hear, so nobody will have any idea anymore about a specific vaccine’s efficacy.

• FDA Panel Recommends Half-dose Boosters For Moderna Vaccine (JT)

The Food and Drug Administration’s advisory panel unanimously approved Thursday a booster shot of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for select groups of people. According to the Associated Press, the panel of outside experts recommended booster shots be administered to people over the age of 65, people ages 16 and older who have underlying conditions causing them to be at risk of severe illness, and those whose profession puts them at risk of contracting COVID. The final category of people includes frontline workers, such as supermarket employees, healthcare professionals, and first responders.

The panel recommended booster shots at half the dosage of the original shots, advising that they can be administered six months after a person was fully vaccinated. According to NPR, some experts pointed out that the FDA has set a precedent by granting emergency use to Pfizer for its booster shots. “I support this [emergency use authorization] because we’ve already approved it for Pfizer, and I don’t see how we can possibly not approve it for Moderna and not have most U.S. folks completely confused,” said Dr. Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa. “I think it’s a pragmatic issue.” The panel is expected to discuss booster shots for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine on Friday.

We’re going to lose a lot of doctors, nurses, policemen, soldiers.

• Navy Announces Plans To Expel Those Refusing Vaccine, Revoke Benefits (ZH)

At the end of August the Pentagon initially announced a mandate for military personnel across all armed service branches, ordering them to “immediately begin” Covid vaccination. A memo issued by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time directed the Secretaries of the Military Departments to “immediately begin full vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces under DoD authority on active duty or in the Ready Reserve, including the National Guard, who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19.” However, when the mandate went out it remained unclear precisely what repercussions military members would face if they don’t comply – this also as a number of lawsuits have since been filed against the DoD by troops arguing that the order violates individual medical freedom. On Thursday the US Navy made it clear to their personnel: receive the jab by November 28 for be expelled from the service.

“With Covid-19 vaccines now mandatory for all military members, the Navy has announced plans to start processing for discharge those who refuse vaccination without a pending or approved exemption,” the US Navy said in the statement. The Pentagon had so far remained ambiguous over whether servicemembers would actually be booted after the mandate cut-off date. With Thursday’s Navy announcement, other branches are expected to soon follow suit. The AFP notes that “The navy said that 98 percent of its 350,000 active duty members had begun or completed the vaccination process.” The rate among all branches combined is about equal – or just under this, but Pentagon officials worry about lagging vaccination rates in the reserves, given recent reports indicate just 80% of the reserves have had at least one dose.

The AFP report underscores that if official Pentagon policy becomes to expel troops across the board for refusing the shot, this could create a significant problem for US defense readiness, given it would inevitably involve a mass exit of troops. “If all the services take the same hard line that the navy is taking, it risks losing as many as 46,000 troops, though presumably more will accept vaccinations before the deadline,” the report underscores. What remains is the question of the terms under which they would be discharged at the end of November. The Navy said in the Thursday announcement those kicked out for not taking the vaccine “will receive no lower than a general discharge under honorable conditions.” However, there could be penalties like being forced to pay back certain training and education costs – or more significantly the loss of post military service benefits, as the official Navy guidance spells out: “This type of discharge could result in the loss of some veterans’ benefits.”

“Workers at the lab face potential termination if they are unable to provide proof of vaccination by Friday.”

• Workers At Los Alamos Nuclear Lab Sue Over Vaccine Mandate (JTN)

Workers at a nuclear laboratory in New Mexico filed a lawsuit Thursday attempting to stop a vaccine mandate from taking effect. According to The Hill, more than 100 workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are alleging that the laboratory’s vaccine exemption policy is too strict and that their exemptions were wrongfully denied. The New Mexico laboratory is best known for creating the atomic bomb and is one of the largest employers within the state. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have some of the highest security clearances in the nation, and their jobs range from nuclear engineers to research technicians.

According to the Associated Press, the workers allege that the company that manages the lab, Triad National Security LLC., created a hostile work environment, as well as violated their constitutional rights by implementing a strict COVID-19 vaccine mandate. In an anecdote reported to The Hill, one worker claimed they were scolded publicly for not being vaccinated and told that his “family deserved to die.” According to the Associated Press, the management company says 96% of its workforce is vaccinated, while the plaintiffs claim this number is actually much lower. Workers at the lab face potential termination if they are unable to provide proof of vaccination by Friday.

“..passed a staggering $419.5 million of Zuckerberg’s money into local government elections offices..”

• The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg (Fed.)

During the 2020 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out likely Democratic voters. But this wasn’t traditional political spending. He funded a targeted, private takeover of government election operations by nominally non-partisan — but demonstrably ideological — non-profit organizations. Analysis conducted by our team demonstrates this money significantly increased Joe Biden’s vote margin in key swing states. This unprecedented merger of public election offices with private resources and personnel is an acute threat to our republic, and should be the focus of electoral reform efforts moving forward.

The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes. The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) passed a staggering $419.5 million of Zuckerberg’s money into local government elections offices, and it came with strings attached. Every CTCL and CEIR grant spelled out in great detail the conditions under which the grant money was to be used. This is not a matter of Democrats outspending Republicans. Private funding of election administration was virtually unknown in the American political system before the 2020 election.

Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, lobbying, or other expenses that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. It had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by left-wing activists, and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, and data-sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive outreach campaigns in areas heavy with Democratic voters. For instance, CTCL/CEIR funded self-described “vote navigators” in Wisconsin to “assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing … and witness absentee ballot signatures,” and a temporary staffing agency affiliated with Stacey Abrams called “Happy Faces” counting the votes amidst the election night chaos in Fulton County, Georgia.

“..training ex-military to be poll workers on Election Day..”

• Blackwell: Republicans Should Have Poll Workers At Every Precinct In 2022 (JTN)

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is urging that all Republican candidates should follow the lead of GOP Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who is training ex-military to be poll workers on Election Day. Youngkin’s campaign is ensuring they have poll workers — not just observers — at every precinct for the the state’s gubernatorial election in November, Blackwell explained on the John Solomon Reports podcast Wednesday. With this strategy, “any attempt to hide in the dark corners of a process and snatch this election from the voters of Virginia will be stopped dead in its tracks,” said Ohio’s former top election official. “[S]afeguarding the integrity of our elections is paramount to preserving our republic,” he continued.

“And any attempts of individual cheaters, or any attempt by the federal government to concentrate control of our elections back in one party in Washington, D.C. must be resist[ed].” Blackwell added that Virginia is the first test case “to build a strong team on the field — you know, not sideline sitters, but folks who are on the frontline.” Blackwell was asked if the Republican Party should train poll workers, like Youngkin is doing with ex-military, and have them cover every precinct in America during the 2022 midterm elections. “I’m encouraging … that battle plan to be carried out in every state,” he replied. In a country of over 3,000 counties, there are hundreds of thousands of precincts, he noted. “[W]e cannot allow what happened in 2020 to happen again,” Blackwell stressed, when “we had tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of precincts left uncovered.”

They’re sweating by now.

• #EmptyShelvesJoe Hits Number 1 Trend On Twitter (PM)

On Wednesday afternoon, #EmptyShelvesJoe became the number one trending hashtag on Twitter in the US as the country experiences shortages stemming from a supply chain crisis. Despite President Joe Biden calling himself a “Supply Commander” during his run for president, the US has been hit hard with supply chain snarls. At one point, there were 62 boats backed up at the Port of Long Beach in Los Angeles. In a Wednesday speech, Biden addressed the supply chain issues, saying he signed an executive order in February regarding the issue. Conditions have gradualy deteriorated since then.

“I know you’re hearing a lot about something called supply chains, and how hard it is to get a range of things from a toaster to sneakers to bicycles bedroom furniture. And that’s why, back in February. I signed a piece of legislation on supply chain — Executive Order on supply chains, and what we had to move on. And with the holidays coming up, you might be wondering if gifts you plan to buy will arrive on time,” said Biden. He continued: “Well, let me explain. Supply chains, essentially mean, how we make things, and how the material and parts get delivered to factory a factory, so we can manufacture things, and manufacturing here, how we move things, how a finished product moves from a factory to a store to your home.”

Biden assured residents in June that after a dismal jobs report, saying “There are going to be ups and down in jobs and economic reports, but there are going to be supply chain issues and price pressures on the way back to stability and steady growth.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked whether the issue would get better before it got worse, but she refused to make a prediction on the matter. “I’m not going to make a prediction of that from here. We know there are a number of issues that impact the supply chain and I don’t want to make a prediction because it’s not just one issue. Certainly, increasing the capacity at… ports and increasing the number of hours will have a positive impact, there’s no question about that,” said Psaki on Wednesday.

“With these disclosures, we have accounts being used to pay both Hunter and Joe Biden..”

• Joe Biden Could Get Drawn Into The FBI Probe Into His Son Hunter (Fox)

A report published Tuesday contends that President Joe Biden could get tied up in the ongoing FBI investigation into his son Hunter Biden’s finances due to the sharing of bank accounts and payment of each other’s bills. Emails obtained by DailyMail.com from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop show that his business partner, Eric Schwerin, was working on Joe Biden’s tax returns and discussing the father and son paying each other’s bills. Additionally, the emails show that Schwerin fielded book deal requests for Joe Biden, who was vice-president at the time, and also managed the donation of Biden’s Senate papers to the University of Delaware.

Hunter Biden has claimed that he and his father shared a bank account and admitted last year that he was under federal investigation over his taxes. Emails show that on April 9, 2010, Schwerin wrote to Hunter: “I was dealing all afternoon with JRB’s taxes (but solved a big issue – so it was all worth it).” On June 10 of the same year, Schwerin wrote, “Your Dad’s Delaware tax refund check came today. I am depositing it in his account and writing a check in that amount back to you since he owes it to you. Don’t think I need to run it by him, but if you want to go ahead. If not, I will deposit tomorrow.” It is unknown what specifically Joe Biden owed Hunter money for.

An expert on money laundering and criminal tax law told DailyMail.com that those entanglements could drag the current president into the FBI’s investigation. “Whatever transaction you’re looking at, if there’s a connection to a family member or a friend, sure the answer is yes [they would be investigated],” the expert, a former federal prosecutor who requested not to be named, told DailyMail.com. “Obviously, if you’re talking about the President of the United States, you’d better have a pretty damn good reason to talk to that person.”

[..] JONATHAN TURLEY: With these disclosures, we have accounts being used to pay both Hunter and Joe Biden and money being reimbursed to Hunter Biden from an individual associated with a company called Rosemont Seneca. Now that’s a company that has been tied to payments from China and Russia. And so this is getting more and more serious. The question is why the Justice Department hasn’t considered the appointment of a special counsel. We know there’s a criminal investigation into the tax issues, possible money laundering. But there are also serious questions about whether the Biden family conducted an extensive influence-peddling operation involving not just Hunter but his uncle and potentially the president of the United States.

The pandemic cost us a lot of energy.

• Americans’ Heating Bills To Soar Up To 50% This Winter (ZH)

So far, Americans have been watching the money-depleting energy crisis that hit Europe and Asia with detached bemusement: after all, while US energy prices are higher, they are nowhere near the hyperinflation observed in Europe. That is about to change because as the Energy Information Administration warned this week, much higher heating bills are coming this winter. According to the IEA’s October winter fuels outlook (pdf), nearly half of U.S. households that warm their homes with mainly natural gas can expect to spend an average of 30% more on their “multi-year high” bills compared with last year. The agency added that bills would be 50% higher if the winter is 10% colder than average and 22% higher if the winter is 10% warmer than average.

The forecast rise in costs, according to the report, will result in an average natural-gas home-heating bill of $746 from Oct. 1 to March 31, compared with about $573 during the same period last year. As the Epoch Times adds, propane costs are forecasted to rise by 54%, heating oil costs to rise by 43%, natural gas costs to rise by 30%, and electricity costs to rise by 6 percent. And with natural gas consumption projected to rise by 3% this winter, households are expected to spend $746 this winter, up from $573 last winter. The increase in natural gas heating costs varies by region with the Midwest U.S. leading the price hike at a 45% increase from last winter, and the Northeast expecting a hike of 14%.

Nearly half of all U.S. households use natural gas as the primary source of heating. Households relying on heating oil over winter will spend $1,734 over winter, relative to $1,212 last winter. Houses in Northeastern regions will be more affected by the price hike as nearly one in five homes in the region rely on heating oil as their primary source of space heating. The projection is based on the Brent crude oil price, which helps determine the prices of U.S. petroleum products. “The higher forecast Brent crude oil price this winter primarily reflects a decline in global oil inventories compared with last winter as a result of global oil demand that has risen amid restrained production levels from OPEC+ countries,” according to the EIA.

While most households commonly use electricity for heating, 41% rely on electric heat pumps or heaters as their primary source for space heating. These homes should expect to spend $1,268 this winter season, relative to $1196 last year. This projection accounts for 3 percent more residential electricity demand with more Americans working from home, a colder winter, as well as a rise in fuel costs for power generation. “During the first seven months of this year, the cost of natural gas delivered to U.S. electric generators averaged $4.97/MMBtu, which is more than double the average cost in 2020,” stated EIA.

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Debt Rattle October 12 2021

Oct 122021

October 12, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:15 am Finance Tagged with: cytokine storm, Durham, excess deaths, Iceland, ivermectin, Moderna, Seattle, Southwest, Texas, UK 56 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Two naked figures 1908

• Covid Response ‘One Of UK’s Worst Ever Public Health Failures’ (G.)

• Down To Only One Question Now.. (Denninger)

• The Waiting Is The Hardest Part (Kunstler)

• Seattle PD May Lose 40% Of Officers Over Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate (ZH)

• Southwest Says Staffing Shortages Contributed To Flight Snarls (Y!)

• Texas Gov. Abbott Issues Order Banning Covid Vaccination Mandates (NBC)

• Ivermectin as Covid Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Method in Healthcare Workers (NIH)

• Russian Drug To Calm Cytokine Storm (RT)

• FDA Responds To Nordic Countries Suspending Moderna COVID Vaccine Usage (ET)

• Thousands More People Than Usual Are Dying … But It’s Not From Covid (Tel.)

• Live Free Or Die: Why Medical Autonomy Matters (Miele)

• Is Durham Circling Jake Sullivan? (Turley)

• Southwest Offers Free Flights To Anyone Vaccinated Who Can Fly A Plane (BBee)

The report itself is as big a failure. What went wrong? Lockdowns came too late.. But the vaccines are a resounding success. Yeah, sure. Just look at all the new cases. Oh, and in the 2nd graph, what are all those recent excess deaths? Where do they come from? Couldn’t be the vaccines, could it?

Not one word on early treatment or prophylaxis. Not one.

• Covid Response ‘One Of UK’s Worst Ever Public Health Failures’ (G.)

Britain’s early handling of the coronavirus pandemic was one of the worst public health failures in UK history, with ministers and scientists taking a “fatalistic” approach that exacerbated the death toll, a landmark inquiry has found. “Groupthink”, evidence of British exceptionalism and a deliberately “slow and gradualist” approach meant the UK fared “significantly worse” than other countries, according to the 151-page “Coronavirus: lessons learned to date” report led by two former Conservative ministers. The crisis exposed “major deficiencies in the machinery of government”, with public bodies unable to share vital information and scientific advice impaired by a lack of transparency, input from international experts and meaningful challenge.

Despite being one of the first countries to develop a test for Covid in January 2020, the UK “squandered” its lead and “converted it into one of permanent crisis”. The consequences were profound, the report says. “For a country with a world-class expertise in data analysis, to face the biggest health crisis in 100 years with virtually no data to analyse was an almost unimaginable setback.” Boris Johnson did not order a complete lockdown until 23 March 2020, two months after the government’s Sage committee of scientific advisers first met to discuss the crisis. “This slow and gradualist approach was not inadvertent, nor did it reflect bureaucratic delay or disagreement between ministers and their advisers. It was a deliberate policy – proposed by official scientific advisers and adopted by the governments of all of the nations of the UK,” the report says.

“It is now clear that this was the wrong policy, and that it led to a higher initial death toll than would have resulted from a more emphatic early policy. In a pandemic spreading rapidly and exponentially, every week counted.”

“.. that the vaccine makes you more likely to both get and give to others the virus is now established.”

• Down To Only One Question Now.. (Denninger)

Unfortunately what this means is that now for anyone over 30 you are more likely to get infected, yes, adjusted for the population that is vaccinated, if you are vaccinated. Indeed in the 40-49 age group you’re close to double as probable on a per-population basis. This means that if your employer mandates the jabs he or she can be sued for putting those who can’t get vaccinated at double the risk, on purpose, by enforcing the mandate. Since there are people who can’t (due to immune compromise, such as cancer patients) be vaccinated this is now intentional risk. In other words this is hard, scientific evidence that these mandates by employers have increased the risk of customers (and other employees) contracting Covid-19. This isn’t a natural risk, it’s a man-made one created by the employer.

That’s actionable. So far this is not translating into higher risk of Covid hospitalization and death on a per-100,000 basis. But that the vaccine makes you more likely to both get and give to others the virus is now established. It is fact. It is in fact true for everyone who is over 30. I have pointed out that preventing infection was never in the cards; it was not part of the EUA, it was not part of the studies, it was never demonstrated. But this is much worse because now we are talking about a direct threat to others The CDC, NIH and Biden almost-certainly know this. This is why the mad rush to demand you get jabbed; they know damn well what this means and that while the manufacturer is immune the employers are not and in fact any such mandate leaves them wide open legally as soon as an unvaccinated person gets infected after being at said firm either as an employee or customer and sues the company on the basis of intentionally and maliciously increasing their risk by forcing their employees to get the jab, which is exactly what they did.

The data from England is conclusive in that regard. I bet that they’ve known this was happening right here in the US for months now. I expected no effective protection. What I did not expect was negative protection, but that’s what we got. This portends the potential for very, very bad things. Specifically, if the impairment is only toward Covid-19; that is, this is some sort of VEI specific to Covid, then the issue ends there. For those with natural (recovered) immunity they don’t care and absolutely should not get the jab; indeed, if you’re recovered and take them you may destroy your protection in part or whole and wind up susceptible to repeat infection you would otherwise not be hit with! If you do that you’re stupid and may well win a stupid prize.

But the 900lb Gorilla is that the impairment may not Covid-19 specific. In other words the impairment may be immune system generalized, in which case those who took the jabs are screwed because that immune damage could be long-lasting or even permanent, yet the protection against serious outcomes is specific to Covid. So yes, you’re “safer” against a serious outcome even while screwing everyone else, but at the same time you are wildly more-susceptible to a severe or fatal outcome due to, for example, influenza.

“If you were paranoid, you might suspect that something was up in this attempt to roadblock cheap, safe, and effective treatments..”

• The Waiting Is The Hardest Part (Kunstler)

Meanwhile, we have the arrival on-the-scene of another joker: Merck’s new anti-Covid-19 drug molnupiravir, said to reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from Covid by 50 percent. Merck and its partner, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, have applied for an emergency use authorization (EUA) from the FDC for this new drug, the same legal loophole that Pfizer and Moderna got for their mRNA vaxes. “Joe Biden” promised to spend $1.2 billion procuring a big batch of the new drug, so bringing it on must be a done deal. The catch is, molnupiravir is in the same order of nucleoside analogue drugs as remdesivir, a clinically-proven failure in the treatment of Covid 19. The stuff killed patients left and right. Molnupiravir’s mutagenic mechanism is supposed to mess with the DNA of Covid-19 viruses, incrementally disabling them and killing them off.

The trouble is, mutagenic drugs are notorious for broad spectrum action, so Molnupiravir might do the same thing to the various cells in your body, too: instant cancer. I guess we’ll have to stand-by and see how that works out. It pays to remember, though, that the EUA didn’t work out so well for the Covid-19 vaccines, did it? The waiting is the hardest part. Molnupiravir was shoved out onstage after two years of the public health authorities (Drs. Fauci, Collins, et al.) and the corporate news media casting curses on the existing suite of cheap drugs that proved clinically effective in the early treatment of Covid-19, namely ivermectin (a.k.a. “horse paste”), hydroxychloroquine, fluvoxamine, prednisone, etc. If you were paranoid, you might suspect that something was up in this attempt to roadblock cheap, safe, and effective treatments in favor of untested novelties that would just happen to be another multibillion-dollar boon for drug companies.

How many of these “leaders” will give in before Christmas?

• Seattle PD May Lose 40% Of Officers Over Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate (ZH)

It was inevitable – as vaccine mandates across the country approach their deadlines, vast swaths of American workers, service members and atheletes face termination or disciplinary action for refusing to take the Covid-19 jab. In Los Angeles, nearly 1,000 firefighters are about to sue the city over the mandate. Southwest Airlines’ pilot union sued the company last week, before staffing shortages led to the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights over the weekend (and more on Monday). Meanwhile, doctors and nurses across the country have begun suing their employers. Interestingly, after a group of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department sued over the mandate, Sheriff Alex Villanueva announced that he would not ‘force anyone’ to take the jab.

But not Seattle – which stands to lose 40% of its 1,000 person force for failing to get vaccinated as an Oct. 18 deadline approaches. “The environment has been pretty toxic and negative,” one officer anonymously told Fox 13. “Not just from this whole mandate, but prior to that as well. I’m not sure this would be a good place for me to work long-term for my mental health. It has been very stressful.” Recall that this is on the heels of the city losing around 300 officers amid Black Lives Matter riots and the “defund the police” movement. By the numbers, as of Oct. 6, 292 sworn personnel had yet to provide proof of a COVID-19 vaccination per the report, down from 354 on Tuesday. An additional 111 officers are awaiting the results of exemption requests, meaning the total number of potentially fired Seattle cops is as high as 403.

The hide and seek game continues.

• Southwest Says Staffing Shortages Contributed To Flight Snarls (Y!)

After initially blaming air traffic control issues and weather for thousands of flight cancelations, Southwest Airlines on Monday acknowledged that staffing shortages also played a role in the service disruption. The carrier cancelled 1,124 flights on Sunday — by far the highest rate of any airline — 800 the day before and another 326 on Monday, according to airline tracker FlightAware. “On Friday evening, the airline ended the day with numerous cancellations, primarily created by weather and other external constraints, which left aircraft and crews out of pre-planned positions to operate our schedule on Saturday,” the low-cost carrier said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the out-of-place aircraft and continued strain on our crew resources created additional cancelations across our point-to-point network that cascaded throughout the weekend and into Monday.”

CNBC reported Southwest Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven acknowledged to employees that the company “is still not where we need to be on staffing, and in particular with flight crews.” Like most airlines, Southwest let employees go when air traffic collapsed as the Covid-19 pandemic began, but has seen business surge this year as vaccinations spur people to travel again. The weekend’s snarls caused speculation that some pilots or other Southwest staff were participating in a work slowdown as a way to express opposition to the company’s decision to require its employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19. In their statement, Southwest said “the operational challenges were not a result of Southwest employee demonstrations” and they hope to restore normal operations “as soon as possible.”

The value of freedom.

• Texas Gov. Abbott Issues Order Banning Covid Vaccination Mandates (NBC)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Monday prohibiting any entity, including private businesses, from imposing Covid-19 vaccination requirements on employees or customers. “The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective, and our best defense against the virus, but should remain voluntary and never forced,” Abbott said in a statement. Abbott, a Republican, said in his order that it was prompted by the Biden administration’s vaccination mandate, which he said was federal overreach. President Joe Biden announced a mandate last month requiring companies with 100 or more employees to ensure that their workforces are vaccinated or regularly tested. The Labor Department has yet to release details of the emergency rule, but Biden last week called on companies to act now and not to wait for the requirement to go into effect.

Abbott, who tested positive for Covid in August, has also resisted mask mandates and requiring proof of vaccination. Texas has continued to experience a rise in cases and crowded hospitals, prompting Abbott to invest in monoclonal antibody infusion centers. Abbott issued executive orders over the summer banning local governments and school districts from requiring either masks or vaccinations, issuing $1,000 fines to those who failed to comply. School districts in San Antonio and Dallas have challenged the order in court. The Legislature also passed a bill in June banning private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from customers.

From the NIH: ” Ivermectin is a drug that has been shown to be active against coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) in previous studies”.

Any further questions?

• Ivermectin as Covid Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Method in Healthcare Workers (NIH)

Background: Ivermectin is a drug that has been shown to be active against coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) in previous studies. Healthcare personnel are highly exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Therefore, we decided to offer them ivermectin as a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) method.

Purpose: Primary outcome was to measure the number of healthcare workers with symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and a positive reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) COVID-19 test in the ivermectin group and in the control group. Secondary outcome was to measure the number of sick healthcare workers with a positive RT-PCR COVID-19 test whose condition deteriorated and required hospitalization and/or an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), or who died, in the ivermectin group and in the control group.

Material and methods: This observational and retrospective cohort study was carried out in two medical centers, Centro Medico Bournigal (CMBO) in Puerto Plata and Centro Medico Punta Cana (CMPC) in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. The study began on June 29, 2020, and ended on July 26, 2020. A Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Propensity Score Matching procedure was applied in a 1:1 ratio to homogeneously evaluate 271 healthcare personnel that adhered to a PrEP program with ivermectin at a weekly oral (PO) dose of 0.2 mg/kg, and 271 healthcare personnel who did not adhere to the program were assigned as a control group.

Results: In 28 days of follow-up, significant protection of ivermectin preventing the infection from SARS-CoV-2 was observed: 1.8% compared to those who did not take it (6.6%; p-value = 0.006), with a risk reduction of 74% (HR 0.26, 95% CI [0.10,0.71]). Conclusions: These results suggest that compassionate use of weekly ivermectin could be an option as a preventive method in healthcare workers and as an adjunct to immunizations, while further well-designed randomized controlled trials are developed to facilitate scientific consensus.

Promising, but…

• Russian Drug To Calm Cytokine Storm (RT)

A group of Russian scientists have created a drug that may potentially revolutionize the treatment of Covid-19 by defusing the most catastrophic reaction the disease causes in patients, while not destroying their immune response. The drug, called Leitragin, was developed by the Biomedical Technology Research Center of the Russian Federal Medical and Biology Agency (FMBA), and is currently undergoing clinical trials in Russia. Although its base substance was previously known and used in ulcer treatment medicine by Soviet and Russian doctors, it was the FMBA team that discovered how to apply it for the treatment of severe cases of Covid-19 and, potentially, other deadly diseases that cause life-threatening lung inflammation.

The Russian scientists had tasked themselves with finding a substance that would act as an ‘off switch’ for the chain reaction that, after being triggered by the invading SARS-CoV-2 virus, actually causes potential organ failure and death. This reaction of the immune system, dubbed the “cytokine storm,” has been variously described as our body’s overreaction to the virus or a “suicide attack” against the invading pathogen, and even as an evolutionary mechanism to stop the spread of deadly infections with the death of the host. Trying to stop this uncontrolled immune response while still preserving the body’s ability to fight the virus without causing more damage is what scientists and medics in intensive care units across the world have been wrestling with during the Covid-19 pandemic. In that regard, Leitragin is being touted as a game-changer, since its novel mechanism acts in a targeted way, and is said to be completely safe for one’s health.

Wait, so Iceland ditches Moderna because it has enough Pfizer… which it says has the same effects as Moderna.

• FDA Responds To Nordic Countries Suspending Moderna COVID Vaccine Usage (ET)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responded to Nordic countries limiting the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine last week, saying the shot’s benefits outweigh the risks. Health officials in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland suspended the use of the Moderna vaccine for younger people due to a risk of side effects including myocarditis. Sweden said it would pause the vaccine for people under the age of 30, and Denmark did the same for those under 18. Finland said that males under the age 30 shouldn’t receive the jab, while Icelandic officials added over the weekend that they would suspend use of the shot.

“The FDA is aware of these data. At this time, FDA continues to find that the known and potential benefits of vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks for the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine,” an FDA official said in a statement to news outlets over the weekend in response to the Nordic nations’ decision to suspend the vaccine for certain age groups. Moderna, meanwhile, said in a statement after the countries’ decision that it was “aware of the very rare occurrence of myocarditis and/or pericarditis following administration of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” “These are typically mild cases and individuals tend to recover within a short time following standard treatment and rest. The risk of myocarditis is substantially increased for those who contract COVID-19, and vaccination is the best way to protect against this,” the company’s statement continued.

Moderna’s vaccine is still being administered under the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization. The company’s application for full approval is still pending. On Oct. 10, Iceland’s Health Directorate said the Moderna vaccine would be entirely suspended due to the risk of cardiac inflammation. “As the supply of Pfizer vaccine is sufficient in the territory … the chief epidemiologist has decided not to use the Moderna vaccine in Iceland,” according to a statement published on the Health Directorate website. The move was handed down due to “the increased incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination with the Moderna vaccine, as well as with vaccination using Pfizer/BioNTech,” its statement continued.

Sep 24. yeah, we have no idea what kills all those people…

• Thousands More People Than Usual Are Dying … But It’s Not From Covid (Tel.)

While focus remains firmly fixed on Covid-19, a second health crisis is quietly emerging in Britain. Since the beginning of July, there have been thousands of excess deaths that were not caused by coronavirus. According to health experts, this is highly unusual for the summer. Although excess deaths are expected during the winter months, when cold weather and seasonal infections combine to place pressure on the NHS, summer generally sees a lull. This year is a worrying outlier. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), since July 2 there have been 9,619 excess deaths in England and Wales, of which 48 per cent (4,635) were not caused by Covid-19. So if all these extra people are not dying from coronavirus, what is killing them?

Data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that during that period there were 2,103 extra death registrations with ischemic heart disease, 1,552 with heart failure, as well as an extra 760 deaths with cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke and aneurysm and 3,915 with other circulatory diseases. Acute and chronic respiratory infections were also up with 3,416 more mentions on death certificates than expected since the start of July, while there have been 1,234 extra urinary system disease deaths, 324 with cirrhosis and liver disease and 1,905 with diabetes. Alarmingly, many of these conditions saw the biggest drops in diagnosis in 2020, as the NHS struggled to cope with the pandemic.

A report released last week by the Government detailing the direct and indirect health impacts of the pandemic reported that there were an estimated 23 million fewer GP consultations – both in-person and online, in 2020 compared with 2019. Diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) fell by 51 per cent, atrial fibrillation 26 per cent, heart failure 20 per cent, diabetes 19 per cent, coronary heart disease, 17 per cent and stroke and transient ischemic attack by 16 per cent.

“I make my choices, and you make yours. Except with COVID. Then Joe Biden makes my choices, trying to protect me from myself.”

• Live Free Or Die: Why Medical Autonomy Matters (Miele)

I think vaccines have done the world a world of good. I remember getting my smallpox vaccine and waiting eagerly to get the scar on my arm that my mother’s arm showed off like a badge of courage, but it never appeared for me. Then when the oral polio vaccine was developed, I remember lining up in the gym at North Garnerville Elementary School in New York to get my first dose on a sugar cube. Yum. So yes, I’m pro-vaccine. I also generally get the flu vaccine every year. I even got a shot last year, although for some peculiar reason, influenza vanished last winter while COVID was enjoying its greatest reign of terror. And naturally, my three children have all been vaccinated against the usual childhood diseases and taken whatever was recommended to keep them safe.

But one thing I never thought of doing was forcing my neighbors to get vaccinated against the flu. Did you know that influenza kills as many as 50,000 Americans a year? That’s approaching the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the entire length of the Vietnam War. On average, flu kills as many Americans every year as car crashes. Yet did anyone — even St. Anthony Fauci — ever dare to suggest that vaccination for flu should be mandatory because it would save lives? Hell, no, and even though many vaccinations are required of school children for good reasons, we also have allowed religious and medical exemptions for families that needed them. Because we aren’t supposed to be a nation of slaves, but a nation of citizens. If someone had a personal reason why they rejected vaccines, we didn’t put them through an inquisition or try to burn them at the stake of public opinion. This was America — land of the free.

I also never thought of celebrating when a person who opted not to get the flu vaccine died of influenza. But vaccine mandate supporters seem to get giddy when a vaccine refusenik falls ill from COVID and dies on a ventilator or worse. This isn’t science; it’s scientific imperialism — and the CDC centurions are ruthless in their application of power to the masses. Obey or die. So why might a reasonable person decide not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in such a hysterical climate? Maybe because it’s an experimental and untested drug using a technology (mRNA) that has the power to tamper with the very genetic makeup of the cells in my body. Maybe because I’m more worried about herd instinct than herd immunity. Maybe because I’ve heard wonky scientists gloating about the power they wield over everyday Americans.

Maybe because Big Pharma’s getting rich by inventing reasons why you just might need to get a new shot every year. Maybe because I want to decide for myself what’s best for me. Think of it this way. You are afraid of dying of COVID-19. So am I. But that doesn’t mean I am going to die from COVID. In fact, there is what I would characterize as an acceptably small chance I will die of COVID, and I’m 66 years old, right smack in the realm of the supposedly at-risk elderly population. According to data from the CDC reported at RationalGround.com, from Jan. 1, 2020 until Sept. 11, 2021, there were 12,702 U.S. deaths from COVID for my age cohort out of an estimated population of 3,618,069. That’s a death rate of 0.365%.

Meanwhile, 100,449 people my age died during the same period of all causes, suggesting I have about a 12% chance of dying of something this year, a much scarier possibility than dying of COVID-19. Think of it! If I’m going to die this year, I’m 33 times more likely to die of anything else besides COVID. Based on the propaganda we are inundated with every day about the virus, I should be terrified! There are way worse things out there trying to kill me than COVID. But I’m not terrified, not even slightly, because life is always a risk. I can temper my risks by avoiding downhill skiing, ATVs, booze, surfing, and motorsports. Those are my choices, but heaven forbid I should dictate that you have to avoid those activities because they are not 100% safe. Your behavior is none of my business. I make my choices, and you make yours. Except with COVID. Then Joe Biden makes my choices, trying to protect me from myself.

Wouldn’t he be circling Biden then?

• Is Durham Circling Jake Sullivan? (Turley)

As soon as the conspiracy theory was packaged and delivered the FBI and the media by Sussman, the indictment recounts an exchange between some of those “VIPs”: “… on or about September 15, 2016, Campaign Lawyer-1 exchanged emails with the Clinton Campaign’s campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor concerning the Russian Bank-1 allegations that SUSSMANN had recently shared with Reporter-1.” The campaign lawyer reportedly was Elias, and the “foreign policy advisor” reportedly was Sullivan. Sullivan was quoted in an official campaign press statement as stating that the Alfa Bank allegation “could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow.”

In the statement, Sullivan said: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia … This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin.” The U.S. intelligence community ultimately rejected the Alfa Bank conspiracy. It also concluded that the Steele dossier not only relied on a suspected Russian agent but likely was used by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation through the Clinton campaign. Yet, when Sullivan was later questioned by Congress, he went full Sergeant Schultz, claiming he basically did not have a clue about the basis or origins of the Alfa Bank controversy or other campaign-orchestrated scandals.

Sullivan was adept at laying qualifiers upon qualifiers to render statements useless: “broadly speaking, at some point in the summer, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, around the convention, I learned that there was an effort to do some research into the ties between Trump and Russia.” That will make any false statement claim difficult absent direct involvement in the planning of these “campaign efforts.” Sullivan denied knowing that Elias or Sussman were working for the Clinton campaign, despite numerous news articles identifying Elias as the campaign’s general counsel. Sullivan just shrugged and said: “To be honest with you, Marc wears a tremendous number of hats, so I wasn’t sure who he was representing. I sort of thought he was, you know, just talking to us as, you know, a fellow traveler in this — in this campaign effort.”

“..other skills that were not required, but beneficial: Experience calming herds of rabid, sleepless passengers, expertise in flying through mysterious, invisible weather events, and the ability to land the plane.”

• Southwest Offers Free Flights To Anyone Vaccinated Who Can Fly A Plane (BBee)

A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines has announced delays in flights due to strange weather that seems to pass over competitors’ planes, only affecting their own signature blue and orange aircraft. The airline has stated these delays have no connection to their pilots protesting vaccine mandates. The spokesperson then announced a new Southwest Airlines incentive program for potential passengers: All flights, domestic or international, are free to any passenger who is vaccinated and can also fly a plane.

“The requirements to take advantage of these incredible savings are simple,” said Southwest CEO Bob Southwest to a crowd of customers who have been stuck at the airport all weekend and were frothing at the mouth in anger. “Show us proof of vaccination against COVID-19 and promise us you know how fly commercial airliners, and your flight is on us.” The CEO then mentioned other skills that were not required, but beneficial: Experience calming herds of rabid, sleepless passengers, expertise in flying through mysterious, invisible weather events, and the ability to land the plane.

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Attack on Red Blood Cells

Oct 062021

October 6, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:33 pm Finance Tagged with: ACE2, endothelium, ivermectin, lipid nano particle, red blood cells, vascular occlusion 29 Responses »

Joaquin Sorolla Passeggiata sulla spiaggia (Walk on the beach) 1909

This is from regular Automatic Earth commenter “chooch”.

chooch: I had to switch from “be the spike” to “be the Lipid Nano Particle” and I now find myself in a vortex of understanding for which there may be no escape velocity. It could be a kool-aid vortex, but we will see. Suffice it to say, though the primary mechanisms are different, the understanding gained on the infection side is still most useful.

The infection gains access to the blood stream (“ARDS” like DAD not a precursor):

1) The virus gains access to an epithelial cell in the air sac of the lungs by attaching to ACE2. It uses this cell to make many copies of itself.

2) Once it breaches the epithelial wall, which is only one cell thick it gains access to an ACE2 receptor on the pericytes, which sit on top of the endothelial cells that make up the nearby capillaries.

3) Many more copies are made, weakening the capillary walls, which again are only one cell thick. The virus now has access to the blood stream.

Here are three interesting articles, starting with the most recent, describing complications related to having a spike coated virus in the blood.

[1] (virus time = Jul 2021)

COVID-19 Changes Properties Blood Cells

“Shortness of breath, fatigue and headaches, some patients still struggle with these long-term effects of a severe infection by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus after six months or more. This post COVID-19 syndrome, also called COVID long-haulers, is still not properly understood. What is clear is that during the course of the disease, often blood circulation is impaired, clotting and dangerous vascular occlusions can occur, and oxygen transport in is limited. These are all phenomena in which the blood cells and their physical properties play a key role.”

“They found that, for example, the size and deformability of the red blood cells of patients with the disease deviated strongly from those of healthy people. This indicates damage to these cells and could explain the increased risk of vascular occlusion and embolisms in the lungs. In addition, the oxygen supply, which is one of the main tasks of the erythrocytes, may be impaired in infected persons.”

Lymphocytes (one type of white blood cell responsible for the acquired immune defense) were in turn significantly softer in COVID-19 patients, which typically indicates a strong immune reaction. The researchers made similar observations for neutrophil granulocytes, another group of white blood cells involved in the innate immune response. These blood cells even remained drastically altered seven months after the acute infection.

[2] (virus time = Feb 2021)

Covid-19 Can Affect The Blood. Its Spike Protein May Be The Culprit.

In this article they refer to RGD, I think they mean RBD (Receptor Binding Domain)

The autopsy reports revealed COVID-19 patients were suffering from huge amounts of thick, coagulated blood, and dysfunctional blood vessels were tearing through body tissue instead of repairing it-highly uncommon side effects of respiratory diseases.

The postmortem evidence plus his own experience with something called “COVID toes”-an odd side effect of the disease that causes heightened blood vessel formation in the toes, turning them bright red-led Makowski to speculate that something about the virus might be causing abnormal blood-related complications.

“One of the most perplexing and devastating effects of this disease is the scenario where three or four weeks after being hospitalized with pneumonia, people under the age of 50 are back home, they feel fine, and then all of a sudden they have a stroke and die,” says Makowski, professor and chair of the bioengineering department at Northeastern.

[3] (virus time = Nov 2020)

Attack on Red Blood Cells a Prime Suspect in COVID’s Debilitating Effects

The oxygen-saturation level of COVID patients, especially those with severe cases, was prone to dropping to dangerous levels, even below 90%. “We asked the question: Can it be due to the cell that transports oxygen?” D’Alessandro said. “Can COVID attack red blood cells – the most abundant cell in the human body – which has evolved specifically to transport oxygen?”

The answer to both questions was “yes.” The study revealed that SARS-CoV-2 damages the membranes of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The virus didn’t affect the cells’ hemoglobin, which allow the cells to pick up oxygen, but it did damage membrane proteins responsible for blood cell structure, a characteristic that allows these cells to indirectly regulate red cell capacity to release oxygen and, most importantly, to squeeze through narrow capillaries in the periphery of the bloodstream.

“When the red blood cells are damaged, and you’re a COVID patient who is exposed to another stress – pharmacological treatment, high fever or, after recovering from the disease, exercise or something of that nature – then your red blood cell is more likely to hemolyze (rupture),” D’Alessandro said. This explains why D’Alessandro, who jumped back into training for a late-summer marathon, noticed that more than a month after his initial COVID bout – two subsequent tests came out negative – he felt extremely tired just 20 minutes into a run.

“Something was happening in the red blood cells, and it’s why we believe that they are part of the problem in long-term COVID symptoms,” he said. The lingering oxygen-level difficulties are explained by the lifespan of red blood cells. The cells circulate for up to 120 days before the body replaces them. To make room for hemoglobin, red blood cells have evolved to lose nuclei and organelles that allow other cells to replace damaged molecular components. So, if the virus damages red blood cells, it will be up to four months before they are cleared and replaced with cells that do not carry such damage.

Anyway, before addressing the best theory I have come across regarding Covid in the blood I wanted to circle back and highlight the spike proteins RBD affinity to Sialic Acid (SA) and its importance in the human body. Here is the image, showing how this affinity grows from a Corona cold virus thru Sars-Cov2.

Below is from the abstract of the linked paper. (It’s mainly for reference if interested)

[4] (virus time = Jan 2020)

Sialic acid and biology of life: An introduction

Sialic acid play important roles in human physiology of cell-cell interaction, communication, cell-cell signaling, carbohydrate-protein interactions, cellular aggregation, development processes, immune reactions, reproduction, and in neurobiology and human diseases in enabling the infection process by bacteria and virus, tumor growth and metastasis, microbiome biology, and pathology. It enables molecular mimicry in pathogens that allows them to escape host immune responses.

Viral sialic acid-recognizing lectins or HAs can agglutinate RBC. Viruses use sialic acids linked to glycoproteins and gangliosides to attach to host cells, followed by their entry, for example, corona virus, DNA tumor viruses, hepatitis virus, influenza viruses (A, B, and C), mouse polyoma virus, mumps, Newcastle disease virus (NDV), norovirus, parainfluenza viruses, rotavirus, and Sendai virus. HAs from influenza A, C, NDV, and polyoma viruses have been crystallized. Sialic acid-recognizing lectins from adenoviruses and picornaviruses have not been identified.

Some of these viruses carry neuraminidase or sialyl-O-acetyl-esterase that destroys the receptor, promotes virus release from infected cells, and removes sialic acid on host cell affecting cell surface binding of the virus. Influenza A virus enters the host by using host surface sialic acids. Influenza C virus HA-esterase specific for 9-O-acetylated sialic acids can break down 9-O-acetyl ester. HA-esterase from mouse hepatitis virus is specific to sialic acids substituted by O-acetyl group at the C-4 position (Neu4,5Ac2). HA-neuraminidase of NDV84 and parainfluenza viruses perform vital functions in infection biology.

Back in Oct 2020, independent researcher David Scheim, uploaded this paper to SSRN. In virus time it was before the rollout of the jabs and early days of mass IVM awareness. Here is the link to the abstract. From there you can open the pdf.

[5] (virus time = Oct 2020)

From Cold to Killer: How SARS-CoV-2 Evolved without Hemagglutinin Esterase to Agglutinate, Then Clot Blood Cells in Pulmonary and Systemic Microvasculature

Abstract;
The role of vascular occlusion in the morbidities, pulmonary and systemic, of COVID-19 has received increasing focus. Histological studies of lung tissue from COVID-19 patients have found extensively damaged endothelium of capillaries adjoining relatively intact alveoli, corresponding to hypoxemia accompanying normal breathing mechanics in such patients. Advanced image analysis of lung CT scans of COVID-19 patients reveals redistribution of blood flow from smaller to larger diameter blood vessels, this effect correlated with the degree of breathing dysfunction.

Essential to the study of vascular occlusion in COVID-19 are viral properties dating back to studies of Jonas Salk in the 1940s that have been positively established for SARS-CoV-2. First, SARS-CoV-2 binds to red blood cells (RBCs), in vitro and also clinically in COVID-19 patients. Second, although fusion and replication of SARS-CoV-2 occur via ACE2, such hemagglutinating viruses initially attach to infective targets and clump with blood cells via much more abundantly distributed sialic acid (SA) glycoconjugate binding sites. SARS-CoV-2, in particular, attaches to these SA sites. Third, certain enveloped viruses express an enzyme, hemagglutinin esterase (HE), that counteracts viral-RBC clumping. Notably, among betacoronaviruses, the common cold strains express HE while SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1 and MERS, the virulent strains, do not.

These hemagglutinating properties of SARS-COV-2 establish a framework for “catch and clump” induction of microvascular occlusion proposed here. Ultramicroscopic studies of tissues from COVID-19 patients indicate a key role for hemagglutination early and mid-course in COVID-19, before such clumps harden into clots via the coagulation cascade. Hemagglutination may be reversed by two anti-COVID-19 therapeutics that each competitively bind to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, blocking such viral attachments.

One therapeutic is antiviral antibodies generated by vaccines, the anti-hemagglutination effect of which is exhibited in Jonas Salk’s hemagglutination inhibition assay. The other therapeutic is ivermectin (IVM), a drug of Nobel Prize honored distinction, distributed in 3.7 billion doses worldwide. In ten clinical trials, three with randomized controls, IVM yielded mortality reductions for COVID-19 of 90% at highest doses. IVM may limit virulence of SARS-CoV-2 by steric interference with multivalent spike protein attachments to SA binding sites, blocking hemagglutination, an effect likely to target mutant viral strains.

NOTE: In regards to IVM studies.

1) There may be little impact in a respiratory only infection, therefore taking it prophylactically may not help much in the respiratory phase if infected.

2) The real impact seems to be for those whose infections have moved into the vascular system.

TAE’s resident doctor John Day added this:

@Chooch: Lots of good work. I can see you are cut out for it. Ivermectin does, tremendously decrease infections when used prophylactically, depending on the dosage regimen. FLCCC increased dose and frequency recently, which should kick viral butt, but it’s a high ivermectin burn rate. Ivermectin has a very long half life intracellularly and you might not come across that. It helps keep COVID inside the cells from replicating, partly by blocking transit within the cell.

COVID in the nasopharynx is no big deal, a cold. When it gets into the lungs it jumps to the bloodstream and becomes a big deal, with micro-clotting. Vitamin-D stablilizes the endothelium. Ivermectin reduces the clot formation and a lot of cross-linking that contributes to it, and also inhibits virus getting into the cells. Once weekly or less ivermectin is mainly protecting inside the cells, whereas the twice weekly prophylaxis FLCCC now recommends is full protection in the bloodstream, too.

The virus takes about 5 days to incubate from inoculation to symptoms, but viral loads get high by day #3 post inoculation. Ivermectin twice per week really breaks that cycle, and prevents even nasopharyngeal viral loads from getting high. Ivermectin, even weekly, vitamin-D, a little zinc and quercetin should really be a giant COVID-Condom of protection.

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Debt Rattle October 6 2021

Oct 062021

October 6, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, ivermectin, medical privacy, Molnupiravir, placebo, whistleblower 30 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Five women 1907

• Mandating Vaccinations For Domestic Flights (Gato Malo)

• Wuhan and US Scientists Planned To Create A New Coronavirus In 2018 (DM)

• What Is The REAL Long-Term Impairment? (Denninger)

• The Extraordinary Hypocrisy of Molnupiravir (PR)

• Ivermectin – Truth and Totalitarianism (Hope)

• Oh, You Flashed A VexPass? (Denninger)

• How New Zealand Snookered Itself By Calling Time On Zero Covid (G.)

• Pentagon Sets Nov. 22 Deadline For Civilian Employees To Get Vaccinated (JTN)

• New York Expands Covid-19 Vaccine Pass Program (JTN)

• Canadian Government’s Proposed Online Harms Legislation (CBC)

• Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook (Greenwald)

military purge

The Biden cabal is purging the military with their vaccine mandate. pic.twitter.com/9wtjheaJ8l

— Joe Kent for WA-3 (@joekent16jan19) October 6, 2021

Biden Kerry AUKUS

John Kerry admits in interview with French TV that Joe Biden had no idea about the fallout with the French from the AUKUS sub deal.

"He literally had not been aware of what had transpired" pic.twitter.com/EblvE05zKg

— POLARIS (@polarisnatsec) October 5, 2021

Safe! Effective!

• Mandating Vaccinations For Domestic Flights (Gato Malo)

Watching Ashish Jha, blight of the Gato alma mater, wade into the debate on vaccine mandates for air travel and prove once more that schools of “public health” are the “biology for aggrievement studies majors” of the university systems cannot help but dishearten one. It would be sad were it not so pernicious. There has not been a single reported superspread on a plane. None. There have been about a zillion flights. So this, right there, seems a bizarre fight to pick. Even his tweet seems to admit that this has not been a spread vector or a risk. But he has a “story” that “confirms this need.” It must be a heckuva story.

Just what kind of story would make vaccine mandates needed on airplanes when it’s now a completely established fact that these are non-sterilizing vaccines? Even the CDC threw in the towel on this in early august. And we’ve had buckets of data since then that not only are vaccines non-sterilizing (unable to stop infection or stop spread) but that they are actually spread enhancing. The UK vaccine surveillance report is VERY clear on this. VE for cases is -60% in many age brackets. this is data straight from their report and this is the rigged data that only looks at “fully vaccinated” people more than 14 days after their second dose and ignores the whole worry window after dose 1. reality is worse than this. but this is plenty bad all on its own…

added VE’s in red. (under 18 should be broadly ignored as so few are vaxxed and the injected bias makes the data more artifact than signal, especially due to extreme testing rates among unvaccinated school (and college) kids. This renders 18-29 suspect as well. This really all needs to be controlled for tests per 100k by vaxx status.)

“The proposal was rejected and the database of viral strains at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was taken offline some 18 months later, making it impossible to check what scientists there were working on.”

• Wuhan and US Scientists Planned To Create A New Coronavirus In 2018 (DM)

US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group. ‘We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. ‘Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised commercially using established techniques and genome-length RNA and electroporation to recover recombinant viruses,’ the application states.

This would result in a virus which had no clear ancestor in nature, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert told The Telegraph. The expert, who asked the paper not to publish their name, said that, if such a method had been carried out, it could explain why no close match has ever been found in nature for Sars-CoV-2. The closest naturally occurring virus is the Banal-52 strain, reported in Laos last month. It shares 96.8 per cent of Covid-19’s genome. No direct ancestor, which would be expected share around 99.98 per cent, has been found so far. The WHO expert told The Telegraph that the process detailed in the application would create ‘a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to anything.’

‘They would then synthesise the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses. ‘Then they put that RNA in a cell and recover the virus from it. ‘This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new ‘backbone’ that didn’t exist in nature but is very, very similar as it’s the average of natural backbones,’ the expert said. The proposal was rejected and the database of viral strains at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was taken offline some 18 months later, making it impossible to check what scientists there were working on. The institute’s scientists have consistently denied creating the coronavirus in their lab. The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore, The Telegraph reported.

“2 days from exposure to you’re ****ed”

• What Is The REAL Long-Term Impairment? (Denninger)

The reports all over social media and among people who have been jabbed strongly implies that the long-term or even permanent impairment rate is likely somewhere around one in a hundred persons jabbed. That’s an utterly ridiculous adverse event rate and in any normal set of circumstances would never be acceptable for anyone with other than a condition that would be terminal if not treated, such as cancer. We already know (because its been leaked by whistleblowers) that hospital and other medical staff are being directly told not to file VAERS reports and, in some cases, threatened with disciplinary action or termination should they violate that mandate. There are also those who refuse to seek medical attention as doing so would conclusively blow up their mental belief, part of the Stockholm Syndrome-style insanity that has gripped the world in the era of Covid, that what they did was “safe and effective.”

Never mind the write-up out of Israel that has now proved quite-conclusively that vaccination is worthless to prevent acquisition and propagation of the virus and that personal protection in terms of severe and fatal outcomes has a high probability of being seriously attenuated or even entirely absent within six months. An attack rate of more than 20% of the patients where 95.2% of them were fully vaccinated makes quite clear that even nearly-100% coverage, which can never be achieved, does nothing of value from a standpoint of cutting off infection. It may provide some personal protection against severe infection outcomes, but whether this is a “good bargain” when measured against the risk of permanent impairment from the jab itself is a much tougher call.

The other problem that the Israeli study presents is that one of these cases was a person who had Covid and recovered but then took a single jab. Did that jab destroy their resistance from previous infection? Nobody knows and the data set is too small to draw conclusions, since only one person was in this circumstance. But this is absolutely on the table given the fact that it happened, and if true jabbing people who recovered may well have been a big part of the surge we just took in the summer by turning recovered and immune people back into susceptible ones! What’s even worse is that in such a person a severe outcome was astronomically-unlikely in the first place so the “personal protection” argument for getting jabbed appears to have been voided.

What’s worse is that of the attacked patients five died including the index, who was vaccinated. These were all older, fairly-morbid people — but the fact of the matter is that both masking and jabs failed to protect them from a fatal outcome. “.. all transmissions between patients and staff occurred between masked and vaccinated individuals, as experienced in an outbreak from Finland [12]”. In addition all of the transmission happened with people both wearing PPE and being vaccinated, so the presumption has to be that neither masking or jabs are effective to provide protection and using both in combination does nothing either. Finally, and perhaps most-damningly, is the presence of evidence, albeit not convincing due to small sample size, in this write-up of severe immune compromise from the jabs that promoted infection severity in the people who got attacked. Why? Right here:

“Infection advanced rapidly (many cases became symptomatic within 2 days of exposure), and viral load was high.” This is consistent with other anecdotal reports of jabbed people who get a severe alleged “breakthrough” case go from being entirely-fine to screwed almost-immediately, which is an extreme outlier among the general population exposed, including when exposed to Delta but unvaccinated. I can speak to that with personal knowledge since I and two others were infected by a known index during a time that Delta was the only statistically-important variant circulating and none of us had that sort of “2 days from exposure to you’re ****ed” experience.

“Merck and NIH allowed 14.1% of people in the control arms to develop severe COVID-19 and die with no treatment. None. Just placebo.”

• The Extraordinary Hypocrisy of Molnupiravir (PR)

Trigger alert: This article may upset those who care about other human beings.Molnupiravir (mull-noo-’peer-aveer) is the talk of the town, belle of the ball in the press. “Game changer” is the word on the street, according to a message to Science Insider: “Molnupiravir is unquestionably a game changer! The large effect size, and the ease of administration change the paradigm of mild COVID-19 treatment with a potential to reduce COVID-19 death rates.” See: Science Magazine The hype even included Fauci going on in an interview about how the idea that molnupiravir is so effective that the vaccine won’ t be needed. “That’s such a false narrative” Fauci aped at the camera.

What’s all the excitement & hype about? Well for one, Merck reported no deaths in the molnupirvir group, but there were eight deaths in the placebo group. Great news, right? Hold on there. This is an interim analysis. On non-hospitalized patients. (See the Phase 3 MOVe-OUT trial record at ClinicalTrials.gov) Why, when the litany of studies have been published on the efficacy of off-label use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, has the media been silent or hostile to the published studies? When meta-analyses find that the studies – both randomized clinical trials and observational studies – spanning the range of prophylaxis, mild, moderate and severe COVID-19 support immediate adoption for early treatment using ivermectin especially – why in the world is Merck’s molnupirvir interim analysis given the spotlight?

Slow Down, People. The Molnupirvir Study is ONE Study (And It’s Not Even a Study) In Non-Hospitalized People Without HIV, Hepatitis or Liver Disease. And the Hospitalized Patients – They’re Found in A SECOND, BURIED Study. Before we get too excited about molnupirvir, let’s remember that there are 29 studies on ivermectin and 32 studies on hydroxychloroquine totaling over 26,000 and 54,000 patients combined, respectively. Merck’s non-peer-reviewed molnupirvir interim analysis report study? Only 775 patients. According to the US press, with 775 patients in the Merck study, 7.3% of patients given molnupiravir were either hospitalized or died 9 days after treatment, compared to the 14.1% of placebo patients. None died, but 7.3% were hospitalized.

And 14.1% on placebo died. Placebo? Died? When there is a vast amount of published research on clear winners are the early treatment protocols as described by the medical authorities on the matter? Merck and NIH allowed 14.1% of people in the control arms to develop severe COVID-19 and die with no treatment. None. Just placebo. How did the NIH and the FDA let this happen in the face of the evidence of efficacy of early treatment? How could they? Because that’s the standard of care for early COVID-19: go home, incubate, get sick, and die if you must. But don’t call us until you are seriously ill.

Lots of references.

• Ivermectin – Truth and Totalitarianism (Hope)

“Merck stock surged 10% Friday after it said its investigational pill cuts the risk of hospitalization and death in COVID-19 patients…The pill reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by about 50%,” Merck and its partner, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, said in a statement Friday. “This is a phenomenal result. This is a profound game-changer to have an oral pill that had this kind of effect, this magnitude of effect in patients who are at high risk who are already symptomatic,” former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Friday on CNBC about results of the interim analysis. “Meanwhile, shares of COVID vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna fell 2.5% and 10%, respectively.”

This puts Dr. Scott Gottlieb between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, as a member of Pfizer’s Board of Directors, he is paid handsomely to attend a few board meetings per year, yet on the other hand, he must not be too glowing in his praise of the antiviral, which might lead people away from the Pfizer vaccine. Moreover, it could affect sales just as it has already dropped the stock price. In 2020, Gottlieb was paid $338,587 by Pfizer. In 2020, he also earned $525,850 as a director of Illumina. Due to his former FDA Chief status, Gottlieb is in high demand as one word of favor from him can send a stock price soaring. He has served on multiple other boards, including Tempus Labs, National Resilience, and the Mount Sinai Health System. It must be a daunting task to walk the line by promoting one corporate interest while not offending any of the others.

But the good news is that soon, Pfizer, too, will be peddling their antiviral drug, which should make up for any drop in their vaccine sales. “Pfizer is testing whether its pill—PF-07321332—can prevent infection in people exposed to the virus or benefit patients who have not been hospitalized with COVID-19.” Roche and Atea are not far behind with their antiviral pills, and soon all of Big Pharma can get in on the action. They have timed it perfectly. While shutting down any competition from repurposed drugs like HCQ or Ivermectin, they deftly rolled out the vaccines first, making sure not to confuse the consumer with antiviral pills that would only be allowed AFTER the majority of the population had been vaccinated.

The one glitch is that Merck’s Molnupiravir only surfaced AFTER a prominent scandal involving Merck lying three times. Just as Peter would disown Christ three times before the cry of the rooster, Merck would turn their back on their creation with three lies about Ivermectin before they would accept the payoff from the United States government. On February 4, 2021, Merck, the corporation behind the monumental Mectizan Program, which rescued the world from River Blindness, told three untruths about Ivermectin.

Lie #1: No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from preclinical studies; Lie #2: No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease. Lie #3: A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies. However, the Monash preclinical study disproved the first statement showing a massive 99.98% reduction in viral load with a single Ivermectin treatment in cell culture.

Medical privacy.

• Oh, You Flashed A VexPass? (Denninger)

Note that for a private fact to exist it must be private. There is an exception in the law for things that are newsworthy and of legitimate public concern but absent that medical status is one of the areas where this law is routinely upheld. If you make known to others without a legal duty of confidentiality that you are HIV+, for example, you cannot sue if someone discloses that because it’s not private anymore. Once you willingly make something public by your own actions it is not possible to return that item of information to the status of a private fact. There are things that we remove from the status of “private facts” willingly and by our own hand. Our true identity, for one. You flash a driver license to prove you’re 21 at a bar, for example. Said bar has zero duty of confidentiality to you.

There are all manner of places where such is requested and we willingly comply. By doing so we waive the private fact nature of that information since we willingly and intentionally display it in public. If you go to a professional conference, for example, and flash a vax card or a digital app QR code at the door to “attest” that you had a Covid-19 vaccination you have released that information to people who have no duty in law or by contract to keep that information private. Said app developer and owner has no legal stricture requiring said privacy either. Further, by definition your mere presence in such a place, if such a pass is required for entry, voluntarily discloses your medical status to thousands of others! Again: Your mere presence in a business — any business — that requires such at the door waives your private fact protection.

I remind you that anyone can photograph you from or in a public place. Never mind that damn near everywhere such is happening all the time in public anyway; there’s a camera behind the bar in the restaurant, three more in the dining area, etc. If you’re walking down the street these days your next door neighbor probably has a camera on their doorbell and you were in a public place, namely, the street. The minute you consent to a requirement for your medical status in some regard to be in a place open to the public you have, by definition and your own hand, destroyed any claim now or in the future that such is a private fact. Thus you have now consented to your employer requiring you to document same since you already have made your Covid vaccination status available to the public on an unrestricted basis.

If and when something related to that (e.g. whether you have taken the sixth booster two years from now) is required of you you have already consented to that disclosure and discrimination because you, by your own hand, voluntarily gave up all right of privacy in that regard and consented to be discriminated against. Note that prior to Covid-19 there was exactly zero such attempt made. Oh, people say, but the schools required vaccinations for kids. Ah, but said entities were government agencies and had strict protocols for medical privacy. Further, there were plenty of kids who didn’t have all those shots in the school — but nobody knew who they were. If you had an exemption on whatever basis that was nobody else’s business and exactly nobody had access to those records. Finally, I attended college briefly in the 1980s (and took some classes while in High School too at a different college) and was never asked for a single bit of medical documentation before or while doing so. All they were interested in was money.

For a fast increasing number of people, freedom is something granted to you by goverment. Scary.

• How New Zealand Snookered Itself By Calling Time On Zero Covid (G.)

The New Zealand government called time on its world-leading Covid-19 elimination strategy on Monday, announcing a suite of measures that grant Aucklanders greater freedom after seven weeks of community transmission, despite experts urging tighter restrictions. In doing so, the government has snookered itself in three mutually-reinforcing ways: on social license, on enforcement, and on the economy. New Zealand’s strategy depends on social license, and people feeling like they understand and are part of the system, and can contribute to its success, knowing others will be prevented from undermining their efforts. This has proceeded partly from prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s personal popularity and the excellence of her communications, but more from her resolve and the strong alignment of her policies with the expert consensus in favour of continued elimination.

It has worked well. And social license has also been rooted in a transparent, understandable system that lets well-informed non-experts anticipate policy decisions and feel validated when they come to pass. Two weeks ago, when the government moved from alert level four to three despite untraced community transmission, its policies began to diverge from the consensus, and on Monday the gap widened further. On Sunday, the day before the announcement, a group of experts from the University of Otago urged the government to do more to ensure the safety of vulnerable communities in Auckland. Instead, the government did less. As a result, the government’s decisions are now less comprehensible to people who have spent 18 months observing the outbreak and response. Ardern, who remains enormously popular, had fewer cheerleaders on Monday night than she did on Sunday.

The most immediate policy shift will allow Aucklanders to gather outdoors in small groups from Wednesday. This means enforcement is now essentially impossible at any scale, because when you tell a million people who have been stuck inside for two months they can go and have a drink at the beach or in a park, that is what they will do and a certain number of them will not follow the rules. Police have taken a hands off approach to enforcement of illegal gatherings, most notably refusing to break up a rally of more than 1,000 anti-lockdown protesters who gathered at the Auckland Domain on Saturday. This was wise, because provoking a confrontation could have done enormous harm to social cohesion. But if police now start arresting people for low-level breaches, they will further erode social license. The authorities have snookered themselves.

Including contractors.

• Pentagon Sets Nov. 22 Deadline For Civilian Employees To Get Vaccinated (JTN)

The Department of Defense has set Nov. 22 as the deadline for civilian employees to get fully vaccinated against COVID-19. In a memorandum Tuesday, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the deadline, noting that the last day to get the second jab is Nov. 8. The memo also states that civilian employees must be ready to provide a copy of their vaccination records to the appropriate management departments. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the entire military, including civilian employees and contractors, to be fully vaccinated following Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine being approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Employees who do not comply face termination, without any separation benefits. Service members and civilian employees can apply for a medical or religious exemption.

The feds can’t mandate it, so they use the states to do that.

• New York Expands Covid-19 Vaccine Pass Program (JTN)

New York is expanding its COVID-19 vaccination pass program to allow residents who’ve been vaccinated in other states to prove they’ve gotten their shots or tested negative for the virus. On Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York state’s Excelsior Pass Scanner app – which allows businesses to verify a person’s COVID-19 vaccination – has been updated to enable the validation of SMART Health Cards from out-of-staters. Hochul said the changes are based on federal and state COVID-19 guidance and will help more New York businesses stay afloat with the winter months approaching. “New York was hit hard by COVID-19, and we have led bold efforts to pursue innovative solutions to reinvigorate economies,” she said in a statement.

“We’re expanding this solution even further with a set of standards that can be used and validated by all businesses for free, nationwide, based on shared policies and commitments New Yorkers trust.” The move will allow New York businesses participating in the Excelsior Pass program to verify vaccination and negative COVID-19 tests for people from states that issue SMART Health Cards, including California, Hawaii, Louisiana and Virginia. Washington state is in the process of setting up its SMART card system. New York’s digital pass, which was unveiled by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in March, allows people to download an app to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test.

DR. FAUCI ON VACCINE MANDATES:

“There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision for the greater good of society." pic.twitter.com/LCkPLOFlqy

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 3, 2021

Canada is lost like Australia.

• Canadian Government’s Proposed Online Harms Legislation (CBC)

The Canadian government is considering new rules to regulate how social media platforms moderate potentially harmful user-generated content. Already, the proposed legislation has been criticized by internet scholars — across the political spectrum — as some of the worst in the world. [..] The legislation is simple. First, online platforms would be required to proactively monitor all user speech and evaluate its potential for harm. Online communication service providers would need to take “all reasonable measures,” including the use of automated systems, to identify harmful content and restrict its visibility. Second, any individual would be able to flag content as harmful. The social media platform would then have 24 hours from initial flagging to evaluate whether the content was in fact harmful.

Failure to remove harmful content within this period would trigger a stiff penalty: up to three per cent of the service provider’s gross global revenue or $10 million, whichever is higher. For Facebook, that would be a penalty of $2.6 billion per post. Proactive monitoring of user speech presents serious privacy issues. Without restrictions on proactive monitoring, national governments would be able to significantly increase their surveillance powers. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects all Canadians from unreasonable searches. But under the proposed legislation, a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity would not be necessary for a service provider, acting on the government’s behalf, to conduct a search. All content posted online would be searched.

Potentially harmful content would be stored by the service provider and transmitted — in secret — to the government for criminal prosecution. Canadians who have nothing to hide still have something to fear. Social media platforms process billions of pieces of content every day. Proactive monitoring is only possible with an automated system. Yet automated systems are notoriously inaccurate. Even Facebook’s manual content moderation accuracy has been reported to be below 90 per cent. Social media companies are not like newspapers; accurately reviewing every piece of content is operationally impossible. The outcome is uncomfortable: Many innocent Canadians will be referred for criminal prosecution under the proposed legislation.

But it gets worse. If an online communication service provider determined that your content was not harmful within the tight 24-hour review period, and the government later decided otherwise, the provider would lose up to three per cent of their gross global revenue. Accordingly, any rational platform would censor far more content than the strictly illegal. Human rights scholars call this troubling phenomenon “collateral censorship.”

That whistleblower is bad theater.

• Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook (Greenwald)

When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation’s discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.

This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all. As it always does, the censorship began by targeting widely disliked figures — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others deemed “dangerous” — so that few complained (and those who did could be vilified as sympathizers of the early offenders). Once entrenched, the censorship net then predictably and rapidly spread inward (as it invariably does) to encompass all sorts of anti-establishment dissidents on the right, the left, and everything in between.

And no matter how much it widens, the complaints that it is not enough intensify. For those with the mentality of a censor, there can never be enough repression of dissent. And this plot to escalate censorship pressures found the perfect vessel in this stunningly brave and noble Facebook heretic who emerged this week from the shadows into the glaring spotlight. She became a cudgel that Washington politicians and their media allies could use to beat Facebook into submission to their censorship demands. In this dynamic we find what the tech and culture writer Curtis Yarvin calls “power leak.” This is a crucial concept for understanding how power is exercised in American oligarchy, and Yarvin’s brilliant essay illuminates this reality as well as it can be described.

Hyperbolically arguing that “Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all,” Yarvin points out that it may appear that the billionaire Facebook CEO is powerful because he can decide what will and will not be heard on the largest information distribution platform in the world. But in reality, Zuckerberg is no more powerful than the low-paid content moderators whom Facebook employs to hit the “delete” or “ban” button, since it is neither the Facebook moderators nor Zuckerberg himself who is truly making these decisions. They are just censoring as they are told, in obedience to rules handed down from on high. It is the corporate press and powerful Washington elites who are coercing Facebook and Google to censor in accordance with their wishes and ideology upon pain of punishment in the form of shame, stigma and even official legal and regulatory retaliation.