Dec 122022
 


Vincent van Gogh Autumn landscape 1885

 

 

We’ve done quite a few episodes of commenter TAE Summary’s “Tales of Two Narratives” through time. Let’s add this one, why don’t we. Reading through -especially- Twitter, the past 24 hours or so, it struck me how fitting this is. We’re talking narratives that are so many light years apart, never the twain shall meet. Interested in time travel? This is for you.

On the one hand, lots of people react to the following tweet by Elon Musk, by claiming Fauci saved millions of lives. On the other hand, just as many people (or so it seems) claim Fauci killed millions of people. It’s hard to get a bigger, and more consequential, chasm, than that. And apparently this Musk tweet got the most likes in Twitter history. What does that tell us? This chasm is not just on Twitter, this is the entire country plus anywhere else on the planet where people follow this. Despite the enormous 24/7 pressure to accept “The Science”, get a shot and a mask, and shut up.

 

 

Of all people, John Brennan tried. The ex-CIA director who was caught lying to the Senate in 2014, and in 2017 to the House Intelligence Committee (Steele Dossier) about Russian interference during the 2016 election, still appears to think he has some form of moral high ground. Which is remarkable in and of itself. But at least Brennan has “class”.

 

 

Elon Musk’s reaction has been loud and clear (note: this tweet is not a direct reaction to Brennan):

 

 

Elon Musk has promised us a “full” record of the decision making process behind the censoring and banning by Twitter’s former staff, of renowned doctors like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory, Robert Marik, Richard Urso, and many more. Many of these distinguished scientists have seen their careers and livelihoods hampered, even destroyed by Fauci -and Twitter- over the past -almost- 3 years. And, of course, anyone else who dared question “The Science”.

This was (is?!) a highly concerted effort. How many people died who could have been saved with ivermectin? Or just Vitamin D3, for that matter? HCQ? So many lives were lost to FDA, Fauci et al banning anything but Pfizer. Many more will perish because they now have mRNA in their bodies, and will never be able to get rid of it anymore.

The “full record” will be a spectacle. Even if some things still remain hidden. Elon Musk may not be a saint, I very much hope he’s not, saints scare me, but I’d take him over Tony Fauci any day of the week.

Here’s TAE Summary:

 

 

TAE Summary:

The Mainstream Narrative

– As a worldwide ‘public square,’ Twitter should be heavily regulated for misinformation and spamming by hostile interests. Twitter bears a responsibility to take action against disinformation and hate. Content moderation on platforms like Twitter is absolutely necessary to safeguard our democracy. As a private company Twitter is under no legal obligation to protect free speech and everything Twitter has done is within the law. Twitter and other social media platforms were instrumental in combating disinformation about Covid 19, climate change, election integrity and the war in Ukraine.

– Elon Musk is an arrogant, toxic person. He doesn’t really care about free speech. His goals in purchasing Twitter are political. His takeover of Twitter is the most terrifying development in recent history. His purchase of Twitter will destroy it by driving away advertisers and providing a platform for Neo-Nazis and other hate-speechers. Under Musk, Twitter is a scammer’s paradise. Elon Musk decimated the staff of Twitter (breaking Federal labor laws) while restoring accounts that spread disinformation. Control of Twitter involves national security risks and Musk’s takeover should be investigated by the US Government.

– The so-called “Twitter Files” are a feast for conspiracy theorists and have re-enlivened the influence of entities like QAnon. Journalists like Matt Taibbi writing about the Twitter Files are selling their souls to do PR work for the richest man in the world. The Twitter Files entries are sloppy, anecdotal and devoid of context. They are a nothing event about nothing event. The hysteria surrounding the Twitter Files is being used by Republicans for political gain.

– The Hunter Biden laptop story was difficult and the truth was not known early and so caution was justified. There is no evidence in the Twitter Files that the government was involved in the suppression of the Hunter Biden Laptop story. There is nothing on Hunter Biden’s laptop that actually implicates Joe Biden. James Baker took the careful approach and urged Twitter to weigh both sides of the Hunter Biden Laptop story before proceeding.

– Hate speech has dramatically increased since Must took over Twitter and these hateful tweets will lead to violence against the already marginalized. Right wing accounts such as those of Donald Trump, Project Veritas and the Babylon Bee should continue to be banned.

 

 

The Counter Narrative

– Twitter management was openly against free speech and used techniques such as “Visibility Filtering” to limit the reach of some posts. Twitter had secret blacklist files to limit the distribution of certain tweets specifically targeting right wing users. Twitter and other social media platforms have been instrumental in distributing disinformation and hiding the truth about Covid 19, climate change, election integrity and the war in Ukraine. Twitter censorship was used by the Democrats for political gain

– Elon Musk is a hero. He bought Twitter to restore free speech. Twitter, pre-Musk, was a major accomplice and enabler in selling-out America’s future. Twitter was bloated with excess and left wing employees.

– The Twitter Files show that the DNC and FBI were directly involved in suppressing free speech and prove that the 2020 elections were not free and fair. Twitter was clearly involved in election interference. The government interactions with Twitter were similar to Nazi propaganda methods. Twitter employees and their government contacts should be made to answer for their actions before congress. So-called journalists criticizing Matt Taibbi for his work on the Twitter Files are embarrassing in their uniformity and mindless support of a corrupt system.

– The files on Hunter Biden’s laptop prove that Joe Biden used his office to make money and Twitter’s suppression of the laptop story was done to help get Joe Biden elected. It is a bigger scandal than Watergate. James Baker was involved in RussiaGate at the FBI and the Hunter Biden Laptop suppression at Twitter. Baker deleted some of the content that should have been in the Twitter Files.

– The claims that hate speech has increased on Twitter since Musk’s takeover are utterly false. Hate speech is not tolerated on Twitter. Twitter largely ignored child trafficking issues until Musk took over. Lifting the ban on Donald Trump, Project Veritas and the Babylon Bee on Twitter are victories for free speech.

 

 

 

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Sep 022022
 
 September 2, 2022  Posted by at 5:41 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


El Greco Dormition of the Mother of God 1565-1566

 

 

Not the kind of thing I would do often, making a video the protagonist of an article, but here’s an exception. Now, I know that -thank God- most of my readers are familiar with the ivermectin topic, but you too, watch the 13:38 min of this. Take that time.

You see, I think we owe it to the doctors who have lost their jobs, their reputations, to this, and who nevertheless have kept on pushing. G-d knows how many people died because these doctors were banned and censored, maybe they would have a better estimate than me. We’re talking millions of human lives.

Personally, I have had ivermectin at my disposal since April 2020, ordered from India, and still use it now. But when I offer it to others, they are not sure. Because they don’t read what I do, they read the MSM, and wherever you are in the world, Pfizer et al have the MSM covered. It’s horse paste.

I’ve always written here that if you up your vit. D level enough, that is about 50% of the game (boost your immune system) . Zinc (+quercetin) is the next 25% (virus can’t enter cells) . And ivermectin will fill in the rest. There’s no guarantee that if you’re severely obese, or you’re 90 years old, or both, ivermectin will keep you from getting infected. But if you’re either -or all- of those, you have bigger issues.

Mike Yeadon, Paul Marik, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Robert Urso, Pierre Kory, Simone Gold, Tess Lawrie, and dozens of others (thank God), sorry for leaving many of you out. These doctors are very brave people, they have lost their jobs, their reputations, their pensions, everything, after mostly stellar careers, because Tony Fauci and his Big Pharma backers wanted it that way, because they wanted to make billions of off untested “vaccines”, for which there was never any need -let alone evidence-. And we owe the doctors a huge thank you. You guys deserve medals. And tons of recognition.

As we move into fall and winter, Big Pharma has already got their pills lined up, of course. They claim to have an “Omicron Special”. Don’t fall for that nonsense. Take Vit. D and zinc, and ivermectin if you can get it. In the US, the NIH just sneakily added ivermectin to its list of covid cures very recently, would you believe it.

At the same time, there are ever more reports of more people dying from the vaccines than from covid. You take your pick. As booster number 8(26) comes.

 

 

 

 

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Mar 212022
 
 March 21, 2022  Posted by at 9:39 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  57 Responses »


Wassily Kandinsky Succession 1935

 

Zelensky Nationalizes TV News And Restricts Opposition Parties (Week)
Zelensky Warns Of WWIII If Negotiations With Russia Fail (Hill)
Zelensky Strikes The Wrong Note To Bring Knesset To His Side (JPost)
Pearl Harbor My Eye! (David Stockman)
Turkey Says Ukraine, Russia “Close To An Agreement” (ZH)
China’s Time for Global Leadership (Stephen Roach et al)
Will Saudi Arabia Ditch The US Dollar? (Lacalle)
Is the Petrodollar Swaying? (Kadi)
Joe Rogan Slams Media Coverup Of Hunter Biden Laptop Story (PM)
Vitamin D For Covid-19: Real-time Meta Analysis Of 186 Studies (vdmeta)
800,000 Lives Could Have Been Saved with Ivermectin and HCQ – Kory (USAW)

 

 

Saw this in the US as well. Curious.

 

 

Condemnation


https://twitter.com/shen_shiwei/status/1505732372003647494

 

 

Be careful what you wish for.

 

 

11 political parties: gone. Azov Neo Nazi and Svoboda, still acceptable parties.
Most of the media “cosolidated”: gone.
Smell a rat yet?

But yeah, do let’s send him tens of billions more, and close the skies.

Zelensky Nationalizes TV News And Restricts Opposition Parties (Week)

On Saturday and Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked his emergency powers under martial law to suppress several opposition political parties and implement a “unified information policy.” In an address to the nation delivered Sunday, he announced a temporary ban on “any activity” by 11 political parties. The ban includes the Opposition Platform – For Life party, which holds 43 seats in Ukraine’s national parliament and is the largest opposition party. Opposition Platform – For Life is a pro-Russia party, but on March 8, party leader Yuriy Boyko demanded that Russia “stop the aggression against Ukraine,” according to Ukrainian outlet LB.


That same day, Viktor Medvedchuk, who was accused of treason against Ukraine in May and escaped from house arrest shortly after the invasion began, was removed from his post as the party’s co-chair. Russian President Vladimir Putin is godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter. Zelensky’s information policy involves “combining all national TV channels, the program content of which consists mainly of information and/or information-analytical programs, [into] a single information platform of strategic communication” to be called “United News.” Reuters notes that, until Saturday, privately owned Ukrainian media outlets “continued to operate” independently. Zelensky said the measure was necessary to combat Russian misinformation and “tell the truth about the war.”

Read more …

Better make sure they don’t fail then.

Zelensky Warns Of WWIII If Negotiations With Russia Fail (Hill)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday warned of a third world war if negotiations with Russia fail. Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin are vital, saying Ukraine has been reeling since Moscow launched its invasion. “We were losing people on a daily basis, innocent people on the ground. … Russian forces have come to exterminate us, to kill us,” Zelensky told Zakaria. “Unfortunately, our dignity is not going to preserve the lives, so I think that we have to do any format, any chance, so in order to have … the possibility of talking to Putin. But if these attempts fail, that would mean … a third world war,” Zelensky added.


Zakaria also asked Zelensky if Ukraine is willing to make compromises to end the Russian invasion, including not joining NATO, as Putin has demanded. “You cannot reverse this situation anymore. You cannot demand from Ukraine to recognize some territories as intended for conflicts, and these compromises are simply wrong,” Zelensky added. The United Nations said recently that 6.5 million people have been displaced inside Ukraine since the start of the invasion.

Read more …

He’s literally working with nazis. But wants to teach Israel about the holocaust?

Zelensky Strikes The Wrong Note To Bring Knesset To His Side (JPost)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s virtual tour of Western parliaments has gone off mostly without a hitch. He referenced Winston Churchill to Westminster and Martin Luther King Jr. to Capitol Hill. The Ukrainian-to-English translator in Brussels broke down in tears translating his plea for help. Zelensky continued his practice of customizing his speeches to suit his audience when he addressed the Knesset over Zoom, taking the comparisons he had already made between his country’s situation and World War II to the next level and dedicating the lion’s share of his speech to the Holocaust. That comparison did not have the effect Zelensky apparently had hoped for.

Rather than stir Israel’s leaders and legislators to action and solidarity, the heavy Holocaust comparisons – from saying Moscow is planning a “final solution for the Ukrainian question” to saying that Israel should save Ukrainians like Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations saved Jews – drew more focus from its audience, which criticized its inappropriateness, than Zelensky’s appeal for weapons. “I appreciate the President of Ukraine and support the Ukrainian people in heart and deed, but it is impossible to rewrite the terrible history of the Holocaust,” Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel tweeted. “Genocide was also committed on Ukrainian soil. The war is terrible, but the comparison to the horrors of the Holocaust and the final solution is outrageous.”

Asked about the tweet, Hendel said that he did not judge Zelensky’s behavior in a time of crisis, and he accepted Zelensky’s criticism of Israel and calls for Jerusalem to send weapons, but he felt he had to set the historical record straight. Former cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz, now a Likud MK, went so far as to say, “If Zelensky’s speech was given… in normal [non-war] times, we would have said it bordered on Holocaust denial… Every comparison between a regular war, as difficult as it may be, and the extermination of millions of Jews in gas chambers in the framework of the Final Solution, is a total distortion of history. The same is true for the claim that Ukrainians helped Jews in the Holocaust… The historic truth is that the Ukrainian people cannot be proud of its behavior in the Holocaust of the Jews.”

Read more …

Great historic overview by Dave.

Pearl Harbor My Eye! (David Stockman)

[..] there really are not two distinct nations there, one invading the other. Russia and Ukraine have never been neighboring independent states like Germany and France or Spain and Portugal or Columbia and Peru. To the contrary, they have been an intermingled territory and peoples for the last 1300 years with borders, governing arrangements episodic external invasions all over the lot. The Ukrainian language itself is testimony to that history and geography. The dialects spoken in the Donbas (brown and yellow areas) are a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian; the old Galician territories of Western Ukraine centered in Lviv (red areas) are heavily influenced by Polish, Slovakian and Rumanian vocabularies.; and the blue areas of the North present dialects heavily influenced by Belarusian.

What is also true is that these segmented populations have never been united under a common polity except by communist arms between 1922 and 1991; then between 1991 and 2014 by tenuous and continuously shifting electoral balances after the Ukrainian administrative entity was arbitrarily disgorged from the old Soviet Union; and finally after the February 2014 coup by dint of a Kiev government based on central and western Ukraine that essentially declared a civil war on Crimea (which seceded) and the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas regions that have tried to do the same. So again, what’s wrong with partition? At the end of the day, Zelensky stood before Congress and had the gall to demand WWIII in behalf of an abortion of a nation that has virtually no chance of long-term survival in its present form.


How Ukraine Will Be Partitioned After Kiev Capitulates

Yet the knuckleheads from both parties are in such war heat that they vociferously applauded the unctuous rantings of a clown who should have stuck to the comedy business. Still, for want of doubt about the madness of defending Ukraine by economic warfare now, and military confrontation with Russia if the warmongers get their way, just recall how the arbitrary borders depicted above got here. If this mongrel merits all out defense in behalf of the “rule of law,” then the rule of law be damned.

Read more …

• Ukraine’s neutrality;
• disarmament and security guarantees;
• the so-called “de-Nazification”;
• removal of obstacles on the use of the Russian language in Ukraine;
• the status of the breakaway Donbas region;
• and the status of Crimea

Turkey Says Ukraine, Russia “Close To An Agreement” (ZH)

“It’s not easy to negotiate while the war is ongoing, or to agree when civilians are dying. But I want to say that there is momentum,” Turkey Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said from the southern Turkish province of Antalya, AFP reported. “We see that the parties are close to an agreement.” Cavusoglu this week visited Russia and Ukraine as Turkey, which has strong bonds with the two sides, has tried to position itself as a mediator. The foreign minister, who hosted his peers from Russia and Ukraine this week, said Turkey was in contact with the negotiating teams from the two countries but he refused to divulge the details of the talks as “we play an honest mediator and facilitator role.” In an interview with daily Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said the sides were negotiating six points: Ukraine’s neutrality; disarmament and security guarantees; the so-called “de-Nazification”; removal of obstacles on the use of the Russian language in Ukraine; the status of the breakaway Donbas region; and the status of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014.

Turkey’s pro-government Hurriyet newspaper reported that the two countries were edging towards agreement on Kyiv declaring neutrality and abandoning its drive for Nato membership, “demilitarizing” Ukraine in exchange for collective security guarantees, what Russia calls “denazification” and lifting restrictions on the use of Russian in Ukraine. Two people familiar with the discussions said it was likely a compromise would involve token concessions from Kyiv on what Russia calls “denazification”. But Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US ambassador to the UN, accused Moscow of failing to fully participate in the talks. “The negotiations seem to be one-sided,” she said. “The Russians have not leaned into any possibility for a negotiated and diplomatic solution.”

Hopes that an agreement is close were dashed, however, after the Russian military delivered an ultimatum for the surrender of Mariupol, the besieged city in southern Ukraine and the scene of some of the heaviest fighting since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine more than three weeks ago, according to the National Defense Control Center of the Russian Federation as cited by Tass. Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev said all armed units of Ukraine must leave Mariupol from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. local time on Monday, according to Tass, after which any fighters remaining would “face a military tribunal.” It said humanitarian convoys would deliver food, medicine and other essentials to the city. The Russian statement demanded a written response from Ukraine’s government by 4 a.m. Kyiv time.

Read more …

I’m sure this is just what America seeks.

China’s Time for Global Leadership (Stephen Roach et al)

The war in Ukraine is pushing the world ever closer to an existential crisis. The lessons of the twentieth century and its ghastly world wars have been lost on today’s leaders. The peace dividend of the Cold War has been squandered. Two superpowers – the United States and the Russian Federation – are on the brink of an unimaginable military confrontation. The momentum of conflict escalation threatens to become inexorable, and the risk of a nuclear miscalculation can no longer be ignored. China is in a unique position to bring Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine to an end. As the world’s second-largest economy with aspirations of national rejuvenation and global leadership – both elements central to the “Chinese Dream” long espoused by President Xi Jinping – China has two critical advantages as a potential peacemaker in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

First, it can rely on its own core principles. Since the days of Zhou Enlai in the 1950s, China has stressed that its foreign policy has been guided by the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. These include mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, and non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine is a flagrant violation of these central values. The debate is not about the supposed rationale for Russia’s unilateral action – NATO expansion; it is about the risk the war in Ukraine poses to world peace. Chinese principles offer a clear lens to put that debate into perspective.

Second, China has the advantage of partnership with Russia. At the February 4 opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Xi and Putin signed an expansive agreement that underscored their joint commitment to a “New Era” of international relations. By stressing that “friendship between the two States has no limits,” Xi and Putin spoke of cooperation, not confrontation, between major powers. The war in Ukraine has turned that commitment inside out. With a rapidly weakening Russian economy now isolated from the world, its unlimited reliance on China takes on special significance for both countries. Russia’s GDP is no larger than the combined economies of Belgium and the Netherlands. That makes it all but impossible for Russia to sustain a major conventional war, even if it does receive the Chinese military assistance it is reportedly seeking.

Read more …

Why should they?

Will Saudi Arabia Ditch The US Dollar? (Lacalle)

Does Saudi Arabia need to use the yuan at all? No. Its foreign currency reserves including gold stood at $472.8 billion in 2020 despite the pandemic-led slump in exports and oil demand. Is it in any pressure to change currency? Even less so. Its reserves comfortably cover its external debt, giving an enviable level of stability compared to other OPEC nations that have large trade and fiscal deficits. What would Saudi Arabia gain from using the Yuan? Not higher exports to China. The Asia giant needs its oil imports more than Saudi Arabia needs its domestic currency. There is no real evidence that exports to China would fall if Saudi Arabia continued to use the US dollar.

The yuan utilization in global transactions is very limited. According to Bloomberg, “activity in the renminbi, as the currency is also called, rose to its second-highest level ever in 2021” using figures compiled by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. However, that means a stubbornly modest 2.7% of the market versus the dollar at 41%, which has held the top slot for decades. The euro is used in 36.6%, the GBP in 5.9% -more than double the use of the Yuan despite being a much smaller economy-, and the Japanese yen is used as much as the yuan at 2.6%. More importantly, despite the large increase in importance of the Chinese economy in the global landscape, its importance as a currency has barely improved from its 2015 high, when it reached the fourth spot.

Why is the yuan only used in 2.7% of global transaction despite being 14% of the world’s GDP and what happened in 2015? The yuan is the only currency from a global economic leader that has capital controls and a fixed pricing set by the PBOC. As such, any holder of the Chinese currency finds a constant threat from an abrupt devaluation and the inability to use the currency freely in payments. And that is exactly what happened in 2015. The Chinese central bank announced an aggressive devaluation. The yuan is not an alternative to the US dollar because of capital controls, fixed pricing and, even worse, because monetary policy is even more aggressive than that of the Federal Reserve. The expansion of money supply in China has been multiple times over that of the United States for two decades with significantly lower global demand.

Read more …

“As time went by, the deal became increasingly one-sided, one in which Saudi Arabia was getting the spiky end of the pineapple.”

Is the Petrodollar Swaying? (Kadi)

‘The Petrodollar came into existence in 1973 in the wake of the collapse of the international gold standard which was created in the aftermath of WWII under the Britton Woods agreements. These agreements also established the US Dollar as the reserve currency of the world. The Nixon Administration understood that the collapse of the gold standard system would cause a decline in the global demand for the US Dollar. Maintaining demand for the US Dollar was vital for the United States’ economy. So, the United States under Nixon struck a deal in 1973 with Saudi Arabia. Under the terms of the deal, the Saudis would agree to price all of their oil exports in US Dollar exclusively and be open to invest their surplus oil proceeds in US debt securities. In return, the United States offered weapons and protection of Saudi oil fields from neighboring countries including Israel.

For the Americans, the Petrodollar increases demand for the US dollar and also for US debt securities and allows the US to buy oil with a currency it can print at will. In 1975, all of the OPEC nations agreed to follow suit. Maintaining the Petrodollar is America’s primary goal’. Do you get the picture? The Petrodollar was meant to be a win-win agreement in which America propped up its economy, and in return supplied Saudi Arabia with security. As time went by, the deal became increasingly one-sided, one in which Saudi Arabia was getting the spiky end of the pineapple. The Saudis have been feeling shafted for a long time, but they did not have enough intestinal fortitude to stand up and show their dismay to Uncle Sam. When America asked old-school Saudi royals to jump, they asked how high. Love him or hate him, young Saudi Crown Prince Muhamed Bin Salman (MBS) is different.

Over the last few years, I have written many scathing articles about MBS’s character, ambitions, thirst for power, sneaky behind-the-scenes deals with Israel, but the biggest black mark against him will always be his war on Yemen. I will not suddenly make a 180 degree turn and start praising him. But credit must be given when credit is due. MBS happened to rise to power on the eve of Saudi Arabia’s failure in Syria. For fairness, this was not a war he started. When he took control, Saudi Arabia had already lost its war in Syria, its biggest ally in Lebanon (Hariri) proved to be a wimp and a hopeless ally despite all the support and bottomless funds he received in order to put Hezbollah under control. In Yemen, the Houthis had already taken control of the capital Sanaa. Iran was moving in on Saudi Arabia on 3 fronts; or at least this was how he perceived it.

This is not to forget the oil price war that Saudi Arabia waged on Russia. It is difficult to put all of those events in exact chronological order because they are all interwoven and happened almost concurrently. Back in 2016, Saudi Arabia decided to increase its oil production in order to drop the crude oil price and put pressure on Russia in Syria. The plan backfired and only resulted in a huge slump in the price of oil, and when MBS tried to reverse that decision and bring the crude price back up again, he was unable to. MBS inherited a Saudi Arabia that was teetering on the edge. He had few options to restore its image and stature. It faced bankruptcy and for the first time since its oil boom nearly a whole century ago, it fell into debt and he took drastic domestic spending cut measures. He had to do something.

Read more …

Go Joe!

Joe Rogan Slams Media Coverup Of Hunter Biden Laptop Story (PM)

Podcasting icon Joe Rogan slammed the corporate media’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop saga on Saturday’s episode of his popular show featuring former CIA covert operations officer Mike Baker, the current CEO of a global intelligence firm. In the program’s segment, Baker noted the legacy media “love a good story.” “They don’t just love a good story. They love a narrative, and they’re willing to ignore facts to push that narrative. That’s what scares me,” Rogan said. Rogan noted he believes there are objective journalists who work for The Washington Post and The New York Times. “There’s real solid journalists out there,” Rogan acknowledged, “but I don’t necessarily know if you’re getting all the information,” he continued, causing Baker to break out in laughter.

“You’re not sure?” Baker asked Rogan sarcastically. “I think it’s safe to say that some f*ckery is afoot,” replied Rogan. “The New York Times, just now, is admitting that the Hunter Biden laptop is real. And, we remember from the debates, with Trump bringing it up to Biden, and Biden saying, ‘It’s bullshit.’ And it’s a lie, a flat-out lie. Everybody knew it was a lie,” Rogan went on, then referring to when The New York Post’s bombshell report on the infamous “laptop from hell” was suppressed on Twitter in October 2020. Rogan said the censorship “was just outright crazy,” mentioning that the conservative news outlet is “one of the oldest newspapers in the country.” He stressed how “nobody is apologizing.” CNN anchor Brian Stelter has refused to apologize for amplifying the “Russian disinformation” claim as well as the dozens of former intelligence officials who either doubled down or declined to comment.

“There’s a dynamic here,” Baker jumped in. “I love this topic, in a sense, not so much because of whatever the f*ck Hunter was up to, but in part, because now when you look at the liberal Dems and the progressives, it doesn’t matter to them.” Baker elaborated further on the topic of left-wing apathy to the Hunter Biden laptop story, saying, “If you read some of the narrative that’s out there now, the social media in the past day or so, ever since The New York Times came out with this, they’re just dismissive of it. They don’t care, or they’re willing to overlook it.” “Which is the same thing they accuse the right of doing. Both sides—we’ve talked about this before—both sides are just so f*ked up,” Baker added.

Read more …

Still haven’t seen one government promoting vit. D. Criminal.

Vitamin D For Covid-19: Real-time Meta Analysis Of 186 Studies (vdmeta)

” Statistically significant improvements are seen in treatment studies for mortality, ventilation, ICU admission, and hospitalization. 33 studies from 30 independent teams in 14 different countries show statistically significant improvements in isolation (25 for the most serious outcome). ” Random effects meta-analysis with pooled effects using the most serious outcome reported shows 81% [53 92%] and 38% [31 45%] improvement for early treatment and for all studies. Results are similar after restriction to 65 peer-reviewed studies: 77% [45 90%] and 38% [31 45%], and for the 42 mortality results: 76% [37 91%] and 37% [25 47%]. ” Late stage treatment with calcifediol/calcitriol shows greater improvement compared to cholecalciferol: 73% [57 83%] vs. 40% [21 54%]. ”


Sufficiency studies show a strong association between vitamin D sufficiency and outcomes. Meta analysis of the 115 studies using the most serious outcome reported shows 54% [49 60%] improvement. ” While many treatments have some level of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid infection. Only 10% of vitamin D treatment studies show zero events in the treatment arm. ” Elimination of COVID-19 is a race against viral evolution. No treatment, vaccine, or intervention is 100% available and effective for all current and future variants. All practical, effective, and safe means should be used. Denying the efficacy of treatments increases mortality, morbidity, collateral damage, and endemic risk.

Read more …

“So much of the medical establishment and doctors have been propagandized to have bizarre behaviors.”

800,000 Lives Could Have Been Saved with Ivermectin and HCQ – Kory (USAW)

In October, Dr. Pierre Kory, a world renowned pulmonary and critical care Covid expert, warned, “The suppression of early treatment in this country is one of the most historically calamitous actions, and history will not be kind here.” Sadly, Dr. Kory was right and explains, “If you look at us now, we are over 900,000 deaths, and a huge proportion could have been saved. If you look at Dr. Peter McCullough’s protocol, it was published in August of 2020. He argued for combination therapy protocols . . . a combination of Ivermectin (IVR) and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). We know the vast majority, 85% to 90% of the hospitalizations and deaths, would have been prevented. You apply that to, let’s say, 800,000 excess deaths, and you are talking about a massive humanitarian crisis that resulted from the suppression of early effective repurposed drug treatments.” (IVR & HCQ) Dr. Kory goes on to say, “We are in a war of information. They call us ‘misinformation-ists.’ They are ‘disinformation-ists.’

They are actually employing disinformation. They want everyone to be convinced that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer, and only uncredible people would take it for a viral syndrome. They have never shown it is an anti-viral, and it’s been shown for 10 years to work on a number of viruses. . . . So much of the medical establishment and doctors have been propagandized to have bizarre behaviors. They are still pushing vaccines because they have been told lies. They are still attacking Ivermectin based on lies and wrong information. It’s the same thing with Hydroxychloroquine.” When it comes to the so-called vaccines, Dr. Kory says it all should have come to a grinding halt with all the deaths from the inoculations very early on. Dr. Kory explains, “The stopping point for an experimental intervention, therapy or vaccine, that stopping point was exceeded within weeks of the rollout.

The scale of what we are talking about now is almost indescribable. The traditional stopping point with deaths associated, that was exceeded in January of 2021, and the agencies (FDA & CDC) ignored it. The VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) data just kept climbing and climbing and climbing. I can’t even keep up. Last I checked, there were over 24,000 death reports in VAERS.” Dr. Kory goes on to talk about the unvaxed and vaxed patients he is treating. Dr. Kory talks about the deaths and injuries from the vaccines and thinks they will keep climbing as he predicted at the beginning of 2022. Dr. Kory will also tell you how you can help yourself no matter if you are vaxed or unvaxed.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

What the headline should be

 

 

Biden prosecutor

 

 

 

 

Dogs using tools
https://twitter.com/i/status/1505152106587693058

https://twitter.com/i/status/1505518012459270146

 

 

 

 

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Jan 102022
 


Rembrandt van Rijn The Adoration of the Magi 1634

 

Novak Djokovic Wins Appeal Against Decision To Cancel His Australian Visa (G.)
99.9987% of Under-20s Survive Covid– And 97.1% of the Elderly Do As Well (DS)
100,000 NHS Staff Face The Sack If Mandatory Covid Vaccines Enforced (Exp.)
Advisers Urge Biden To Change COVID-19 Strategy (SAC)
4th COVID Booster Shot Could Cause ‘Immune System Fatigue (CHD)
Saturday Night Fight.. At The Pharmacy (Kory)
New Zealand Not Prepared For Omicron Outbreak Expected In ‘Matter Of Weeks’ (G.)
UK Government Urges All Pregnant Women To Get Immediate Covid Jab (G.)
#BareShelvesBiden Trends On Twitter As Americans Deal With Empty Shelves (PM)
Temporary Empty Shelves are Not a Supply Chain Crisis (CTH)

 

 

 

 

Occam Omicron

 

 

This is almost verbatim the Great Barrington Declaration, according to Fauci and Collins written by “fringe epidemiologists”.

 

 

 

 

 

Walensky

 

 

 

 

How many millions in future tourist income has Australia lost so far in this case? A land of petty vengeful wankers. Where the people suffer from Mass Stockholm Syndrome.

‘Djokovic has won the battle, but might still lose the war!’ Australian immigration minister could use a separate power to personally cancel Novak Djokovic’s visa which could have serious knock-on impacts on the tennis star. He would be banned from the country for 3 years. But then the international tennis federation could bar them from organizing the Australia open for those 3 years.

Novak Djokovic Wins Appeal Against Decision To Cancel His Australian Visa (G.)

Novak Djokovic will be immediately released from immigration detention in Australia, after the federal circuit court ordered a decision to cancel his visa be quashed. But the Australian government’s counsel, Christopher Tran, has revealed the immigration minister will consider exercising a personal power to cancel Djokovic’s visa meaning he is not guaranteed to stay and compete in the Australian Open. The decision now under consideration to cancel Djokovic’s visa anew would result in him being excluded from Australia for three years – significantly upping the stakes in a bizarre border stoush that threatens Djokovic’s quest to win the most grand slam singles titles of all time.

After a lengthy adjournment on Monday the judge Anthony Kelly read a consent minute agreed between the world No 1 male tennis player and the home affairs minister, Karen Andrews. Djokovic, after being temporarily released from immigration detention earlier on Monday to attend the remote hearing, was present off-screen as Kelly ordered the visa cancellation decision be quashed and costs awarded in his favour. After the decision is quashed, Djokovic must be released from detention within 30 minutes with his passport and personal effects be returned to him. Kelly said it was “unreasonable” for Australian Border Force officials to interview Djokovic on Thursday morning and cancel his visa in circumstances where they had agreed to give him until 8.30am to speak to officials and respond to the proposed visa cancellation.


Tran informed the court that another minister of the Australian government – the immigration minister, Alex Hawke – would consider exercising a personal power to cancel Djokovic’s visa. Kelly praised his candour. He questioned if such a power was exercised whether Djokovic would be removed from Australia and unable to return for three years, which Tran confirmed. “The stakes have now risen rather than receded,” the judge said. “I cannot purport to encroach on the valid exercise of a minister of executive power.”

Read more …

“..even the proponents of lockdown should be able to accept that this virus is well below a level where restrictions are justifiable…”

99.9987% of Under-20s Survive Covid– And 97.1% of the Elderly Do As Well (DS)

Early last year renowned epidemiologist Professor John Ioannidis published an analysis of seroprevalence (antibody) studies from 2020 which concluded the infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 – the proportion of those infected who die – was around 0.15% globally. It varied significantly by region, up to 0.3%-0.4% in Europe and the Americas and down to 0.05% in Africa and Asia. Prof. Ioannidis has now published an update, using 2021 seroprevalence studies to find a more recent IFR for the conditions prevailing in the second year of the pandemic. The new study has a special focus on the IFR in the elderly, but also includes estimates for all age groups, though not a new overall estimate. From analysis of 25 seroprevalence surveys across 14 countries, Prof. Ioannidis and his colleague found the IFR varied from 0.0013% in the under-20s to 0.65% in those in their 60s.


For those above 70 not in a care home it was 2.9%, rising to 4.9% for all over-70s. This means that even for the elderly, more than 95% of those infected survive, 97.1% when considering those not in a care home. For younger people the mortality risk is orders of magnitude less, with 99.9987% of under-20s surviving a bout of the virus. The authors note that if you allow for antibody waning of 5% per month in the elderly then the IFR reduces to 2.4% for non-care home residents and 4% for all elderly. They add that IFR varies between countries, and this variation correlates with the proportion of the elderly who are over 85, suggesting much of the difference may be accounted for by the age of the population. The authors conclude that the IFR of COVID-19 has reduced substantially from previously reported figures. They suggest some reasons for this, including better treatments and the vaccine programmes:

“The share of nursing home deaths decreased markedly over time in most high-income countries with some exceptions (e.g. Australia). This change may be reflected in a much lower IFR among the elderly and the entire population after the first wave. Improved treatments (e.g. dexamethasone) and less use of harmful treatments (e.g. [high dose] hydroxychloroquine, improper mechanical ventilation) may also have decreased IFR substantially in late 2020 and in 2021. Other investigators have estimated in 2020 a global IFR of only 0.11% in the absence of effects of new variants and vaccinations. Vaccines that are more effective in protecting against death rather than infection are also expected to have decreased the IFR in 2021. New variants becoming dominant in 2021 may also be associated with further lower IFR…”


The study’s findings confirm that Covid is a mild disease in all but a small minority of cases. With Omicron now reducing the severity several-fold further, even the proponents of lockdown should be able to accept that this virus is well below a level where restrictions are justifiable.

Read more …

“Perhaps fire the modellers and keep the NHS staff. Most will already have immunity.”

100,000 NHS Staff Face The Sack If Mandatory Covid Vaccines Enforced (Exp.)

The cross-party alert comes after troops were drafted into hospitals with thousands of employees on sick leave through Covid or stress. Trade union bosses urged Health Secretary Sajid Javid to delay making Covid jabs mandatory by the end of March “with immediate effect”. They fear the exodus it triggers will worsen the staffing crisis, which includes 93,000 unfilled vacancies. And the Government and NHS trusts are facing a two-pronged legal challenge over the policy, by the Together Declaration campaign and Workers of England Union. The Government says that vaccinations are “our best defence” against Covid, preventing infection and saving lives”. But concerned ministers have held private talks with Tory MPs from the Covid Recovery Group about delaying or ditching the plan.

Sir Graham Brady, who chairs the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, said: “The experience of forcing care home workers to be vaccinated was tens of thousands left their jobs, piling extra pressure on NHS beds. “We are about to repeat this folly by forcing NHS staff out of their jobs too. It’s time we took a more rational approach now we know that vaccines don’t stop transmission of Covid. A negative test provides much more reassurance.” In October, Mr Javid brushed off pleas from professionals to “pause” the requirement for care staff to be fully jabbed, saying those who “can’t be bothered” should “get out and get another job”. Around 11,000 left in the two months before the deadline.

Mr Javid was confronted at Kings College Hospital, in south London, on Friday by consultant anaesthetist Steve James. He has had Covid but does not want the vaccine, and is therefore facing dismissal. Mr James told him “the science isn’t strong enough” to justify a compulsory jab. He quoted research showing the vaccine suppressed Covid transmission of the Delta variant for only eight weeks and “is probably less” for Omicron. A senior NHS official at a London trust said: “There are serious ethical questions about forcing people to have medical interventions against their will but the public needs to understand the practical implications too. “We are looking at more than 100,000 people being sacked and some calculations have it at above 200,000.

Read more …

“They say the first thing the administration needs to do is take a broader vision, by recognizing that Covid-19 is here to stay.”

Advisers Urge Biden To Change COVID-19 Strategy (SAC)

Six public health advisers who advised President Biden during his presidential transition published three opinion articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association urging Biden to change his strategy in responding to COVID-19 to one aimed at learning how to live with the virus. “The authors are all big names in American medicine; several, including Dr. Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. David Michaels, a former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have held high-ranking government positions,” The New York Times reported. “The driving force behind the articles is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, medical ethicist and University of Pennsylvania professor who advised former President Barack Obama.”

“They say the first thing the administration needs to do is take a broader vision, by recognizing that Covid-19 is here to stay. In one article, Dr. Emanuel and two co-authors — Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert at New York University — pointedly note that in July, Mr. Biden proclaimed that ‘we’ve gained the upper hand against this virus,’ which in retrospect was clearly not the case,” the outlet added. The call for a new strategy comes after the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened to reaching over 1 million new daily cases despite Biden’s promise to “shut down the virus” during his 2020 presidential campaign.

“To be better prepared for inevitable outbreaks, they suggest that the administration lay out goals and specific benchmarks, including what number of hospitalizations and deaths from respiratory viruses, including the coronavirus, that should trigger emergency measures,” The New York Times added. “The authors say the administration needs to acknowledge that Omicron may not mark the end of the pandemic — and to plan for a future that they concede is unknowable. They also make clear that the current rate of Covid hospitalizations and deaths is unacceptably high.”

Read more …

“There is one official report of an Israeli dying from Omicron. However, according to The Times of Israel, it is unclear that Omicron caused the death of the individual..”

We are still at zero confirmed deaths… From Omicron, that is. Not from the vaccines.

4th COVID Booster Shot Could Cause ‘Immune System Fatigue (CHD)

COVID-19 booster shots could do more harm than good, according to scientists interviewed late last month by The New York Times. The scientists warned “that too many shots might actually harm the body’s ability to fight COVID” and “might cause a sort of immune system fatigue.” On Monday, Israeli authorities began offering anyone over age 60 a chance to get a fourth shot, or second booster of the COVID vaccine. But scientists told The Times, before Israel confirmed it would offer the fourth shot, the science is not yet settled on using an additional booster shot to combat the new Omicron variant. There is one official report of an Israeli dying from Omicron. However, according to The Times of Israel, it is unclear that Omicron caused the death of the individual — a man in his 60s hospitalized weeks earlier from a pre-existing condition.

A new report from the UK Health Security Agency showed booster doses are less effective against Omicron than previous variants, and their effectiveness wears off in only 10 weeks. Professor Hagai Levine, an epidemiologist and chairman of Israel’s Association of Public Health Physicians, told The New York Times there’s no published scientific evidence a fourth shot is needed to prevent severe illness from Omicron. “Before giving a fourth shot, it is preferable to wait for the science,” Levine said. Benny Muchawsky, an architect based in Israel, told The Times the push to administer boosters for the Omicron variant “seemed like hysteria.” “Israel is the laboratory for the coronavirus vaccine,” Muchawsky said.

Dr. Robert Malone echoed during an interview with Joe Rogan: “These days the country’s name is actually ‘Pfizreal.’ It’s no longer Israel. Their government has a financial deal with Pfizer and they only have the Pfizer vaccine.” Malone told Rogan the scientific data points to booster doses doing more harm than good. Citing data from Denmark, he told Rogan there seems to be “negative efficacy in correlation with increased doses” meaning the more doses or boosters an individual receives, the higher chance they’ll be infected.

Read more …

Pierre Kory’s ongoing battle with pharmacists.

Saturday Night Fight.. At The Pharmacy (Kory)

I am exhausted.. physically and emotionally and morally. Although I am not sure moral exhaustion is “a thing,” the daily witnessing of masses of physicians and pharmacists abandoning their core responsibility of placing the welfare of the patient as their primary consideration.. is beyond wearying. As my friend and COVID expert Dr. Hector Carvallo has long ago said, “it’s time for the lawyers.” It is becoming increasingly critical that the law profession aid the medical profession as it has long ago been led astray by captured federal pharmaceutical agencies. Note that I no longer call them “federal health agencies” as all their actions have been 100% consistent with what a pharmaceutical or vaccine manufacturer would want them to do. To prove that point, I simply ask that, when you read an announcement in corporate media that reports a new decision or action by the federal pharmaceutical agencies (FPA’s for short), simply ask yourself “is that what a pharmaceutical company would do?”

Perfect example of this exercise was 2 days ago when it was announced that the “FPA” had authorized boosters for 12-17 year old’s against omicron (a generally mild cold in kids), using a vaccine designed for older, fundamentally different variants that have already spectacularly failed at giving protection against omicron given ever-increasing data of “negative efficacy” (i.e. vaccinated people are getting omicron more frequently than the unvaccinated). Yet the FPA “doubles down” with yet another “non-scientific policy” so that Pharma can increase the total market size of those eligible for a vaccine… and who cares if this decision ends up sending more kids to hospital than the disease ever would. Another brutal assault on public health. Another day in the United States of Pharma.

In the United States of Pharma, the individual docs and pharmacists have been led so far astray, forgivably or unforgivably, due to the relentless barrage of dis-information targeted at them by the FPA’s (supplemented by synchronous Pharma influence over the media and medical journals). The resulting proportion of the two professions that have failed to display even a modicum of either critical thinking or moral conviction.. is terrifying. It is also causing lots of problems for patients and physicians (a colleague of mine now differentiates “doctors” from “physicians”, reserving the latter term for those who follow our guiding principles and ethics by always, always, putting the patient’s welfare as their primary goal above all else, even at personal sacrifice).

Bartiromo/Kory

Read more …

All about vaccines that we know don’t help against Omicron.

New Zealand Not Prepared For Omicron Outbreak Expected In ‘Matter Of Weeks’ (G.)

Two of New Zealand’s most prominent Covid-19 experts have warned that the country is unprepared to prevent the health system from being overloaded by an Omicron outbreak, with likely fatal consequences. Otago University’s Dr Nick Wilson and Dr Michael Baker also said it was only a “matter of weeks” before the highly transmissible variant seeped into the community due to border failures. Wilson said that despite New Zealand’s high vaccination rates, the number of adults who had received a booster dose of the vaccine – essential for minimising the effects of Omicron – remains dangerously low, and noted that the vaccine rollout for children between five and 11 still had not begun.

New Zealand received its first shipment of Pfizer’s paediatric vaccine only at the weekend, and intends to begin child vaccinations from 17 January, despite some comparable countries beginning their child vaccine rollout late last year. Omicron’s short incubation period also means New Zealand’s system for identifying and containing new community cases would be much less effective. Wilson panned the country’s traffic light system – which replaced the more stringent alert-level system last year – as “not fit for purpose” with Omicron due to its tolerance for relatively significant social interaction for vaccinated people when Covid is in the community. Baker agreed, calling for the government to rapidly reinstate an amended version of the alert level system.

“The traffic light system won’t help us very much because it was never designed to dampen down transmission, it was only designed to nudge people towards vaccination,” Baker said. Until these weaknesses were fixed, he said, “we need to hugely turn down the tap of people arriving in New Zealand”. Wilson agreed: “The priority is to have a tighter border so that we don’t have to vaccinate kids and conduct a booster program during an outbreak.” The pair called for a “significant tightening” of the number of New Zealanders entering the country.

McCullough Denmark

Read more …

Brought to you by Pfizer.

UK Government Urges All Pregnant Women To Get Immediate Covid Jab (G.)

The UK government is warning that almost all pregnant women admitted to hospital with Covid symptoms were unvaccinated in one analysis over several months last year, as it kicks off an advertising campaign encouraging expectant mothers to get boosted. The campaign is calling on pregnant women not to wait to get either their first, second or booster jab. It will highlight the risks of Covid-19 to mothers and babies, with testimonies of pregnant women who have had the vaccine to be broadcast on radio and social media. The government says it has been clear, along with medical experts and institutions, that Covid-19 vaccines are safe for pregnant women and have no impact on fertility.

The Department of Health and Social Care cited statistics from the UK Obstetric Surveillance System which showed 96.3% of pregnant women admitted to hospital with Covid-19 symptoms between May and October were unvaccinated, a third of whom required respiratory support. About 20% of women admitted to hospital with the virus need to be delivered pre-term to help them recover, and 20% of their babies need care in the neonatal unit, the Department of Health and Social Care said. Since April 2021, about 84,000 pregnant women have received one dose and more than 80,000 have received two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, the department said.

Dr Jen Jardine, from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, who is seven months pregnant and has had her Covid-19 booster jab, said: “Both as a doctor and pregnant mother myself, we can now be very confident that the Covid-19 vaccinations provide the best possible protection for you and your unborn child against this virus. “I would strongly call on all pregnant women like me, if you haven’t had the vaccine yet, to either speak to your GP or midwife if you still have questions and then book right away today.”

Read more …

Enormous amounts of photos on Twitter.

#BareShelvesBiden Trends On Twitter As Americans Deal With Empty Shelves (PM)

The hashtag “BareShelvesBiden” has taken off on Twitter, with Americans nationwide documenting an alarming number of empty shelves in their local grocery stores. It was #6 on Twitter’s trending list at the time of publishing. #BareShelvesBiden became a leading Twitter trend on Sunday evening as social media users across the country took aim at President Joe Biden and his administration for failing to address the ongoing supply chain crisis. A large number of photographs posted using the alliterative hashtag show bare shelves in produce, meat, and dairy areas of stores, and paper goods isles that resemble the mass buying of toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic.


Throughout the hashtag, Twitter users posted videos and photographs of their local supermarkets across numerous grocery chains. While it’s currently unclear what exactly has caused these widespread shortages in stores across the country, some Twitter users have blamed the Biden administration and a supply chain crisis that hasn’t been solved for the shortages. The shortages appear to have touched a large portion of the country, with Twitter users from California, Maryland, Minnesota, and more states sending in their experiences with the popularized hashtag. Shelves remained unstocked and in a dire state as retail outlets continue to struggle with the shortage of goods, exacerbated by the pandemic and the Biden administration’s continued struggle to remedy the situation.

Read more …

“Sundance” with a closer look.

Temporary Empty Shelves are Not a Supply Chain Crisis (CTH)

All of these #BidensEmptyShelves assumptions, which are being heightened by increased attention and social media, are leading to confusion. An empty retail shelf or case for a 24, 36 to 48-hour period is not, I repeat, NOT, part of a systemic supply chain disruption. Those are mostly location and regional specific out of stock situations caused by localized events, weather and employee shortages. What CTH has been describing for the past several months is NOT what is noted above. What we have been describing is a long-term supply chain crisis that will slowly unfold over a period of about a week or two, and then remain a problem over time, for a period of 6+ months. The thirteen bullet points below are the issues we will first notice as the general food supply chain begins to show signs of that type of vulnerability. This outline explains why it is happening and how long it can be expected.

Initial food instability signs in the supply chain. Things to look for:

(1) A shortage of processed potatoes (frozen specifically).

And/Or a shortage of the ancillary products that are derivates of, or normally include, potatoes.

(2) A larger than usual footprint of turkey in the supermarket (last line of protein).

(3) A noticeable increase in the price of citrus products.

(4) A sparse distribution of foodstuffs that rely on flavorings.

(5) The absence of non-seasonal products.

(6) Little to no price difference on the organic comparable (diff supply chain)

(7) Unusual country of origin for fresh product type.

(8) Absence of large container products

(9) Shortage of any ordinary but specific grain derivative item (ex. wheat crackers)

(10) Big brand shortage.

(11) Shortage of wet pet foods

(12) Shortage of complex blended products with multiple ingredients (soups etc)

(13) A consistent shortage of milk products and/or ancillaries.

These notes above are all precursors that show significant stress in the supply chain. Once these issues are consistently visible, we are going to descend into food instability very quickly, sector by sector, category by category.

Read more …

 

 

 

“Gives ‘Made In China’ a whole new level of meaning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jul 292021
 
 July 29, 2021  Posted by at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  111 Responses »


Paul Gauguin The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob wrestling with the Angel) 1888

 

The Vaccine Causes The Virus To Be More Dangerous – Malone (WR)
USA Today Scrubs Passage Suggesting Vaccinated May Spread More Virus (Becker)
California COVID Cases Rising In Most Heavily Vaccinated Counties (ZH)
Ruin Them (Denninger)
Pfizer Suggests Third Dose Of Vaccine ‘Strongly’ Boosts Protection (CNN)
Latest Data Show Efficacy Of Pfizer Vaccine Falls To 84% After 6 Months (ZH)
New US Mask Guidance Prompted By Evidence Vaccinated Can Spread Delta (G.)
CDC Head Says New Mask Guidance Could Help Tame Delta Outbreak In ‘Weeks’ (F.)
Gottlieb: US Will Be Through Delta Wave In 2 Or 3 Weeks (Hill)
US Reports More Than 100,000 New Coronavirus Cases (BNO)
Dr. Pierre Kory’s Medical Lecture for Physicians and Citizens of Malaysia (O.)
Omaha Doctor Sees Tremendous Success with Ivermectin as Early Treatment (TSN)
The Noble Lies of COVID-19 (Slate)
The Vaccine Aristocrats (Taibbi)
NIH Dumped Millions Into Chinese Entities To Study Infectious Diseases (DC)
Will Washington Stop China From Buying Up Farmland? (JTN)
Assange Attorney Accuses Ecuador Of Foul Play (RT)

 

 

A tour of more mainstream news today. If only because it makes clear we’re wasting so much time talking about whatever the narrative is, but what has already been well debunked. We need our focus. If you need three shots of something, it’s not a vaccine. Doesn’t even matter if in the end it works. Which in this case it doesn’t. We’re getting dragged back into conversations we should have long left behind.

 

 

Vanden Bossche

 

 

 

 

Fleming Delta

 

 

 

 

Weinstein Long term plan

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take these 10 minutes. Yes, it’s Bannon, but at least he lets Malone speak.

The Vaccine Causes The Virus To Be More Dangerous – Malone (WR)

Read more …

It’s out.

USA Today Scrubs Passage Suggesting Vaccinated May Spread More Virus (Becker)

“NBC News, citing unnamed officials aware of the decision, reported it comes after new data suggests vaccinated individuals could have higher levels of virus and infect others amid the surge of cases driven by the delta variant of the coronavirus,” the USA Today reported in a passage that was later scrubbed from an article. A screenshot from the article and an online archive of the passage points out the surfacing evidence.The story from the USA Today drops the reference to NBC News, but nonetheless corroborates the news: “CDC says vaccinated people may transmit virus, recommends masks indoors.”


“CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said new data shows the delta variant, which accounts for more than 80% of the new infections in the U.S., behaves ‘uniquely differently’ from its predecessors and could make vaccinated people infectious,” the article notes. “Information on the delta variant from several states and other countries indicates that in rare occasions some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others,” Walensky said in announcing new guidance, which reverses a CDC recommendation in May. “This new science is worrisome and unfortunately warrants an update to our recommendation.”

NBC News reported on the CDC guidance reversal on Monday. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Tuesday that fully vaccinated people begin wearing masks indoors again in places with high Covid-19 transmission rates,” NBC News reported. “The agency is also recommending kids wear masks in schools this fall.” “Federal health officials still believe fully vaccinated individuals represent a very small amount of transmission,” the report continued. “Still, some vaccinated people could be carrying higher levels of the virus than previously understood and potentially transmit it to others.”

Read more …

It’s fun to see them all bend themselves into pretzels to “explain” how they were not wrong when they were.

California COVID Cases Rising In Most Heavily Vaccinated Counties (ZH)

Some might have been surprised to see California on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s map of high-risk areas where the new federal indoor mask mandates must be obeyed. The Golden State was deemed more high risk than Texas. Indeed, scientists are finding that despite its high vaccination rates, California is seeing more COVID cases than it should. California and its big coastal cities have embraced vaccines in their effort to beat back the COVID pandemic. But a Bay Area News Group analysis shows that not only are cases rising fast, they are rising in areas where there are more fully vaccinated people. Some of these counties have both among the highest vaccination rates, and the highest new-case rates.

Notice that five of these counties have both a higher percentage of their eligible residents fully vaccinated and a higher average daily case rate than the statewide average. They include: LA, San Diego, Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco. The five counties with falling case rates are Modoc, Glenn, Lassen, Del Norte, San Benito, and they, coincidentally, have below-average vaccination rates. As to what might be causing this, experts point to two things: the extraordinary ease with which the virus’ now-dominant delta strain spreads, and the fact that no vaccine offers complete protection.


“I am not so surprised that transmission rates are not neatly tracking immunization rates,” said Dr. Stephen Luby, a medical professor specializing in infectious diseases at Stanford University. “There are a number of issues that contribute to transmission,” Luby said. “In high density urban settings, for example, even with a higher level of vaccine coverage, there can still be a lot of exposure to unvaccinated folks and potentially to folks who are vaccinated but are asymptomatically shedding the delta variant.” Reports of the vaccines’ effectiveness against the delta variant have been mixed. In Israel, the Ministry of Health suspects the protection afforded by the Pfizer jab might be as low as 64%.

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“Unfortunately the so-called “public health” authorities have destroyed — not just damaged, but destroyed — their own credibility.”

Ruin Them (Denninger)

If you go into the hospital for any reason they test you. Why? Because if you’re positive they want their magic $13,000 Biden Money (formerly Trump money) if you’re on Medicare and Medicaid for treating a “Covid case.” Biden is still continuing this bull**** no matter why you’re there. Chest pain? Covid! Oh, never mind the heart attack. So are the “hospitalized” actually hospitalized for Covid or is Tennessee counting anyone in the hospital who tested positive irrespective of the reason for their admission? This particular game has been run since March of 2020 and nobody has put a stop to it because they’re making money from it — lots of money. Never mind that these jabs are not behaving like a vaccine. US Code: “The term “vaccine” means any substance designed to be administered to a human being for the prevention of 1 or more diseases.”

The data is that these jabs do not prevent disease. They also do not prevent transmission of disease. In fact they appear to, if you get a breakthrough case, make transmission more likely in that the Ct data from these miners shows equal or lower values on balance in the vaccinated cohort with one sample at Ct22! Reminder: The lower the Ct the more virus you have in your body. Now granted this is a small group — very small. But it is extremely concerning that the lowest Ct recorded among these cases was a fully-vaccinated person. Where is the data from the state labs and CDC on these “breakthroughs” and their Ct numbers generally? It’s not being reported. I bet you can guess why not without needing more than one guess.

This appears to be confirmed as something that does indeed happen by the reported “super-spreading” person who (1) was fully-vaccinated, (2) infected more than 60 other people and (3) most of those whom he gave it to were also vaccinated. He obviously was an extremely-efficient emitter of virus! The only remaining argument for the jabs is that they make a personal severe outcome less likely. Here the data is somewhat more-reassuring but the adverse effect profile of the shots is not reassuring at all, it is being deliberately glossed over, and as a result the question as to whether or not to take them is a deeply personal decision that must be informed by your personal medical status coupled with intentional deception on those advocating for the jabs.

How in the hell do you make an informed decision under those circumstances? Unfortunately the so-called “public health” authorities have destroyed — not just damaged, but destroyed — their own credibility. Tennessee’s Department of Health proved themselves liars with nothing more than public data. So have others. I have multiple reported sets of data from individual practices where the percentage of unvaccinated people presenting with Covid-19 symptoms is lower than the percentage of unvaccinated people in the population of that specific area. In other words the data is that the jabs not only do not prevent you from getting the virus at all but in fact may ENHANCE the risk of infection and this, incidentally, voids the argument that the jabs are a vaccine from a LEGAL standpoint.

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As soon as you talk about a third -or even a second- dose, you’re no longer talking about a vaccine.

Pfizer Suggests Third Dose Of Vaccine ‘Strongly’ Boosts Protection (CNN)

A third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine can “strongly” boost protection against the Delta variant — beyond the protection afforded by the standard two doses, new data released by Pfizer on Wednesday suggests. The data posted online suggest that levels of antibodies that can target the Delta variant grow fivefold in people 18 to 55 who get a third dose of the vaccine.Among people ages 65 to 85, the Pfizer data suggest that antibody levels that should protect against Delta grow 11-fold more than following a second dose.The data, which involved tests of 23 people, have not yet been peer-reviewed or published. It’s not clear if boosted antibody levels actually correlate to better protection, or if that extra protection is even needed.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the current vaccines protect people well against all the common variants. During a company earnings call on Wednesday morning, Dr. Mikael Dolsten, who leads worldwide research, development and medical for Pfizer, called the new data on a third dose of vaccine “encouraging.” “Receiving a third dose more than six months after vaccination, when protection may be beginning to wane, was estimated to potentially boost the neutralizing antibody titers in participants in this study to up to 100 times higher post-dose three compared to pre-dose three,” Dolsten said in prepared remarks. “These preliminary data are very encouraging as Delta continues to spread.” The data also show that antibody levels are much higher against the original coronavirus variant and the Beta variant, first identified in South Africa, after a third dose.


Separately, Pfizer and its partner BioNtech released new safety and efficacy data for their coronavirus vaccine Wednesday, and said it shows protection holds up for at least six months, although it may start to wane slightly towards the end of that time. The pre-print paper, posted Wednesday to the online server medrxiv.org, updates results from Pfizer’s trial involving 44,000 volunteers around the world. It found the overall efficacy was about 91% during the six months. Vaccine efficacy against severe Covid-19 was about 97%, the data show. The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed nor published in a journal.

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Again, not a vaccine. And do remember RRR vs ARR numbers.

Latest Data Show Efficacy Of Pfizer Vaccine Falls To 84% After 6 Months (ZH)

As pressure builds for the FDA to simply ‘get on with it’ and issue full approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna jabs, it looks like the people responsible for deciding whether vaccines are safe and effective are finally coming around to the reality that those vaccines aren’t as effective against the delta strain as they had once hoped. Despite months of insisting that the opposite was true, the FDA has found that the efficacy of the jabs has fallen to 84% over six months, according to new data released Wednesday. Conveniently, STAT News, which broke the story about the data, reported that the lower efficacy would likely bolster Pfizer’s case for approval of a third dose.

Per the data, which has been released to outside scientists, the ongoing study, which enrolled more than 44K volunteers, found that the vaccine’s efficacy appeared to decline by an average of 6% every two months after administration. Efficacy peaked at more than 96% within two months of vaccination and slipped to 84% after six months. The overall efficacy against severe disease was a still considerable 97% (though that’s still not 100%). Unsurprisingly, STAT lined up a few talking heads to plug the numbers. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told STAT that the results were “very reassuring.” The potential need for booster shots is tied to the number of fully vaccinated people who develop severe disease, Offit said.


That number is just 3% lower after six months, suggesting two doses of Pfizer’s vaccine offers adequate protection. Earlier, Pfizer boosted its fiscal year revenue forecast for its vaccine business. Perhaps these data offer some insight into that decision. Of course, there’s reason to believe that number might be even lower than the 97%. Israel’s Ministry of Health recently found that the Pfizer vaccine is only 39% effective at combating delta, down from 64% according to earlier Israeli data intended to measure the efficacy against the delta variant. Pfizer is already shipping jabs to Israel, which is preparing to start doling out booster shots to residents deemed vulnerable to COVID. For whatever reason, the data released Wednesday doesn’t directly address the delta variant.

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Aka the vaccines don’t work. A spade, a spade.

New US Mask Guidance Prompted By Evidence Vaccinated Can Spread Delta (G.)

The CDC revised its mask guidance on Tuesday to recommend fully vaccinated Americans wear masks in “public indoor settings” with “substantial and high transmission”, a shift from its earlier guidance issued on 13 May, which said vaccinated individuals did not need to wear masks in most indoor settings. The move came as Joe Biden said requiring all federal workers to get a coronavirus vaccine is “under consideration” as the Delta variant surges in the US. Some local and state leaders, including New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the California governor, Gavin Newsom, have already announced such mandates for their government employees.

Walensky also spoke on Wednesday about the threat of Covid-19 to children. “If you look at the mortality rate of Covid, just this past year for children, it’s more than twice the mortality rate that we see in influenza in a given year,” she said. On Tuesday the CDC changed its advice and now recommends that fully vaccinated people living with vulnerable household members, such as those who are immunocompromised and children, wear masks in indoor public spaces. In addition, the agency recommended everyone in K-12 schools wear masks, “including teachers, staff, students and visitors, regardless of vaccination status”, Walensky said in a press briefing on Tuesday.

“In recent days I have seen new scientific data from recent outbreak investigations showing that the Delta variant behaves uniquely differently from past strains of the virus that cause Covid-19,” Walensky said on Tuesday, referring to scientists’ discovery of the Delta strain shedding as actively in breakthrough infections as it does in unvaccinated individuals, despite the rarity of breakthrough cases. For months Covid cases, deaths and hospitalizations were falling steadily, but the highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus has fueled steep rises in case numbers, particularly among unvaccinated Americans and amid struggles with disinformation and resistance, particularly on the political right.

“Nobody wants to go backward but you have to deal with the facts on the ground, and the facts on the ground are that it’s a pretty scary time and there are a lot of vulnerable people,” Robert Wachter, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told the Washington Post. “I think the biggest thing we got wrong was not anticipating that 30% of the country would choose not to be vaccinated.”

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Unfortunately, there are still plenty Americans who believe this nonsense.

CDC Head Says New Mask Guidance Could Help Tame Delta Outbreak In ‘Weeks’ (F.)

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CBS on Wednesday she believes the new mask guidance from her agency along with a rise in vaccinations could halt the current escalation of Covid-19 cases in the U.S. in “a couple of weeks,” though some critics are already expressing doubt that the CDC’s recommendations will be followed in the worst-hit places. Walensky appeared on CBS This Morning a day after her agency announced it was reversing course and recommending that all people wear masks—regardless of vaccination status—in parts of the country with “high” or “substantial” rates of transmission of coronavirus.


She touted the new guidance during her Wednesday interview as a crucial measure that follows new information about so-called breakthrough infections and has the potential to help with quickly mitigating the country’s current virus surge. “If we get people vaccinated who are not yet vaccinated, if we mask in the interim, we can halt this in just a couple of weeks,” said the CDC head. Walensky also said she hopes more stringent mask-wearing guidelines and other measures won’t be necessary in the coming weeks, but her agency “will follow the science.” “We can halt the chain of transmission,” Walensky said. “We can do something if we unify together.”

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What a coincidence. Also in weeks.

Note: Gottlieb is a Pfizer board member. But Delta waning will have nothing to do with their products.

Remember: “India, where Delta Variant began? Deaths down 92% since its May peak, cases down 91% since then, too. One of the lowest vaccination rates in the world, btw.”

Gottlieb: US Will Be Through Delta Wave In 2 Or 3 Weeks (Hill)

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb predicted early Wednesday that the United States could get through the worst of the delta variant surge of the coronavirus in a few weeks. “The bottom line is, the vaccine does not make you impervious to infection,” Gottlieb said during an appearance on CNBC. “There are some people who are developing mild and asymptomatic infections even after vaccination.” After acknowledging the delta variant of the coronavirus as “much more transmissible” than the first strain, Gottlieb questioned whether that fact should “translate into general guidance” on mask wearing and vaccine requirements in the United States.

“I don’t think that’s the case,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to get enough bang for our buck by telling vaccinated people they have to wear masks at all times to make it worth our while. I think we’re further into this delta wave than we’re picking up. I think in another two or three weeks we’ll be through this.” Gottlieb added that the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could have a “negligible impact” on public health and that federal officials should instead focus on more targeted messaging on guidance for high-risk areas. The CDC announced new guidance Tuesday recommending that vaccinated Americans wear masks while in crowded indoor environments in certain areas of the country where the delta variant has caused a major increase in cases.


The delta variant is now accounting for the majority of new cases in the United States, almost entirely among the unvaccinated. President Biden’s administration is facing increased pressure to get more people vaccinated and require federal workers, teachers and people who work in health care industries to be vaccinated as a condition of their employment. “If you are vaccinated in a high-prevalence area, in contact with virus, you think you might have the virus because you have mild symptoms of it, be prudent, get tested, maybe wear a mask especially if you are around a vulnerable person,” Gottlieb said on CNBC. “That should be bottom-line guidance we give.”

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On Tuesday. Be gone in weeks. And then they’ll praise the “vaccines” again. Damned if you do, doomed if you don’t.

US Reports More Than 100,000 New Coronavirus Cases (BNO)

More than 100,000 new coronavirus cases have been reported in the U.S. amid a rapid surge in hospital admissions and new calls from federal officials to wear a mask in public. Data from health departments across the U.S. showed that 106,084 new cases were reported, including a two-day backlog from Florida which occurs every Tuesday. It represents an increase of 73% from last week. The states reporting the most new cases are: Florida (38,321 for a three-day period), Texas (8,642), California (7,731), Louisiana (6,818), Georgia (3,587), Utah (2,882), Alabama (2,667), and Missouri (2,414). The rolling 7-day average for daily cases is 62,411, up from 12,648 a month ago.


The surge is accompanied by a rapid rise in hospital admissions, particularly in Florida, which reported the biggest one-day increase on record. Nearly 40,000 coronavirus patients are currently hospitalized across the U.S., well below the peak in January but an increase of nearly 11% in one day. Earlier on Tuesday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky urged all Americans to wear a mask in public in high-risk areas. She said the new advice was based on evidence which shows that the Delta variant can spread among vaccinated people, even though the vast majority of people who become seriously ill are unvaccinated.

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He never gets tired.

Dr. Pierre Kory’s Medical Lecture for Physicians and Citizens of Malaysia (O.)

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Article’s a little incoherent, bu the idea is clear.

Omaha Doctor Sees Tremendous Success with Ivermectin as Early Treatment (TSN)

Physicians from around the United States continue to emerge, going public with their declaration of the benefits of ivermectin as an early onset, mild-to-moderate stage COVID-19 treatment. Most recently on KETV 7 Omaha, Dr. Louis Safranek came forth, declaring, “I typically use it in combination with other agents. But I do prescribe it for virtually all the patients who come to be, as part of a treatment regimen, which I think is effective for folks.” The Harvard Medical School graduate has been specializing in infectious diseases for four decades. Having treated nearly 200 COVID-19 patients at home and in the local hospitals here in Omaha, Nebraska, ivermectin is a key medicine tool in the medicine box targeting COVID-19.

TrialSite can assure that the National Institute of Health (NIH) formal policy in fighting the pandemic is to have a comprehensive mix of 1) safe and effective vaccines, 2) branded therapeutics, 3) generic repurposed therapeutics, and 4) sound and locationally relevant public health policy. Of course, industry bias has reared its ugly head in this pandemic as the NIH and the federal government have spent many billions on vaccines and novel investigational therapies while investing probably less than 5% of the portfolio investment in generic repurposed drugs—the NIH happens to be testing ivermectin now as part of the ACTIV-6 program.

In fact, Dr. Safranek shared that not one COVID-19 patient that he has treated with ivermectin and other regimens have ended up on a ventilator or dead. He reports out of about 200 patients, only one ended up hospitalized, making this a very high success. Here in the Midwest plains, Doctor Safranek had an 80-year old Omaha woman who survived two bouts of COVID-19, the second via a breakthrough infection. That is, she got infected even after being fully vaccinated. When she came to the doctor and he treated her with the anti-parasite, FDA-approved drug, she informed, “I was better the next day, not well but better.” She continued that while on the ivermectin regimen, “Each day, I got better, and now I am over it.”

Of course, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, isn’t about to administer its COVID-19 patients with ivermectin. Their position: “Further studies needed to be done to show Ivermectin has utility in the treatment of COVID-19,” reports UNMC Medical Director of Infectious Disease Dr. Mark Rupp. Of course, Dr. Rupp will administer remdesivir to hospitalized patients, even though the drug has some concerning safety signals and the World Health Organization (WHO), on no uncertain terms, declared the drug wasn’t effective based on the results of the Solitary study. UNMC also makes monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) available for the care of COVID-19 patients, and these have shown some promise but they are highly investigational.

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Nothing noble about them. Don’t try to make them that, Slate.

The Noble Lies of COVID-19 (Slate)

The fourth noble lie from government agencies and/or officials occurred more recently. On June 4, using data from February to March, the agency made the case that hospitalizations were rising in adolescents. It tweeted, “The report shows the importance of #COVID19 vaccination for adolescents.” That tweet spurred a great deal of media attention and concern. It was true that hospitalization rates had risen. However, at the time of the press coverage, hospitalization rates in this age group had already fallen again. Numerous commenters immediately pointed out that the “rise” in hospitalization statistic promoted by the CDC was out of date the moment it was highlighted and raised questions about why the CDC would promote a dated statistic, when the organization had access to up-to-date information.

This obvious error was compounded weeks later during a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The committee met to discuss what we knew and did not know about heart inflammation, or myocarditis, that had been linked to mRNA vaccination, and most notable in young men who received the vaccine. During the course of the meeting, representatives of the CDC showed a model that claimed that vaccination of young adults was preferable to the disease itself. There were, however, several concerns with this model. First, it used rates of community SARS-CoV-2 spread that again were out of date. By the time of the meeting, the rates were lower, meaning the benefits of vaccination would be reduced, but the harms remain the same.

Second, it did not consider the risks separately for boys and girls, who appear to have substantially different risk of myocarditis (much higher in boys). Third, it did not consider any middle ground positions, such as only receiving one dose of the vaccine, which provides much of the benefit with far lower myocarditis risk. Instead, the CDC presented zero or two doses as the only options. Fourth, the modeling did not consider natural immunity—i.e., the vaccine’s risk to kids who already recovered from COVID-19 might be the same, but the benefits far lower (as these children have some natural immunity). Finally, the model did not consider the fact that young adults with preexisting medical conditions and those who are otherwise well might have different risk benefit profiles, as the former account for a disproportionate number of COVID-19 hospitalizations.

Together, these are all information choices made by government agencies and/or officials about vaccination of young adults. Amplifying out-of-date statistics and building a model to support vaccination that has questionable assumptions work to support rapid deployment of two doses of mRNA to all healthy kids aged 12 to 17. That may be the CDC’s policy pursuit, and one we are sympathetic to. However, distorting evidence to achieve this result is a form of a noble lie. Accurately reporting current risks to adolescents, and exploring other dosing possibilities, is part of the unbiased scientific exploration of data.

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I like Taibbi, but why does he have to vent an opinion about other people’s lives and choices? Does he simply not understand what he says?

I’m vaccinated. I think people should be vaccinated

The Vaccine Aristocrats (Taibbi)

On This Week With George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday, a bafflegab of Washington poo-bahs including Chris Christie, Rahm Emmanuel, Margaret Hoover, and Donna Brazile — Stephanopoulos calls the segment his “Powerhouse Roundtable,” which to my ear sounds like a Denny’s breakfast sampler, but I guess he couldn’t name it Four Hated Windbags — discussed vaccine holdouts. The former George W. Bush and Giuliani aide Hoover said it was time to stop playing nice. If you’re going to get government-provided health care, if you’re getting VA treatment, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, anything — and Social Security obviously isn’t health care — you should be getting the vaccine. Okay? Because we are going to have to take care of you on the back end. Brazile nodded sagely, but Emmanuel all but gushed cartoon hearts.

“You know, I’m having an out of body experience, because I agree with you,” said Obama’s former hatchet man, before adding, over the chyron, FRUSTRATION MOUNTS WITH UNVACCINATED AMERICANS: I would close the space in. Meaning if you want to participate in X or Y activity, you gotta show you’re vaccinated. So it becomes a reward-punishment type system, and you make your own calculation. This bipartisan love-in took place a few days after David Frum, famed Bush speechwriter and creator of the “Axis of Evil” slogan, wrote a column in The Atlantic entitled “Vaccinated America Has Had Enough.” In it, Frum wondered: Does Biden’s America have a breaking point? Biden’s America produces 70 percent of the country’s wealth — and then sees that wealth transferred to support Trump’s America. Which is fine; that’s what citizens of one nation do for one another… [But] the reciprocal part of the bargain is not being upheld…


Will Blue America ever decide it’s had enough of being put medically at risk by people and places whose bills it pays? Check yourself. Have you? I’m vaccinated. I think people should be vaccinated But this latest moral mania — and make no mistake about it, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” PR campaign is the latest in a ceaseless series of such manias, dating back to late 2016 — lays bare everything that’s abhorrent and nonsensical in modern American politics, beginning with the no-longer-disguised aristocratic mien of the Washington consensus. If you want to convince people to get a vaccine, pretty much the worst way to go about it is a massive blame campaign, delivered by sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem with large chunks of the population, and now insist they’re owed financially besides.

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US banned gain of function, Fauci and Daszak exported it to China. Not a complicated story.

NIH Dumped Millions Into Chinese Entities To Study Infectious Diseases (DC)

The National Institutes of Health has doled out nearly $46 million in taxpayer funds to 100 Chinese institutions in the form of subgrants since the 2012 fiscal year to conduct research into infectious diseases, drug addiction, mental health and other scientific fields, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of federal spending data. The NIH’s ongoing funding of Chinese research institutions comes amid growing bipartisan concern in Washington D.C. over the fact that U.S. taxpayers support research in a country that has violated international health regulations, stonewalled a proper investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and that may be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the NIH subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, provided $6.6 million in taxpayer-funded subgrants to 27 of the Chinese entities, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to conduct research into allergies and infectious diseases, subgrant data pulled from USASpending.gov shows. One of the NIAID-funded subgrants, which involved the transfer of $428,000 to a Chinese government-owned institution in 2020 to conduct research into emerging mosquito and tick-based infections, states unequivocally that the U.S. will only receive the research, funded in part by U.S. taxpayers, upon approval by Chinese government authorities.


“Following testing for common pathogens, and then, after approval by the relevant authorities of the Chinese government, a subset of samples will be sent to Washington University in St. Louis for further analysis,” the subgrant description to the Chinese National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention reads.[..] Another NIAID-funded project provided $600,000 in subgrants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the COVID-19 pandemic to conduct research that involved the genetic modification of bat-based coronaviruses.

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China 1/3, Bill Gates 1/3, Monsanto 1/3. American farmers: 0.

Will Washington Stop China From Buying Up Farmland? (JTN)

China’s effort to unseat America as the world’s economic superpower has a new tactic: It has bought up more than 200,000 acres of U.S. farmland. And while there is bipartisan support for legislation to slow down Beijing’s acquisitions, Democrats have added a new wrinkle. Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), who is leading the legislative charge, says congressional Democrats have removed all references to the communist government of China in an amendment to an agricultural spending bill that originally prevented the Chinese Communist Party’s purchase of American farmland. “[O]ver the last decade, we’ve seen a huge increase in the acquisition of these kinds of assets — farming in particular — by the People’s Republic of China,” he said. “And that, to me, is just a direction that, while we can, we should do all we can to stop.”

With China purchasing the United States’ agricultural assets and becoming more ingrained in the U.S. economy, America might eventually “become dependent on Communist China for our agricultural production,” Newhouse warned. “We don’t want that to happen. We want to stop that in its tracks.” Only six states have agricultural restrictions on China, Newhouse said, “so this is something that I think is desperately needed in our country to prevent China, Communist China, from taking over our agricultural industry.” Newhouse added that the House Committee on Appropriations adopted the amendment through a unanimous voice vote, which is rare for two reasons: being unanimous and passing an amendment from the minority party.


“I think that that tells us that there’s concern across the board [over] the direction that people see China taking,” he said, adding that neither political party wants to see China taking over America’s critical assets, like it has with other countries. Democrats want to include North Korea, Iran, and Russia in addition to China in the amendment, Newhouse said. But North Korea has no money to buy farmland in the U.S., and the other countries haven’t purchased any land in recent years, unlike China.

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Apparently, revoking his citizenship is not final yet.

Assange Attorney Accuses Ecuador Of Foul Play (RT)

Ecuador has revoked Julian Assange’s citizenship, citing alleged inconsistencies with his naturalization documents. A lawyer for the imprisoned publisher claims the decision was made without due process. The WikiLeaks co-founder was informed that his citizenship had been nullified in a letter issued by Ecuador’s justice system, following a complaint issued by the South American nation’s Foreign Ministry. Ecuadorian officials claimed that Assange’s application for naturalization contained numerous inconsistencies, including different signatures, as well as possibly forged documents. Assange also failed to pay fees connected with his citizenship in the country, authorities alleged. Carlos Poveda, Assange’s lawyer, responded to the decision by accusing the Ecuadorian government of turning its back on due process.

The Australian was unable to contest the claims made against him because he is currently being “deprived of his liberty” and suffering from a “health crisis” while locked away at London’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, Poveda told AP. The lawyer complained a week earlier that it was “impossible” for his client to properly defend himself under the circumstances, and expressed hope that the case would not be “judged by ‘public opinion’” alone. Poveda said he will petition the government to clarify its decision on the matter. “More than the importance of nationality, it is a matter of respecting rights and following due process in withdrawing nationality,” he said.


Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry insisted that it had “acted independently and followed due process,” claiming that similar concerns about Assange’s citizenship had been raised by the previous government. Assange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship in January 2018, as part of an attempt by then-President Lenin Moreno to help the journalist safely leave the country’s embassy in London, where he had been seeking asylum since June 2012.

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San Diego
https://twitter.com/i/status/1420401547037462532

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jun 232021
 
 June 23, 2021  Posted by at 8:48 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  85 Responses »


Edward Hopper New York movie 1939

 

‘It’s Anti-science, And It’s Anti-me’ – Fauci (RT)
Mass Vaccination Drives A Rapid Evolutionary Response Of SARS-CoV-2 (VDBossche)
Ivermectin: The Forbidden Treatment (APL)
Oxford University Explores Ivermectin As Covid-19 Treatment (R.)
Nearly 4,000 Fully Vaccinated People in MA Positive for COVID-19 (ET)
3rd COVID Wave Will Kill Or Hospitalize 60 To 70% of Fully Vaccinated (GGI)
Daszak Leaves UN-backed COVID Origins Probe (NYP)
Media Allowed Itself To Be Duped By One Man On Covid-19 (Bloom)
Gabon Paid For Protecting Forests, In African First (Y!)
A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow’s Viewers Know She Doesn’t Offer Facts (Greenwald)
EU Opens Antitrust Probe Into Google’s Online Ad Tech Business (F.)
Millions Become Millionaires During Covid Pandemic (BBC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Craig Kelly MP
https://twitter.com/i/status/1407280779055419394

 

 

All America has had to say for a year and a half. Poor. Can’t disagree with Tony, because that makes you far-right.

‘It’s Anti-science, And It’s Anti-me’ – Fauci (RT)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, has dismissed controversy surrounding numerous past emails being published as “anti-science” nonsense from the “far-right.” Fauci has found himself facing new waves of criticism since thousands of his emails were released via Freedom of Information Act requests through Buzzfeed and the Washington Post. Critics have timed what Fauci has said in some of the emails during the pandemic to what he was saying publicly and accused the infectious disease expert of hypocrisy on issues such as masking and theories about the origin of Covid-19. In an interview with the New York Times published on Monday, Fauci dismissed his “far-right” critics as being “politically motivated” and pushing “nonsense” to discredit him.


“It’s clear. It’s anti-science, and it’s anti-me,” Fauci declared. He went on to say that every piece of correspondence is “perfectly normal, perfectly innocent, and completely above board.” Fauci has long been accused of flip-flopping on key guidances in short periods of time during the pandemic, something he has denied, explaining that his opinion has changed as the “science” has, an argument he doubled-down on in his most recent defense. “So the people who are giving the ad hominems are saying, ‘Fauci misled us,'” he said. “‘First, he said no masks, then he said masks.’ Well, let me give you a flash. That’s the way science works. You work with the data you have at the time. It is essential as a scientist that you evolve your opinion and your recommendations based on the data as it evolves.”

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Spike proteins all the way.

Mass Vaccination Drives A Rapid Evolutionary Response Of SARS-CoV-2 (VDBossche)

We do know about the outcome of a natural pandemic but don’t know at all about the outcome of the ongoing pandemic, as the latter has now become a ‘pandemic of variants’. From what follows below (and which is basically a summary of findings made by molecular/ genomic epidemiologists that I put into a broader context), there is however, one certainty, which is that Sars-CoV-2 variants are rapidly evolving in response to the natural immune selection pressure they are experiencing. Phylogenetics-based natural selection analysis indicates that a substantial amount of the immune selection pressure exerted during this pandemic is directed at the Sars-CoV-2 spike (S) protein, which is targeted by the vaccines.

On their journey to adapting to the host(ile) environment of neutralizing antibodies (nAbs), variants further exploit their evolutionary capacity to overcome this S-directed, population-level immune pressure. Hence, in a given vaccination setting and stage of the ongoing pandemic, the success of mass vaccination campaigns will to a large extent depend on the evolving prevalence of increasingly problematic variants. Alternatively, S-directed immune interventions that seem effective in one vaccination setting and stage of this pandemic may not work as well when applied to another vaccination setting or when implemented at another stage of the ongoing pandemic.

The observation that the effectiveness of mass vaccination campaigns, as assessed during a pandemic of immune escape variants, oftentimes evolves very differently between countries or regions is, therefore, not surprising. It is only when the population-level selective immune pressure will culminate that variants and, therefore, the effects of these campaigns will start to globally converge to the same endpoint, which is ‘resistance’ to the vaccines. It is only at that very endpoint that all assessments of the alleged ‘effectiveness’ of this experiment will be unanimous and consistent. [..] as the immune selection pressure in the global population is now ‘massively’ rising and the set of naturally selected, S-directed mutations together with the plasticity thereof dramatically expanding, one can reasonably expect that the edition of a super variant capable of resisting S-specific Abs will be precipitated such as to emerge within the next few months.

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“Please may we start saving lives now.” She heard nothing back.”

Ivermectin: The Forbidden Treatment (APL)

On Dec. 8 2020, FLCCC member Dr. Pierre Kory gave nine minutes of testimony to the U.S. Homeland Security Committee Meeting on the potent anti-viral, anti-inflammatory benefits of ivermectin. Nine million people viewed the video on YouTube before it was taken down by YouTube’s owner, Google. Capuzzo said mainstream and social media have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep people in the dark about ivermectin. Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check reporter” interviewed Kory. Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a recommendation by the NIH or WHO.

On Jan. 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” (Ivermectin) only to have Twitter take down the official public health tweet for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” On Jan. 31, the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to allow use of Ivermectin. Facebook took down the post and removed the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries. In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet…”

As Kory’s testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the community. Undeterred, many front-line doctors have tried to persuade their health regulators of the efficacy and safety of ivermectin as a covid treatment. They include Dr. Tess Lawrie, a prominent independent medical researcher who, as Capuzzo reports, evaluates the safety and efficacy of drugs for the WHO and the National Health Service to set international clinical practice guidelines: “She read all 27 of the Ivermectin studies Kory cited. The resulting evidence is consistent and unequivocal, she said, and sent a rapid meta-analysis, an epidemiolocal statistical multi-study review considered the highest form of medical evidence, to the director of the NHS, members of parliament, and a video to Prime Minister Boris Johnson with “the good news… that we now have solid evidence of an effective treatment for COVID-19…” and Ivermectin should immediately “be adopted globally and systematically for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.”

Ignored by British leaders and media, Lawrie convened the day-long streaming BIRD conference—British Ivermectin Recommendation Development—with more than 60 researchers and doctors from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Belgium, Argentina, South Africa, Botswana, Nigeria, Australia, and Japan. They evaluated the drug using the full “evidence-to-decision framework” that is “the gold standard tool for developing clinical practice guidelines” used by the WHO, and reached the conclusion that Ivermectin should blanket the world. “Most of all you can trust me because I am also a medical doctor, first and foremost,” Lawrie told the prime minster, “with a moral duty to help people, to do no harm, and to save lives. Please may we start saving lives now.” She heard nothing back.

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Oxford is AstraZeneca. They should never lead a study like this. And they know it.

Oxford University Explores Ivermectin As Covid-19 Treatment (R.)

The University of Oxford said on Wednesday it was testing anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a possible treatment for COVID-19, as part of a British government-backed study that aims to aid recoveries in non-hospital settings. Ivermectin resulted in a reduction of virus replication in laboratory studies, the university said, adding that a small pilot showed giving the drug early could reduce viral load and the duration of symptoms in some patients with mild COVID-19. Dubbed PRINCIPLE, the British study in January showed that antibiotics azithromycin and doxycycline were generally ineffective against early-stage COVID-19.


While the World Health Organization, and European and U.S. regulators have recommended against using ivermectin in COVID-19 patients, it is being used to treat the illness in some countries, including India. “By including ivermectin in a large-scale trial like PRINCIPLE, we hope to generate robust evidence to determine how effective the treatment is against COVID-19, and whether there are benefits or harms associated with its use,” co-lead investigator of the trial Chris Butler said. People with severe liver conditions, who are on blood-thinning medication warfarin, or taking other treatments known to interact with ivermectin, will be excluded from the trial, the university added. Ivermectin is the seventh treatment to be investigated in the trial, and is currently being evaluated alongside antiviral drug favipiravir, the university said.

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How it started and how it’s going is the same. No progress:

“The health agency added, “There is some evidence that vaccination may make illness less severe.”

Nearly 4,000 Fully Vaccinated People in MA Positive for COVID-19 (ET)

Nearly 4,000 people in Massachusetts who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have contracted the virus, adding to the growing number of breakthrough cases nationwide. According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, as of June 12, there were 3,791 people who tested positive for COVID-19 among the 3.7 million fully vaccinated people in the state, accounting for roughly one in 1,000 vaccinated individuals. “We’re learning that many of the breakthrough infections are asymptomatic or they’re very mild and brief in duration,” said Boston University infectious diseases specialist Davidson Hamer, the Boston Herald reported. “The viral load is not very high.”

“Breakthroughs are expected, and we need to better understand who’s at risk and whether people who have a breakthrough can transmit the virus to others,” Hamer added. “In some cases, they’ll be shedding such low levels of the virus and won’t be transmitting to others.” So-called breakthrough cases refer to cases appearing two or more weeks after a person’s final shot. That’s primarily the second Pfizer or Moderna dose, but can be the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “Vaccine breakthrough cases are expected,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states on its website. “COVID-19 vaccines are effective and are a critical tool to bring the pandemic under control. However, no vaccines are 100 percent effective at preventing illness. There will be a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19.”

The health agency added, “There is some evidence that vaccination may make illness less severe.”

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From April, but a keeper.

3rd COVID Wave Will Kill Or Hospitalize 60 To 70% of Fully Vaccinated (GGI)

According to projections by UK’s top modelling agency the third wave of COVID-19 spike will hospitalize and kill 60 to 70% of those people who took both the vaccine doses. The paper suggests that the resurgence in both hospitalisations and deaths will dominated by those who have received two doses of the vaccine, comprising around 60% and 70% of the wave respectively. The modelling (read below in full) was presented to the UK’s top scientific advisory body Sage by one of its sub groups, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational (SPI-M-O). This committee of academics has done modelling work throughout the pandemic and has looked at the impact vaccination will have on hospital admissions, infections and deaths.

Its findings suggest that a third wave is inevitable but that the size of the spike in cases depends on the effectiveness of vaccines, the speed at which restrictions are eased and the impact new variants have on transmission and illness. It suggests that the resurgence in both hospitalisations and deaths will be “dominated by those that have received two doses of the vaccine”. “Maintaining a large reduction in transmission from such measures after Step 4 [England’s plans to remove all restrictions from June 21] is taken is almost certain to reduce the size of the subsequent resurgence. This latest modelling reinforces this finding, as lower adherence to baseline measures and the resulting increased transmission could lead to a peak close in scale to that seen in January 2021.” The paper looks at a range of possibilities what we can expect from Covid as we ease restrictions going into the summer. It takes into account a range of difference sources including modelling from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“Scenarios with little transmission reduction after step 4 [full lifting of restrictions planned for June in England] or with pessimistic but plausible vaccine efficacy assumptions can result in resurgences in hospitalisations of a similar scale to January 2021.” The paper suggests that the resurgence in both hospitalisations and deaths will dominated by those who have received two doses of the vaccine, comprising around 60% and 70% of the wave respectively. “The resurgence in both hospitalisations and deaths is dominated by those that have received two doses of the vaccine, comprising around 60% and 70% of the wave respectively. This can be attributed to the high levels of uptake in the most at-risk age groups, such that immunisation failures account for more serious illness than unvaccinated individuals.”

Read more …

Where there’s Daszak, there’s Fauci.

Daszak Leaves UN-backed COVID Origins Probe (NYP)

The head of a New York City-based nonprofit that directed hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is no longer part of a UN-backed commission examining the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak’s profile on the website of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission has been updated to include the parenthetical quote “recused from Commission work on the origins of the pandemic.” Earlier this month, Vanity Fair reported that Dazsak helped organize a statement signed by 27 leading scientists that appeared in The Lancet — a prestigious British medical journal — in February 2020. The statement condemned what it called “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” and proclaimed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China.”

“Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours [sic], and prejudice that jeopardise [sic] our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” the statement added. Though the statement initially claimed that the signatories had “no competing interests,” The Lancet issued a statement Monday saying it had invited all 27 signatories (at least one of whom has walked back his support of the natural, or zoonotic, theory) to “re-evaluate their competing interests.” The statement included an updated disclosure from Daszak attached to the February 2020 statement and two other pieces he co-authored or contributed to. In his expanded disclosure, Daszak stated that EcoHealth’s work in China — including at the Wuhan lab — was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Daszak also denied that he or EcoHealth received money directly from the Chinese government.

“EcoHealth Alliance’s work in China … includes the production of a small number of recombinant bat coronaviruses to analyse [sic] cell entry and other characteristics of bat coronaviruses for which only the genetic sequences are available,” he wrote. “NIH reviewed the planned recombinant virus work and deemed it does not meet the criteria that would warrant further specific review by its Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee.” The belated disclosure from The Lancet comes months after the nonprofit group US Right to Know reported that four of the statement’s co-authors had direct ties to EcoHealth Alliance. The Vanity Fair report stated that six signatories had either worked at EcoHealth Alliance or received funding from it.

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“What does it say about the state of our media and social media that one man can so wrongly shape a narrative?”

Media Allowed Itself To Be Duped By One Man On Covid-19 (Bloom)

The more we learn about Peter Daszak, one of the main villains of the COVID epidemic, the worse it gets. Daszak is president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization mostly funded by the US government. EcoHealth passed some of that money on to the lab in Wuhan, China. It was Daszak who organized the letter in The Lancet from February 2020 dismissing as “misinformation” claims that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Virology Lab. The letter created the illusion of consensus, which Internet companies proceeded to enforce through censorship, and the media reinforced by constantly interviewing Daszak himself. There might be journalistic value in hearing from the Chernobyl plant director about all those clouds floating over Ukraine.

But if he suggests the rash of mysterious sores and cancers were due to a faulty shipment of microwaves recently arrived in Pripyat, you’d probably think he was engaged in a bit of “motivated reasoning.” Apparently not the World Health Organization, which invited Daszak to join their microwave hunt in Wuhan. In the last two days, Daszak has been removed from The Lancet’s own UN-backed commission investigating COVID’s origins, though whether he removed himself or was fired remains unclear. It appears Daszak collaborated with Anthony Fauci as well, based on a recently released e-mail in which he thanks the NIAID director for “publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release.”

To top it all off, the Trump administration canceled the EcoHealth grant in early 2020, a move that was characterized by “60 Minutes” and NPR as jeopardizing a possible COVID-19 cure. Both stories featured — guess who — Daszak. Now we learn that Google’s charitable arm may have also funded EcoHealth. Steve Hilton suggested Monday on Fox that the Google funding might have something to do with why information about COVID was so ruthlessly policed on social media platforms and search engines. We’ll be sorting through the many failures of the COVID pandemic for years, failures by the most important institutions of society, from big tech to scientific research to public health to the media, but whatever blame rests on them, we can say Daszak helped break them all. What does it say about the state of our media and social media that one man can so wrongly shape a narrative?

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Wonder where the loot ends up.

Gabon Paid For Protecting Forests, In African First (Y!)

Gabon has become the first African nation to receive a financial reward for protecting its forests as part of international efforts to fight climate change, the government announced Tuesday. Gabon has received $17 million in recompense for successfully cutting its carbon emissions by reducing deforestation and forest degradation, the environment ministry said in a statement. The payment came “after independent experts verified Gabon’s results” showing that the country’s carbon emissions in 2016-17 had dropped compared with the annual figures for 2006-15.

The funds were delivered by the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), an organisation launched in 2015 by the United Nations and backed by international donors. The scheme provides financial incentives to Central African governments to pursue economic growth without harming the vast forests that cover much of the region. The world’s rainforests are seen as a vital weapon in the fight against climate change by sucking out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Gabon, where forests cover 90 percent of the territory, is home to some 18 percent of the Congo Basin forest, known as “the second lung of the planet” after the Amazon.

Under a 10-year deal signed with CAFI in 2019, Gabon is set to receive a total of $150 million if it meets its carbon-cutting targets. The small tropical country has pledged to cut its carbon emissions in half by 2025 from 2005 levels. The forests in Gabon alone “absorb a total of 140 million tonnes of CO2 each year, which is equivalent to removing 30 million cars from circulation throughout the world,” the environment ministry said. Gabon has been a leader in Central Africa in preserving its rainforests, creating 13 national parks since 2000 that cover around 11 percent of the country.

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For entertainment purposes only. Such an odd defense that Tucker can use it too.

A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow’s Viewers Know She Doesn’t Offer Facts (Greenwald)

In sum, ruled the court, Rachel Maddow is among those “speakers whose statements cannot reasonably be interpreted as allegations of fact.” Despite Maddow’s use of the word “literally” to accuse OAN of being a “paid Russian propaganda” outlet, the court dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that, given Maddow’s conduct and her audience’s awareness of who she is and what she does, “the Court finds that the contested statement is an opinion that cannot serve as the basis for a defamation claim.” What makes this particularly notable and ironic is that a similar argument was made a year later by lawyers for Fox News when defending a segment that appeared on the program of its highest-rated program, Tucker Carlson Tonight.

That was part of a lawsuit brought by the former model Karen McDougal, who claimed Carlson slandered her by saying she “extorted” former President Trump by demanding payments in exchange for her silence about an extramarital affair she claimed to have with him. McDougal’s lawsuit was dismissed in September, 2020, by Trump-appointed judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, based on arguments made by Fox’s lawyers that were virtually identical to those made by MSNBC’s lawyers when defending Maddow. In particular, the court accepted Fox’s arguments that when Carlson used the word “extortion,” he meant it in a colloquial and dramatic sense, and that his viewers would have understood that he was not literally accusing her of a crime but rather offering his own subjective characterizations and opinions, particularly since viewers understand that Carlson offers political commentary:

“Fox News first argues that, viewed in context, Mr. Carlson cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect. See Def. Br. at 12-15. Fox News cites to a litany of cases which hold that accusing a person of “extortion” or “blackmail” simply is “rhetorical hyperbole,” incapable of being defamatory. . . .

In particular, accusations of “extortion,” “blackmail,” and related crimes, such as the statements Mr. Carlson made here, are often construed as merely rhetorical hyperbole when they are not accompanied by additional specifics of the actions purportedly constituting the crime. . . . Such accusations of crimes also are unlikely to be defamatory when, as here, they are made in connection with debates on a matter of public or political importance. . . . The context in which the offending statements were made here make it abundantly clear that Mr. Carlson was not accusing Ms. McDougal of actually committing a crime. As a result, his statements are not actionable.”

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Google’s monopoly is glaringly obvious. No probe needed.

EU Opens Antitrust Probe Into Google’s Online Ad Tech Business (F.)

The European Union on Tuesday opened a formal antitrust probe into Google to inspect whether the company violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online advertising technology over competing providers, in a move that follows a similar probe against Facebook earlier this month. The investigation will examine whether Google is distorting competition by restricting third parties from accessing user data for advertising purposes while using such data for its own service, according to a statement released by the European Commission. European Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, said regulators are concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online ad services to compete.

Vestager also noted that the investigation will look into Google’s policies on user tracking to make sure they are in line with fair competition. The investigation will also look into the obligation to use Google’s ad manager when serving ads on YouTube, its plan to block third party cookies on Chrome and its plans to restrict access of advertising identifier information to third parties on Android devices where a user has chosen to opt-out of personalized advertising. The commission says it will take into account the need to protect user privacy under the EU’s data protection law but noted that it must ensure that all advertising market participants operate on a level playing field when it comes to protecting user privacy.

In a statement shared with Forbes, Google said their services are used by thousands of European businesses “because they’re competitive and effective” and it plans to answer the European Commission’s questions and demonstrate the benefits of its products. “Online advertising services are at the heart of how Google and publishers monetise their online services,” Vestager said. “Google is present at almost all levels of the supply chain for online display advertising. We are concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack.”

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“..if asset price increases, such as house price rises, were removed from the analysis, “then global household wealth may well have fallen..”

Millions Become Millionaires During Covid Pandemic (BBC)

More than five million people became millionaires across the world in 2020 despite economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic. While many poor people became poorer, the number of millionaires increased by 5.2 million to 56.1 million globally, Credit Suisse research found. In 2020 more than 1% of adults worldwide were millionaires for the first time. Recovering stock markets and soaring house prices helped boost their wealth. Wealth creation appeared to be “completely detached” from the economic woes of the pandemic, the researchers said. Anthony Shorrocks, economist and author of the Global Wealth Report, said the pandemic had an “acute short term impact on global markets”, but added this was “largely reversed by the end of June 2020”.


“Global wealth not only held steady in the face of such turmoil but in fact rapidly increased in the second half of the year,” he said. However, wealth differences between adults widened in 2020, and Mr Shorrocks said if asset price increases, such as house price rises, were removed from the analysis, “then global household wealth may well have fallen”. “In the lower wealth bands where financial assets are less prevalent, wealth has tended to stand still, or, in many cases, regressed,” he said. “Some of the underlying factors may self correct over time. For example, interest rates will begin to rise again at some point, and this will dampen asset prices.” Total global wealth grew by 7.4%, the report said. Since the start of the 21st century, the number of people with wealth between $10,000 and $100,000 had more than tripled in size from 507 million in 2000 to 1.7 billion in mid-2020.

Read more …

 

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Jun 162021
 
 June 16, 2021  Posted by at 12:54 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  11 Responses »


Nikolay Dubovsky Became Silent 1890

 

 

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a Austrian priest and philosopher who used the term “institutionalization” to describe what happens in several fields of knowledge, when these fields are monopolized by a subset of that knowledge. For instance, he saw schools and universities claim a monopoly on education, and doctors and hospitals (medicine) claim a monopoly on health care.

This is both utter nonsense and at the same time widely accepted. In reality, your education comes from everywhere around you, family, friends etc., and schools can merely add a layer to it. While medicine is sick care, not health care: it fails almost entirely in preventing your health from deteriorating (see the food most people eat) and focuses only on “curing” you once you’re already sick. Case in point: covid patients are left to their own “devices”, and no prophylactics are used until it’s time for a respirator. It’s a dangerous monopoly. But people accept it as some god-given truth.

Someone linked to a 2020 piece on Illich recently by David Cayley -see below-, and though it’s good -albeit very long- I think we can do better than that, in light of what Illich’s words mean in our current predicament. Illich said the monopoly claims in various fields would lead to “counterproductivity”, aka diminishing returns, indicating that at some point not only do additional steps no longer lead to progress, they cause regression.

This is very much what we see today when people like Anthony Fauci, politicians across the globe, Big Pharma, the MSM, talk about “The Science”, and don’t you dare question it, because they have the monopoly on it. There is one truth only, and it consists of facemasks, lockdowns and very poorly tested vaccines, and anyone questioning that is a danger to the entirety of mankind.

The reality is we can’t afford not to ask questions, and we can’t afford to stifle questions and dissent. We need every voice. The efficacy of masks and lockdowns is shaky at best, look around you, and so is the efficacy of the vaccines, while the latter raise many new questions about blood clots, heart inflammation, spike proteins accumulating in ovaries and testes etc etc. We’d be crazy not to ask questions.

 

In terms of Illich terminology, the concept of “The Science”, which cannot be questioned, means we have reached institutionalization on steroids, runaway institutionalization. And given the variety of severe adverse reactions to the vaccines, including 1000s of deaths, we also appear to have reached diminishing returns on steroids; in children, for instance, the vaccines appear much more dangerous than the virus they are supposed to fight.

While at the same time, “The Science” monopoly rejects any and all other approaches, vitamin D, ivermectin, HCQ etc. They do that because there are still laws and protocols in place that date from before “The Science”, and spell out procedures that have to be followed to get a novel approach, or drug, approved or even authorized. One of which is that if there is any other effective method for the purpose the vaccines are developed for, there can be no approval.

And that leads to regression in medicine. It also leads to media bans, scientists who are “cancelled”, the works. There is no logical reason to ban certain medicines, and use only certain -new- others. Well, other than money, that is. It would better for mankind to try everything we can, but not for The Science, which revels in its monopoly. And Ivan Illich saw all that coming.

 

Meanwhile, the list of very competent medical professionals who are getting banned, deleted, ostracized, keeps growing. There’s Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, who said before his death in 2019 that it was unfit for the purpose it’s presently used for. There’s Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA vaccines, who’s very critical of how these are used today and recently said: “What happens to confidence in public health and USG if ivermectin turns out to be safe and effective for COVID, and the genetic vaccines turn out to have significant safety issues? This looks like a very plausible scenario from where I sit.”

Then we have former Pfizer Chief Scientific Officer Michael Yeadon, who said about mRNA vaccines: “There is something very, very bad happening and if you don’t pay attention, you will soon lose any chance to do anything about it. And don’t say you weren’t warned.” as well as “I’d pay a vaccinated person to shop for me before getting vaccinated myself.” We have Nobel Prize virologist Luc Montagnier, we have Roger Hodkinson, and of course FLCCC member Pierre Kory, a fierce advocate for ivermectin. And Peter McCullough:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1404716387247996928

Take all of them together, and I’m sure I forget a few, and you start to realize how insane it is that these people are banned from the discussions and policy decisions. All that expertise that is discarded in favor of a few opinions, it can not be a positive thing. And it’s not science, either: science requires constant questioning and discussion. Yeadon: “There is something very, very bad happening and if you don’t pay attention, you will soon lose any chance to do anything about it.”

 

Here’s from David Cayley’s April 2020 piece on Ivan Illich:

Questions About the Current Pandemic From the Point of View of Ivan Illich

At the beginning of his 1973 book Tools of Conviviality, Illich described what he thought was the typical course of development followed by contemporary institutions, using medicine as his example. Medicine, he said, had gone through “two watersheds.” The first had been crossed in the early years of the 20th century when medical treatments became demonstrably effective and benefits generally began to exceed harms. For many medical historians this is the only relevant marker – from this point on progress will proceed indefinitely, and, though there may be diminishing returns, there will be no point, in principle, at which progress will stop. This was not the case for Illich. He hypothesized a second watershed, which he thought was already being crossed and even exceeded around the time he was writing.

Beyond this second watershed, he supposed, what he called counterproductivity would set in – medical intervention would begin to defeat its own objects, generating more harm than good. This, he argued, was characteristic of any institution, good or service – a point could be identified at which there was enough of it and, after which, there would be too much. Tools for Conviviality, was an attempt to identify these “natural scales” – the only such general and programmatic search for a philosophy of technology that Illich undertook.

Two years later in Medical Nemesis – later renamed, in its final and most comprehensive edition, Limits to Medicine – Illich tried to lay out in detail the goods and the harms that medicine does. He was generally favourable to the large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good food, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal etc. He also praised efforts then underway in China and Chile to establish a basic medical toolkit and pharmacopeia that would be available and affordable for all citizens, rather than allowing medicine to develop luxury goods that would remain forever out of reach of the majority.

But the main point of his book was to identify and describe the counterproductive effects that he felt were becoming evident as medicine crossed its second watershed. He spoke of these fall-outs from too much medicine as iatrogenesis, and addressed them under three headings: clinical, social and cultural. The first everyone, by now, understands – you get the wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug, the wrong operation, you get sick in hospital etc. This collateral damage is not trivial. An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus – Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways, April 2012 – estimated 7.5% of the Canadians admitted to hospitals every year suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 die as a result of medical mistakes. Around the same time, Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggested that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is around 400,000. This is an impressive number, even if exaggerated – Nader’s estimate is twice as high per capita as The Walrus’s – but this accidental harm was not, by any means, Illich’s focus.

What really concerned him was the way in which excessive medical treatment weakens basic social and cultural aptitudes. An instance of what he called social iatrogenesis is the way in which the art of medicine, in which the physician acts as healer, witness, and counsellor, tends to give way to the science of medicine, in which the doctor, as a scientist, must, by definition, treat his or her patient as an experimental subject and not as a unique case. And, finally, there was the ultimate injury that medicine inflicts: cultural iatrogenesis. This occurs, Illich said, when cultural abilities, built up and passed on over many generations, are first undermined and then, gradually, replaced altogether. These abilities include, above all, the willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality, and the capacity to die one’s own death.

The art of suffering was being overshadowed, he argued, by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved – an attitude which doesn’t, in fact, end suffering but rather renders it meaningless, making it merely an anomaly or technical miscarriage. And death, finally, was being transformed from an intimate, personal act – something each one can do – into a meaningless defeat – a mere cessation of treatment or “pulling the plug,” as is sometimes heartlessly said. Behind Illich’s arguments lay a traditional Christian attitude. He affirmed that suffering and death are inherent in the human condition – they are part of what defines this condition. And he argued that the loss of this condition would involve a catastrophic rupture both with our past and with our own creatureliness. To mitigate and ameliorate the human condition was good, he said. To lose it altogether was a catastrophe because we can only know God as creatures – i.e. created or given beings – not as gods who have taken charge of our own destiny.

Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power – a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health. According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power, though this character may be hidden by the claim that all that is being asserted is care. In the province of Ontario where I live, “health care” currently gobbles up more than 40% of the government’s budget, which should make the point clearly enough. But this everyday power, great as it is, can be further expanded by what Illich calls “the ritualization of crisis.” This confers on medicine “a license that usually only the military can claim.” He continues:

Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency. He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human…Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts. In a footnote to this passage Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation. The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.” There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.”

Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception – and rule in its place as the very source of law. This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims…in an emergency.” Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates. But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich. Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.” Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped, or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies.

 

 

 

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May 262021
 
 May 26, 2021  Posted by at 9:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  65 Responses »


Théodore Géricault Prancing Grey Horse 1812

 

I Don’t Know Of A Bigger Story In The World (NC)
The Drug That Cracked Covid (Michael Capuzzo)
Finnish Firm Earns US Patent For Covid Drug Containing Ivermectin, HCQ (Yle)
Mild COVID-19 Induces Lasting Antibody Protection (wustl)
Rand Paul Says Dr. Anthony Fauci Should ‘Be Immediately Fired’ (JTN)
Inside India’s “Hunger Games” (Bhandari)
More Bombshells On Covid And Wuhan Lab Connection Should Come Soon (JTN)
The Ghost of Arthur Burns (Stephen S. Roach)
America’s Nuclear Spending Spree (DP)

 

 

19 reasons

 

 

Michael Capuzzo, famous journalist and writer, started looking into ivermectin when his daughter fell ill with Covid. But even Capuzzo couldn’t get his paper published. It’s time to start talking about the untold number of deaths caused by the ban, by politics, media, medical field, social media, of mentioning anything related to ivermectin. This has gone too far.

When my daughter Grace, a vice president at a New York advertising agency, came down with COVID-19 recently, she was quarantined in a “COVID hotel” in Times Square with homeless people and quarantining travelers. The locks on her room door were removed. Nurses prowled the halls to keep her in her room and wake her up every night to check her vitals—not to treat her, because there is no approved treatment for COVID-19; only, if her oxygen plummeted, to move her to the hospital, where there is only a single effective approved treatment for COVID-19, steroids that may keep the lungs from failing.

I Don’t Know Of A Bigger Story In The World (NC)

Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. The 15-page article chronicles the gargantuan struggle being waged by frontline doctors on all continents to get ivermectin approved as a Covid-19 treatment, as well as the tireless efforts by reporters, media outlets and social media companies to thwart them. Because of ivermectin, Capuzzo says, there are “hundreds of thousands, actually millions, of people around the world, from Uttar Pradesh in India to Peru to Brazil, who are living and not dying.” Yet media outlets have done all they can to “debunk” the notion that ivermectin may serve as an effective, easily accessible and affordable treatment for Covid-19. They have parroted the arguments laid out by health regulators around the world that there just isn’t enough evidence to justify its use.

For his part, Capuzzo, as a reporter, “saw with [his] own eyes the other side [of the story]” that has gone unreported, of the many patients in the US whose lives have been saved by ivermectin and of five of the doctors that have led the battle to save lives around the world, Paul Marik, Umberto Meduri, José Iglesias, Pierre Kory and Joe Varon. These are all highly decorated doctors. Through their leadership of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, they have already enhanced our treatment of Covid-19 by discovering and promoting the use of Corticoid steroids against the virus. But their calls for ivermectin to also be used have met with a wall of resistance from healthcare regulators and a wall of silence from media outlets.

“I really wish the world could see both sides,” Capuzzo laments. But unfortunately most reporters are not interested in telling the other side of the story. Even if they were, their publishers would probably refuse to publish it. That may explain why Capuzzo, a six-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books Close to Shore and Murder Room, ended up publishing his article on ivermectin in Mountain Home, a monthly local magazine for the of the Pennsylvania mountains and New York Finger Lakes region, of which Capuzzo’s wife is the editor. It’s also the reason why I decided to dedicate today’s post to Capuzzo’s article. Put simply, as many people as possible –particularly journalists — need to read his story. As Capuzzo himself says, “I don’t know of a bigger story in the world.”

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“A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain.”

The Drug That Cracked Covid (Michael Capuzzo)

Marik had been keeping tabs on Ivermectin but hadn’t included it in his protocols. He knew the drug as a core medicine on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, and it is wellestablished in the literature as a “wonder drug” that won the 2015 Nobel Prize for its discoverer, Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Omura, for nearly eradicating two of the “most dis guring and devastating diseases” in history, river blindness and elephantiasis, that had plagued millions of people in Africa countries, one of the great achievements in the history of medicine. The drug was also well known as a standard treatment for scabies and lice, from nurseries to nursing homes. A veterinary version keeps millions of family dogs and cats, farm animals, and cattle safe from worms and parasitic diseases.

An over-the-counter medicine in France, Ivermectin is safer than Tylenol and “one of the safest drugs ever given to humanity,” Dr. Marik said, with “3.7 billion doses administered in forty years, that’s B for billion, and only extremely rare serious side e ects.” An earlier Australian study, reported in the journal Antiviral Research, showed that Ivermectin, which blocked other RNA viruses like Dengue virus, yellow fever virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus, influenza, the Avian fu, and HIV1/AIDS in vitro, decimated the coronavirus in vitro, wiping out “essentially all viral material by 48 hours.” But more research was needed in human beings. But by October Marik’s concerns were answered. ¬e studies were well-designed university trials that showed amazing anti-COVID-19 activity at the normal doses used to treat parasites.

Though small and endlessly diverse by large, Western big pharma “one-size-fits all” random control trials, the Ivermectin studies were a mosaic of hundreds of scientists and many thousands of patients in trials all over the world, all showing the same remarkable efficacy against all phases of COVID-19 no matter what dose or age or severity of the patient. “Penicillin never was randomized,” Marik says. “It just obviously worked. Ivermectin obviously works.” Marik was astonished. “If you were to say, tell me the characteristics of a perfect drug to treat COVID-19, what would you ask for?” he said. “I think you would ask rstly for something that’s safe, that’s cheap, that’s readily available, and has anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. People would say, “That’s ridiculous. There could not possibly be a drug that has all of those characteristics. That’s just unreasonable. But we do have such a drug. The drug is called Ivermectin.”

———––

A news blackout by the world’s leading media came down on Ivermectin like an iron curtain. Reporters who trumpeted the COVID-19 terror in India and Brazil didn’t report that Ivermectin was crushing the P-1 variant in the Brazilian rain forest and killing COVID-19 and all variants in India. That Ivermectin was saving tens of thousands of lives in South America wasn’t news, but mocking the continent’s peasants for taking horse paste was. Journalists denied the world knowledge of the most effective life-saving therapies in the pandemic, Kory said, especially among the elderly, people of color, and the poor, while wringing their hands at the tragedy of their disparate rates of death.

Three days after Kory’s testimony, an Associated Press “fact-check reporter” interviewed Kory “for twenty minutes in which I recounted all of the existing trials evidence (over fifteen randomized and multiple observational trials) all showing dramatic benefits of Ivermectin,” he said. Then she wrote: “AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence Ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.” Like many critics, she didn’t explore the Ivermectin data or evidence in any detail, but merely dismissed its “insufficient evidence,” quoting instead the lack of a recommendation by the NIH or WHO. To describe the real evidence in any detail would put the AP and public health agencies in the difficult position of explaining how the lives of thousands of poor people in developing countries don’t count in these matters.

Not just in media but in social media, Ivermectin has inspired a strange new form of Western and pharmaceutical imperialism. On January 12, 2021, the Brazilian Ministry of Health tweeted to its 1.2 million followers not to wait with COVID-19 until it’s too late but “go to a Health Unit and request early treatment,” only to have Twitter take down the official public health pronouncement of the sovereign fifth largest nation in the world for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information.” (Early treatment is code for Ivermectin.) On January 31, the Slovak Ministry of Health announced its decision on Facebook to allow use of Ivermectin, causing Facebook to take down that post and removed the entire page it was on, the Ivermectin for MDs Team, with 10,200 members from more than 100 countries.

In Argentina, Professor and doctor Hector Carvallo, whose prophylactic studies are renowned by other researchers, says all his scientific documentation for Ivermectin is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. “I am afraid,” he wrote to Marik and his colleagues, “we have affected the most sensitive organ on humans: the wallet…” As Kory’s testimony was climbing toward nine million views, YouTube, owned by Google, erased his official Senate testimony, saying it endangered the community. Kory’s biggest voice was silenced.

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Nasal spray.

Finnish Firm Earns US Patent For Covid Drug Containing Ivermectin, HCQ (Yle)

A coronavirus drug developed by Therapeutica Borealis, a pharmaceutical firm in Turku, has been granted a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The nasal spray contains hydroxychloroquine, among other ingredients. Earlier in May, the company said it had received approval for a patent application, based on which it expected a final patent this month. “The final patent is an important milestone for us on our way to the market. Our next goal is to find an established pharmaceutical industry company with an international business scale,” says Professor Kalervo Väänänen, one of the three inventors and founders of Therapeutica Borealis, in a press release on Monday. Väänänen is a cell biologist and former rector of the University of Turku.

The co-inventors of the drug and co-founders of Therapeutica Borealis are Lauri Kangas, an adjunct professor of science at the University of Turku, and Matti Rihko, a psychologist, and board chair of the Turku Chamber of Commerce and of the University of Turku. He is also a former CEO of the Raisio food corporation, known for its cholesterol-lowering Benecol products. According to the company, the nasal spray acts on cell function in nasal mucous in three ways, impairing the ability of the virus to penetrate the body and multiply, thus reducing the risk of serious illness. [..] The firm said that the drug’s active ingredients – aprotinin, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin – are well-known and widely used drugs, but in this product are used in a new, targeted manner on the upper respiratory mucous membrane.

All the drug molecules covered by the patent are approved for the treatment of other diseases, but if used systemically, for instance as pills or infusions swallowed by patients, the amounts of drugs would be high and potentially harmful. For topical use, as in a nasal spray, the concentrations of the active ingredients throughout the body remain very low but are sufficient locally to prevent the passage and replication of the virus, making the drug safer and more effective, says Therapeutica Borealis.

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No vaccines needed.

Mild COVID-19 Induces Lasting Antibody Protection (wustl)

Months after recovering from mild cases of COVID-19, people still have immune cells in their body pumping out antibodies against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Such cells could persist for a lifetime, churning out antibodies all the while. The findings, published May 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that mild cases of COVID-19 leave those infected with lasting antibody protection and that repeated bouts of illness are likely to be uncommon. “Last fall, there were reports that antibodies wane quickly after infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, and mainstream media interpreted that to mean that immunity was not long-lived,” said senior author Ali Ellebedy, PhD, an associate professor of pathology & immunology, of medicine and of molecular microbiology.


“But that’s a misinterpretation of the data. It’s normal for antibody levels to go down after acute infection, but they don’t go down to zero; they plateau. Here, we found antibody-producing cells in people 11 months after first symptoms. These cells will live and produce antibodies for the rest of people’s lives. That’s strong evidence for long-lasting immunity.” During a viral infection, antibody-producing immune cells rapidly multiply and circulate in the blood, driving antibody levels sky-high. Once the infection is resolved, most such cells die off, and blood antibody levels drop. A small population of antibody-producing cells, called long-lived plasma cells, migrate to the bone marrow and settle in, where they continually secrete low levels of antibodies into the bloodstream to help guard against another encounter with the virus. The key to figuring out whether COVID-19 leads to long-lasting antibody protection, Ellebedy realized, lies in the bone marrow.

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Won’t happen. Not now.

Rand Paul Says Dr. Anthony Fauci Should ‘Be Immediately Fired’ (JTN)

Sen. Rand Paul said Tuesday that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly lied and should be fired. Paul said on Just the News’ “Water Cooler” show that Fauci lied to Congress when he said the National Institutes of Health did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “He oughta be immediately fired,” said Paul, who has repeatedly clashed with Fauci over numerous COVID-19 issues. “He’s been lying to us since the very beginning. He first said no masks work, which wasn’t true. Then he said all masks work and that wasn’t true either. The N95 masks work, the rest of them don’t. But he’s been dishonest from the very beginning.” The Kentucky Republican Paul also said Fauci has lied “so-called with good intentions, noble lies, but he has been dishonest and he should be dismissed.”

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And you thought your health care was a mess..

Inside India’s “Hunger Games” (Bhandari)

I have just returned from a visit to my family in India. It was hard to escape. To get to the US from India, I needed a COVID test. The Indian government has seriously restricted who can provide COVID testing, treatment, and vaccination. Private doctors and hospitals that are not approved face brutal legal consequences if they provide COVID treatment. Emergency powers were centralized early last year in the hands of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. He gave himself direct control over the bureaucrats of the states, making local governments largely impotent and dependent on him. In their supreme wisdom, government bureaucrats concluded that because the prefix “COVID-” exists in treatment, vaccination, and testing, they must all be performed at the same place.

For my test, I sat in a petri dish of COVID, with those coming out positive sitting right next to me. Desperate, vulnerable old people, who merely wanted to get their jabs, sat among us. Those who were sick for reasons other than COVID were among us too, for the government has required everyone who is sick to be tested for COVID first . A microcosm of how everything is done in India, the tests were given haphazardly, with samples getting mixed up, nurses spending most of their time fighting among themselves, and — lacking a lineup system — people crowded together, pushing and breathing into the mouths of one another. A few days earlier, the government had given notice of the rate of tests and further restricted where they could be performed.

A bribe-taking system would have been my preference to bypass government restrictions, but no such system has evolved yet. Nevertheless, corruption has exploded, and self-centeredness, apathy, a dog-eat-dog environment has come to the surface. You see this everywhere; the scavengers are out in full force. I went to a private COVID hospital. The situation in government hospitals is far worse, beyond my capacity to cope with it. Yet the story of COVID in India is hardly about COVID as such, which is nothing more than a trigger. More than twice as many people died of fairly easily treatable tuberculosis in 2020 than of COVID. Instead, this is a story of foolish rulers, completely hollowed out institutions, and a pathetically irrational and tribal society.

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Hope.

More Bombshells On Covid And Wuhan Lab Connection Should Come Soon (JTN)

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) believes that intelligence on COVID-19 originating from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is forthcoming, and will be revealed by force of legislation if it is not released otherwise. Braun told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast about the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2021 that he introduced with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.): “Something was afoot even a week to two weeks ago — we were just a little ahead of the game when we rolled that out — where I think we’re going to hear more information. “When you got somebody like Dr. Fauci that moves goalposts from one end zone to the other and then back again, and wherever it needs to kind of plop down, when you hear the head of the WHO, when you hear the Biden administration now saying that there needs to be an investigation — of course, they’re still saying WHO needs to do it itself.


“That’s like the fox in the henhouse metaphor. So something is happening. And that’s why, with our bill out there, it’s now very pertinent.” Braun is confident the truth will soon emerge. “I think we’re gonna get to the bottom of it,” he said. “It’s just a question of, will we need a bill to do it? I don’t even think we’re going to need that because I think there’s going to be stuff coming forward that might flush it out without having to force it legislatively. If not, we’re prepared to roll up the support. Sadly, we probably won’t get one Democrat on it, though.” Braun was asked where Congress could get information on COVID and Wuhan. “How about in our own DHS?” he replied. “How about in our own Director of National Intelligence? That’s the essence of declassifying this stuff. And when you’ve got such a political posture that has dominated the dynamic, we just need that — we need the Freedom of Information Act, in essence, to release all this stuff that’s been classified.”

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History of CPI.

The Ghost of Arthur Burns (Stephen S. Roach)

Memories can be tricky. I have long been haunted by the inflation of the 1970s. Fifty years ago, when I had just started my career as a professional economist at the Federal Reserve, I was witness to the birth of the Great Inflation as a Fed insider. That left me with the recurring nightmares of a financial post-traumatic stress disorder. The bad dreams are back.

They center on the Fed’s legendary chairman at the time, Arthur F. Burns, who brought a unique perspective to the US central bank as an expert on the business cycle. In 1946, he co-authored the definitive treatise on the seemingly rhythmic ups and downs of the US economy back to the mid-nineteenth century. Working for him was intimidating, especially for someone in my position. I had been tasked with formal weekly briefings on the very subjects Burns knew best. He used that knowledge to poke holes in staff presentations. I found quickly that you couldn’t tell him anything.

Yet Burns, who ruled the Fed with an iron fist, lacked an analytical framework to assess the interplay between the real economy and inflation, and how that relationship was connected to monetary policy. As a data junkie, he was prone to segment the problems he faced as a policymaker, especially the emergence of what would soon become the Great Inflation. Like business cycles, he believed price trends were heavily influenced by idiosyncratic, or exogenous, factors – “noise” that had nothing to do with monetary policy.

This was a blunder of epic proportions. When US oil prices quadrupled following the OPEC oil embargo in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Burns argued that, since this had nothing to do with monetary policy, the Fed should exclude oil and energy-related products (such as home heating oil and electricity) from the consumer price index. The staff protested, arguing that it made no sense to ignore such important items, especially because they had a weight of over 11% in the CPI. Burns was adamant: If we on the staff wouldn’t perform the calculation, he would have it done by “someone in New York” – an allusion to his prior affiliations at Columbia University and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Then came surging food prices, which Burns surmised in 1973 were traceable to unusual weather – specifically, an El Niño event that had decimated Peruvian anchovies in 1972. He insisted that this was the source of rising fertilizer and feedstock prices, in turn driving up beef, poultry, and pork prices. Like good soldiers, we gulped and followed his order to take food – which had a weight of 25% – out of the CPI.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we had just created the first version of what is now fondly known as the core inflation rate – that purified portion of the CPI that purportedly is free of the volatile “special factors” of food and energy, where gyrations were traceable to distant wars and weather. Burns was pleased. Monetary policy needed to focus on more stable underlying inflation trends, he argued, and we had provided him with the perfect tool to sharpen his focus.

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Where the big profits are.

America’s Nuclear Spending Spree (DP)

As Capitol Hill lawmakers continue to insist that initiatives like Medicare for All are too expensive, a new congressional report shows that the United States government is on a path to spend more than a half-trillion dollars on nuclear weapons in just the next decade. The report emerges at the same time a separate analysis shows that a handful of top executives at defense contractors are being wildly enriched by a Pentagon spending spree. The first report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that the federal government is on track to spend $634 billion over the next decade to maintain its nuclear forces, according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Almost two-thirds of those costs are for the Department of Defense, mostly to maintain ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. About one-third is for the Department of Energy.

For comparison that is: • 1.5 times the cost of all of the $1,400 stimulus checks that were sent to people through the American Rescue Plan earlier this year • Nearly 14 times the $47 billion that Congress has spent so far this year helping Americans who are behind on rent. • Over one-third of the cost of cancelling the $1.7 trillion in student debt held by Americans, most of which is never going to be repaid. • More than 7 times the estimated $81 billion of outstanding medical debt in America, as of 2018. The new CBO estimate represents a 28-percent increase over the last 10-year estimate that the CBO made on U.S. nuclear forces two years ago.

The figures were released just a few weeks after a new analysis from the Center for International Policy, a foreign policy think tank in Washington, found that “In 2020 alone, the CEOs of the [Pentagon’s] top five contractors received a total of $105.4 million in compensation.” When accounting for all top corporate officials, these firms paid out more than a quarter billion dollars of total executive compensation in 2020 — and paid out more than $1 billion over the last four years.

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