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Debt Rattle June 20 2021

Jun 202021

June 20, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:46 am Finance Tagged with: CDC, COVID, cruise, crypto, Facebook, facemasks, ivermectin, mRNA, satire 41 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Femme au Béret et à la Robe Quadrillée (Marie-Thérèse Walter) 1937

• Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection (AJT)

• The Mechanisms Of Action Of Ivermectin Against SARS-CoV-2 (JoA)

• Regarding Dosing Of The Covid Genetic Vaccines (Malone)

• How Many Lives are Expendable for a 100% Boost in Vaccine Revenue? (TSN)

• South China Airport Cancels 100s of Flights After Covid Case (F24)

• CDC Can’t Regulate Cruises: Judge (Hill)

• Florida Lab Finds Dangerous Pathogens On Children’s Face Masks (ET)

• Scientists Can Identify A City By Its Unique Mix Of Viruses And Bacteria (USci)

• More Brits Bought Crypto Than Stocks Last Year (RT)

• The “Technical Obstacles” Standing In The Way Of Global Corporate Tax Deal (ZH)

• Facebook Promises To Clarify What It Considers Satire (RT)

See 1st article below

American Journal of Therapeutics

• Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection (AJT)

Therapeutic Advances: Meta-analysis of 15 trials found that ivermectin reduced risk of death compared with no ivermectin (average risk ratio 0.38, 95% confidence interval 0.19–0.73; n = 2438; I2 = 49%; moderate-certainty evidence). This result was confirmed in a trial sequential analysis using the same DerSimonian–Laird method that underpinned the unadjusted analysis. This was also robust against a trial sequential analysis using the Biggerstaff–Tweedie method. Low-certainty evidence found that ivermectin prophylaxis reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86% (95% confidence interval 79%–91%). Secondary outcomes provided less certain evidence. Low-certainty evidence suggested that there may be no benefit with ivermectin for “need for mechanical ventilation,” whereas effect estimates for “improvement” and “deterioration” clearly favored ivermectin use. Severe adverse events were rare among treatment trials and evidence of no difference was assessed as low certainty. Evidence on other secondary outcomes was very low certainty.

Conclusions: Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.

The Journal of Antibiotics

• The Mechanisms Of Action Of Ivermectin Against SARS-CoV-2 (JoA)

Although several drugs received Emergency Use Authorization for COVID-19 treatment with unsatisfactory supportive data, Ivermectin, on the other hand, has been sidelined irrespective of sufficient convincing data supporting its use. Nevertheless, many countries adopted ivermectin as one of the first-line treatment options for COVID-19. With the ongoing vaccine roll-out programs in full swing across the globe, the longevity of the immunity offered by these vaccines or their role in offering protection against new mutant strains is still a matter of debate. The adoption of Ivermectin as a “safety bridge” by some sections of the population that are still waiting for their turn for vaccination could be considered as a “logical” option.

Several doctor-initiated clinical trial protocols that aimed to evaluate outcomes, such as reduction in mortality figures, shortened length of intensive care unit stay and/or hospital stay and elimination of the virus with ivermectin use have been registered at the US ClinicalTrials.gov [7]. Real-time data is also available with a meta-analysis of 55 studies to date. As per data available on 16 May 2021, 100% of 36 early treatment and prophylaxis studies report positive effects (96% of all 55 studies). Of these, 26 studies show statistically significant improvements in isolation. Random effects meta-analysis with pooled effects using the most serious outcome reported 79% and 85% improvement for early treatment and prophylaxis respectively (RR 0.21 [0.11–0.37] and 0.15 [0.09–0.25]).

The results were similar after exclusion based sensitivity analysis: 81% and 87% (RR 0.19 [0.14–0.26] and 0.13 [0.07–0.25]), and after restriction to 29 peer-reviewed studies: 82% and 88% (RR 0.18 [0.11–0.31] and 0.12 [0.05–0.30]). Statistically significant improvements were seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization, cases, and viral clearance. 100% of the 17 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) for early treatment and prophylaxis report positive effects, with an estimated improvement of 73% and 83% respectively (RR 0.27 [0.18–0.41] and 0.17 [0.05–0.61]), and 93% of all 28 RCTs.

mRNA-vaccine inventor:

“I know of no data wherein the mean, median, range etc of total amount of spike protein produced in a patient after administration of the COVID genetic vaccine has been defined.”

• Regarding Dosing Of The Covid Genetic Vaccines (Malone)

Regarding dosing of the COVID genetic vaccines (mRNA, recombinant adenovirus) versus the more traditional vaccines (including Novavax). There are some inconvenient truths here. First, the current genetic vaccines (Sanofi, J&J, Pfizer, Moderna) did not undergo the time tested assessments of dose ranging and dose timing clinical studies, to the best of my knowledge. I have direct first person report of how the dose was selected for Moderna (confidential source), and it was basically a SWAG by committee consensus. Personally, for what it is worth, it is my opinion that the current mRNA vaccines selected a dose that was too high, too far up on the sigmoidal dose response curve – so that we may have excess adverse events. Dose selection with vaccines is usually about careful balancing of adverse events with potency/efficacy/effectiveness, with a bias towards safety.

Second big inconvenient truth is that the spike protein is the actual active agent, in terms of eliciting an immune response. And in the case of the traditional vaccines, the dose of spike protein is defined relatively precisely. With the genetic vaccines, it is not (to the best of my knowledge). I know of no data wherein the mean, median, range etc of total amount of spike protein produced in a patient after administration of the COVID genetic vaccine has been defined. Usually, the FDA is quite persnickety about such things, but I am not aware of this key variable having been determined. Therefore, the range and severety of adverse events potentially attributable to the level of expressed spike protein may reflect patient to patient differences in genetic transfer efficiency and subsequent spike expression.

TrialSiteNews should do better than just a discussion about one or two doses. That ship has sailed.

• How Many Lives are Expendable for a 100% Boost in Vaccine Revenue? (TSN)

Looking at the data from Pfizer’s Phase 3 trial, it becomes apparent that they reported a 94.6% relative risk reduction (aka: Vaccine Efficacy) for their two-dose regimen but only a 52.4% relative risk reduction for their single-dose regimen. From that data, it seems clear that the two-dose regimen confers far superior protection and makes the choice between the two regimens clear. This decision to follow a two-dose regimen versus a single dose had monumental consequences for the pace and complexity of the vaccine rollout in the United States and throughout the globe. Obviously, the supply shortage immediately doubled by requiring two doses for every person. This alone would cost countless lives by delaying protection.

However, the logistics of follow-up, reserving second doses, and ensuring the same vaccine is administered for both doses, were all added complexities stacked on top of an already daunting task that stalled the vaccine campaign in its early months. Another significant consequence is that the risk of adverse reactions greatly increased due to the two-dose regimen. Obviously, administering each dose poses some risk of an adverse reaction. However, the second dose is associated with far more frequent and severe reactions compared to the first dose. This is expected because the immune system has already been materially primed and will react robustly to the recognized antigen on the second dose. Now that we’ve seen the dramatic benefits that a single dose regimen would have provided, we’ll delve into the data to determine why the two-dose regimen was chosen, but first, let’s discuss some concepts of how immunity develops over time.

The human immune system is quite complex. It’s well understood that adaptive immunity takes time to develop. It starts to develop in days and ramps up quickly in weeks. However, over longer periods of time, it continues to improve through a process called affinity maturation. The details of these concepts go beyond the scope of this article but, in short, adaptive immunity takes time to develop and continues to improve over many weeks and even months. For this reason, in order to determine the most efficacious dosing regimen, the point in time that the Vaccine Efficacy should be measured must use the same offset from the start of the various dosing regimens being compared. For example, any positive cases that occur greater than 28 days after the first dose for both the single-dose and two-dose regimens would be counted.

400 flights for one covid case.

• South China Airport Cancels 100s of Flights After Covid Case (F24)

The airport in China’s southern city of Shenzhen cancelled hundreds of flights and tightened entry controls Saturday after a restaurant employee tested positive for the Delta coronavirus variant. Anyone entering the facility must show a negative virus test from the last 48 hours, Shenzhen Airport Group said in a statement on its official WeChat social media account. City health officials said a 21-year-old waitress at Shenzhen Baoan International Airport had been infected with the Delta variant of the virus. The woman tested positive during a routine test for airport staff conducted Thursday, they said.

Shenzhen, a mainland Chinese city neighbouring Hong Kong, is home to some of Asia’s biggest tech companies including telecoms equipment maker Huawei and gaming giant Tencent. China on Friday reported 30 new coronavirus cases, including six local transmissions in the southern province of Guangdong where Shenzhen is located. The airport entry restrictions came into effect from 1 pm local time Saturday (0500 GMT). Nearly 400 flights to and from the airport were cancelled Friday, data from flight tracker VariFlight showed. Dozens of flights scheduled for Saturday morning were also dropped.

“..an overreach of power..”

• CDC Can’t Regulate Cruises: Judge (Hill)

A federal judge in Florida on Friday ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) coronavirus-era sailing orders were an overreach of power, issuing a preliminary injunction temporarily barring the CDC from enforcing the guidelines. Judge Steven Merryday for the Middle District of Florida in his ruling sided with the Sunshine State in its argument that the “CDC’s conditional sailing order and the implementing orders exceed the authority delegated to CDC.” As a result, Merryday approved Florida’s motion for a preliminary injunction suspending the mandatory guidelines for cruise ships, writing that the CDC is “preliminary enjoined from enforcing against a cruise ship arriving in, within, or departing from a port in Florida the conditional sailing order and the later measures.”

The injunction will stay in place until July 18, at which point the “conditional sailing order and the measures promulgated under the conditional sailing order will persist as only a non-binding ‘consideration,’ ‘recommendation’ or ‘guideline,’” as is the case for other industries such as restaurants, railroads and hotels, according to the ruling. The cruise industry had previously been under a conditional sailing order issued by the CDC since the end of October, under which cruise lines were required to commit to a phased approach of implementing testing and other safety measures before they could start sailing. The conditional sailing order followed the end of the CDC’s no-sail order amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the CDC last month released the final guidance for cruise lines to apply to run test ships with voluntary passengers.

“Our kids have been in masks all day, seven hours a day in school,” Donoho told Fox & Friends on June 17. “The only break that they get is to eat or drink.”

• Florida Lab Finds Dangerous Pathogens On Children’s Face Masks (ET)

A laboratory at the University of Florida that recently analyzed a small sample of face masks, detected the presence of 11 dangerous pathogens that included bacterias that cause diphtheria, pneumonia, and meningitis. Gainesville parents in Florida concerned about the harm caused to their children wearing face masks all day at school in 90 °F weather sent out six masks—five that were worn by children ages 6 to 11 for five to eight hours at school, and one worn by an adult—to be analyzed for contaminants at the University of Florida’s Mass Spectrometry Research and Education Center. Of the six masks, three were surgical, two cotton, and a poly gaiter. Masks that have not been worn and a t-shirt worn at school acted as the control samples.

Five of the masks were found to be contaminated with parasites, fungi, and bacteria, according to Rational Ground. Only one mask was found to contain a virus that can cause a fatal systemic disease in cattle and deer. Other less harmful pathogens that can cause ulcers, acne, and strep throat were also detected. None of the controls were contaminated with pathogens, while “samples from the front top and bottom of the t-shirt found proteins that are commonly found in skin and hair, along with some commonly found in soil.” Amanda Donoho, a mother of three elementary school children, teamed up with other parents to send the masks to the lab because her sons broke out in rashes from prolonged mask-wearing. “Our kids have been in masks all day, seven hours a day in school,” Donoho told Fox & Friends on June 17. “The only break that they get is to eat or drink.”

“Although there are millions and millions of different species on Earth, scientists only have a decent genome reference for about 100.000 to 200.000 at this time.”

• Scientists Can Identify A City By Its Unique Mix Of Viruses And Bacteria (USci)

A group of scientists examined the bacteria and viruses in 60 different cities worldwide. It turns out that each city has its own unique mix of microorganisms. According to Christopher Mason, one of the researchers, the teams’ detailed knowledge goes so far that they would be able to tell you from which city you came from with 90% accuracy by just giving them your shoe for analysis. The scientists collected microorganisms from urban public transport and hospitals. Samples were retrieved from such things as door handles, garbage cans, shoe soles, railings, and buttons on appliances, among other things. Among the 4,728 samples, they found no less than 11,000 new virus and bacterial species that had not yet been described. This shows that world cities are home to an unexpected diversity of species.

Although there are millions and millions of different species on Earth, scientists only have a decent genome reference for about 100.000 to 200.000 at this time. The finding of additional species can assist with the construction of microbial family trees enabling researchers to understand how different species are linked to each other. Mason stated that people often see tropical rain-forests as the pinnacle of biodiversity, but it appears that the same goes for a railing in the metro or a bench in a park. In each city they studied, the science team discovered a number of microorganisms or a specific mix of microorganisms that are typical for that particular city. Moreover, the larger the city, the more complex and diverse the micro-life found there. Cities such as Tokyo, Bogota, New York, and London participated in the study.

After analysis, the researchers were able to say with 90% certainty from which city a sample came. This could also be useful for forensic investigations in the future. The microbes a person carries can then reveal where he or she has been or has not been.

Or did they?

Factoid: the World Bank has refused to help El Salvador with its switch to bitcoin, but it can’t refuse the bitcoin itself.

• More Brits Bought Crypto Than Stocks Last Year (RT)

New research by UK investment firm AJ Bell shows that 7% of British adult respondents reported they had bought crypto over the last year, compared to 5% who invested in stocks and shares ISAs (individual savings accounts). The research suggests that Britons have become more eager to invest in cryptocurrencies than in traditional stocks and shares-based investments. “When more people are buying cryptocurrency than investing in a stock market ISA, you have to conclude the world’s gone crypto crazy,” financial analyst at AJ Bell Laith Khalaf said about the results.

According to the research, Britain’s crypto investors are predominantly male and under 35. More than 70% of those who said they had bought crypto assets claimed to have made a profit, while 12% reported making a loss in the past year. Meanwhile, 17% said they did not even know if they had made a profit or loss with their crypto investments. The survey, however, contrasts with UK think tank Parliament Street’s research from March which reveals that 52% of the 2,000 respondents in its survey were more likely to invest in the stock market and traditional assets, such as gold, than in crypto. A third of the respondents said they will not invest in crypto as they believe they have already “missed the boat.”

Biden won’t live to see it. Too complicated.

• The “Technical Obstacles” Standing In The Way Of Global Corporate Tax Deal (ZH)

As we have been saying for a while now, the Biden Administration’s push to create a new minimum corporate tax likely will never succeed despite all the optimistic reporting in the western press – a reality that will ultimately limit the degree by which the US corporate tax rate can be raised to finance Biden’s ‘Great Society’ ambitions. Even after the G-7 struck a tentative deal during its recent meeting, a comprehensive reworking of the OECD’s international tax framework – what would constitute the biggest shakeup on the international tax front in a century – will require the consent of dozens of nations, including countries like Ireland, Indonesia and Singapore which have successfully used their low tax rates to drive economic development. Any one of these can sabotage the deal by refusing to lower tax rates.

To try and compensate for this, the Biden Administration is promising foreign governments that they will be entitled to a bigger piece of the profits generated by American multinationals. The G-7 deal would have applied this “carrot” on “profit exceeding a 10% margin for the largest and most profitable multinational enterprises.” There have even been talks to specifically exclude Amazon’s low-margin e-commerce business, allowing the tax to be based on profits from its more lucrative divisions, like AWS. Over the coming weeks, diplomats will hold talks involving more than 100 governments about the new corporate tax framework ahead of a G-20 meeting in July where Washington hopes the outlines of a deal can come together. For the plan to succeed, more than 100 nations would ultimately need to agree on it.

Given the staggering scope of competing interests involved, as corporations jockey to be excluded from the tax while countries jockey for all sorts of special interest carve-outs, Bloomberg reports that the process could ultimately take years – even as the administration pushes for a significant breakthrough by the end of the summer – and involve a complex web of legislation to compensate for myriad “technical” complications.

It’s things like this that make me despair for mankind.

• Facebook Promises To Clarify What It Considers Satire (RT)

Facebook has pledged to provide a more detailed explanation of what constitutes satire on its platform, after the company’s oversight board ruled that a meme commenting on the Armenian genocide was wrongfully removed. The social media giant said it was committed to developing a “new satire framework” which will be used to assess facetious or sarcastic content that may be flagged as suspected hate speech. Information will also be added to the site’s community standards clarifying how satire factors into “context-specific decisions” about problematic content. The company already has a “satire exception” to its rules prohibiting hate speech, but the policy “is currently not communicated to users,” Facebook acknowledged.

The platform underscored that it takes the metaphysics of satire extremely seriously, noting that it had repeatedly engaged with “academic experts, journalists, comedians, representatives of satirical publications, and advocates for freedom of expression” to discuss the subtle intricacies of online jokes. According to Facebook, this army of satire experts said that humor is highly subjective and therefore requires “human review by individuals with cultural context” of the joke in question. The company was also told that “intent is key” when it comes to determining if something is legitimate satire – although admittedly this can be “tough to assess.” Content that is “simply derogatory” and not seen as “complex” or “subversive” is not satire, Facebook decreed.

Given the apparently vast complexities involved in sniffing out what is ‘real’ humor, the company conceded that it is not currently able to provide in-depth assessment of every suspected ‘case’ of satire. More time is needed to determine whether it is even feasible to improve the review process used to identify content that may qualify for the site’s satire exception, Facebook said. The company’s more transparent approach to assessing satire came in response to a May ruling issued by its oversight board which said that a popular “two buttons” meme, commenting on Turkey’s seemingly contradictory approach to dealing with Armenian genocide, should be reinstated. Facebook had initially deleted the image – which showed a man stressing over which “button” to press, “The Armenian Genocide is a lie” or “The Armenians were terrorists that deserved it” – because moderators believed it violated the site’s hate-speech rules, as well as guidelines banning cruel and insensitive content.

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Institutionalization on Steroids

Jun 162021

June 16, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:54 pm Finance Tagged with: Fauci, institutionalization, ivermectin, Kory, mRNA, PCR, science, steroids, Yeadon 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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The Ethics of Child Vaccinations

Jun 092021

June 9, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 3:02 pm Finance Tagged with: carpet bombing, children, corona, fear, fertility, mRNA, Netherlands, risk, safe, survival, vaccines 18 Responses »

Willem de Kooning Woman 1969

We’ve been talking a lot lately at the Automatic Earth about programs to vaccinate children. It’s one more thing that people appear to blindly accept as necessary and beneficial to our societies. While the only consideration really should be how beneficial it is to the children themselves. Most people here, at least, seem to agree on that. But that’s just here.

The US, Germany, Canada, and soon France and Spain all have plans, some already have been rolled out, to carpet bomb the virus by going after their children, and there is no doubt many more countries will follow their example.

Since we know there is no medical reason to do so, we must ask what the ethical and legal aspects tell us. And I can’t find those. How and why can you justify injecting people against something that is no threat to them, with a substance that potentially is a much worse threat?

I dug up a graph again that I posted in April, which spells out the Covid risk for all age groups, including children:

If your chance of survival is 99.99996%, there is no risk. And you don’t need to be inoculated. That would -at best- be equivalent to keeping your kids home 24/7 because you are afraid of what might happen in traffic, or in social life with other kids, or some bogeyman. The risk is never zero, but close enough that we do not act on it, and call it common sense.

The arguments that are usually used are that 1) kids must be jabbed to protect others around them, and 2) that the vaccines have been tested and proven safe. Obviously, 1) is very curious, and never been used before, and 2) is simply a lie: vaccines need years of testing for side effects, not months, and certainly not weeks, as is now the case for the effects on children.

The “testing” is simply that if not too many people drop dead after 5 minutes, well, then it must be safe, as institutions like the European Medicines Agency solemnly declare. Completely ignoring potential long term effects, something that seems essential in mRNA “vaccines” because of their potential effects on fertility etc. We just don’t know, but we should before applying the substances. There’s a reason none of the vaccines have been approved.

As for that alleged safety, this is from the European version of the American VAERS system:

1,5 million adverse reactions, and those are just the ones that have been reported. Now, I don’t know how many people in Europe have been inoculated, but I bet you this is not a 99.99996% success story. The numbers of deaths are not, either.

So I was happy to see some actual common sense reported in a Dutch paper today (Google translated), where the Health Council in the Netherlands injects at least some nuance into the debate. For kids with underlying conditions, like severe obesity or lung- and heart problems, some protection might make sense. I still wouldn’t go with mRNA vaccines, I would use ivermectin instead, but I get the reasoning somewhat.

Health Council: Vaccinate Children From 12 Years Old With Medical Risk Against Corona

The Health Council advises the cabinet to vaccinate children from the age of 12 with a medical risk against the corona virus. Vaccinating all children in that age group, as is done in Germany, France and the US, for example, is not yet on the agenda. An opinion on this will follow in a few weeks. The current advice concerns children aged 12 to 17 who are annually invited for the flu shot and children with severe obesity. According to the Health Council, vaccination of these children provides significant health benefits, because they run a high risk of a serious course of Covid-19. According to chairman Bart-Jan Kullberg, that risk is twice as high as in healthy children.

The corona pandemic also indirectly has a major impact on children at medical risk. To avoid the risk of contamination, for example, they do not go to school or social activities. The Health Council also takes this ‘social-emotional impact’ into account. The council cannot estimate the number of children involved. “It concerns, for example, children with a heart or lung disease. There are also many small groups with a rare condition. General practitioners and paediatricians have a good picture of these groups,” says Kullberg.

An advice on vaccinating healthy children will only follow in a few weeks. The vast majority of children do not or hardly get sick after a corona infection. So far, almost 280,000 children in the Netherlands are known to have been infected. Usually they had only mild symptoms, such as a cold and cough. In the age group 0-12 years, 379 children were hospitalized. In the 13-17 age group, there have been 101 since September. A total of three children have died; all three had an underlying condition. Last month, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) gave the green light for the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children from 12 years of age. More and more countries are also vaccinating all healthy children over the age of 12 to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.

Vaccinating children from the age of 12 against the coronavirus can make a significant contribution to curbing the pandemic, OMT chairman Jaap van Dissel already suggested last weekend. According to him, it reduces the reproductive value (R) of the virus in winter by as much as this. about 15 percent. “That can be important to keep the spread low during that period as well.” In Germany, for example, teenagers will be vaccinated from next Monday, in France from mid-June and in Spain from mid-August. The US and Canada have been at it for weeks.

Vaccinating healthy children, who themselves hardly run the risk of becoming seriously ill after a corona infection, requires a ‘broader medical, epidemiological, ethical and legal consideration’, according to the Health Council. “It also depends on the phase of the pandemic,” Kullberg said. Because the number of infections is currently falling sharply and more than a million adults are now vaccinated every week, there is no reason to make that decision hastily, he says.

Now, mind you, that is the same country that admitted depriving children of their freedom, their development, and normal lives, in order to manipulate their parents. Talk about ethics. As I said a few days ago, “Holland closed schools not to protect children, but to make parents stay home. Think about how crazy that is.”

The Netherlands Used Children As A Weapon In The Fight Against Corona

Due to the Dutch corona policy to close schools and thus keep parents at home, children have been used as a means to fight the epidemic. Our cabinet receives that hard slap on the fingers today in the annual worldwide children’s rights report, the KidsRights Index. According to the makers, the Netherlands has set a very bad example internationally, by not even trying to keep schools open safely. With all the consequences that entails for the mental health of our youth. The corona guidelines from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have also been neglected. Youth has not been given any priority in Dutch policy, it sounds.

Statements by corona minister Hugo de Jonge, dated mid-December 2020, are presented as proof. Then De Jonge indeed mentioned on television as the reason why the cabinet decided to close the schools, that parents with children sitting at home will therefore start working from home more quickly. When parents take their children to school, that is another moment of contact, De Jonge explained at the time. “And we also learned from the first wave, when the schools were also closed, that the fact that primary education does not provide physical education also ensures that parents adhere better to another advice, namely: work from home as much as possible. ”, said the minister at the time.

“Children’s rights have been put in second place by the cabinet during corona time,” Marc Dullaert, founder of the international children’s rights organization KidsRights, now told this site. “They were the ankle bracelet for parents. These had to be kept at home in order to effectively fight the epidemic. At the expense of their mental health.” In the first phase, when everyone was looking for the right approach, this was understandable according to Dullaert. ,,But De Jonge’s statements came at a time when it was really no longer acceptable, in the second phase. And other countries – such as Belgium and Sweden – have done everything they can to keep the schools open, so there were alternatives on the table.”

Staying on topic, I liked this from the Conservative Woman site in Britain, with perhaps the best argument against child vaccination: “The sooner most of us are exposed to it, ideally in childhood, the sooner it will cease to be a major problem..”

Why Subject Our Children To The Risk Of Death From Vaccination?

All non-corrupted scientific commentators have known from the very start that this pandemic only ends one way: SARS-CoV-2 is going to become an endemic virus. It will always be with us. The sooner most of us are exposed to it, ideally in childhood, the sooner it will cease to be a major problem. High-risk individuals can choose to take a vaccine. Ivermectin and vitamin D can be used to prevent infection and treat confirmed cases. As we have seen, the argument that children must take vaccines so that we can achieve herd immunity is utterly false. Only those completely ignorant of virology and immunology would even attempt to make it. That brings us back to the original argument for vaccinating children against Covid: to protect them from the severe disease.

If this is the only reason to vaccinate children, there is only one calculation that parents should make: Is the risk from Covid greater than the risk from the vaccine? The present Covid vaccines being administered in the West are based on experimental technologies that are being used under emergency use authorisations (EUAs). Full safety studies will not be completed until 2023. The Covid vaccines were all created in the last year and we have no medium-term or long-term data on them. We don’t know if they will have an effect on children’s reproductive organs and fertility. We don’t know if they will produce auto-immune diseases. And we don’t know if they will lead to ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement) upon re-exposure to the virus (causing more severe illness).

We do know that the vaccines produce a range of cardiovascular and neurological events including strokes, myocarditis, pericarditis and paralysis in a significant number of people. In the small US state of Connecticut at least 18 children and young adults have come down with myocarditis, an extremely serious and sometimes fatal condition involving inflammation of the heart muscle (and they’ve only just started vaccinating children there). The Israel Ministry of Health has reported that the incidence of myocarditis for vaccine recipients is between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 6,000 in young men.

In Canada (population 38 million) only 11 children have died from Covid since the start of the pandemic. In the UK (pop 68 million) 32 children have died. It is nearly certain that all of them had one or more severe comorbidities. The fact is, most children brush off Covid without even knowing they’ve had it. For all intents and purposes, Covid poses zero risk to healthy children.

And Michael Curzon:

Child Vaccination: Who’s Selfish Now?

A number of school leaders have swung into action following the approval of the vaccination of children against Covid (a disease which almost all children aren’t at risk from) using the Pfizer vaccine (trials of which only included 1,134 children). It wasn’t very long ago that the establishment line was: if you don’t get a Covid vaccine, you are selfish. Even the Queen (disappointingly) joined in with this line [..]. But now, adult advisers to the Government suggest that children should be vaccinated not to protect children but to protect…themselves. Professor Anthony Harnden, the Deputy Chairman of the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, says:

‘I think the vast majority of benefit won’t be to children, it will be an indirect benefit to adults in terms of preventing transmission and protecting adults who haven’t been immunised, for whatever reason haven’t responded to the vaccine and therefore that presents quite a lot of ethical dilemmas as to whether you should vaccinate children to protect adults.’ He notes that children themselves are ‘in the main’ not at risk from Covid. Over half of the adult population has been fully vaccinated (with seventy-five per cent having received at least one dose of a vaccine) and Covid deaths, while still exaggerated, have flattened. There is no reason to vaccinate most children and, given the potential side effects, many not to do so. If the Government bottles it on the vaccination of children, it is they who are being selfish.

The reactions to the virus are many times more dangerous than the virus itself. Because the reactions have been amplified by fear. Time to shake it off. But for that to happen, we need politics and media to change, because they’re doing the amplifying. Problem is, fear sells.

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Debt Rattle June 1 2021

Jun 012021

June 1, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:47 am Finance Tagged with: angst, cashless, digital wallet, marriage, mRNA, origin, Peru, quarantine, spying, SWIFT 30 Responses »

Pablo Picasso La lecture 1932

• 3 Leaks that Sink the Covid Narrative (OffG)

• Thanks For The Labels (Denninger)

• After COVID-19 Successes, Push For mRNA Vaccines For Other Diseases (Nature)

• Former National Security Advisor: ‘I Think We Can’ Find Covid-19 Origin (Hill)

• Peru Surges To Highest Covid Death Toll Per Capita (Axios)

• EU Plans To Lift Covid Quarantine Rules For Vaccinated From 1 July (G.)

• The Three Rivers of Angst (Kunstler)

• US Caught Spying On EU ‘Allies’ Again…What Is Europe Going To Do About It? (RT)

• Russia May Be Cut Off From SWIFT Banking Payment System (RT)

• EU Set To Unveil Plans For Bloc-Wide Digital Wallet (R.)

• Just 7% of UK Shop Payments Predicted To Be In Cash By 2024 (G.)

German department of the interior report: “The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses.”

• 3 Leaks that Sink the Covid Narrative (OffG)

The science of the coronavirus is not disputed. It is well documented and openly admitted: Most people won’t get the virus. Most of the people who get it won’t display symptoms. Most of the people who display symptoms will only be mildly sick. Most of the people with severe symptoms will never be critically ill. And most of the people who get critically ill will survive. This is borne out by the numerous serological studies which show, again and again, that the infection fatality ratio is on par with flu. There is no science – and increasingly little rational discussion – to justify the lockdown measures and overall sense of global panic. Nevertheless, it’s always good to get official acknowledgement of the truth, even if it has to be leaked. Here are three leaks showing that those in power know that the coronavirus poses no threat, and in no way justifies the lockdown that is going to destroy the livelihoods of so many.

1. “IT’S ALL BULLSHIT!” On May 26th Dr Alexander Myasnikov, Russia’s head of coronavirus information, gave an interview to former-Presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak in which he apparently let slip his true feelings. Believing the interview over, and the camera turned off, Myasnikov said: “It’s all bullshit […] It’s all exaggerated. It’s an acute respiratory disease with minimal mortality […] Why has the whole world been destroyed? That I don’t know,”

2. “COVID-19 CANNOT BE DESCRIBED AS A GENERALLY DANGEROUS DISEASE” According to an e-mail leaked to Danish newspaper Politiken, the Danish Health Authority disagree with their government’s approach to the coronavirus. They cover it in two articles. There’s a lot of interesting information there, not least of which is the clear implication that politicians appear to be pressing the scientific advisors to overstate the danger (they did the same thing in the UK), along with the decision of some civil servants to withhold data from the public until after the lockdown had been extended. But by far the most important quote is from a March 15th e-mail: The Danish Health Authority continues to consider that covid-19 cannot be described as a generally dangerous disease, as it does not have either a usually serious course or a high mortality rate,” On March 12th the Danish parliament passed an emergency law which – among many other things – decreased the power of the Danish Health Authority, demoting it from a “regulatory authority” to just an “advisory” one.

3. “A GLOBAL FALSE ALARM” Earlier this month, on May 9th, a report was leaked to the German alternate media magazine Tichys Einblick titled “Analysis of the Crisis Management”. The report was commissioned by the German department of the interior, but then its findings were ignored, prompting one of the authors to release it through non-official channels. The fall out of that, including attacks on the authors and minimising of the report’s findings, is all very fascinating and we highly recommend this detailed report on Strategic Culture. We’re going to focus on just the reports conclusions, including [our emphasis]:

The dangerousness of Covid-19 was overestimated: probably at no point did the danger posed by the new virus go beyond the normal level. The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses. There is no evidence that this was more than a false alarm. During the Corona crisis the State has proved itself as one of the biggest producers of Fake News. After being attacked in the press, and suspended from his job, the leaker and other authors of the report released a joint statement, calling on the government to respond to their findings.

“Took the stab? You’re off the marriage-potential list permanently. Why? Potential life-long medical complications, that’s why.”

• Thanks For The Labels (Denninger)

One of the latest bits of insanity: Dating apps are allegedly asking if you’ve taken the Covid stab and displaying a “badge” if you have. I haven’t verified this personally since I have no use for such things, but it’s allegedly either there or being rolled out. To which, if I was single and younger, especially of potential child-siring age, I’d say “thanks for the warning.” Indeed, the malicious (or shall we say, “predatory”) men out there just got fair warning of who is a **** ’em and leave “fun” date. Took the stab? You’re off the marriage-potential list permanently. Why? Potential life-long medical complications, that’s why. Do I want to marry someone who may have given themselves an auto-immune disease three or five years down the road? Oh Hell No. But if she’s cute, well, the bed awaits — for now.

When Lupus or similar “screw you” lifetime medical issues make their appearance she can enjoy the company of her cats — that wasn’t a random chance thing we all are forced to face as adults and is always part of the deal it was self-inflicted stupidity and her other half didn’t get a vote. Never mind the rather clear problem that is presented to anyone (of either sex) contemplating a permanent relationship with someone who is willing to stab themselves with an experimental drug. There’s a legitimate reason to do it, by the way: You already know you’re at very high risk of a respiratory virus killing you, so despite the unknowns the math pencils out. Ok, thanks for the warning again; you aren’t in good health and don’t expect to remain that way. Is that person marriage and child-raising material? Naw, but a **** is all good.

Then there’s those who can be bribed cheap — you know, with a donut, or a lottery ticket? That’s great marriage material too, right? I mean, let’s face facts: A healthy 20-something person has a statistical zero risk of being killed by Covid and half of them probably already had it and may not even know so they didn’t take the shot to protect their own health after careful deliberation and an antibody test first, right? How does this relate to long-term relationships? Simple: There’s always some ******* who is richer, no matter how much you have and she just branded herself as willing to sell her future cheap. VERY cheap. Thanks for the warning; it’s a hell of a lot better for a guy to conclusively find this out before he needs a divorce lawyer! Make sure the rubbers stay in your wallet so she can’t “pin” them before use and for the love of God flush the damn thing after you’re done so she can’t fish it out of the trash can!

It’s even worse from the male future family evaluation side. Some guys do want families. Was there permanent damage done to that capability in terms of bearing kids? We know that those nice mRNA shots show up in the ovaries. Oh, chick-a-dee didn’t know that before rolling up her sleeve? Well, that’s what haste gets you — not bothering to wait for the science to figure it out. I have no idea and neither does she if that’s a problem but she took the stab voluntarily. So about that willingness to have said family and put your relationship in front of preening around virtue-signaling on Instabitch and Facesucker, eh? Maybe that will all work out ok, but it seems to me that by the time we will know with reasonable certainty the window will be closed on the baby factory as only high-risk (for both woman and child) and maybe even IVF, if any, pregnancies will be possible. Again: No thanks; I’ll take the woman who didn’t deliberately risk permanent compromise of her reproductive capacity so she could get into Lollapalooza.

21st century Frankenstein?

• After COVID-19 Successes, Push For mRNA Vaccines For Other Diseases (Nature)

When the broad range of vaccines against COVID-19 were being tested in clinical trials, only a few experts expected the unproven technology of mRNA to be the star. Within 10 months, mRNA vaccines were both the first to be approved and the most effective. Although these are the first mRNA vaccines to be approved, the story of mRNA vaccines starts more than 30 years ago, with many bumps in the road along the way. In 1990, the late physician-scientist Jon Wolff and his University of Wisconsin colleagues injected mRNA into mice, which caused cells in the mice to produce the encoded proteins. In many ways, that work served as the first step toward making a vaccine from mRNA, but there was a long way to go—and there still is, for many applications.

Traditional vaccines use a weak or inactive form of a microorganism to turn the immune system against the disease. After a person is given injection of an mRNA vaccine, their cells make part or all of a protein that causes an immune response, including the production of antibodies. Although the most widely known examples are the mRNA-based vaccines from BioNTech–Pfizer and Moderna directed against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19, that is just one small part of this field—and those vaccines were not the first efforts that used mRNA. Despite the many benefits of using this molecule as the basis of a vaccine, it comes with fundamental challenges: it is not very stable inside cells, and mRNA is not efficiently translated into proteins when used as a gene-delivery tool. Today, mRNA can be engineered to battle many diseases, but it will not work with all of them.

German biotechnology company BioNTech’s chief medical officer Özlem Türeci—physician, immunologist and entrepreneur—says that “mRNA has a couple of interesting features that make it attractive for vaccines.” Adaptability serves as this molecule’s key feature in this application and beyond. mRNA can be engineered not only to make antigens for vaccines but also to encode antibodies, cytokines and other proteins related to the immune system. “The versatility of mRNA creates a huge design space,” she explains. The scientists at BioNTech spent years researching and developing techniques to get full command over mRNA, including optimizing its non-coding parts, designing specific sequences, developing manufacturing processes and more.

Türeci describes the results of those efforts by saying, “We have a diversified toolbox and by mixing and matching the modules in this toolbox, we can design mRNA with the features that we need for a particular purpose.” She adds that “it is a bit like writing code—by mastering a programming language [that] is rich in terms, one can give any instruction one wants.” With the BioNTech toolbox, the scientists can control how much protein is produced and for how long, the route of administration of the mRNA, which cells express the protein and if the mRNA creates a precise activation or suppression of the immune system.

Does Biden really want to find out?

• Former National Security Advisor: ‘I Think We Can’ Find Covid-19 Origin (Hill)

Former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger said that he believes it is possible to ascertain the origins of COVID-19 during a discussion of the Wuhan lab origin theory on Sunday. “I think there’s a lot that can be learned in 90 days,” Pottinger told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd on NBC, referring to President Biden’s recent call for a 90-day report on the origins of COVID-19 from the U.S. intelligence community. “It’s conceivable that we’ll have an answer and even if we come up short with a definitive answer, what we’re gonna have is a foundation for additional revelations to come out from scientists around the world who are now going to be emboldened because they know that this is a priority of the United States,” Pottinger added.

Todd asked Pottinger if he believed a “definitive answer” about the origins of COVID-19 could be found even if the Chinese government is uncooperative. “I think we can. It might take more than 90 days, but look, … China has incredible and ethical scientists, many of whom in the early stages of the pandemic came out to say that they suspected that this was a lab leak,” Pottinger said. “So those people have been systematically silenced by their government,” he added, saying a U.S.-led global effort to find the origins of COVID-19 may embolden these scientists to come forward.

With or from Covid?

• Peru Surges To Highest Covid Death Toll Per Capita (Axios)

Peru officials revised the country’s COVID-19 death toll Monday from 69,342 to 180,764 after a review. The almost tripling of the number listed Sunday means the country has the worst pandemic death rate per capita, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Per Johns Hopkins, Hungary previously had the highest coronavirus death toll per capita —about 300 per 100,000 people. With its revised toll, Peru stands at over 500 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people. Officials said that the undercounting was partially down to “a lack of testing that made it difficult to confirm whether a person had died due to the virus or some other cause,” Reuters reports. Experts had long raised concerns that the official death toll had been undercounted, as hospitals packed out with coronavirus patients and oxygen ran short, the news agency notes.

It will get dangerous once they claim enough people have bee jabbed. We’re not there yet.

• EU Plans To Lift Covid Quarantine Rules For Vaccinated From 1 July (G.)

The starting pistol has been fired on a “relaxing” summer holiday season for people living in the EU from 1 July, as Brussels proposed lifting all quarantine obligations on those who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19. From Tuesday, a system will be ready to allow member states to issue a digital Covid passport to citizens proving their status and freeing them up to travel. With infection rates on a downward trajectory across the bloc, a deadline has been set for 1 July for all 27 EU countries to accept the documentation as sufficient proof of vaccination for restrictions to be lifted. A negative test or proof of having recovered from infection will confer the same rights on the holder of a certificate.

The European Commission has proposed a standard validity period for tests: 72 hours before travel for PCR tests and 48 hours for rapid antigen tests. The children of those who are fully vaccinated will also be exempt from quarantine under the proposal and as a minimum no one under six years of age will need to take a test. Many countries are likely to set a higher age threshold for the testing of minors. The intention is that fully vaccinated UK travellers will benefit from the Covid passport system but, in light of the emerging variant first identified in India, EU governments may still impose restrictions on people arriving from the UK including testing and quarantine obligations.

From Monday, entry to France has been limited to EU nationals, French residents, and those travelling for essential purposes. People arriving from the UK must have tested negative and quarantine for seven days. While a sudden deterioration in the Covid infection rates in the EU could lead to the use of an “emergency brake” on the lifting of restrictions within the bloc, the intention is to reintroduce free movement as the summer tourism season begins.

“..the whole sorry episode looks like an act-of-war but carried out with America’s foolish willing collaboration..”

• The Three Rivers of Angst (Kunstler)

Three rivers of angst flow out of Memorial Day 2021, and it is possible to imagine how they will meet later this year and join in a mighty flood of woe over the country. The first is the toxic stream of Wokery saturating just about every institution in the USA from the armed services, to the DOJ, to education both public and private, to organized sports, to the corporate C suites and, of course, to the transmission of current events in news and social media. Despite the torrents of mendacious narratives and fogs of gaslight deployed in this campaign, a substantial chunk of the public resists suffocation and has finally begun to fight back, especially at the grass roots local level against the dogma-driven school boards out to cancel Western Civ.

Expect this to ramp up as the spring semester closes out and the schools must set the terms for resuming classes in the fall. The kids themselves are bucking the mask mandates while the parents tangle with the more vexing problems of Woke racist curricula and insane sexual propaganda. It’s going to get ugly. Another stream of angst is the River of Covid-19. The tide has just turned on the question of where it came from, namely, the Wuhan Lab, but it’s hard to game-out both what we might do about that concerning the CCP’s role in it – plus, the roles of Dr. Fauci and our own National Institutes of Health – and whether the depraved administration of China Joe Biden can even acknowledge the facts. That is to say: the whole sorry episode looks like an act-of-war but carried out with America’s foolish willing collaboration.

But then a whole raft of really deadly additional questions overrides even the quandary of who’s responsible, and I refer to the future course of the disease itself, whether another wave comes back, what new variants might emerge, and the extremely spooky issue of what the long-term effects of the experimental vaccines might be. Since the news media is so untrustworthy, and these are such troubling threats, it will be very hard to locate the truth about the medical concerns.

They’ll throw some big words at it, that’s it.

• US Caught Spying On EU ‘Allies’ Again…What Is Europe Going To Do About It? (RT)

The espionage dynamic ultimately ties into the same mindset: The United States sees the European Union more as an economic competitor than as a friend and does not in any respect want it to get ahead of them or gain “advantage” in any specific area. The F-16 story above reveals how US intelligence in fact serves the interests of the military industrial complex, seeking out the secrets of Europe’s own defence industry and ensuring America always has the competitive edge, even to the point of making national intelligence agencies betray their own countries. As Edward Snowden stated in an interview in 2014, the US engages in constant industrial espionage against big German companies such as Siemens, stating: “If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests – even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security – then they’ll take that information nevertheless.”

In line with this, Angela Merkel, as a very Eurocentric leader who has a maverick approach to foreign policy and Germany’s place in the world, is unsurprisingly a frequent target of American intelligence activities. Washington is constantly wondering what she is thinking, intending and doing, not least regarding China and Russia where they do not see eye to eye. She is perhaps a “frenemy” to the US, a de facto ally and enemy simultaneously. But this all boils down to the big question as stated above, what is Europe going to do about it? Or can they do anything about it? The EU’s response to such unending controversies seems to be to make a small protest in the heat of the moment, but otherwise forget it and do nothing, passively tolerating American infiltration designed to undermine European interests and competitiveness across the board.

If Europe is serious about upholding its own “strategic clout” it has to be prepared to take bigger risks and stop being pressed into line under the obligation of “transatlaticism” and get tougher on the “American problem.” The bloc should take a leaf out of its rhetoric toward China and demand “reciprocity” in its relations with the United States, that it ceases espionage against them, seeks to curtail excessive “American influence” operations undermining their foreign policy and strategic independence and that it treats the continent as an equal and fair partner. Surely one would think ‘enough is enough’ but of course there is little reason to think anything will change. In a world where US surveillance is intrusive and rampant, America still surprisingly gets away with accusing everyone else of “spying.”

By now, Russia is well prepared.

• Russia May Be Cut Off From SWIFT Banking Payment System (RT)

Russian banks may be blocked from using SWIFT, a payment system that enables reliable and secure financial transactions, as part of restrictions against Moscow, in what one official has called a potential “spiral of sanctions.” “It’s no secret that there are threats, primarily from the United States, to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT system,” said Dmitry Birichevsky, director of the Economic Cooperation Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Speaking on RIA Novosti on Monday, the diplomat noted that Russia has concerns that SWIFT could get caught up in a “spiral of sanctions,” led by Washington. However, the senior official doesn’t think America will act on this threat any time soon.

“I’m actually confident that we won’t be disconnected from SWIFT anytime soon, and maybe never,” he said, noting that Russia would be able to come to payment agreements with their trading partners anyway. “Since 2014, Russia has been working on its own payment system. This system already exists,” he explained. “We all use the MIR card. It is also accepted in a number of neighboring countries and in Turkey. Negotiations are also underway with other partners.” Last month, politicians from the European Parliament voted in favor of a resolution to condemn what they called Russia’s “military posturing close to the country’s border with Ukraine.” The MEPs agreed that, “should military build-up lead to an invasion,” Moscow should be excluded from SWIFT, along with other economic measures.

Proposals to cut Moscow off from the world’s leading international payment system are not new. After seven years of threats, Russia is now in a position where losing access to SWIFT would no longer be a disastrous blow. The country has created its own alternative, called SPFS, which works domestically, and Moscow is looking to expand the system internationally.

Scary.

• EU Set To Unveil Plans For Bloc-Wide Digital Wallet (R.)

The European Union (EU) is set to unveil plans for a bloc-wide digital wallet on Wednesday, following requests from member states to find a safe way for citizens to access public and private services online, the Financial Times reported. The app will allow citizens across the EU to securely access a range of private and public services with a single online ID, according to the FT report on Tuesday. The digital wallet will securely store payment details and passwords and allow citizens from all 27 countries to log onto local government websites or pay utility bills using a single recognized identity, the newspaper said, citing people with direct knowledge of the plans.

The EU-wide app can be accessed via fingerprint or retina scanning among other methods, and will also serve as a vault where users can store official documents like the driver’s licence, the newspaper reported. EU officials will enforce a structural separation to prevent companies that access user data from using the wallet for any other commercial activity such as marketing new products. Brussels is engaged in talks with member states to provide guidelines on technical standards for rollout of the digital wallet, which is expected to be fully operational in about a year, according to the newspaper.

Cash is freedom.

• Just 7% of UK Shop Payments Predicted To Be In Cash By 2024 (G.)

Just 7% of in-store purchases in the UK could be made in cash by 2024, a report has forecast, after the coronavirus pandemic fuelled the switch to cards and mobile payments. While cash accounted for 27% of in-store transactions in 2019, the latest global payments report from processing company Worldpay found that had fallen to 13% last year. The report predicts usage will continue to drop over the next three years. International figures showed that in several other countries, including Sweden, Canada and Australia, already less than one in 10 shop payments are made in cash. It predicted Sweden would be “almost cashless” by 2024, with 0.4% of transactions paid for with money, down from 15.2% in 2019 and 8.8% last year.

Consumers and businesses were already moving away from cash payments before the pandemic hit, but early concerns that Covid-19 could spread via surfaces led some companies to switch to contactless methods. The increase in the contactless limit on cards, and mobile payment services with no cap on spending have accelerated the switch away from cash. Worldpay said that by 2024 it expected mobile to make up a third of payments. Pete Wickes of Worldpay said: “This research shows the speed and scale of the transformation in consumer behaviour in just 12 months. “The decline in the use of cash in the UK has accelerated, and while this opens up new opportunities for businesses to optimise and drive efficiencies, we need to be mindful that important parts of the economy continue to rely on cash, such as charity donations and restaurant tip jars, while there are many in society who remain underbanked.”

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The Grandest Human Experiment In History

May 062021

May 6, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 5:23 pm Finance Tagged with: cancer, experiment, HARPA, Helsinki, Moderna, mRNA, Nuremberg, Pentagon, Pfizer, Silicon Valley, vaccines 35 Responses »

William Adolphe Bouguereau Girl with a pomegranate 1875

Let’s not beat around the bush any longer, but call things for what they are: we are in the middle of the grandest medical and genetic experiment in the history of mankind, by a mile and a half. The experiment is already so advanced that we can only wait and see its consequences. We don’t know what these will be, and that is exactly the problem with it: we normally run elaborate tests in advance of such experiments to minimize their potential negative effects and their adverse outcomes for our species. This time around, we did not.

There are well-established procedures to test novel substances before they are used in human experiments, which take years – for good reason. We have decided to almost entirely neglect these procedures in the case of Covid “vaccines”, in the same way that we have neglected to look for alternative ways to defend ourselves from the virus. And these two things are closely connected: in case ivermectin or Budesonide or even just vitamin D had shown efficacy in Covid trials, the vaccines could not have received emergency authorization.

Moreover, you will now be punished – in access to travel, work, other activities- for NOT having received a dose of never approved chemicals. The world is upside down, but after months upon months of lockdowns, people think upside down is just how they like it. Anything is better than being locked up/down. Stockholm syndrome writ large.

And now, as we survey the landscape, we see that the proponents of the experiments are already dreaming of much bigger adventures -and profits-. The emergency authorization was all they needed, a full approval was not necessary. Some people behind the companies behind mRNA techniques, such as Moderna and Pfizer, may tell themselves that they are doing mankind a big favor, but they would be the first to know that the well-established procedures are there for good reasons. But yeah, they threaten their short-term profits, we get that.

In 1947, a world disgusted by Joseph Mengele’s medical experiments on German prisoners said: never again. Yes, sounds familiar. The Nuremberg Code was drafted:

The ten points of the code were given in the section of the judges’ verdict entitled “Permissible Medical Experiments”:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide to which extent the mRNA -and other unapproved vaccines- experiment abides by that code. Which in 1964 was further extended and formalized in the Helsinki Declaration. Meanwhile, there are tons of stories like these:

There are so many tragic stories now of loved ones dying after taking an experimental COVID injection, that one has to wonder if people are now starting to become desensitized by all these stories as the public is perhaps being conditioned to accept “death by lethal injection” as part of the “new normal?” A 50-year-old woman in Canada, a 61-year-old woman in Orange, California, and a 58-year-old man in Minnesota are three more casualties following COVID-19 injections.

[..] Lisa Basiuk-Stonehouse passed away May 3, 2021 after her AstraZeneca vaccine. According to her Aunt Shari, blood clots caused a stroke and the matter is still being investigated. Lisa’s husband Morrie passed away two years ago, according to the Facebook post by Lisa’s Aunt Shari Turner. Lisa and Morrie’s daughter Jordan, is now 19 years old. A gofundme account has been created, and as of May 3, 2021 the fundraiser had generated 19k of the 25k goal. It appears Lisa and her family are very loved.

[..] HIBBING, MINNESOTA — A 57-year-old trucker and avid fisherman is dead in one of the more heartbreaking stories we’ve covered on this blog. Mr. John Medved received the experimental Johnson & Johnson viral vector shot on April 1, according to his daughter, Mrs. Rachel Weise. Twelve days later, Mr. Medved was in the emergency room due to extreme shortness of breath. Doctors diagnosed him with a pulmonary embolism, aka blood clots in his lungs. He was placed on a ventilator and in a medically-induced coma the next day as his condition rapidly deteriorated. Doctors then discovered that Mr. Medved had a stroke that damaged the entire left side of his brain. The doctor told Rachel that it was the worst stroke he’d seen in his career.

[..] The Orange County Coroner’s office is investigating the death of a woman who died just days after she received her second dose of the Moderna vaccine. The family says the grandmother was healthy before she got her shot, and that her sudden death came as a shock. A conversation with staff at the Orange County Coroner’s office about Griselda Flores’ death, raised red flags for her son Richard Cardenas and the family. “They made it seem like this was not the first call that they had,” Cardenas said. Assistant Chief Deputy Coroner Brad Olsen says that’s right. Olsen told Eyewitness News a handful of deaths, including Flores’, are under investigation because they happened one to three days after the person got a COVID-19 vaccine dose.

But yeah, the fact that those well-established procedures were ignored completely for the Covid vaccines, leads scientists and drug makers to believe they have a lot more leeway now for the next series of experiments. Some of which are truly unsettling, to me at least. Experimenting on human embryo cells which were never meant to come to full growth is right up there with Mengele in my mind:

CRISPR Madness: Welcome to the Age of Genetic Chaos

Body cell, or “somatic,” modification is in line with traditional medical practice, where a sick person undergoes a procedure or takes a drug that may be the best means for saving their life or sparing them a life of misery. It might or might not be successful but is a risk a patient or those responsible for them can reasonably assume. In embryo modification, in contrast, the tissues of the body are pervasively altered as it is taking form in ways that are poorly understood.

Even so-called single-gene traits are established with the participation of dozens or hundreds of other genes often acting in compensatory fashions, leading to the situation that in some individuals a double dose of the most threatening cystic fibrosis or sickle cell gene variants leads to no adverse symptoms at all. Under such circumstances, a single gene change, no matter how accurately administered, is an uncontrolled experiment on a prospective person that may do more harm than good. While errors can be propagated to future generations (leading to the misleading claim that the hazard is primarily through the reproductive cells or “germ line”), damage would also be incurred by the initial experimentally produced person.

All the books under review, from the frankly promotional ones of Isaacson, Kevin Davies and Jamie Metzl, to the more balanced one of Françoise Baylis, accept the baseless premise propounded by many CRISPR researchers that gene modification of embryos can be done safely, as does the reviewer herself. “[I]n ten years or so, we will probably meet the minimum conditions of safety and predictability for editing out single-gene diseases,” de Souza writes, and there is no indication that any of the authors disagrees.

Baylis, the book author most critical of the technology, is similarly concerned with ensuring that the fruits of this powerful, perfectable technology will be distributed equitably, and that enough disparate voices participate in deciding whether the endeavor (i.e., making experimental changes in prospective children; irreversibly changing the human gene pool; bringing human production into the commodity system) is what “we” really want.

And wouldn’t you know, as Whitney Webb describes, there a major convergence in this field, with the US government involved, and the Pentagon, Silicon Valley, Big Tech and Big Pharma (and of course the media). All for the benefit of mankind, wouldn’t you know. The mRNA technology, for which Moderna could never get any approval prior to the Covid era, now looks set to be used in many other fields. Cancer and terrorism and preventing crime and reading minds, it’s all here:

This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.” Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur.

[..] ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID. BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.

[..] the flagship program of HARPA would be SAFE HOME, short for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes. SAFE HOME would suck up masses of private data from “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo, and Google Home” and other consumer electronic devices, as well as information from health-care providers to determine if an individual might be likely to commit a crime. The data would be analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms “for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence.”

The Department of Justice’s pre-crime approach known as DEEP was activated just months before Trump left office; it was also justified as a way to “stop mass shootings before they happen.” Soon after Biden’s inauguration, the new administration began using information from social media to make pre-crime arrests as part of its approach toward combatting “domestic terror.” Given the history of Silicon Valley companies collaborating with the government on matters of warrantless surveillance, it appears that aspects of SAFE HOME may already be covertly active under Biden, only waiting for the formalization of ARPA-H/HARPA to be legitimized as public policy.

[..] While nominally focused on “bioterrorist attacks,” TIA’s Bio-Surveillance project also sought to acquire early detection capabilities for “normal” disease outbreaks. Bio-Surveillance and related DARPA projects at the time, such as LifeLog, sought to harvest data through the mass use of some sort of wearable or handheld technology. These DARPA programs were ultimately shut down due to the controversy over claims they would be used to profile domestic dissidents and eliminate privacy for all Americans in the US.

[..] This most recent effort to create ARPA-H/HARPA combines well with the coordinated push of Silicon Valley companies into the field of health care, specifically Silicon Valley companies that double as contractors to US intelligence and/or the military (e.g., Microsoft, Google, and Amazon). During the COVID-19 crisis, this trend toward Silicon Valley dominance of the health-care sector has accelerated considerably due to a top-down push toward digitalization with telemedicine, remote monitoring, and the like.

One interesting example is Amazon, which launched a wearable last year that purports to not only use biometrics to monitor people’s physical health and fitness but to track their emotional state as well. The previous year, Amazon acquired the online pharmacy PillPack, and it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which data from Amazon’s Halo wellness band is used to offer treatment recommendations that are then supplied by Amazon-owned PillPack.

[..] The military is currently being used to pilot COVID-19–related biometric wearables for “returning to work safely.” Last December, it was announced that Hill Air Force Base in Utah would make biometric wearables a mandatory part of the uniform for some squadrons. [..] While of interest to the military, these wearables are primarily intended for mass use—a big step toward the infrastructure needed for the resurrection of a bio-surveillance program to be run by the national-security state.

We continue to forget the lessons of the past. We worship “science” now. Decades of diligence and actual science, which were carefully crafted by our parents and grandparents, have been swept under the carpet under the guise of emergency in matter of months, and “science” takes that to mean all limits are off. Yes, governments and armies etc. would love to experiment on you and I, and tell us it’s for our own best sake. If we just wear a ring or a watch or an app, we will all benefit from centralized medical systems checking our symptoms 1000 times a second and beaming it all into some database, what could be better for us?

And maybe this is indeed inevitable, but it also contradicts a lot of what we, until now, consider to be freedom and liberty, of our decisions about our own existence, without anyone else interfering. And then on top of that they will try to force you into getting another mRNA jab, and then another, until you have very obviously no longer the genetic make-up that you were born with.

We are born into this world as healthy people, and we use our healthcare systems to correct in the still rare instances that we are not. But we will lose that presumption if and when we will be monitored 24/7 from the day we are born. Even while we are as healthy as our ancestors were when they were born. Do we benefit from this? Well, not as long as we remain healthy. Then it’s just more centralized crap.

You might say that we benefit when we get old or sick, sure, but then we must ask ourselves if we want some entity checking on us all the time while we’re just living a life like our parents did. You think that idea, of just living your life, independent from centralized powers, will disappear? I guess it’s possible, but it scares the heebees out of me.

And then you get back to asking what the logic is behind injecting perfectly healthy people, children even for g-d’s sake, with an untested chemical substance. Shouldn’t we leave healthy people alone? Oh, but they can’t prove they’re healthy… That’s the world upside down. And that’s what the mRNA manufacturers count on us to believe. That no-one is a normal healthy human being anymore until and unless they have been injected with an experimental substance. Governments, the Pentagon, Silicon Valley, Big Tech and Big Pharma want nothing more than for you to think that. Because then they got you for life. YOUR life.

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Debt Rattle May 6 2021

May 062021

May 6, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:37 am Finance Tagged with: genetic chaos, genocide, ivermectin, lockdowns, mRNA, patents, Pentagon, Pfizer, T cells, Wuhan 80 Responses »

Edgar Degas Two laundresses 1876

• Senior NHS Board Member: Stop The Genocide Or Our Children Are Next (UKC)

• Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin (AJT)

• Did People Or Nature Open Pandora’s Box At Wuhan? (Wade)

• mRNA Vaccines Induce Broad CD4+ T Cell Responses

• What A Convenient LIE (Denninger)

• Crimes of Covid Vaccine Maker Pfizer Documented (M&A)

• Stay-at-Home Lockdowns Made No Difference to Covid Deaths in US States (LDS)

• US Backs Waiving Patent Protections For Covid Vaccines (CNBC)

• Public Officials Turned Covid Celebrities Don’t Want Restrictions To End (RT)

• This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship” (Whitney Webb)

• CRISPR Madness: Welcome to the Age of Genetic Chaos (CP)

• US, NATO Launch Massive Military Exercise Amid Complaints From Russia (JTN)

“If you refuse to co-operate in rolling this out, then we’ll remove you.”

• Senior NHS Board Member: Stop The Genocide Or Our Children Are Next (UKC)

The transcript below is of a call made to Brian Gerrish on 18 April 2021. The voice of the caller has been changed to protect her identity. The senior NHS Board member warns that the government is now controlling the NHS, and it is the government that is actually dictating what the NHS should do during Covid emergency measures. She states that the result of the government’s enforced Covid and vaccination policies can be described as genocide. [..] Brian Gerrish: I’ve been contacted by an NHS professional who would like to speak to me about things happening in the NHS. So, without any ado, let’s go over to our caller today. Thank you very much for calling me. It’s really been wonderful that you’ve had the confidence to give us a call at the UK Column. I’m going to ask the key question: why have you called me today?

Whistleblower: [..] You know, I just really wanted to share my personal story on what’s happened since last March. [..] I guess when all the Coronavirus started, and when it came into the UK — mainframing kind of March last year — obviously the conversations really were predominantly about measures to stop infection, forecasting, you know, “this is what we’re anticipating will happen”, you know, “how do we manage the services”. Kind of all that was going on, and then as we went through the summer, there started to be a little bit of talk about the vaccine development and potential treatments and things like that. And then the treatments completely went, and the vaccine discussions ramped up, and in November it really started to be predominantly what we talked about.

And, I mean, you can’t call it a vaccine, because it doesn’t meet the definition, so I’m going to refer to it as an injection, but I’m just making sure that everyone’s on the same page with me. So, it became kind of clear to myself, and a few other colleagues that I know on other NHS Boards, in November that we were going to be asked to completely roll this out — and also that there really were some long-term safety issues, and stuff that we just didn’t know. And so it really took us by surprise, the scope and speed at which they were moving. And at the time, we had a lot of discussions, as a Board, as to our concerns around this — and remember that when the NHS is in emergency measures, which it is and has been, then the Government is able to tightly control what the NHS does, and is able to dictate a lot more what the NHS does than it would be able to if it wasn’t in emergency measures.

So, our Chief Executive had discussions about our concerns, and I can say other Boards had the same discussions, and in a nutshell, what we were told in December was, “If you refuse to co-operate in rolling this out, then we’ll remove you.” And it wasn’t said explicitly, and it wasn’t put in e-mails, but it was certainly very indicated that that was the case.

American Journal of Therapeutics

• Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin (AJT)

Since 2012, a growing number of cellular studies have demonstrated that ivermectin has antiviral properties against an increasing number of RNA viruses, including influenza, Zika, HIV, Dengue, and most importantly, SARS-CoV-2.9–17 Insights into the mechanisms of action by which ivermectin both interferes with the entrance and replication of SARS-CoV-2 within human cells are mounting. Caly et al18 first reported that ivermectin significantly inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication in a cell culture model, observing the near absence of all viral material 48 hours after exposure to ivermectin. However, some questioned whether this observation is generalizable clinically given the inability to achieve similar tissue concentrations used in their experimental model using standard or even massive doses of ivermectin.19,20

It should be noted that the concentrations required for an effect in cell culture models bear little resemblance to human physiology given the absence of an active immune system working synergistically with a therapeutic agent, such as ivermectin. Furthermore, prolonged durations of exposure to a drug likely would require a fraction of the dosing in short-term cell model exposure. Furthermore, multiple coexisting or alternate mechanisms of action likely explain the clinical effects observed, such as the competitive binding of ivermectin with the host receptor-binding region of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, as proposed in 6 molecular modeling studies.21–26 In 4 of the studies, ivermectin was identified as having the highest or among the highest of binding affinities to spike protein S1 binding domains of SARS-CoV-2 among hundreds of molecules collectively examined, with ivermectin not being the particular focus of study in 4 of these studies.27

This is the same mechanism by which viral antibodies, in particular, those generated by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The high binding activity of ivermectin to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein could limit binding to either the ACE-2 receptor or sialic acid receptors, respectively, either preventing cellular entry of the virus or preventing hemagglutination, a recently proposed pathologic mechanism in COVID-19.21,22,26–28 Ivermectin has also been shown to bind to or interfere with multiple essential structural and nonstructural proteins required by the virus to replicate.26,29 Finally, ivermectin also binds to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), thereby inhibiting viral replication.30

Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists

“The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months..”

But after 15 months, we still have no idea about the origin of Sars 2.

• Did People Or Nature Open Pandora’s Box At Wuhan? (Wade)

Natural emergence was the media’s preferred theory until around February 2021 and the visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) commission to China. The commission’s composition and access were heavily controlled by the Chinese authorities. Its members, who included the ubiquitous Daszak, kept asserting before, during, and after their visit that lab escape was extremely unlikely. But this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese authorities may have been hoping for. What became clear was that the Chinese had no evidence to offer the commission in support of the natural emergence theory. This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment.

The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and after a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.

And as long as that remains the case, it’s logical to pay serious attention to the alternative conjecture, that SARS2 escaped from a lab. Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists asserted.

Question is: what else do they do?

• mRNA Vaccines Induce Broad CD4+ T Cell Responses (JCI)

Recent studies have shown T cell cross-recognition of SARS-CoV-2 and common cold coronavirus spike proteins. However, the effect of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines on T cell responses to common cold coronaviruses remain unknown. In this study, we analyzed CD4+ T cell responses to spike peptides from SARS-CoV-2 and 3 common cold coronaviruses (HCoV-229E, HCoV-NL63, and HCoV-OC43) before and after study participants received Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) or Moderna (mRNA-1273) mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccine recipients made broad T cell responses to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and we identified 23 distinct targeted peptides in 9 participants including one peptide that was targeted by 6 individuals.

Only 4 out of these 23 targeted peptides would potentially be affected by mutations in the UK (B.1.1.7) and South African (B.1.351) variants and CD4+ T cells from vaccine recipients recognized the 2 variant spike proteins as effectively as the spike protein from the ancestral virus. Interestingly, we saw a 3-fold increase in the CD4+ T cell responses to HCoV-NL63 spike peptides post-vaccination. Our results suggest that T cell responses elicited or enhanced by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines may be able to control SARS-CoV-2 variants and lead to cross-protection from some endemic coronaviruses.

“Let me give you a piece of advice: Shoving a gun in anyone’s face, which is what a mandate is, generates no confidence at all. It does, however, generate a whole bunch of other things, including revulsion, hatred or even justified retribution.”

• What A Convenient LIE (Denninger)

Oh, look at this: Beyond safety, requiring mandatory vaccinations also allows us to set an example for those who are hesitant to get vaccinated. Leaders at all levels have championed the vaccine and are taking action to educate people who are reluctant to get vaccinated. By mandating vaccines, healthcare institutions will show the world that we trust the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, and inspire others to follow. Riiiight. You inspire women to consent to sex by putting a gun in their face and demanding they take off their clothes? Let me give you a piece of advice: Shoving a gun in anyone’s face, which is what a mandate is, generates no confidence at all. It does, however, generate a whole bunch of other things, including revulsion, hatred or even justified retribution.

In addition you’re not immune from lawsuit, nor is your institution. Pfizer is, but you are not. Sucks to be you if and when one of your staff members is badly hurt or killed by taking the shots. Maybe it hasn’t and won’t happen but that liability is open-ended and permanent for both you personally and your institution. Further that liability is civil so no, it doesn’t have to be proved the shot was the cause — just more-likely than not in the opinion of the jury. It’s not like you don’t have a very nice building and institution there that looks like some awfully-deep pockets to go raid if someone dies or perhaps worse, is permanently disabled from taking said shot, right? And it’s not like social media isn’t awash in people who have had that happen already and are all over GoFundMe and elsewhere begging for money as they’ve been hit with half-million dollar medical bills and aren’t done — right?

If that’s a result of an entirely voluntary decision then it’s of course on them no matter how foolish but if it’s a result of a mandate well, who gets to pay for that Marc and how do you think that will end for you and your hospital when, not if, it winds up in court? Because it will end up in court and you will be named as Defendant, both personally and corporately. Perhaps your threat to fire anyone who won’t submit is an empty one. We’ll see. Maybe your legal department has explained all of this to you and you’re waving your arms around making noise, publishing OpEds because you know damn well that you’re so far out on the legal ledge 300′ up that your greatest fear is that someone is going to come along with a chainsaw.

Perhaps the gun you claim to be shoving in people’s faces, in other words, isn’t actually loaded and you know damn well it’s empty. Perhaps the real reason you published the OpEd is that the other medical center across town is not mandating anything, you asked and were told to go to Hell and you’re scared that the best talent will quit and go work there, eviscerating the quality of your services. Is that really what this is about; another illegal, 15 USC Chapter 1 monopolist trick to go along with all the other ones damn near every medical center in the US have gotten away with for the last 30 years?

November 18, 2020, from law firm Matthews and Associates.

• Crimes of Covid Vaccine Maker Pfizer Documented (M&A)

Here’s a brief glimpse of Pfizer’s track record for safety and ethics. This is a short list, by no means inclusive of the company’s entire rap sheet.

Pfizer received the biggest fine in U.S. history as part of a $2.3 Billion plea deal with federal prosecutors for mis-promoting medicines (Bextra, Celebrex) and paying kickbacks to compliant doctors. Pfizer pleaded guilty to mis-branding the painkiller Bextra by promoting the drug for uses for which it was not approved.

In the 1990s, Pfizer was involved in defective heart valves that lead to the deaths of more than 100 people. Pfizer had deliberately misled regulators about the hazards. The company agreed to pay $10.75 Million to settle justice department charges for misleading regulators.

Pfizer paid more than $60 Million to settle a lawsuit over Rezulin, a diabetes medication that caused patients to die from acute liver failure.

In the UK, Pfizer has been fined nearly €90 Million for overcharging the NHS, the National Health Service. Pfizxer charged the taxpayer an additional €48 Million per year for what should have cost €2 million per year.

Pfizer agreed to pay $430 Million in 2004 to settle criminal charges that it had bribed doctors to prescribe its epilepsy drug Neurontin for indications for which it was not approved.

In 2011, a jury found Pfizer committed racketeering fraud in its marketing of the drug Neurontin. Pfizer agreed to pay $142.1 Million to settle the charges.

Pfizer disclosed that it had paid nearly nearly 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals some $20 Million for speaking on Pfizer’s behalf.

In 2012, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had reached a $45 Million settlement with Pfizer to resolve charges that its subsidiaries had bribed overseas doctors and other healthcare professionals to increase foreign sales.

Pfizer was sued in a U.S. federal court for using Nigerian children as human guinea pigs, without the childrens’ parents’ consent. Pfizer paid $75 Million to settle in Nigerian court for using an experimental antibiotic, Trovan, on the children. The company paid an additional undisclosed amount in the U.S. to settle charges here. Pfizer had violated international law, including the Nuremberg Convention established after WWII, due to Nazi experiments on unwilling prisoners.

Amid widespread criticism of gouging poor countries for drugs, Pfizer pledged to give $50 million for an AIDS drug to South Africa. Later, however, Pfizer failed to honor that promise.

Pfizer’s Covid vaccine is being rolled out with nothing but positive press from every mainstream media outlet in the country. Meanwhile, more than half of Americans surveyed have said they will not take a Covid vaccine. The plain fact is that many questions remain unanswered regarding this, or any other, Covid vaccine’s safety and efficacy.

“We were not able to explain the variation of deaths per million in different regions in the world by social isolation..”

• Stay-at-Home Lockdowns Made No Difference to Covid Deaths in US States (LDS)

A new study from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago has analysed the impact of stay-at-home orders on infections and deaths in U.S. states and found they made no difference. The peer-reviewed study, published in the scientific journal PNAS, found stay-at-home orders (also known as shelter-in-place orders or SIPs) were not associated with lower infections or deaths; furthermore, they were actually associated with a slight increase in infections and deaths, although this was not statistically significant.

[..] The authors observe that if stay-at-home orders aren’t affecting mobility, it’s difficult to see how they will affect anything else: “If SIP [shelter-in-place] orders did not have large effects on behaviour, it is hard to imagine how they could have had large effects on COVID-19 cases and deaths.” They add: “The health benefits of SIP orders were likely limited because many people were already social distancing before the introduction of SIP orders.” They suggest that voluntary mobility reduction and social distancing made a difference to outcomes, though do not commit to saying how much. Noting that nationwide there was around a 50% decrease in mobility between February and April 2020, they state: “The nationwide reaction to COVID-19 almost surely decreased the spread of the disease.”

However, their results, they say, “have nothing to say about the health and societal benefits of staying at home and reducing physical contact with others. The model-based studies which claim stay-at-home lockdown orders saved thousands of lives are therefore in error, they argue. “The previously presented evidence on the effectiveness of SIP orders appears to be misleading, and there is currently no compelling evidence to suggest that SIP policies saved a large number of lives or significantly mitigated the spread of COVID-19. However, this does not mean that voluntary social distancing – SIP practice as distinct from policy – was ineffective.”

The study was written and submitted prior to the appearance in Nature this March of the study by R.F. Savaris and colleagues which in effect looked at “SIP practice as distinct from policy”. It found that actually staying at home made little to no difference either: “We were not able to explain the variation of deaths per million in different regions in the world by social isolation, herein analysed as differences in staying at home, compared to baseline. In the restrictive and global comparisons, only 3% and 1.6% of the comparisons were significantly different, respectively.”

Long overdue. But far from done.

• US Backs Waiving Patent Protections For Covid Vaccines (CNBC)

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it supports waiving intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines, as countries struggle to manufacture the life-saving doses. “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai wrote in a statement. “As our vaccine supply for the American people is secured, the Administration will continue to ramp up its efforts — working with the private sector and all possible partners — to expand vaccine manufacturing and distribution. It will also work to increase the raw materials needed to produce those vaccines,” the statement added.

The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised the U.S. decision as a “monumental moment in the fight against Covid-19” that reflects the “moral leadership” of the White House in the fight to end the pandemic. Stocks of major pharmaceutical companies that have produced vaccines, including Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer, dropped sharply after news of the potential waivers first broke. Pfizer ended its trading day flat, while Moderna lost 6.1%; Johnson & Johnson shed a modest 0.4%. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America expressed pointed opposition to the Biden administration’s support for waiving IP protections. The trade group’s members include vaccine makers such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.

“In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety,” said Stephen J. Ubi, the group’s president and CEO. “This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines. ”

“..the Faucis and Ferrers of the world feasted well on buckets of media love for some 13+ months, and they’re not ready to go back to a diet of irrelevance.”

• Public Officials Turned Covid Celebrities Don’t Want Restrictions To End (RT)

Narcissistic civil servants have turned into pseudo-celebrities thanks to the pandemic and they don’t want to go back to the shadows. Now the only way to stop their endless restrictions is by threatening their public standing. On April 21, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Director, settled in before fawning SoCal reporters for the latest in her mind-numbing Möbius strip of press conferences. This grownup with a job she considers essential to her city’s survival proceeded to tell millions of restrictions-weary Angelenos about hungry bunny rabbits. In a failed effort to explain why fully vaccinated men and women who can no longer spread or suffer infection by the coronavirus should go on wearing masks for months to come, Ferrer wove a fable of a garden trying to fend off rabbits that want to eat carrots.

You can hear how proud Ferrer is of this few minutes of “Watership Downer.” She no doubt labored over her infectious fairy tale – this off-off Broadway brand of virus Vaudeville – for hours, confident she’d sway that handful of suckers still bothering to pay any attention. While news reports conveniently glossed over Ferrer’s furry voyage into drivel, I managed to find a recording of her hopping down the bunny trail. As she drones along, it’s clear she’s not educating the public. She’s performing. It’s juvenile, patronizing and ineffective. Still, you must wonder if Ferrer found it to be her finest hour. Ferrer feels comfortable enough to present a bad children’s book as public health data because she has soaked in the spa waters of media adoration and public attention for more than a year. All the while, panic over a serious, but manageable pandemic surged through the easily led, slow-to-question LA populous.

That same panic allowed this woman of some educational achievement to rise to fame from the dark and dusty halls of the public sector. In any normal era, she’s the kind of appointed official who would otherwise toil in anonymity. Fortunately for her, the “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV- 2)” made her a star, albeit a dim one. The slog that was 2020 became a time to glow for the likes of infectious disease personality Dr. Anthony Fauci and for Ferrer, too. And now it’s now well past the hour to turn out the lights on her and her kindred. But sadly, the Faucis and Ferrers of the world feasted well on buckets of media love for some 13+ months, and they’re not ready to go back to a diet of irrelevance.

For the longest time, Moderna could not get mRNA approved for anything. Still not for its Covid vaccine either. But they have big plans.

• This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship” (Whitney Webb)

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.” Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur.

Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic “pre-crime” organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as “wrongthink.” The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden’s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley–dominated Broad Institute, has been controversial for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new “health DARPA.”

This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds would not be peer reviewed prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants. ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID.

BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV. Other “innovative” technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.

“..left the door open to future manipulation of humans.”

• CRISPR Madness: Welcome to the Age of Genetic Chaos (CP)

The Nobel prize in chemistry awarded last year to the biochemists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for the genetic modification technique called CRISPR cemented the popular idea that a new era of precision manipulation of hereditary material had arrived. The award came on the heels of the unauthorized use of the technique by the scientist He Jiankui in 2018 in China in an effort to produce individuals (twin girls in this case) resistant to HIV, and a flurry of studies in early 2020 showing that accuracy in altering DNA in a test tube or bacteria in a culture dish, did not hold up when applied to animal embryos. Attempts to modify single genes in human embryos (not intended to be brought to full-term) in fact led to “large-scale, unintended DNA deletions and rearrangements in the areas surrounding the targeted sequence,” aka “genetic chaos.”

Dr. He was imprisoned, fined, and fired from his academic position in China for his actions, although it is still not clear to what extent the higher-ups at his institute were aware of them. At a small meeting that I attended in Berkeley in early 2017 where He spoke, he unambiguously stated that “these things are thought of differently in China than in the U.S.” The U.S. scientific establishment uniformly condemned He’s experiments, but when questioned, most scientists, including Doudna herself, and bioethicists (a profession dedicated, with a few exceptions, to getting the public used to what the scientists and bioentrepreneurs have in store for it), left the door open to future manipulation of humans.

The Pantagon touting its transparency. Onion material.

• US, NATO Launch Massive Military Exercise Amid Complaints From Russia (JTN)

Following complaints from Russia that it was being cast as a mock NATO enemy, the United States and allies on Tuesday launched a long-planned military exercise in Europe involving more than 28,000 troops from 26 nations training across the continent. The exercise, Defender-Europe 21, commenced following opening ceremonies in Albania, and comes in the wake of Russian troop movements along the border with Ukraine. Amid speculation last month that Russia aimed to invade or intimidate Ukraine, Moscow charged that the current NATO exercise was designed with a Russian enemy in mind. The U.S. and its allies routinely conduct exercises “with a clear anti-Russian orientation,” Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu said in an April videoconference with other military leaders.

Noting that Defender Europe 21 is is the largest NATO exercise in 30 years, Shoygo couched the training as a threat to Russia. According to the Pentagon, Defender Europe is meant to build readiness within the NATO alliance. “It’s defensive in nature, focused on deterring aggression, while preparing our forces to respond to crisis and conduct large-scale combat operations if necessary,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said this week. In a remark aimed at Moscow’s long silence on why 100,000 Russian troops had been sent to the Ukraine border, Kirby highlighted the openness surrounding Defender Europe.

“We actually come to the podium and tell you about it,” Kirby told reporters on Monday. “I told you how many troops. I told you how many nations. I talked about specifics in terms of what they’re going to be exercising … and we’re not getting that out of Moscow, and we haven’t. So that’s a big difference right there.” The Pentagon began moving troops and equipment to Europe for the exercise in March, and in April moved prepositioned military stocks from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The training will focus on defending the western Balkans and Black Sea regions, and also will rehearse defense operations elsewhere in Europe and Ukraine, according to the Pentagon. Events will include live fire training, medical exercises, and mock evacuations.

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Armenia Assange

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Covid Rattle April 16 2021

Apr 162021

April 16, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:43 am Finance Tagged with: AstraZeneca, blood clots, Brazil, COVID, India, lockdown, mRNA, rapid tests, vaccine passport, vaccines 15 Responses »

Edvard Munch Spring in Johan Karl Street 1944

• Blood Clots As Prevalent With Pfizer, Moderna Vaccine As Astrazeneca (MW)

• Risk Of Rare Blood Clotting Higher For Covid-19 Than For Vaccines (Oxford)

• EU Commission To End AstraZeneca and J&J Vaccine Contracts At Expiry (R.)

• India’s COVID-Vaccine Woes — By The Numbers (Nature)

• Brazil’s P1 Coronavirus Variant Mutating, May Become More Dangerous (R.)

• Norwegian Experts Recommend Stopping Further Use Of AstraZeneca Vaccine (RT)

• Ireland May Delay 2nd Vaccine Doses Amid J&J Delays, AstraZeneca Age Limits (RT)

• Poland Starts J&J Covid Vaccine Rollout Amid Objections, Health Concerns (RT)

• 37 People In Denmark Seek Compensation Over Covid Vaccine Side Effects (RT)

• Rapid Covid Testing In England May Be Scaled Back Over False Positives (G.)

• Is Boris Lauding Lockdowns Because He’s Planning Another For October? (Clark)

• ‘Vaccine Passports’ Can’t Be Requirement For Travel, Says EU (F.)

Another one of those days where there’s just too much news. So I split it up in this Covid Rattle and a Debt Rattle that will follow imminently.

Despite all the bad news, here’s what I think will happen in much of the northern hemipshere, following this graph from Daniel J. Wilson at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (see Debt Rattle April 13)

Around June 1, in many countries the viral load will have fallen off a cliff. Summer will be much less dangerous than winter. Makes sense. Whether Covid will return in autumn will depend largely on what we do to make people’s immune systems stronger. Vitamin D plays a large role in that, but so do exercise and healthy food.

Just as everyone starts banning AstraZeneca, turns out mRNA “vaccines” are just as bad. And just as poorly tested.

• Blood Clots As Prevalent With Pfizer, Moderna Vaccine As Astrazeneca (MW)

A study by Oxford University found the number of people who receive blood clots after getting vaccinated with a coronavirus vaccine are about the same for those who get Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as they are for the AstraZeneca vaccine that was produced with the university’s help. According to the study, 4 in 1 million people experience cerebral venous thrombosis after getting the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, versus 5 in 1 million people for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The risk of getting CVT is much higher for those who get COVID-19 — 39 in a million patients — than it is for those for get vaccinated. AstraZeneca’s vaccine use has been halted or limited in many countries on blood clot concerns.

But the report this is based on comes from Oxford, one of the makers of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

• Risk Of Rare Blood Clotting Higher For Covid-19 Than For Vaccines (Oxford)

Researchers at the University of Oxford have today reported that the risk of the rare blood clotting known as cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) following COVID-19 infection is around 100 times greater than normal, several times higher than it is post-vaccination or following influenza. The study authors, led by Professor Paul Harrison and Dr Maxime Taquet from Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry and the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, counted the number of CVT cases diagnosed in the two weeks following diagnosis of COVID-19, or after the first dose of a vaccine. The then compared these to calculated incidences of CVT following influenza, and the background level in the general population.

They report that CVT is more common after COVID-19 than in any of the comparison groups, with 30% of these cases occurring in the under 30s. Compared to the current COVID-19 vaccines, this risk is between 8-10 times higher, and compared to the baseline, approximately 100 times higher. The breakdown comparison for reported cases of CVT in COVID-19 patients in comparison to CVT cases in those who received a COVID-19 vaccine is:

• In this study of over 500,000 COVID-19 patients, CVT occurred in 39 in a million patients.
• In over 480,000 people receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna), CVT occurred in 4 in a million.
• CVT has been reported to occur in about 5 in a million people after first dose of the AZ-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine.
• Compared to the mRNA vaccines, the risk of a CVT from COVID-19 is about 10 times greater.
• Compared to the AZ-Oxford vaccine, the risk of a CVT from COVID-19 is about 8 times greater.

However, all comparisons must be interpreted cautiously since data are still accruing. Paul Harrison, Professor of Psychiatry and Head of the Translational Neurobiology Group at the University of Oxford, said: ‘There are concerns about possible associations between vaccines, and CVT, causing governments and regulators to restrict the use of certain vaccines. Yet, one key question remained unknown: ‘What is the risk of CVT following a diagnosis of COVID-19?’. ‘We’ve reached two important conclusions. Firstly, COVID-19 markedly increases the risk of CVT, adding to the list of blood clotting problems this infection causes. Secondly, the COVID-19 risk is higher than we see with the current vaccines, even for those under 30; something that should be taken into account when considering the balances between risks and benefits for vaccination.’

Pfizer is winning.

• EU Commission To End AstraZeneca and J&J Vaccine Contracts At Expiry (R.)

The EU Commission has decided not to renew COVID-19 vaccine contracts next year with AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Italian daily La Stampa reported on Wednesday, citing a source from the Italian health ministry. “The European Commission, in agreement with the leaders of many (EU) countries, has decided that the contracts with the companies that produce (viral vector) vaccines that are valid for the current year will not be renewed at their expiry,” the newspaper reported. It added that Brussels would rather focus on COVID-19 vaccines using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, such as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s.

A spokesman for the EU Commission said it was keeping all options open to be prepared for the next stages of the pandemic, for 2022 and beyond. “We cannot, however, comment on contractual issues,” the spokesman added. Later on Wednesday the President of the European Commission said the EU was in talks with Pfizer and BionTech for a new contract for 1.8 billion doses, confirming a Reuters report from last week. “We need to focus on technologies that have proven their worth. mRNA vaccines are a clear case in point,” she added.

India is not winning. Wonder what went wrong there. Note: 1.4 billion is a lot of people.

• India’s COVID-Vaccine Woes — By The Numbers (Nature)

India, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of vaccines, is facing a COVID-19 vaccine crunch, partly due to an explosion of cases linked to new variants. This spells trouble for many countries relying on Indian-made vaccines supplied through the World Health Organization’s COVAX initiative for equitable access to vaccines. On 12 April, India reported 168,912 new COVID-19 cases, its highest daily total yet. It has now had more than 13.5 million confirmed cases in total, overtaking Brazil as the world’s second-worst hit country, behind the United States. “While new variants are surfacing in India, a decline in COVID-appropriate behaviour such as wearing masks and social distancing is adding to their faster spread,” says Randeep Guleria, director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

By 14 April, more than 111 million people had been vaccinated in the country (see ‘The race to vaccinate’). But in March, fears of vaccine shortages led to the government temporarily halting exports of a version of the University of Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine known as Covishield, which is produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), based in Pune. The SII, the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccine components, was expected to provide many of the doses for COVAX. But a fire at a facility in January is part of the reason that it hasn’t yet been able to live up to its production target of 100 million doses per month. Currently it produces between 60 million and 65 million per month.

Last June, AstraZeneca, which is based in Cambridge, UK, announced that it had licensed the SII to supply a total of one billion doses of Covishield for low- and middle-income countries. But only 64 million had been exported before the halt in exports last month, 28 million of which went to COVAX. Earlier this year, chief executive Adar Poonawala said on Twitter that the SII had been directed by the Indian government “to prioritise the huge needs of India and along with that balance the needs of the rest of the world”. India’s battle with a surge in cases could delay planned deliveries of Covishield to 64 lower-income countries through COVAX, according to a 25 March statement by initiative member Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a health partnership based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Note: this article says: “Studies have shown the P1 variant to be as much as 2.5 times more contagious than the original coronavirus ..”

That makes much more sense than the recent piece that claimed the B117 variant was 67 times more contagious than the original.

• Brazil’s P1 Coronavirus Variant Mutating, May Become More Dangerous (R.)

Brazil’s P1 coronavirus variant, behind a deadly COVID-19 surge in the Latin American country that has raised international alarm, is mutating in ways that could make it better able to evade antibodies, according to scientists studying the virus. Research conducted by the public health institute Fiocruz into the variants circulating in Brazil found mutations in the spike region of the virus that is used to enter and infect cells. Those changes, the scientists said, could make the virus more resistant to vaccines – which target the spike protein – with potentially grave implications for the severity of the outbreak in Latin America’s most populous nation.

“We believe it’s another escape mechanism the virus is creating to evade the response of antibodies,” said Felipe Naveca, one of the authors of the study and part of Fiocruz in the Amazon city of Manaus, where the P1 variant is believed to have originated. Naveca said the changes appeared to be similar to the mutations seen in the even more aggressive South African variant, against which studies have shown some vaccines have substantially reduced efficacy. “This is particularly worrying because the virus is continuing to accelerate in its evolution,” he added. Studies have shown the P1 variant to be as much as 2.5 times more contagious than the original coronavirus and more resistant to antibodies.

Can you still follow it?

• Norwegian Experts Recommend Stopping Further Use Of AstraZeneca Vaccine (RT)

The Institute of Public Health in Norway has recommended that the government stop using the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine after a lengthy review of the jab. Oslo suspended its use on March 11.
In a press release on Thursday, the agency said that after considering, in collaboration with external experts, the continued use of the heavily-scrutinized Covid-19 jab, that it would no longer recommend its use. It said more evidence has emerged to suggest there is a link between the jab and very rare cases of potentially fatal blood clots. “Based on this knowledge, we have arrived at a recommendation that the AstraZeneca vaccine be removed from the coronavirus vaccination program in Norway,” Geir Bukholm, director of infection control at the National Institute of Public Health, said in the statement.

The institute noted that Norway has made great strides in vaccinating its elderly and those most at risk of Covid. Therefore, those who are yet to be vaccinated are younger and less at risk from the virus – but are also potentially more prone to thrombotic events linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine. Those who have already received their first dose of the Anglo-Swedish jab will get a second shot from another vaccine manufacturer, the body stated. Also on Thursday, Health Minister Bent Hoeie said the government would not be drawn into a decision yet. “The government believes that we do not have a good enough basis for drawing a final conclusion that the AstraZeneca vaccine should be removed from the Norwegian vaccination program at this point,” Hoeie told a news conference.

They must have found a different science.

• Ireland May Delay 2nd Vaccine Doses Amid J&J Delays, AstraZeneca Age Limits (RT)

The Irish government has said it is considering whether to space out the administering of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in order to reach more people with a first dose as the country looks to open up from tough restrictions.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland on Thursday, the Irish deputy prime minister, Leo Varadkar, said it would make sense to space out the administering of the Pfizer shots, like in the UK, for those under 60 years old and in good health. The current interval between the administration of the two shots is 28 days, but some other countries have extended that to 12 weeks, allowing more people to be partially immunized against coronavirus in a shorter period of time. Research from the UK, before the country approved the Moderna jab, showed that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines greatly reduced the risk of hospitalization from Covid-19 after just one shot.

On Wednesday, Irish Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said a decision on whether to spread the vaccines out would be made within the week. The possible move comes as the EU’s medicines regulator reviews the use of the single-shot J&J vaccine and after Ireland limited the AstraZeneca vaccine to those aged 60 and over. On Tuesday, J&J said it would be delaying shipments to Europe while the vaccine is being reviewed following its suspension in the US; its rollout is yet to start in the EU. Similar technology was used in the development of their vaccines, which have been linked to very rare cases of blood clotting. Meanwhile, the EU announced on Wednesday that the bloc would be receiving an additional 25% of vaccines doses in quarter two from Pfizer.

It’s just lovely that every country’s experts reach different conclusions. Great for confidence.

• Poland Starts J&J Covid Vaccine Rollout Amid Objections, Health Concerns (RT)

Polish health authorities began rolling out doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine on Thursday, rejecting the concerns of the majority-Catholic country’s religious community and fears about the side effects of the jab. The government’s vaccine chief, Michal Dworczyk, confirmed the state’s vaccine rollout now included the Johnson & Johnson jab, stating health experts felt the benefits outweighed the side effects and they “have not received signals that there are problems or that patients are refusing [to take it].” Some 120,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have arrived in the country, with the first jabs from the consignment administered on Thursday.

On Wednesday, a senior official in Poland’s Catholic Church called on its members to reject both the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines over the use of abortion-derived cells in their manufacturing processes. Bishop Jozef Wrobel declared that the church has a “serious moral objection” to the use of vaccines that include cells “derived from aborted foetuses” in the manufacturing process despite the jabs not containing any abortion-related cells in their ingredients. The comments from Poland’s religious authority contradict earlier remarks from Pope Francis, who declared that it is “morally acceptable” to be vaccinated with jabs developed using the aborted cell-linked manufacturing process. Addressing similar concerns to the Polish Catholic Church, the Pope said that having the vaccine does “not constitute formal cooperation” with or support of abortion.

“..if you have had a serious side effect and there is a temporal connection with the vaccination, then I would encourage you to seeks compensation from us..”

• 37 People In Denmark Seek Compensation Over Covid Vaccine Side Effects (RT)

Some 37 people in Denmark are requesting compensation over adverse effects they say were suffered after getting a Covid-19 jab. Most of the cases are related to AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which the country has stopped using. A total of 29 people have applied for compensation for side effects believed to be linked to the Swedish-British jab – which was renamed Vaxzevria last month – the Danish Patient Compensation Association said in a statement on Thursday. A further eight people applied for compensation in connection with the coronavirus jab made by Pfizer. The side effects cited in the applications range from mild fever and discomfort to such extreme conditions as paralysis, blood clots, miscarriage, and even death.

In Denmark, patients are eligible for state-sponsored compensations if they suffer rare or severe adverse effects of any medicines. The relatives of patients who have died can also receive compensation. “There are almost no drugs without side effects. That is why we have a safety net in Denmark that picks up the patients who are so unfortunate as to be affected by rare and serious side effects,” the director of Patient Compensation, Karen-Inger Bast, stated. The director also urged other people who might have suffered side effects to come forward with their complaints as well. She warned, though, that the health troubles must be serious in order to receive compensation.

“It is important to say that you do not receive compensation for mild and transient symptoms such as a little fever or pain in the arm. But if you have had a serious side effect and there is a temporal connection with the vaccination, then I would encourage you to seeks compensation from us,” Bast stated. The association’s announcement comes a day after Denmark became the first European country to completely discontinue use of AstraZeneca vaccine, citing “a possible link between very rare cases of unusual blood clots, bleeding, low blood platelets counts” and the shot by the drug maker. “Our overall assessment is there is a real risk of severe side effects associated with using the Covid-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca,” Danish Health Authority Director General Soeren Brostroem said.

Painting rapid tests in a bad light? PCR is crap too, so no testing left?

• Rapid Covid Testing In England May Be Scaled Back Over False Positives (G.)

Senior government officials have raised “urgent” concerns about the mass expansion of rapid coronavirus testing, estimating that as few as 2% to 10% of positive results may be accurate in places with low Covid rates, such as London. Boris Johnson last week urged everyone in England to take two rapid-turnaround tests a week in the biggest expansion of the multibillion-pound testing programme to date. However, leaked emails seen by the Guardian show that senior officials are now considering scaling back the widespread testing of people without symptoms, due to a growing number of false positives.

In one email, Ben Dyson, an executive director of strategy at the health department and one of health secretary Matt Hancock’s advisers, stressed the “fairly urgent need for decisions” on “the point at which we stop offering asymptomatic testing”. On 9 April, the day everyone in England was able to order twice-weekly lateral flow device (LFD) tests, Dyson wrote: “As of today, someone who gets a positive LFD result in (say) London has at best a 25% chance of it being a true positive, but if it is a self-reported test potentially as low as 10% (on an optimistic assumption about specificity) or as low as 2% (on a more pessimistic assumption).”

He added that the department’s executive committee, which includes Hancock and the NHS test and trace chief, Dido Harding, would soon need to decide whether requiring people to self-isolate before a confirmatory PCR test “ceases to be reasonable” in low infection areas where there is a high likelihood of a positive result being wrong. The accuracy of rapid coronavirus tests and how they should be deployed have been the focus of months of debate in the UK. The proportion of false positives – people incorrectly told they have the virus – increases when the prevalence of the disease falls. This happens because although the number of true positives is falling, the tests produce roughly the same number of false positives – meaning the proportion of incorrect results becomes greater.

Is it lockdowns, vaccines or 50% of under-25s already carrying antibodies because the virus was so widespread? Fried of a friend in London says everyone he knows has “already had it”.

• Is Boris Lauding Lockdowns Because He’s Planning Another For October? (Clark)

The prime minister’s claim that it was lockdown, and not the vaccine or seasonal factors, which led to the rapid fall in Covid cases and deaths in the UK should set alarm bells ringing very loudly. The Man in Black wanted us to be in no doubt during his interview this week with Sky News: it was the lockdown whatdunit. “It is very, very important for everybody to understand,” Johnson said, “that the reduction in these numbers, in hospitalisations, in deaths, in infections, has not been achieved because of the vaccination programme. “People don’t, I think, appreciate that it’s the lockdown that has been overwhelmingly important in delivering this improvement in the pandemic and in the figures that we’re seeing. And so, yes of course the vaccination programme has helped, but the bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown.”

Repeat after Me: “The bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown.. The bulk of the work…” Why is Johnson so keen to downplay the government’s roll-out of a mass vaccination programme and instead big-up lockdown? Some have said it’s because he fears legal challenges for locking us down again in early January and wants to get his defence statement in before the writ. But I think BoJo is looking forwards, not backwards. By stressing ’lockdowns work’ now, he is ‘nudging’ us towards accepting another shutdown of the non-virtual economy in autumn. There are already some pretty strong clues about what might lie ahead. As I’ve noted in previous articles, the extension of furlough has been an excellent guide over the last twelve months for what is going to happen – far better than the smug ‘inside the tent’ pundits who have assured us since last March that things would soon be getting back to normal.

In December, Chancellor Sunak’s extension of furlough until April was the giveaway – no pun intended – that we’d be locked down again in the New Year, and so it proved. On December 18, I correctly predicted the exact date (January 4) that Johnson would announce the new 2021 lockdown. In early March, furlough was extended again, until the end of September, despite the government assuring us all restrictions would be lifted on June 21. This suggests it’s odds-on that some form of restrictions will remain well past that date, because what happens in October? Why, the autumn/winter flu season starts. It would be so easy for Johnson at that point to say “We need another lockdown” to “protect the NHS” from another wave (the ‘third’ or ‘fourth’) or from a “variant of concern” of coronavirus.

They call it the “Digital Green Certificate” instead. Same difference.

• ‘Vaccine Passports’ Can’t Be Requirement For Travel, Says EU (F.)

Travel is on the up and up. CBS News Travel Editor, Peter Greenberg reported that U.S. domestic airfares are rapidly increasing, as are hotel rates (not to 2019 levels yet, but certainly rising). Cruise liners are not waiting for CDC permission to set sail from U.S. ports and are instead repositioning cruises to leave from and visit non-U.S. ports (in the Caribbean, for instance). One cruise liner started selling tickets for its 2021/2022 world cruise, at $40,o00 a cabin, and the ship sold out in one day. And of course, there needs to be a way to verify that people are traveling safely without transmitting the virus to one place from another. In the EU, all 27 countries have agreed that coordination is necessary and that this will take the form of a Digital Green Certificate.

Crucially, however, the EU has agreed that people who don’t have this certificate shouldn’t be discriminated against–that’s why it isn’t called a passport or doesn’t have anything called vaccine near the title. Firstly, it’s to be called a Digital Green Certificate, able to be downloaded onto your phones. It’s not called a vaccination passport, because–the EU said Thursday–you don’t need to be vaccinated to get it. You can also get a certificate if you have had Covid-19 (and recovered) and if you have had a negative Covid-19 test before departure. That way, it doesn’t discriminate between those that have been vaccinated and those who haven’t. As reported by The Local, the EU plans to roll it out by mid-June, initially across the 27 EU bloc to citizens and residents, but also eventually to be compatible with non-EU countries.

Eduardo Santander, chief executive officer of the European Travel Commission, an association of national tourism organizations based in Brussels said: “Finally, we have a tangible solution to coordinating and harmonizing travel measures. I think other countries like the U.S. will also come up with their own technological solutions that will be compatible, and after a period of trials this summer, a global standard will be established.” Individual countries will also have a way of setting individual rules within the certificate. For example, Hungary uses Russia’s Sputnik vaccine, which most of the other EU countries do not, and so–under the certificate–they would be able to incorporate the vaccines they each want to use.

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Debt Rattle April 2 2021

Apr 022021

April 2, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:44 am Finance Tagged with: COVID, DNA, Fauci, ivermectin, Lavrov, mRNA, NATO, Suez, Texas, Ukraine, vaccine 90 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Vue de Notre-Dame de Paris 1945

• Why Are ‘Experts’ Disagreeing With Each Other Over Covid Vaccine? (Ron Paul)

• CDC Real-World Study Confirms Protective Benefits of mRNA Vaccines (CDC)

• Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t (NYT)

• Quadruple Therapy With Ivermectin Is Effective In Treating COVID-19 (Hindu)

• Texas COVID-Positivity-Rate Drops To Record Low After Mask-Mandate Lifted (ZH)

• Fewer Than 1 In 5 Britons With Symptoms Gets Tested, Only 2 In 5 Isolate (RT)

• Almost Third Of UK Covid Hospital Patients Readmitted Within 4 Months (G.)

• GOP Rep. Greene Introduces Bill To Cut Fauci’s $400,000 Salary To Zero (JTN)

• Kremlin Responds To Anger Over Ukraine Border Build-Up (ZH)

• We‘ll Talk To NATO ‘But Not Just About Ukraine’ – Lavrov (RT)

• Analyst Pleads To Leaking Secrets About Drone Program (AP)

• The Empire State Building Falls into the Suez Canal (Stoller)

• Massive DNA Damage Caused By CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing (GMW)

• New Digital Archive Preserves and Protects Indigenous Folk Medicine (Smiths.)

Reopening
https://twitter.com/i/status/1377756996083011592

“Deaths in Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), since its start in 1990. 2021 is off the charts.”

Ron Paul is a Doctor of Medicine. Will he be censored too?

• Why Are ‘Experts’ Disagreeing With Each Other Over Covid Vaccine? (Ron Paul)

Even the establishment experts seem to be in total disagreement with each other – and often with themselves – over the experimental Covid “vaccine.” Does it prevent the illness? Lessen the illness? Provide lasting immunity? Temporary immunity? Is it safe for all? So many questions, but so few reliable answers.

Pfizer’s sales team.

• CDC Real-World Study Confirms Protective Benefits of mRNA Vaccines (CDC)

A new CDC study provides strong evidence that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections in real-world conditions among health care personnel, first responders, and other essential workers. These groups are more likely than the general population to be exposed to the virus because of their occupations. The study looked at the effectiveness of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections among 3,950 study participants in six states over a 13-week period from December 14, 2020 to March 13, 2021. Results showed that following the second dose of vaccine (the recommended number of doses), risk of infection was reduced by 90 percent two or more weeks after vaccination.

Following a single dose of either vaccine, the participants’ risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 was reduced by 80 percent two or more weeks after vaccination. It takes about two weeks following each dose of vaccine for the body to produce antibodies that protect against infection. As a result, people are considered “partially vaccinated” two weeks after their first dose of mRNA vaccine and “fully vaccinated” two weeks after their second dose. These new vaccine effectiveness findings are consistent with those from Phase 3 clinical trials conducted with the vaccines before they received Emergency Use Authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration. Those clinical trials evaluated vaccine efficacy against COVID-19 disease, while this study evaluated vaccine effectiveness against infection, including infections that did not result in symptoms.

“This study shows that our national vaccination efforts are working. The authorized mRNA COVID-19 vaccines provided early, substantial real-world protection against infection for our nation’s health care personnel, first responders, and other frontline essential workers,” said CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH. “These findings should offer hope to the millions of Americans receiving COVID-19 vaccines each day and to those who will have the opportunity to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated in the weeks ahead. The authorized vaccines are the key tool that will help bring an end to this devastating pandemic.”

PCR history.

From New York Times Jan. 22, 2007

• Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t (NYT)

Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her.Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of a whooping cough epidemic? By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing, and severe, intractable coughing is a whooping cough hallmark. And if it was whooping cough, the epidemic had to be contained immediately because the disease could be deadly to babies in the hospital and could lead to pneumonia in the frail and vulnerable adult patients there. It was the start of a bizarre episode at the medical center: the story of the epidemic that wasn’t.

[..] For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications. Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given antibiotics and a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care. Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an e-mail message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm. Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed with the definitive test, growing the bacterium, Bordetella pertussis, in the laboratory. Instead, it appears the health care workers probably were afflicted with ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold.

[..] “You’re in a little bit of no man’s land,” with the new molecular tests, said Dr. Mark Perkins, an infectious disease specialist and chief scientific officer at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, a nonprofit foundation supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “All bets are off on exact performance.” Of course, that leads to the question of why rely on them at all. “At face value, obviously they shouldn’t be doing it,” Dr. Perl said. But, she said, often when answers are needed and an organism like the pertussis bacterium is finicky and hard to grow in a laboratory, “you don’t have great options.” Waiting to see if the bacteria grow can take weeks, but the quick molecular test can be wrong. “It’s almost like you’re trying to pick the least of two evils,” Dr. Perl said.

At Dartmouth the decision was to use a test, P.C.R., for polymerase chain reaction. It is a molecular test that, until recently, was confined to molecular biology laboratories. “That’s kind of what’s happening,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, an infectious disease specialist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. “That’s the reality out there. We are trying to figure out how to use methods that have been the purview of bench scientists. The Dartmouth whooping cough story shows what can ensue.

From September 2020.

• Quadruple Therapy With Ivermectin Is Effective In Treating COVID-19 (Hindu)

Elaborating on the effective methods being followed for treating COVID-19 across the globe, Shashikanth Manikappa, a specialist cardiac anaesthetist working at Monash Health in Melbourne, Australia, has strongly advised what he termed Quadruple Therapy involving four medicines — Ivermectin, Doxycycline, Zinc and Vitamin D3 — as a preventive as well as treating method. Addressing a media conference in Kalaburagi on Monday, the senior doctor said that the use of Ivermectin would be more effective than that of Hydroxychloroquine which was widely being used worldwide, right from the outbreak of the pandemic.

Referring to a pre-official release of a randomised controlled trial using Ivermectin in three doses in primary contacts of COVID-19, Dr. Manikappa said that 93 % of primary contacts who received Ivermectin did not develop any symptoms and 58 % of primary contacts who did not receive Ivermectin did progress to have symptoms of the pandemic. “Quadruple Therapy includes Ivermectin 12 mg one dose, Doxycycline 100 mg once a day for four days, Zinc 50 mg once a day for four days and Vitamin D3 once a week. Ivermectin, Doxycycline and Zinc are to be repeated every 14 days and Vitamin D3 every week with blood levels monitored. The synergistic effect of these medicine acts to prevent viral multiplication and also stop the virus from entering human cells.

Thomas Borody, an Australian gastroenterologist who is known for curing peptic ulcers with triple antibiotic therapy, has revealed that one block in South America that received Ivermectin combination prophylaxis did not contract coronavirus infection while others did,” he said. On the side effects, Dr. Manikappa said that Ivermectin was being used in 3.7 billion people for intestinal parasites and was found to be safe. “These are not new medicine. They are already in use for treating different ailments and are found to be safe. They can be prescribed by any doctor to control the pandemic,” he said.

“The 4.95 percent test positivity rate is the lowest the state has seen since the start of the pandemic.”

• Texas COVID-Positivity-Rate Drops To Record Low After Mask-Mandate Lifted (ZH)

For the better part of the past year, the US public was bombarded with “science” how only the wearing of a mask (or two masks, or three masks or more) was the only thing that stood between the Western way of life and Armageddon (despite the periodic emergence of cold, hard data showing no improvement in covid transmission in states that mandated masks vs those that did not, at least until Twitter decided to ban it). Then, one month ago, Texas had had enough and its governor shocked the Faucis of the world – and the White House – when he declared that the mask mandate in the state was officially over. What happened then? Well, in a development that would likely shock Dr. Fauci, newly confirmed Coronavirus cases in Texas plunged to their lowest since June, roughly three weeks after the state lifted its mask mandate and reopened businesses.

Additionally, the 7-day Covid positivity rate dropped to a new recorded low: 4.95%…

Texas Governor Greg Abbott wrote in a tweet over the weekend. “Everyone now qualifies for a shot. They are highly recommended to prevent getting Covid but always voluntary.” The 4.95 percent test positivity rate is the lowest the state has seen since the start of the pandemic. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, some 1,900 new virus cases were reported on Sunday, which is the lowest daily number the state has seen since early June. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the seven-day moving average number of cases in Texas dropped to the lowest level since mid-June. According to the CDC, Texas was averaging 3,783 daily cases as of March 27.

National Health Service’s Test and Trace program costs £37 billion over two years.

• Fewer Than 1 In 5 Britons With Symptoms Gets Tested, Only 2 In 5 Isolate (RT)

Only half of Britons know the main symptoms of Covid-19, and most don’t get tested or self-isolate, a new study has shown, raising questions about the UK’s Test and Trace system and placing emergence from the pandemic at risk The large study, exploring the effectiveness of the National Health Service’s Test and Trace program, was published in the British Medical Journal on Wednesday. Designed to identify, find and test those who have coronavirus, it has been allocated a massive budget of £37 billion over two years. Researchers at King’s College London, University College London and Public Health England looked at aggregated data from some 37 national online surveys, encompassing more than 75,000 responses from nearly 54,000 people living in the UK.

Only some 51.5% of those surveyed managed to properly identify the symptoms of Covid-19 – which include a cough, high temperature, fever, and loss of sense of smell or taste – that have been “actively promoted to members of the UK public,” the study reads. Moreover, the willingness to get tested should any of those symptoms be experienced turned out to be extremely low, with only 18% of those who reported suffering such symptoms having requested a test to confirm whether they had coronavirus. Such low figures call into question the effectiveness of the whole Test and Trace system, the researchers said, while acknowledging a slight improvement in people’s willingness to follow the rules over time.

With such low rates for symptom recognition, testing, and full self-isolation, the effectiveness of the current form of the UK’s test, trace, and isolate system is limited. Only 43% of respondents said they had adhered to self-isolation. The need to go to work or to leave the house to shop or attend to medical needs other than Covid-19 were among the most common excuses given for breaking the rules. Young people, those on a low income and/or from a working-class background were identified as the ones most likely to break the rules. The researchers suggested targeted messaging and increased financial support as methods by which to improve adherence.

“..far from a benign illness..”

• Almost Third Of UK Covid Hospital Patients Readmitted Within 4 Months (G.)

Nearly a third of people who have been in hospital suffering from Covid-19 are readmitted for further treatment within four months of being discharged, and one in eight of patients dies in the same period, doctors have found. The striking long-term impact of the disease has prompted doctors to call for ongoing tests and monitoring of former coronavirus patients to detect early signs of organ damage and other complications caused by the virus. While Covid is widely known to cause serious respiratory problems, the virus can also infect and damage other organs such as the heart, liver and kidneys. Researchers at University College London, the Office for National Statistics, and the University of Leicester, compared medical records of nearly 48,000 people who had had hospital treatment for Covid and had been discharged by 31 August 2020, with records from a matched control group of people in the general population.

The records were used to track rates of readmission, of deaths, and of diagnoses for a range of respiratory, heart, kidney, liver and metabolic diseases, such as diabetes. After an average follow-up time of 140 days, nearly a third of the Covid patients who had been discharged from hospital had been readmitted and about one in eight had died, rates considerably higher than seen in the control group. “This is a concern and we need to take it seriously,” said Dr Amitava Banerjee, at the Institute of Health Informatics at University College London. “We show conclusively here that this is very far from a benign illness. We need to monitor post-Covid patients so we can pick up organ impairment early on.”

Ha ha ha!

• GOP Rep. Greene Introduces Bill To Cut Fauci’s $400,000 Salary To Zero (JTN)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Thursday said she is introducing a bill to strip Dr. Anthony Fauci of his government salary. In a press release Greene posted on Twitter, the controversial Georgia Republican said her “Fire Fauci Act” would decrease “Dr. Always Wrong’s pay to $0 and the ‘We Will Not Comply Act’ will ‘prevent discrimination against the unvaccinated.’ ” Greene said the Fire Fauci Act will: • Remind the American public that Dr. Fauci is the highest paid ($434,312) of all 4 million federal employees, including the president. • Cite numerous findings about Dr. Fauci’s evolving and contradictory advice on COVID-19. • Reduce Dr. Fauci’s salary to $0 until a new NIAID administrator is confirmed by the Senate. • Direct the Government Accounting Office to conduct a study about the correspondence, financials, and policy memos inside the NIAID before COVID through the end of this year. This will allow us to see what Fauci and the NIAID knew, when they knew it, what they spent money on, and how the agency responded to the virus.

The bill has little if any chance of passage in the Democrat-controlled House. Fauci has made several seemingly contradictory statements during the pandemic about the virus and related health-safety measures – including one on mask wearing. The annual salary for Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, makes him “the highest paid doctor in the federal government and the highest paid out of all 4 million federal employees,” Forbes reported. In fact, Fauci’s salary is more than the president of the United States’ annual $400,000 pay.

Who do YOU think is the agressor here?

• Kremlin Responds To Anger Over Ukraine Border Build-Up (ZH)

Various reports strongly suggest that over the past week there’s been a significant uptick in shelling and fighting in the war-torn Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. This has served to thrust the over 5-year long crisis back in the media spotlight in the past days, particularly after the US Army ( via US European Command, or EUCOM) raised its Europe threat level to its highest of “potential imminent crisis”. At the same time The New York Times and others are detailing the escalation while alleging ‘Russian aggression’ is fueling the fresh flare-up, which has signaled the collapse of yet another cease-fire. And more alarmingly the reports allege a major build-up of Russian troops and tanks along Ukraine’s eastern border. But even as the NY Times report mused, it’s also likely that the estimated 4,000 regular Russian soldiers there were simply left over from recent scheduled military exercises common during this time of year.

The Kremlin has responded to the slew of reports on Thursday, underscoring that given the troops remain entirely within Russia’s national boundaries, it’s essentially ‘nobody’s business’ where they go. “The Russian Federation transfers the Armed Forces on its soil as it wants to. This should not concern anyone and this is not posing any threat to anyone,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized. Moscow is taking “all the necessary measures to ensure security of its frontiers,” he stressed according to TASS. Peskov added that: “As for the participation of Russian troops in the armed conflict on Ukraine’s soil, the Russian troops have never taken part in it and are not participating now.” He further said: “And we, the European countries and all world states would not like the civil war in Ukraine as a result of provocations and provocative steps by Ukraine’s military to flare up again.”

“we do not refuse to work, we just don’t want to sit there and hear about Ukraine.”

• We‘ll Talk To NATO ‘But Not Just About Ukraine’ – Lavrov (RT)

Moscow has rejected claims that it is unwilling to participate in talks with NATO, arguing instead that it would be eager to hold a summit, but only if it sticks to topics that are actually within the US-led military bloc’s remit. Last week, the faction’s General Secretary, Jens Stoltenberg, claimed that a breakdown in communication was the fault of one side alone. “Since the summer of 2019, there have been no meetings of the NATO-Russia Council,” he said. “And that’s because Russia has not responded positively to our invitation to convene the Council.” “I regret that, because I think that dialogue is important, especially when times are difficult as they are now, then it is important that we sit down, discuss also difficult issues,” Stoltenberg added.

“I believe in dialogue with Russia partly to strive for a better relationship with [that country].” However, on Wednesday, Moscow hit back at the remarks, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov arguing that his country was not opposed to talks with the bloc. “Our colleague Mr Stoltenberg declares that Russia refuses to work in the Russia-NATO Council,” Lavrov said, insisting that “we do not refuse to work, we just don’t want to sit there and hear about Ukraine.” “NATO has nothing to do with Ukraine,” the Minister said, “and yet when they offer to convene the Russia-NATO Council, they always insist that the first question should be about Ukraine. We sat down a couple of times, listened, we all know this.

Therefore, we have proposed to restore contacts between our militaries in order to save complex agreements that we have previously signed.” In February, Stoltenberg said that the ball was in Moscow’s court when it comes to relations with the bloc. “We need to send a clear signal to Russia,” he said. “If they want clashes, we are ready. If they want to co-operate, we will be glad.”

“Damn, @theintercept got yet another whistleblower pinched. It’s almost like Omidyar is running a sting operation there.”

• Analyst Pleads To Leaking Secrets About Drone Program (AP)

A former Air Force intelligence analyst pleaded guilty Wednesday to leaking classified documents to a reporter about military drone strikes against al-Qaida and other terrorist targets. The guilty plea from Daniel Hale, 33, of Nashville, Tennessee, comes just days before he was slated to go on trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, for violating the World War I-era Espionage Act. Hale admitted leaking roughly a dozen secret and top-secret documents to a reporter in 2014 and 2015, when he was working for a contractor as an analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). While court papers never specified the recipient of the leak, details about the case make it clear that the documents were given to Jeremy Scahill, a reporter at The Intercept, who used the documents as part of a series of critical reports on how the military conducted drone strikes on foreign targets.

He faces up to 10 years in prison at sentencing scheduled for July 13. The original indictment against Hale states that he reached out to the reporter in April 2013 while still enlisted in the Air Force and assigned to the National Security Agency. The leaks continued after Hale became a private contractor and was assigned to NGA. Hale’s lawyers sought unsuccessfully last year to have the case tossed on First Amendment grounds. They also argued that the case was a selective and vindictive prosecution. Defense lawyers said that while Hale was being punished for leaking information about negative aspects of the drone program, the government seemed unconcerned about anonymous leaks by government officials about successful strikes.

“And frankly, we should have seen this coming, because a lot of people have been noticing supply chain fragility, even if Thomas Friedman didn’t.”

• The Empire State Building Falls into the Suez Canal (Stoller)

Over the last few decades, ships have gotten really really big, four times the size of what they were 25 years ago, what the FT calls “too big to sail.’ The argument behind making such massive boats was efficiency, since you can carry more at a lower cost. The downside of such mega-ships should have been obvious. Ships like this, which are in effect floating islands, are really hard to steer in tight spaces like ports and canals, and if they get stuck, they are difficult to unstick. In other words, the super smart wizard financiers who run global trade made ships that don’t fit in the canals they need to fit into. The rise of mega-ships is paralleled by the consolidation of the shipping industry itself. In 2000, the ten biggest shipping companies had a 12% market share, by 2019 that share had increased to 82%.

This understates the consolidation, because there are alliances among these shippers. The stuck ship is being run by the Taiwanese shipping conglomerate Evergreen, which bought Italian shipping firm Italia Marittima in 1998 and London-based Hatsu in 2002, and is itself part of the OCEAN alliance, which has more than a third of global shipping. Making ships massive, and combining such massive ships into massive shipping monopolies, is a bad way to run global commerce. We’ve already seen significant problems from big shipping lines helping to transmit financial shocks into trade shocks, such as when Korean shipper Hanjin went under and stranded $14 billion of cargo on the ocean while in bankruptcy. It’s also much harder for small producers and retailers to get shipping space, because large shippers want to deal with large clients.

And fewer ports can handle these mega-ships, so such ships induce geographical inequality. Increasingly, we’re not moving ships between cities, we’re moving cities to where the small number of giant shipping lines find it efficient to ship. Dumb big ships owned by monopolies are the result of dumb big ideas, the physical manifestation of what Thomas Friedman was pushing in the 1990s and 2000s with books such as The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, the idea that “taking fat out of the system at every joint” was leading towards a more prosperous, peaceful and competitive world. Friedman’s was a finance-friendly perspective, a belief that making us all interdependent with a very thin margin of error would force global cooperation.

Just make ships bigger, went the thinking, until a big boat got stuck in a canal, taking down global supply chains with it. It seems so dumb. And it is. But it’s also reality, because for whatever reason, a lot of powerful people at one point thought Thomas Friedman was a genius. And frankly, we should have seen this coming, because a lot of people have been noticing supply chain fragility, even if Thomas Friedman didn’t.

Bigger than God.

• Massive DNA Damage Caused By CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing (GMW)

New research from Chinese scientists shows that CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing causes massive damage to the genome, much of which would have been missed by the analytical tools used so far. In a previous study, the same authors described a novel DNA sequencing procedure, which they called a “primer-extension-mediated sequencing assay” or PEM-seq. By applying this procedure, they found that DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) brought about by the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing tool could lead to unintended chromosomal translocations and large deletions. In their latest follow-up report, the researchers describe a new computer program, which enabled them to analyse the PEM-seq data to greater depth than previous programs had allowed.

They used this program to analyse real sequence data from their own new experiments, as well as previous ones, following CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing in mouse and human cells. In gene editing, while the initial double-strand break made by the DNA “scissors” or gene-editing tool can be targeted to a given location, the subsequent DNA repair that makes the “edit” is performed by the cell’s own repair mechanisms and is not controllable or precise. The researchers analysed the outcomes of the gene edit – and found what they call “tremendous deleterious DSB repair byproducts of CRISPR/Cas9 editing”. The unintended outcomes or genetic errors ranged from unintended small insertions or deletions (indels) to large deletions, plasmid (gene-editing tool delivery vehicle) integrations, and chromosomal translocations.

The researchers wrote, “Our findings provide an extra dimension for genome editing safety besides off-targets” – the well documented unintentional DNA damage at locations of the genome that were not targeted for editing. They added, “Caution should be exercised to avoid not only off-target damages but also deleterious DSB repair byproducts during genome editing.” Worryingly, these unintended deleterious outcomes of gene editing were not overcome even when a high-fidelity CRISPR/Cas tool was used. Furthermore, when components of the DNA repair machinery were inhibited in an attempt to force a specific gene sequence modification outcome (known as SDN-2), this resulted in large deletions, large insertions, and DNA cuts around the start site of genes.

Smithsonian. The Archive of Healing lists traditional remedies, procedures and practices from all seven continents.

• New Digital Archive Preserves and Protects Indigenous Folk Medicine (Smiths.)

For thousands of years, people around the world have relied on medicinal folklore, herbal treatments and rituals to heal an array of ailments. Now, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have created an online platform featuring hundreds of thousands of these traditional therapies. Spanning seven continents and 200 years, the Archive of Healing draws on such sources as anthropologists’ field notes, scholarly journals, oral histories and folktales. “The whole goal here is to democratize what we think of as healing and knowledge about healing, and take it across cultures in a way that’s respectful and gives attention to intellectual property rights,” says David Shorter, director of the digital archive, in a statement.

As Valentina Di Liscia reports for Hyperallergic, the database is one of the most inclusive catalogues of medicinal folklore in the world. A key goal of the project is preserving Indigenous treatments while ensuring that this knowledge is protected against exploitation by pharmaceutical companies seeking to make a profit. To that end, certain identifying details for plants and recipes are omitted from the archive. Western medicine has, historically, overlooked herbal remedies used by women and Indigenous peoples. As folk herbalist Sade Musa explained for Healthline in 2019, many traditional treatments were passed down orally and, as a result, overlooked in favor of written documentation.

“[C]olonialism built a medical industrial complex through often violent means of cultural suppression, erasure, and exploitation,” noted Heathline. “The rise of the patriarchy also authorized only white male physicians to practice and define medicine for the world.” Former faculty member Wayland Hand launched the UCLA database more than 40 years ago. In 1996, folklorist Michael Owen Jones began digitizing the collection of more than one million notecards—then known as the Archive of Traditional Medicine—after receiving a grant. Speaking with Jeyling Chou of the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s independent student newspaper, in 2005, Jones said, “Folk medicine [includes] the beliefs and practices that we learn and teach in our first-hand interactions with one another in our everyday lives.” He added, “It’s not institutional medicine, it’s not medicine that requires a license.”

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How Earth will look in 250 million years according to plate tectonics theory

How Earth will look in 250 million years according to plate tectonics theory https://t.co/f5mF8hk3p6 pic.twitter.com/yRAVGwXBxn

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 31, 2021

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ONLY

Mar 122021

March 12, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 3:42 pm Finance Tagged with: Biden, COVID, doctors, EUA, experts, mRNA, social media, taxes, vaccines 33 Responses »

Claude Monet Grand Canal, Venice 1908

Our freedoms are cancel-cultured one by one, and by now hardly anyone notices anymore, because the media is in on it. But this cannot end well. We better stop this now, or it will get awfully out of hand. It’s a sliding scale bouncing down a slippery slope that gifts politicians and “health authorities” the world over with ever more powers, which they really should not have, as everyone would agree with who takes a step back to look at the bigger picture.

• ONLY doctors are experts.

• We use ONLY vaccines to fight Covid, no prophylactics. No vitamin D, HCQ or ivermectin.

• We have ONLY Emergency Use Authorization vaccines.

• We can soon ONLY travel after having been inoculated with such vaccines.

• We can ONLY express officially approved opinions.

• ONLY doctors are experts.

You can’t let your country be run by doctors, virologists and epidemiologists. Anyone can understand that. But this is the reality:

Advisory Committee On Pandemic Needs Variety Of Experts, Not Just Doctors

The existing committee of experts advising the government on the pandemic must reshape to add experts from different research disciplines instead of one to become more efficient, according to a professor on Friday. Manolis Dermitzakis, professor of genetics at the University of Geneva, told Skai television that, in the first wave of the pandemic, the decisions for the committee were simple. It ONLY had to decide whether some activities should open or close, while the public largely complied with the restrictive measures. But the complexity of the situation as the pandemic continued from the summer onwards was so great that a commission which includes ONLY doctors could not function. Dermitzakis also argued that the panel must have fewer members. “A committee that has 30-40 members and consists ONLY of doctors cannot function,” he said.

• We use ONLY vaccines to fight Covid, no prophylactics. No vitamin D, HCQ or ivermectin.

We talked about the absurdity of this so much at the Automatic Earth, no need to repeat it.

• We have ONLY Emergency Use Authorization vaccines.

That one is tricky: none of the vaccines injected into 100s of millions of people has been approved. Who knows this though, that gets “jabbed”?

• We can soon ONLY travel after having been inoculated with such vaccines.

This article beats around the -legal- bush a little, but you just watch:

EU’s Green Pass Will ONLY Be Valid With EMA-Approved COVID Vaccinations

An EU source has told Euronews that the Green Pass proposal, to be put forward on March 17th to aid free movement within the bloc, will ONLY be valid with EMA-approved vaccinations. Why? Because the vaccinations from unapproved companies will not be covered by the EU liability clause and quality control. The source reported that EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders made it clear that member states were free to get their citizens vaccinated by other products, but they would not be allocated a licensed travel certificate unless their jab had been from an approved company, of which there are currently four. Pfizer/BioNtech, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Johnson&Johnson.

The duration of the digital green certificate should be limited to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU source said, adding that tests and quarantine will continue to be the enablers of free movement. Thus, vaccination does not become a pre-condition for free movement.

But Europe won’t even have the vaccines it needs to enact such policies. You will end up with a new elite: the vaccinated. Older people. Who, as far as we know, will still be liable to be infected, and infect others. The youth must stay home. You MUST be vaccinated, but right now, we’re all out. Call again in September. Call me maybe.

Europe’s COVID Vaccine Rollout Faces Even More Delays

Earlier today, a smattering of European nations halted vaccinations for at least some AstraZeneca COVID vaccine jabs amid an investigation into whether the jabs contributed to dangerous blood clots that led to at least one death. And as if this wasn’t a big enough problem for one day, Bloomberg reports that manufacturing issues are plaguing AstraZeneca’s manufacturing facilities, creating more obstacles to distribution. And now European governments are bracing for further delays. Good thing Italy refused to send that one shipment of jabs to Australia. Here’s more from Bloomberg:

“European Union governments are bracing for further possible delays in the distribution of AstraZeneca Plc’s Covid vaccine after a warning from the European Commission that the manufacturer remains a problem, according to a diplomatic note seen by Bloomberg. Astra Chief Executive Pascal Soriot said last month the company would look at tapping international supply chains to make up for some of the shortfall, including production in the U.S.

It’s revised its delivery schedule multiple times, most recently committing to 40 million doses this quarter and 180 million in the second from an earlier goal of about 280 million across both periods. But at a meeting of EU ambassadors on Wednesday, diplomats were told by senior EU officials that Astra continues to be “problematic.” They also heard that Johnson & Johnson, which could get market authorization from the European Medicines Agency on Thursday, has yet to provide a delivery schedule for its vaccine.”

There are still enormous potential issues with the Emergency Use Authorization vaccines. This is not kid’s play. There’s this from my article yesterday:

Mass Vaccination Amidst A Pandemic Creates An Irrepressible Monster

Basically, we’ll very soon be confronted with a super-infectious virus that completely resists our most precious defense mechanism: The human immune system. From all of the above, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how the consequences of the extensive and erroneous human interventon in this pandemic are not going to wipe out large parts of our human population. One could ONLY think of very few other strategies to achieve the same level of efficiency in turning a relatively harmless virus into a bioweapon of mass destruction.

And there’s this, rehashed by Jim Rickards:

The Vaccines Aren’t Actually Vaccines

First, these so-called vaccines are not really vaccines in the widely understood sense. A traditional vaccine involves an injection either with a weakened form of the virus you are protecting against or a similar virus. Either one can produce antibodies that remain in the system and fight the actual disease if you get it. These new vaccines are entirely different. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds here, but these treatments use experimental genetic modification to inject you with mRNA, which is a partial strand of genetic code. That mRNA then enters your cells and orders the cells to construct a spike protein similar to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID). This spike protein then precipitates antibodies that can reduce your reaction to SARS-CoV-2 if you get it.

But the “vaccine” does not prevent you from getting COVID, and it does not prevent you from spreading it to others. The spike protein remains with you indefinitely. In effect, you have modified your own genetic make-up to fight COVID without actually gaining immunity and without reducing transmissibility. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if you’re immune to a disease, “you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.” But these vaccines do not prevent you from being infected or spreading it to others. Some have likened them to chemotherapy for a cancer you don’t have.Vaccines of this type with respect to viruses are entirely new in humans. Studies have not gone on long enough to evaluate long-term side effects.

These drugs are not FDA approved; they are being distributed under an emergency waiver to avoid the normal approval process. It’s almost like we’re being used as guinea pigs. It is likely that most people receiving the drugs are unaware of these important differences between the new drugs and traditional vaccines, which raises questions about whether their “consent” is fully informed. There could be very good reasons for vulnerable individuals to take these drugs, but they should not be mistaken for the kind of smallpox, polio and flu vaccinations with which we are familiar. As far as vaccines go, mRNA genetic therapy is a brave new world — one that is not well understood.

• We can ONLY express officially approved opinions.

Twitter and Facebook have set standards for this. None of the “old media” deviate from these opinions either.The number of articles on ivermectin, HCQ, vit. D from medical professionals that have been cancel-cultured by social media is staggering. That’s not just un-American, it’s un-every country that pretends to be a democracy.

Like Joe Biden said yesterday: if you’re good boys and girls, and get injected with an experimental never tested and thus never approved substance, then maybe we will allow you to have 1 or 2 friends over in 4 month’s time. I like Tucker Carlson’s reaction to that:

Tucker Biden

Tucker reacts to President Biden's speech:

"How dare you tell us who we can spend the Fourth of July with." pic.twitter.com/MVp27qlTGt

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 12, 2021

Governments across the world have spectacularly failed in their “three weeks to flatten the curve” policies, but don’t anyone dare call them on that. It’s not their fault, it’s the virus, and the variants, and the young people, and all those who don’t obey the orders. But never the people who made and make these decisions. Our world over the past year has become a one-dimensional myopic dystopia in which people will get increasingly uncomfortable and agitated. You just watch.

Just watch what happens when countries and states are forced to open their economies again because they can no longer afford to prop up everything inside them. You will see gigantic waves of lay-offs, which will only exacerbate the problems businesses are already in. And no American Rescue Plan or comparable stimulus elsewhere will rescue anything in the longer term.

And then…because they all want to balance their budgets, taxes will start rising. But that won’t be their fault either.

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Fear is the New Smart

Mar 062021

March 6, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 2:41 pm Finance Tagged with: anti-vaxxers, book bans, Buddha, COVID, denial, experiment, fear, mRNA, science, Smart, vaccine 32 Responses »

Auguste Renoir The umbrellas 1881-6

The Washington Post said recently: “The anti-vaccine movement is comparable to domestic terrorism, and must be treated that way”, while the Guardian had this:

“When it comes to shifting attitudes to vaccines, it is crucial to distinguish between public information campaigns that seek to educate the public and those that seek to persuade them,” said Philipp Schmid, a behavioural scientist researching vaccine scepticism at the University of Erfurt. “[..] if you don’t proactively tackle the problem at all, you end up playing catch-up with the anti-vaxxers. In a way, governments have to work on a parallel vaccine rollout – immunising the public against science denial.”

But WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris said: “it’s very important for people to understand that at the moment, all we know about the vaccines is that they will very effectively reduce your risk of severe disease. We haven’t seen any evidence yet indicating whether or not they stop transmission.” And Dr. David Martin claimed: It’s Gene Therapy, Not a Vaccine. One might add: It’s not science, it’s a sales job.

Now, I don’t know exactly who the WaPo refers to when they say “the anti-vaccine movement”, or that German guy with “the anti-vaxxers”, but it appears there is a widespread movement going on to promote mRNA vaccines, both by governments and by the press. And we’re not supposed to ask questions. Well, I’m sorry, but I make a living asking questions. And I think asking questions is not just everybody’s right, it’s an obligation. So don’t come at me with “domestic terrorism” or “anti-vaxxers”, a term that has nothing to do with the topic to begin with. Asking questions is not the same as being against something.

In essence the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA substances are a giant experiment, nothing else. If you can tell me what the logic is behind injecting -soon- hundreds of millions of people with something about which the WHO itself says: “we haven’t seen any evidence yet indicating whether or not they stop transmission,” try me. And how you get from there to issuing “vaccine passports” is as puzzling as the entire propaganda campaign. Who’s engaging in “science denial” here? In its core essence, an Emergency Use Authorization is unscientific.

A vaccine used to mean something that relied on -mostly- dead virus material to get your body to produce immunity “material”. What mRNA does -in this case – is force your body to produce an S1 spike protein, which is toxic to your body. Someone compared it to sticking a USB stick in your body, but one you can never take out anymore. Actually, it’s more like sticking such a USB stick into -almost- every single cell of your body. Forever.

Can it be successful? Maybe, but we have no idea. No research. No clue what mRNA does in the long term. There’s a lot of concern about what it might do to our immune systems. So lots of questions. But we’re not allowed to ask those questions, because then we’re domestic terrorists. Or maybe we can ask them, but only after getting inoculated.

There’s an eery similarity here to the banning of Huckleberry Finn, the Odyssey, and Dr. Seuss. We apparently cannot be trusted to form our own opinions anymore. And if we apply the same rules that got Mark Twain and Dr. Seuss banned, how on earth can the Bible remain politically acceptable? I’m sure they’ll get to that yet.

And the press help shape this new world, and Big Tech becomes Big Brother. There’s nothing either journalists or 20-something social media “guardians” like more than to tell you what you can see, hear, read or think, and I bet you never imagined that’s what George Orwell imagined. Or Mark Twain, for that matter. There is no real difference between banning books and burning them.

The way this is broadcast to us, is that the mRNA substances are safe, based on the fact that not too many people have died from being “vaccinated”. But not only are short-term effects not the main worry about them, there are already plenty headlines like this:
• Injuries Reported to CDC After COVID Vaccines Climb by 4,000 in One Week
• 34 Spontaneous Miscarriages, Stillbirths After COVID-19 Vaccination
• Danger of mRNA Vaccines To Elderly: 16 Deaths In Switzerland
• Norway warns of Covid-19 vaccine risk after 23 die

When you see that in Germany, France and Switzerland, half of care home workers don’t want to get vaccinated, perhaps it’s good to ask a question. Or how about this: “About 60% Of Nursing Home Staff Declined Covid Vaccines, Walgreens Exec Says”, about which Whitney Webb tweeted: “Just wondering if people consider the 60% of nursing home staffers and 1/3 of US troops declining the experimental COVID-19 vaccine to all be “crazy anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists”

I apparently have to be afraid of what reading Huck Finn or the Odysseus will do to me, my brain, the brains of my children and neighbors. But I’m not afraid of that at all, I think the books will enrich their brains, as they have mine, and I’m confident they will be able to figure out what is just and right in the words they read, and what is not.

I’m not overly concerned about Covid19, but I do take a cautious approach. Which means taking vit. C&D and zinc, with ivermectin in my near future. But it doesn’t rule my life, certainly not as much as the lockdowns in Athens do. And frankly, I’m more afraid of sticking a genetic USB stick that generates untested genetic material in my body for the rest of my life, than I am of a virus that is unlikely to kill me.

By now we should be asking what being ruled by fear for a prolonged period of time does to the mindset of not just individuals, but of entire societies. Well, for one thing, it makes it much easier to censor people’s thoughts and actions, to shape their lives before they themselves do it. Be very afraid, roll up your sleeve, and don’t ask questions. And if you behave the way we tell you to, you may be able, in a year, or two, three, to return to the “old normal”.

Which unfortunately absolutely certainly will no longer exist once you get there. Your society will instead look like a warzone because its economy has been ravaged by fear. For one thing, if “they” allow stores, bars, restaurants to reopen this summer (doubtful), it may well be because they can no longer afford the emergency support for businesses and workers. The very first thing to happen then is mass lay-offs. Which will snowball into more businesses closing and more lay-offs.

It’s simply all gone on too long. For our economies, our societies and our minds. And if only to help us (re)cover, we should ask questions. It’s a obligation.

I like this from John Scott Lewinski on fear:

Panic Has Become A Twisted New Virtue

The Covid-19 pandemic has warped humanity’s mindset, turning fear into an intellectual value. Panic is now the smart choice, and those who reject it are considered dangerous barbarians. Sociologists, political theorists and other experts credit the ongoing coronavirus pandemic with forging countless changes in global society. Some are practical, some psychological. Some are temporary, while others will remain in evolving forms.

It’s difficult to deduce if the most troubling change we’re seeing really resulted from the viral crisis, or whether it had been waiting under the surface noise of daily life for full exposure by Covid-19. For the first time in human history, fear is now considered a sign of intellectual superiority, while the choice to resist panic is seen as stubborn foolishness.

[..] If you don’t stay locked in your bedroom in favor of going about your life – still masked, scrubbed and distanced – you’re a fool. Even worse, you’re a reckless fool who lacks compassion for the people you might infect. Regardless, the underlying theme is “crisis” and desperation in place of “challenge” and problem solving.

[..] Finally, if we allow a little old-time religion into the fray and check in on the Gospel writers, we’re told Jesus wept in fear the night before defeating its temptations and facing the crucifixion. Halfway around the world, the Buddha stated: “The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you.” The current psychological zeitgeist would ridicule all of those figures or those authors and their protagonists as hasty and brainless for not running away and hiding from a threat indefinitely until it did its damage or decided to go away.

Those in the cult of alarm will say all of those references are fiction, and Covid is real life. I would motion over to Joseph Campbell and remind them that myths and their fables indicate cultural values. No one ridiculing their fellows for not wearing a mask while alone in their cars, dining outside of their own kitchens or even longing to get back to their workplaces has any part to play in any stirring touchstone story or in the real world events that inspire them.

Perhaps this new worship of trepidation is another symptom of the coronavirus that will pass. Until then, we live in hope for a vaccine against our 2020 affliction of dull, self-adulatory dread.

Fear is a healthy and useful natural reaction to events. It can save your life. But it’s not healthy for an individual to live in fear for a prolonged period of time, and fear should never take on a mass identity. Entire societies living in fear for a prolonged period of time are highly toxic to their citizens. In war time, societies are saved not by those who fear, but by the individuals who refuse to let fear lead their lives, and turn it into bravery. Because, as the Buddha says: “The whole secret of existence is to have no fear.”

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