Jan 192022
 
 January 19, 2022  Posted by at 9:36 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  63 Responses »


Alfred Sisley Snow at Louveciennes 1878

 

US Daily COVID Cases Drop By 47% And Deaths Fall By 38% Week-on-week (DM)
‘Much Brighter Than Before’: COVID-19 Cases Plunge Across US (ET)
The Narrative Is Falling Apart, Piece By Piece (Kirsch)
US Faces Wave Of Omicron Deaths In Coming Weeks, Models Say (AP)
New Research: Covid Less Deadly Than Thought In 1st Year Of Pandemic (JTN)
The Last Days of the Covidian Cult (CJ Hopkins)
Calls Grow To Ditch Compulsory Covid Jabs Law For NHS Staff (DM)
Observations From An Experienced Nurse About The Covid Vaccines (Kirsch)
Think About What Denying Health Care To The Unvaccinated Means (Vezina)
Nicola Sturgeon Announces Lifting Of Omicron Restrictions In Scotland (G.)
New Zealand Closes Borders To New Arrivals Over Omicron Risk (G.)
Grocery Stores Could Close If Labour, Product Shortages Worsen (CP)
Ghislaine Maxwell Ends Fight To Keep Eight ‘John Does’ Secret (CTV)
Western Governments Drop Plans To Cut Russia Off From SWIFT – Media (RT)
5G Network Deployment In The US Spawns A Cluster Of Disruption (TAC)
Multiple Flights to US Suspended Over 5G Fears (RT)

 

 

 

 

Dr. Bowden Houston Methodist

 

 

“The virus is better at immunising than the vaccine”.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1483485364065116163

 

 

That’s a lot.

US Daily COVID Cases Drop By 47% And Deaths Fall By 38% Week-on-week (DM)

Covid infections are falling in the U.S. for the first time since the Omicron variant erupted at the end of 2021. The nation recorded 721,651 new cases on Monday, a steep fall from the 1.364 million cases reported last Monday. America’s new daily case average has also dropped 10 percent over the past seven days, from 766,939 to 684,457. A DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins University data found there were 717,874 new cases recorded between midnight Monday and midnight Tuesday. Monday is often the day when reported case counts are highest as lagging figures from the weekend are finally reported. Last week’s 1.364 million cases recorded on Monday was the highest single day case total the nation ever recorded.

This week’s total was affected by the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, where many local governments and municipalities were closed and did not fully report cases. It is likely that some cases shift to Tuesday this week instead. But Covid cases have been plunging for days in those states hardest hit by Omicron when it first arrived in the US in early December, suggesting the latest phase pandemic could really be drawing to a close. Two-week case averages are generally the most stable figures and can smooth out single day outliers. Over the past 14 days, overall cases in the U.S. are up 40 percent, though that figure is expected to decline further in the coming days as many previous Covid hotspots in the U.S. are now seeing case counts trend in the right direction.

As of Tuesday morning, Johns Hopkins University reports that the U.S. has logged 66,456,516 cases and 851,730 deaths since the pandemic first began. That means there has been one reported Covid case for every five Americans so far – with the figure likely being even higher due to the mass underreporting of cases and test shortages that have been a problem during different waves of the pandemic.Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, put a fly in the ointment after warning that yet another new variant could emerge – and that it could resist existing immunity in those infected or vaccinated.

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As predicted.

‘Much Brighter Than Before’: COVID-19 Cases Plunge Across US (ET)

COVID-19 case counts have dropped across the United States in recent days, stoking optimism that the Omicron-fueled wave is subsiding. 34 states have recorded a decrease in cases in recent days, not including states that reported a single-day drop, according to an Epoch Times analysis. That includes some of the states that saw huge Omicron-fueled increases, including New York, California, and Florida. Other states that have seen fewer cases recently include Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. States in every region of the country have reported fewer cases, and a smaller number have also seen a lower number of people being admitted to hospitals with or for COVID-19.

Omicron is more transmissible than the Delta variant, which dominated the United States for months last year. However, it causes a smaller percentage of cases that require hospital care or lead to death. States saw a significant increase in positive tests with the emergence of Omicron late last year, in part because the COVID-19 vaccines provide little protection against infection from the strain. Cases in New York shot above 90,000 on Jan. 7, but have since dropped sharply, hitting 26,772 on Monday. Hospitalizations attributed to COVID-19 have also gone down in the northeastern state in recent days. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, worries that hospital admissions may go back up in the near future, “but overall, the prognosis, the forecast, for COVID is much brighter than it had been before.” “The COVID clouds are parting,” she told reporters in Latham last week.

[..] Overall, the number of new cases nationwide dropped from 1.3 million on Jan. 10 to the mid-800,000s in the following days, according to data reported by states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. U.S. health officials have said the drop in cases could come quickly, similar to the plunges seen in South Africa and other countries that dealt with earlier Omicron waves.

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“I’m now hearing a lot from prominent formerly pro-vax docs that they are turning on the vaccine. This is great news. Nobody is going public yet, but they are all pissed and realize they have been misled.”

The Narrative Is Falling Apart, Piece By Piece (Kirsch)

Here are some narrative pieces that have been falling apart that were recently brought to my attention. Here are the four new truths:

1/ The vaccines make you more likely to get COVID: It was supposed to make things better, but we’re basically mandating you get a shot that makes you more likely to get infected. That is totally insane, but that’s what we are doing. Check out the graphs here. No age confounding this time: UK Government Data proves the Covid-19 Vaccines DOUBLE your chances of catching Covid-19.

2/ The vaccines aren’t safe: I’m now hearing a lot from prominent formerly pro-vax docs that they are turning on the vaccine. This is great news. Nobody is going public yet, but they are all pissed and realize they have been misled. It will not be pretty. This is of course great news.

3/ Cloth masks don’t work: The CDC finally admits that cloth masks that they said worked before and that everyone wore (including Rochelle Walensky) don’t actually work. The other mask types don’t work either, but it will take them longer to figure out the obvious. P100 respirators do work but only a small percentage of people know that. I can’t wait to see Rochelle Walensky wear a P100 respirator; after all, she should be modelling best practices.

4/ Kids shouldn’t have boosters shots: Top WHO scientist finally admits that kids shouldn’t get boosted!!!! Yet the US colleges and universities aren’t going to back off. Someone is very wrong here and for once it isn’t the WHO.

Here are some older truths that should have been realized by now, but are still going on:

1/ Remdesivir is killing patients, not saving them: RDV is standard operating procedure in the US, but everyone I talk to says it doesn’t work and is much more likely to kill patients than save them. Doctors are forced to give it by hospital policy.

2/ Social distancing doesn’t work: The MIT study came out in April, 2021 that showed social distancing makes no difference. 6 feet or 60 feet made no difference. People still haven’t figured this out.


P100 mask

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There we go again. Omicron deaths, in waves.

US Faces Wave Of Omicron Deaths In Coming Weeks, Models Say (AP)

The fast-moving omicron variant may cause less severe disease on average, but COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are climbing and modelers forecast 50,000 to 300,000 more Americans could die by the time the wave subsides in mid-March. The seven-day rolling average for daily new COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. has been trending upward since mid-November, reaching nearly 1,700 on Jan. 17 — still below the peak of 3,300 in January 2021. COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents started rising slightly two weeks ago, although still at a rate 10 times less than last year before most residents were vaccinated. Despite signs omicron causes milder disease on average, the unprecedented level of infection spreading through the country, with cases still soaring in many states, means many vulnerable people will become severely sick. If the higher end of projections comes to pass, that would push total U.S. deaths from COVID-19 over 1 million by early spring.


“A lot of people are still going to die because of how transmissible omicron has been,” said University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi. “It unfortunately is going to get worse before it gets better.” Morgues are starting to run out of space in Johnson County, Kansas, said Dr. Sanmi Areola, director of the health department. More than 30 residents have died in the county this year, the vast majority of them unvaccinated. But the notion that a generally less severe variant could still take the lives of thousands of people has been difficult for health experts to convey. The math of it — that a small percentage of a very high number of infections can yield a very high number of deaths — is difficult to visualize. “Overall, you’re going to see more sick people even if you as an individual have a lower chance of being sick,” said Katriona Shea of Pennsylvania State University, who co-leads a team that pulls together several pandemic models and shares the combined projections with the White House.

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Ioannidis.

New Research: Covid Less Deadly Than Thought In 1st Year Of Pandemic (JTN)

COVID-19 was less lethal across nearly every age group in its first full year than previously thought, according to an updated review of global research from Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center (METRIC). Between summer and Christmas 2021, METRIC’s estimates of deaths from infection fell by half in multiple age groups, including young people, and less sharply in others. The international estimates, which have not been peer-reviewed, are not substantially different from the CDC’s own “best estimate” of COVID mortality in the U.S., last updated in March. They use different age ranges, making exact comparisons difficult. The findings raise questions about ongoing COVID restrictions and mandates, particularly for schoolchildren and college students, who remain at the lowest overall risk from infection.

The risk-benefit ratio of vaccine boosters is also under scrutiny, with international authorities souring on their wide deployment and a new Israeli study finding that a fourth dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines doesn’t stop the Omicron variant. METRIC codirector John Ioannidis, credited by one medical publisher as having “practically invented” the field of meta-research, warned early in the pandemic that available infection data were “utterly unreliable.” His ongoing tracking of “seroprevalence,” which measures COVID infection rates using the presence of antibodies in blood samples, has made him controversial in scientific circles. Ioannidis led a study in Stanford’s backyard that estimated a much higher infection rate than local authorities were reporting in spring 2020, leading to criticism of his methods. The revised paper was published last spring in an Oxford medical journal.

He has also consistently emphasized that mortality risks for the non-elderly were “very small” even in COVID “hotbeds.” A June 2020 review of seroprevalence studies determined a median “infection fatality rate” (IFR) of 0.26% overall and 0.04% for everyone under 70. [..] The Greece-born Ioannidis told the Greek Reporter this week that he believes the earlier Delta variant is responsible for a substantial portion of recent COVID deaths in the U.S. and Europe, with infections predating the Omicron wave. “Omicron has the characteristics of an endemic wave,” he said, echoing South African research on Omicron infection providing some protection against Delta infection.

The milder variant has a “seasonal appearance, high rates of transmission, [and] disproportionately low death burden in a setting where there is very high background immunity due to prior infection and/or vaccination,” Ioannidis said. The chief epidemiologist at Denmark’s State Serum Institute made the same claim earlier this month, telling Danish TV 2 that “we will have our normal lives back in two months.” Tyra Grove Krause said her organization found the hospitalization risk from Omicron was half that of Delta. It welcomed the spike in cases in recent weeks, saying the “massive spread” of a mild variant will put the country “in a better place than we were before.’

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“And now the clock is running down, and the resistance isn’t crushed … on the contrary, it is growing..”

The Last Days of the Covidian Cult (CJ Hopkins)

This isn’t going to be pretty, folks. The downfall of a death cult rarely is. There is going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, incoherent fanatical jabbering, mass deleting of embarrassing tweets. There’s going to be a veritable tsunami of desperate rationalizing, strenuous denying, shameless blame-shifting, and other forms of ass-covering, as suddenly former Covidian Cult members make a last-minute break for the jungle before the fully-vaxxed-and-boosted “Safe and Effective Kool-Aid” servers get to them. Yes, that’s right, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the official Covid narrative is finally falling apart, or is being hastily disassembled, or historically revised, right before our eyes.

The “experts” and “authorities” are finally acknowledging that the “Covid deaths” and “hospitalization” statistics are artificially inflated and totally unreliable (which they have been from the very beginning), and they are admitting that their miracle “vaccines” don’t work (unless you change the definition of the word “vaccine”), and that they have killed a few people, or maybe more than a few people, and that lockdowns were probably “a serious mistake.” I am not going to bother with further citations. You can surf the Internet as well as I can. The point is, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has reached its expiration date. After almost two years of mass hysteria over a virus that causes mild-to-moderate common-cold or flu-like symptoms (or absolutely no symptoms whatsoever) in about 95% of the infected and the overall infection fatality rate of which is approximately 0.1% to 0.5%, people’s nerves are shot.

We are all exhausted. Even the Covidian cultists are exhausted. And they are starting to abandon the cult en masse. It was always mostly just a matter of time. As Klaus Schwab said, “the pandemic represent[ed] a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” It isn’t over, but that window is closing, and our world has not been “reimagined” and “reset,” not irrevocably, not just yet. Clearly, GloboCap underestimated the potential resistance to the Great Reset, and the time it would take to crush that resistance. And now the clock is running down, and the resistance isn’t crushed … on the contrary, it is growing.

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“..more than 80,000 – 6 per cent of the workforce – remain unvaccinated..”

Calls Grow To Ditch Compulsory Covid Jabs Law For NHS Staff (DM)

Ministers are under pressure from Tory MPs to scrap a law requiring all NHS staff to have a Covid jab as bosses prepare to start sacking 80,000 in a fortnight. All frontline workers must have had two doses of the vaccine by April 1, meaning the first must have been administered by February 3. But more than 80,000 – 6 per cent of the workforce – remain unvaccinated despite repeated efforts to boost take-up. New NHS guidance to employers says staff who have not been jabbed should start being called into formal meetings from February 4 and warned they face dismissal with the notice period ending on March 31. But the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives have urged ministers to delay the rules, saying they could have a ‘catastrophic’ impact on the delivery of services.


And Mark Harper, the chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Conservative MPs, yesterday urged No 10 to reconsider its approach. He said: ‘The Government is still ploughing on, regardless of the consequences on staffing levels. It’s nonsense. Ministers must change course.’ He posted a link to the Government’s own impact assessment, which says 73,000 NHS staff in England could be lost because of the rules. He added: ‘Here are the stark numbers – which let’s not forget are real people with real families – behind this policy.’ Health Secretary Sajid Javid last week told the Commons the Government remained committed to the plans.

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“It’s time for us to admit that we’ve been completely deceived.”

Observations From An Experienced Nurse About The Covid Vaccines (Kirsch)

One of my nurse friends forwarded this note to me. It was originally written by a nurse, but the source is unknown, probably out of fear of retribution. Among all the vaccines I have known in my life (diphtheria, tetanus, measles, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis, meningitis, flu, and pneumonia, and tuberculosis) I have never seen a vaccine that forced me to wear a mask and maintain my social distance, even when you are fully vaccinated. I had never heard of a vaccine that spreads the virus even after vaccination. I had never heard of rewards, discounts, incentives to get vaccinated. I never saw discrimination for those who didn’t. If you haven’t been vaccinated no one has tried to make you feel like a bad person. I have never seen a vaccine that threatens the relationship between family, colleagues and friends.

I have never seen a vaccine used to threaten livelihoods, work or school. I have never seen a vaccine that would allow a 12-year-old to override parental consent. After all the vaccines I listed above, I have never seen a vaccine like this one, which discriminates, divides and judges society as it is. And as the social fabric tightens… It’s a powerful vaccine! It does all these things except IMMUNIZATION. If we still need a booster dose after we are fully vaccinated, and we still need to get a negative test after we are fully vaccinated, and we still need to wear a mask after we are fully vaccinated, and still be hospitalized after we have been fully vaccinated, it will likely come to “It’s time for us to admit that we’ve been completely deceived.”

I think she forgot to mention that she’s probably also never seen: • a vaccine which makes it more likely you’ll be infected by the virus they are trying to protect you from (after a brief efficacy period). See Incriminating evidence for all the studies showing this. • a vaccine which helps other latent viruses or cancers to re-emerge with a vengeance. • a vaccine which has killed at least 150,000 previously healthy Americans • a vaccine with over 20,000 deaths reported into VAERS and the CDC can’t find a single death that was due to the vaccine • lockdowns for the unvaccinated that can last for years to come

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“..be careful about deciding what medical ethics we are prepared to amend or abandon in order to “get life back to normal.”

Think About What Denying Health Care To The Unvaccinated Means (Vezina)

Once again, the calls to systemically deny or restrict health care to the unvaccinated are surging, opening the Pandora’s box of changing modern biomedical ethics. Many people are saying it is time for our leaders to have, as they phrase it, the difficult conversation. There are two assumptions made in this. The first is that we have decided a medical system which — overtly and in full view — places certain people’s lives above others is tolerable. It’s true we already have other systems which do this indirectly and subtly. There is no rule, for example, that explicitly states the rich are treated better than the poor, but in practice they are, for numerous reasons. The second assumption is that it is permissible to trade not just the quality of life, but lives themselves, especially in the short term, for securing critical infrastructure.

This is also already the case in our society although, again, it is done indirectly. For example, safeguarding economic infrastructure takes priority over extending people’s lives. Greater priority is given to safeguarding Canadian banks than to affordable housing. The poor are given limited public assistance so that the cost of living does not increase even faster for everyone else. Whether any of this is good or bad is irrelevant. It is simply what happens. But going beyond that, with the Pandora’s box of changing medical ethics having been opened, the following strategies can be considered, all doable and each with its own risks and benefits.

1. Deny health care to the unvaccinated. Benefits: Opens up significant ICU and hospital space; removes people who disagree with modern medical science from the population; perhaps gets us through the COVID-19 pandemic faster. Risks: Potential for widespread civil unrest; long-term effects on medical ethics with a precedent having been set; disproportionate impact on workers and industries required to keep critical infrastructures operational. External control measures, such as business closures and public gatherings would need to be maintained, or vaccinated patients might fill ICUs with uncontrolled Omicron spread.

2. Deny ICU health care to all COVID-only patients, regardless of vaccine status. Benefits: Can restart surgeries rapidly; difficult but easier to ethically justify than the first option; perhaps get through COVID-19 faster. Risks: Easy to abuse in terms of preferential treatment on an individual basis; difficult to implement in terms of practicality; potential staffing shortages, with some frontline health-care workers viewing this as the “last straw” ethically and quitting. With this strategy, external control measures are separated from hospital ICU capacity. Once everyone (of all ages) has an available vaccine to control their personal level of risk, removing control measures and allowing people to decide their risks for themselves becomes more attractive.

3. Reach endemic status rapidly, to decrease hospital load over the long term. By delaying the onset of COVID-19 infections and having hospitals at or exceeding capacity for long periods of time, cancer and many other life-saving surgeries are being further delayed. If the assumption is that everyone will get the virus eventually anyway, then a rapid endemic strategy would be to encourage people to become infected as quickly as possible, through the immediate removal of all external control measures to contain the pandemic. This includes allowing all businesses to reopen at full capacity and removing all limits on the number of people allowed to attend public and private events, as well as in people’s homes. Benefits: Reaches COVID endgame much more quickly, the load on hospital infrastructure recedes much faster, cancer and other life-saving surgeries can be resumed much earlier. Risks: Over the short term, a scenario from hell with increased deaths, the hospital system strained beyond maximum capacity during this period; increased chances of a new Canadian variant developing; it will appear to the public as if governments are abandoning frontline health care. In all of these strategies, the ability or inability of society to recover ethically from what has been done, once the immediate pandemic crisis is over, would be on the table. So be careful about deciding what medical ethics we are prepared to amend or abandon in order to “get life back to normal.”

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People who know more than they tell.

Nicola Sturgeon Announces Lifting Of Omicron Restrictions In Scotland (G.)

Restrictions brought in before Christmas to stem the Omicron surge across Scotland are to be lifted from next Monday, Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has said. Nightclubs will reopen, there will be an end to social distancing and to a three-household limit indoors, Sturgeon said, adding that the country had “turned the corner on the Omicron wave”. But Sturgeon urged the public to remain “cautious” about socialising in larger groups, while government guidance remains to work from home wherever possible and use face coverings, with vaccine passports still in place for large-scale events. Sturgeon said in her regular statement at Holyrood that the data suggested Omicron peaked in Scotland in the first week of January and that “we are now on the downward slope of this wave of cases” as hospital and intensive care admissions were falling.


Cases were down from 36,526 new cases on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of last week to 20,268 cases reported this Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. She said that, after discussion with her cabinet, the remaining statutory measures introduced in response to Omicron – limits on indoor public events; the requirement for one-metre physical distancing between different groups in indoor public places; the requirement for table service in hospitality premises serving alcohol on the premises; and the closure of nightclubs – would be lifted from next Monday, 24 January. From that day, the guidance asking people to stick to a three-household limit on indoor gatherings will also be lifted.

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Locking people out of their own country, and home, should be a no-go.

New Zealand Closes Borders To New Arrivals Over Omicron Risk (G.)

New Zealand has temporarily cut off the only pathway home for overseas citizens and visa holders, citing the risk of the Omicron variant. Officials announced on Tuesday evening that new spaces in the country’s managed isolation and quarantine system (MIQ) would not be released. The Covid-19 response minister, Chris Hipkins, said on Wednesday that while the pause was “temporary” there was no date for when spaces would again be available – meaning New Zealand’s border would be closed for an indeterminate time to citizens without an existing booking. “Pausing the next MIQ lobby is a temporary position while MIQ is under extreme pressure from New Zealanders returning with Omicron,” he said.

“No decisions have been made on the date, sequence and conditions for the border reopening and cabinet will consider options within the next couple of weeks based on the most up to date advice. Until then, we are not in a position to release more MIQ rooms.” The MIQ head, Chris Bunny, said there had been an “unprecedented number of Omicron cases coming into New Zealand and MIQ”, with a tenfold increase in cases at the border compared with December, and a seven day rolling average of 33. On Wednesday, New Zealand recorded 24 new cases in the community. One of those cases has been confirmed as Omicron, a household contact of an MIQ worker. Separately, an airport worker tested positive on Wednesday.

New Zealand’s tough border restrictions have been crucial to its avoiding an Omicron outbreak and keeping Covid cases extremely low – but they are also a source of increasing heartache and rage for those who have found themselves locked out, often in extremely difficult personal circumstances. Other than the risky path of chartering a boat across the Tasman sea, securing a spot in MIQ is the only way into New Zealand. Competition for the rooms, which are released via a lottery system, is fierce. At the last release in early January, a queue of 16,000 people were vying to book one of 1,250 available rooms.

For those stranded overseas, the cancellation of future releases was distressing. Maxine Strydom, a member of Grounded Kiwis, which advocates for stranded New Zealanders, said she was stuck in Perth with her two children, and had been unable to secure a spot, despite her job and tenancy in Australia ending. “All of us stranded overseas are affected. We’re all going through mental and emotional stress,” she said. “Soon I’m going to have no money, no house, and no help in a foreign country.” Claire, a New Zealander in San Diego, said: “I feel like every shred of hope has been stripped away … There is no end in sight, it’s just demoralising.” Claire asked to be referred to by first name only amid concerns about criticism by fellow New Zealanders, most of whom have favoured border restrictions.

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Canada screwing up royally.

Grocery Stores Could Close If Labour, Product Shortages Worsen (CP)

Grocery stores are struggling with rising labour and product shortages that could threaten Canada’s food security, experts say. Employee absenteeism due to workers calling in sick and COVID-19 protocols has hit about 30 per cent at some stores and is continuing to rise, Gary Sands, senior vice-president of public policy with the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers, said Tuesday. Without access to rapid testing in many provinces, he said workers are repeatedly forced to isolate for a week or more after an exposure to COVID-19. If the situation worsens, some grocery stores won’t be able to stay open _ threatening food security in rural and remote areas that rely on a sole independent grocer, Sands said. “If we have to keep sending people home, at a certain point stores are not going to be able to operate,” he said. “We’re very frustrated with the lack of rapid test kits for grocers.”


Health Canada has made some rapid test kits available directly to companies in critical sectors, including the food industry, with 200 or more employees. But many independent grocery stores don’t meet that threshold, putting those kits out of reach, Sands said. Yet many grocers cannot obtain rapid tests through provinces either, he said. “Independent grocers are in a myriad of communities in this country where there is no other grocery store,” Sands said. “If those stores close, you’ve got a food security issue.” Meanwhile, stores are also experiencing a shortage of goods stemming from supply chain issues, including a shortage of truckers, packaging and processing delays and the Canadian winter. Grocers rely on “just in time” delivery, meaning even transient issues like inclement weather can cause delays and shortages, Retail Council of Canada spokesperson Michelle Wasylyshen said.

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How many will be famous?

Ghislaine Maxwell Ends Fight To Keep Eight ‘John Does’ Secret (CTV)

Ghislaine Maxwell will no longer fight to keep the names of eight ‘John Does’ secret and will leave it to the court to decide whether the names should be unsealed, according to a Jan. 12 letter to federal Judge Loretta Preska of the Southern District of New York. The documents containing the names are connected to a 2015 defamation case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claimed Epstein sexually abused her while she was a minor and that Maxwell aided in the abuse. The case was settled in 2017. Maxwell, 60, faces up to 65 years in prison after she was found guilty last month in a New York federal court on five federal charges, including sex trafficking of a minor. The charges were related to her role in Epstein’s sexual abuse of minor girls between 1994 and 2004.

“After careful review of the detailed objections submitted by Non-Party Does 17, 53, 54, 55, 73, 93 and 151, counsel for Ghislaine Maxwell writes to inform the Court that she does not wish to further address those objections,” Maxwell attorney Laura Menninger wrote. “Each of the listed Does has counsel who have ably asserted their own respective privacy rights. Ms. Maxwell therefore leaves it to this Court to conduct the appropriate review.” Giuffre’s attorney had filed a brief on Wednesday, arguing for the names to be revealed. “[G]eneralized aversion to embarrassment and negativity that may come from being associated with Epstein and Maxwell is not enough to warrant continued sealing of information. This is especially true with respect to this case of great public interest, involving serious allegations of the sex trafficking of minors,” Guiffre attorney Sigrid McCawley wrote.

“Now that Maxwell’s criminal trial has come and gone, there is little reason to retain protection over the vast swaths of information about Epstein and Maxwell’s sex-trafficking operation that were originally filed under seal in this case.” McCawley said the court has already rejected similar arguments for anonymity and the same standard should apply to the eight ‘John Does’ who still remain anonymous in court documents.

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“Germany would have no way of paying Moscow for its natural gas contracts”

Western Governments Drop Plans To Cut Russia Off From SWIFT – Media (RT)

German newspaper Handelsblatt has reported that Western leaders have ruled out the possibility of disconnecting Russia from the global banking interchange SWIFT. However, the US government has contradicted the assertion. “No option is off the table,” a spokesperson for Washington’s National Security Council told reporters on Monday. The denial comes after Handelsblatt claimed that the US had, in fact, given up on the threat of removing Russia from SWIFT in talks with the German government. If the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication cuts ties with Russian banks, Germany would have no way of paying Moscow for its natural gas contracts. It could also unleash a catastrophic rise in oil and food prices.


Instead, the Düsseldorf-based business daily reported that the US and German governments are discussing “targeted” sanctions against Russia’s largest banks in the event that Moscow “invades” Ukraine. US intelligence has claimed for several weeks now that Russia is preparing an attack on its neighbor. Moscow has rejected the insinuations as “fake news.” Germany has insisted that any sanctions include exceptions so that the import of oil and gas from Russia can continue, according to Handelsblatt. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected in Berlin on Thursday to discuss the sanctions proposal with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the paper added.

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“PULL UP WHOOP WHOOP DON’T SINK TOO LOW GEAR”

5G Network Deployment In The US Spawns A Cluster Of Disruption (TAC)

Something is going on with Runway 10L at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida. Last week, a Bombardier-built CRJ200 regional jet on final approach had the strangest thing happen. The aircraft’s radar altitude abruptly ran down to zero, causing repeated loud aural warnings: PULL UP WHOOP WHOOP DON’T SINK TOO LOW GEAR. The flight landed without incident in good weather, but it wasn’t the first time. “Exact same location multiple times the past two weeks,” the pilot, who was on the flight deck for both anomalies, told The Air Current.

The incidents were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration. It’s not known definitively if the radar altimeter behavior was related to pre-deployment testing of 5G telecommunication technologies, but the unexplained incident underscored the fears of aviators, as well as the confusion and increasing disruption that is now befalling U.S. commercial aviation. International airlines like Emirates, Air India, Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways have cancelled flights to select cities, citing the 5G C Band interference risk to their aircraft. Boeing on Monday night sent a so-called multi-operator message to carriers flying 777 and 747-8s and “recommends operators do not operate 777 airplanes on approach and landing to U.S. runways” with 5G C Band notices starting on January 19 unless there is an alternative means of compliance with FAA directives, according to guidance reviewed by The Air Current.

“The above recommendation has been determined through the Boeing Safety Review Board and engineering pilot evaluation based on the uncertainty of the 5G operating environment,” the company wrote. The review board meeting was held on January 15. “Boeing recommends that operators develop contingency plans for their operations.” Boeing referred comment to the FAA after saying, like Airbus, it was working with an industry coalition to address the 5G deployment issue with U.S. regulators. The FAA did not respond to questions about the reported incident in Palm Beach.

5G

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Y2K?

Multiple Flights to US Suspended Over 5G Fears (RT)

Prominent airlines from Japan, India, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have suspended flights to airports across the United States after expressing concern over the deployment of 5G. Emirates, Air India, Japan Airlines, and All Nippon Airways canceled flights to New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Seattle, among other US cities. Air India announced on Tuesday that it would no longer operate flights the next day to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport “due to deployment of the 5G communications in USA.”


On the same day, Emirates canceled flights to at least nine US cities, again “due to operational concerns associated with the planned deployment of 5G mobile network services in the U.S,” while Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways canceled at least 13 flights. Airlines and the FAA previously repeatedly voiced concerns about C-band 5G potentially disrupting airplane instruments, namely radio altimeters. So far, the US aviation body cleared less than a half of the nation’s commercial fleet for low-visibility landings at the airports potentially affected by 5G interference. International airlines were also seriously affected, with All Nippon Airways saying that while its Boeing 787 aircraft could operate under the new guidelines, 777’s could not. In response to concerns, AT&T and Verizon postponed the Wednesday rollout of 5G service near some airports, but not all.

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Rogan McMaster

 

 

 

 

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Jan 182022
 
 January 18, 2022  Posted by at 10:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  52 Responses »


Johannes Vermeer The lacemaker 1669-71

 

No Time for Crybabies (Jim Kunstler)
Israel Finds 4 Covid Vaccine Jabs ‘Not Good Enough’ Against Omicron (RT)
The War on Treatment Is Fiercer Now Than Even Covid Itself (Pfeiffer)
Incriminating Evidence (Steve Kirsch)
Returning Travellers To Hand Over Phones, Passcodes At Australian Border (G.)
Australia’s Government Is From the Dark Ages (Simon Black)
Watch Australia Closely (Berenson)
Djokovic Facing Fresh Grand Slam Blow (RT)
Oh Look, MORE BS! (Denninger)
Beta and Delta Variants Trigger Fc Effector Function (Cell)
Poor UK Households May Have To Spend Half Their Income On Energy (G.)
Airlines Say 5G Will Create ‘Economic Calamity’ (RT)
Eisenhower’s Warning About The Military-industrial Complex Is Still Valid (CST)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Covid profits

 

 

“..a culture of junk food, junk work, junk art, junk environments, junk government, junk economics, and, lately, junk science..”

No Time for Crybabies (Jim Kunstler)

[..] it’s obvious now, after a year on-the-scene, that the vaxxes work poorly at best to protect against infection or control the spread, and, at worst, induce terrible long-term damage to organs, blood vessels, and the immune system. The vaxxes can kill you or gravely disable you. The statistics in the CDC’s VAERS registry show this in no uncertain terms: 1,003,992 Covid vaxx adverse event reports including 21,745 deaths linked to them through January 7 — and these figures are said to be deeply understated due to the poor design and difficulty using the VAERS website with its clunky, out-dated code that the CDC refuses to fix.

Dr. Fauci has avoided addressing these adverse reactions and the negative efficacy of the “vaccines.” He simply states that the vaxxes are “safe and effective.” That so many Americans believe him, despite all the evidence, and go along with the crusade to vaxx-up everybody, is proof that they are insane. But now that the whole story is unravelling, they are ever more determined to stick to the script. Covid-19 has been their security blanket for two years. As long as it was in the picture, raging and killing as an invisible demon, it could be the focus of all their free-floating terror.

Terror of what, you might ask? Of the meaninglessness, alienation, and debility induced by the managerial class in its own sick institutions and corporations… in short, the 21st-century America that the managers evolved in and supported — a culture of junk food, junk work, junk art, junk environments, junk government, junk economics, and, lately, junk science… a sickening panorama of systems out-of-control and entering failure mode. Confronting the disaster of its own incapacity to sustain a healthy culture and an economy with a future, the managerial class went nuts. Its insane actions now are killing people while seeking to punish those who refuse to walk sheepishly into America’s version of the gas chamber, the Anthony Fauci “vaccines.”

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5,6,7….

Israel Finds 4 Covid Vaccine Jabs ‘Not Good Enough’ Against Omicron (RT)

A fourth dose of coronavirus vaccine showed dwindling effectiveness against the Omicron variant, according to a trial conducted in Israel, with one its lead researchers saying the immunization is simply “not good enough.” A study involving 154 medical staffers at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv found that a fourth shot of the Pfizer vaccine gave only marginal protection against the Omicron strain compared to previous mutations. A separate group of 120 volunteers were also given a fourth dose of Moderna’s inoculation following three rounds with Pfizer, but their immune response was similar. “We see an increase in antibodies, higher than after the third dose. However, we see many infected with Omicron who received the fourth dose,” said Gili Regev-Yochay, one of the head researchers on the trial, adding that while “the vaccine is excellent against the Alpha and Delta [variants],” for Omicron “it’s not good enough.”


Despite the new findings, Israeli health officials already moved ahead with fourth doses for the elderly, the immunocompromised and medical workers beginning earlier this month, with some 500,000 receiving a second booster on top of an initial two-dose regimen as of Sunday. Though the trial is still in an early phase and the hospital did not offer specific figures, Regev-Yochay said she made its preliminary conclusions public as boosters are a matter of “high public interest,” according to the Times of Israel. She noted that giving fourth doses to high-risk residents is “probably” still the best approach, but suggested the booster campaign should be limited to an even older age group than the current over-60 guideline.

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Good overview.

The War on Treatment Is Fiercer Now Than Even Covid Itself (Pfeiffer)

Omicron is tearing through the country, with Covid cases quadrupling and quintupling in thirty-five states from last winter’s peak.That’s the bad news, but only sort of.The good news: For the first time in twenty-two months, experts are uttering words we haven’t heard in answer to the central question: Are we nearing the pandemic’s end? “I think we are,” said Dr. Pierre Kory, a pulmonary and critical care specialist and president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.“I am optimistic for this,” said Dr. Harvey Risch, a Yale epidemiologist and treatment advocate. “The more Omicron cases the better until the peak starts to turn downward.”

These two early treatment pioneers echo the sentiments of other experts, some guarded but mostly hopeful, that the highly transmissible, less-virulent Omicron may end covid as we know it. “I’m so happy that Omicron is milder, that Omicron is winding up the pandemic,” said Dr. Mobeen Syed, known to a half-million subscribers of Drbeen Medical Lectures on YouTube.From France, treatment advocate Dr. Christian Perronne, author of the aptly titled, Is There A Mistake They Didn’t Make?, told me, “It could be the end of the pandemic soon.” By all indications, the U.S. and Europe—where a “west-to-east tidal wave” is unfolding—will follow the South Africa–United Kingdom model.

There, Omicron rose and fell fast, obliterating the more fearsome Delta, and leading to far lower rates of hospitalization and death. Experts are anxiously waiting for that to happen in exploding Omicron hot spots like the United States. But one certainty remains. The U.S. and first-world governments still do not want doctors to treat covid early and are doing all it can to stop them. This article covers that ongoing problem, how to adapt to a veritable blockade on safe effective generics, and how I got around those obstacles when I got sick.

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Steve risks overkill.

Incriminating Evidence (Steve Kirsch)

For many people, the most convincing argument is not the scientific data presented here, but seeing what happened to a formerly perfectly healthy friend or family member (or famous public figure) after they took the vaccine. In my case, I lost confidence in the COVID vaccines when a friend told me that three of her relatives died shortly after being vaccinated (and they were all perfectly healthy before the shot). A week later, another friend had a heart attack 2 minutes after getting the vaccine and his wife developed Parkinson’s symptoms after she got her vaccine. Today, my wife just told me that one of her friends recently got boosted and now her four kids don’t have a mother anymore. It’s tragic, but for most people, it takes many events like this before people wake up and realize they’ve been lied to.

In most cases, the victims remain silent because they don’t want to be ostracized or receive death threats. So you rarely hear of the incidents. Also, the press will never cover the reactions because the media cannot prove the vaccine was the cause of the event. [..] Tragically, when all these events happen, the news reports never mention that the person was recently vaccinated. Many never realize it was due to the vaccine because the vaccine is supposed to be completely safe. For example, Celine Dion’s career ended shortly after she got vaccinated. Did anyone ever notice that the singer never announced the cause of her sudden uncontrolled muscle spasms? Did her agent ever tell the public why the vaccine was ruled out as a possible cause? Nope.

Uncontrolled muscle spasms post-vaccination is a very common side effect of the vaccine, especially in women. Is it possible that her injury was just bad luck? Of course, but statistically, it is far more likely that her injury was caused by the COVID vaccines. If she isn’t being treated by a specialist in vaccine injury, she may never return to the stage.

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Freedom.

Returning Travellers To Hand Over Phones, Passcodes At Australian Border (G.)

A man who was forced to hand over his phone and passcode to Australian Border Force after returning to Sydney from holiday has labelled the tactic “an absolute gross violation of privacy”, as tech advocates call for transparency and stronger privacy protections for people’s devices as they enter the country. Software developer James and his partner returned from a 10-day holiday in Fiji earlier this month and were stopped by border force officials at Sydney airport. They were taken aside, and after emptying their suitcases, an official asked them to write their phone passcodes on a piece of paper, before taking their phones into another room. It was half an hour before their phones were returned, and they were allowed to leave. James initially posted about his ordeal on Reddit.


“We weren’t informed why they wanted to look at the phones. We were told nothing,” he told Guardian Australia. “Who knows what they’re taking out of it? With your phone and your passcode they have everything, access to your entire email history, saved passwords, banking, Medicare, myGov. There’s just so much scope.” James said he has no idea what officials looked at, whether a copy of any of the data was made, where it would be stored and who would have access to it. “It’s an absolute gross violation of privacy.” Under the Customs Act, ABF officers can force people to hand over their passcodes to allow a phone search, as part of their powers to examine people’s belongings at the border, including documents and photos on mobile phones.

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“..these politicians think that Australian residents will only become vaccine hesitant if Djokovic is physically present in Australia..”

Australia’s Government Is From the Dark Ages (Simon Black)

Vaccination rates in Australia are among the highest in the world, and they’re feverishly (no pun intended) administering booster shots to the population. Yet despite this adherence to public health authorities, cases are surging to record highs. In the last 24 hours there were 55,232 new Covid cases in Australia. By comparison, Australia had 10 (yes, ten) new daily cases a year ago in January 2021, just prior to the vaccine rollout.But now that 92.6% of eligible Australians have been vaccinated, the infection rate has increased more than 5,000x from a year ago. Obviously vaccinated people are transmitting the virus to other vaccinated people.Yet the government seems to be asserting that only unvaccinated people like Djokovic can spread Omicron… which is a very flat-earth, anti-science view.

But the Australian government’s dumbest reason to expel Djokovic was that his presence in the country may increase vaccine or booster hesitancy. This one is really extraordinary.Let’s we assume for a moment that their point is true, i.e. Djokovic could infect Australian people with his dangerous ideology.Even so, the Australian government apparently believes that ideas only spread through physical contact.In other words, these politicians think that Australian residents will only become vaccine hesitant if Djokovic is physically present in Australia, as if he’s going to sneeze and his ideas will spread like Omicron droplets.But as long as they keep him out of the country, then Australians will be sufficiently socially distanced from his ideas and no one will be exposed to his heresy.

Just like the rest of their arguments, this notion is completely absurd. And yet it was their ‘rational’ basis for punishing someone whose only transgression was exercising independent thought.Back in the 1600s (and prior), anyone who disagreed with the civil or religious authorities was branded a heretic. And their censorship was especially brutal; people were expelled, imprisoned, tortured, and even put to death for questioning authority and expressing a different view.We have once again returned to medieval intolerance for ideological differences.

Australia’s government is a sad example of this Dark Ages-era mentality– that they (and they alone) dictate truth. And anyone who questions their supreme wisdom must be banished.Back then people faced Inquisition, witch hunts, and public beheadings. Today it’s the Twitter mob, cancel culture, and expulsion.It’s not quite as bloody, but still ruinous.

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“..because their risk of infection is higher, a vaccinated person will need to have substantial post-infection protection to have an overall lower risk of serious outcomes.”

Watch Australia Closely (Berenson)

Australia now averages more than 100,000 new Covid cases per day – equal to about 1.5 million in the United States. One fine day last week, it reported 175,000, the equivalent of about 2.5 million, maybe the highest per-capita total any country has ever reported.Not even six months ago, Australia was still chasing zero Covid and patting itself on the back for “Doughnut Days” – with no new Covid infections. (Because a doughnut is shaped like a zero, see?) By the way, Australia is among the world’s most Covid vaccinated counties. Its policy of open coercion and discrimination against the unvaccinated has “succeeded” – more than 95 percent of Australians 16 and over have received at least one vaccine dose, and 93 percent two doses. Those figures effectively represent full vaccination – many of the people left are probably simply too frail to tolerate Covid vaccines.

Deaths are still relatively low by American standards. But they have risen sixfold in the last two weeks and are now at their highest level ever, equal to almost 700 deaths in the United States a day. The trend adds to other worrisome signs about Omicron in highly vaccinated countries. At this point two facts about Omicron are near-certain: 1: Vaccinated people are at HIGHER risk of being infected with Omicron than the unvaccinated (and whatever protection boosters offer does not last). In Scotland, another highly vaccinated country, vaccinated people are more than twice as likely to be infected as the unvaccinated – and people who have received a booster are 30 percent more likely. 2: Omicron is less dangerous than earlier variants.

But how much less dangerous is not entirely clear, because infections have risen so fast that hospitalizations and deaths are still catching up. In South Africa, the first country to see an Omicron spike, deaths from Omicron didn’t peak until Jan. 11 – almost four weeks after infections peaked. In Britain, infections peaked 10 days ago, but deaths are still soaring; they have tripled since late December. Unfortunately, at this point we still do not know how those two facts interact. In other words, if you are vaccinated and infected with Omicron, will your risk of being hospitalized or dying the same, higher, or lower than someone who is infected but unvaccinated? Remember, because their risk of infection is higher, a vaccinated person will need to have substantial post-infection protection to have an overall lower risk of serious outcomes.

In other words, vaccinations will only help and not hurt against hospitalization or death from Omicron if they somehow substantially reduce the risk of getting very sick even though they substantially increase the risk of infection. Is that tightrope even biologically possible? Sure, it’s possible. The vaccine advocates have lately been writing stories about T-cell protection. But possible doesn’t mean plausible. In reality the vaccines do little to drive broad B- or T-cell responses – and that fact was known before Omicron.

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That only took 48 hours.

Djokovic Facing Fresh Grand Slam Blow (RT)

After his deportation from Australia, Novak Djokovic could be forced to miss another Grand Slam after French Sports Minister Roxana Maracineanu signaled a vaccination pass will be mandatory for international athletes. World number one Djokovic was deprived of the chance to defend his title in Melbourne after a federal court backed the decision by Immigration Minister Alex Hawke to cancel the unvaccinated tennis star’s visa. Djokovic is due to arrive back in Serbia on Monday, but could now find himself barred from the second Grand Slam of the season after the French National Assembly approved the introduction of a controversial new vaccine pass which will exclude anyone who is not fully jabbed from restaurants, sports arenas and other venues.

The legislation is set to come into force in the coming days, and was backed by Sports Minister Maracineanu. “The vaccination pass has been adopted. As soon as the law is promulgated, it will become mandatory to enter public buildings already subject to the health pass (stadium, theater or lounge) for all spectators, practitioners, French or foreign professionals,” she tweeted. “Thank you to the sports movement for the work of conviction with the last rare unvaccinated. We will work together to preserve the competitions and to be the ambassadors of these measures at the international level.” Sunday’s parliamentary vote in France means Sports Minister Maracineanu appears to have been forced to backtrack on previous comments which suggested Djokovic’s vaccination status would not be an issue for his participation at the French Open.

“He would not follow the same organizational arrangements as those who are vaccinated,” Maracineanu told the FranceInfo radio station earlier this month. “But he will nonetheless be able to compete [at Roland Garros] because the protocols, the health bubble, allows it.” That position now appears to be in doubt after the more stringent rules are due to be imposed.

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“It’s hard to sell fear — and jabs — to those who have already been infected if you tell them the truth..”

Oh Look, MORE BS! (Denninger)

Not only do the shots not work they have negative efficacy — that is, they make it more likely for you to not only get it but get seriously ill with it. Of course that’s exactly the opposite of what the medical “profession” has claimed, isn’t it? When you make pronouncements without evidence that has a way of happening. Let’s not forget you’ve been bull****ting people for quite some time in public, haven’t you?”Not only that, but multiple studies have shown that the Omicron variant itself affects the upper airways far more than the lungs, even as it’s much more transmissible than any other variant. This is exactly what happened in the later stages of 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,” who spoke to me about it on SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio this week.”

I thought *****-19 was the deadliest plague in history? Oh, you mean it isn’t? In fact its not even close, as you’re well-aware, but scaring people is hard when you admit that there have been many pandemics through history that have been worse, isn’t it? Indeed. And yes, this very same pattern did happen in 1918. It has also happened in every other respiratory pandemic, including the one in the late 1800s that we think was caused by a beta coronavirus that is known as OC43 and circulates today. We can’t prove that one because we have no preserved samples to test, but genetic sequencing and back-fitting does appear to line up with a pandemic that caused disease very similar to what we saw this time around — and both are beta coronaviruses. In fact there is not one respiratory pandemic where this pattern has not been true.

How do I know this is a fact? You and I are both on this planet along with many billions of other humans, that’s how. Were this not true the human race would have ceased to exist long ago — well before anything known as “modern medicine” showed up.Of course admitting that blows up all the screaming and fear-mongering too, doesn’t it, including that nice fear-mongering OpEd you got published in August? Yeah, it does. Especially for those who already had it, they’re ok, and thus no longer have a reason, statistically-speaking, to fear it in any way. It’s hard to sell fear — and jabs — to those who have already been infected if you tell them the truth about how every respiratory pandemic in history has played out isn’t it? Never mind it being rather tough to convince such people they should wear a mask too eh?

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Going to have to take a closer look at this.

Beta and Delta Variants Trigger Fc Effector Function (Cell)

SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs) exhibit escape from neutralizing antibodies, causing concern about vaccine effectiveness. However, while non-neutralizing cytotoxic functions of antibodies are associated with improved disease outcome and vaccine protection, Fc effector function escape from VOCs is poorly defined. Furthermore, whether VOCs trigger Fc functions with altered specificity, as has been reported for neutralization, is unknown. Here, we demonstrate that the Beta VOC partially evades Fc effector activity in individuals infected with the original (D614G) variant.


However, not all functions are equivalently affected, suggesting differential targeting by antibodies mediating distinct Fc functions. Furthermore, Beta and Delta infection trigger responses with significantly improved Fc cross-reactivity against global VOCs compared to D614G-infected or Ad26.COV2.S vaccinated individuals. This suggests that, as for neutralization, the infecting spike sequence impacts Fc effector function. These data have important implications for vaccine strategies that incorporate VOCs, suggesting these may induce broader Fc effector responses.

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Trumped by Nordstream 2 posturing.

Poor UK Households May Have To Spend Half Their Income On Energy (G.)

Soaring energy bills could eat up more than half of some UK households’ incomes, a leading poverty charity has said, amid warnings that vulnerable people will be left unable to eat regularly or could even be at risk of death from the cold. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) said that while households across the board faced bill increases of 40% to 47% from April, there would be huge variations in the ability of families to cope. Energy bills would amount to 6% of the average income of a middle-income family but 18% for a low-income family. This would rise to 25% for lone parents and couples without children, while single-adult households on low incomes could be forced to spend 54% of their income on gas and electricity when the new energy price cap comes in on 1 April, the JRF found.

“Rising energy prices will affect us all but our analysis shows they have the potential to devastate the budgets of families on the lowest incomes. The government cannot stand by and allow the rising cost of living to knock people off their feet,” said Katie Schmuecker, the deputy director of policy and partnerships at the JRF. The warning came as one of the UK’s most respected financial advisers, Martin Lewis, said ministers must intervene urgently to help vulnerable people whose lives could be at risk. Lewis, the founder of the consumer advice website MoneySavingExpert, said the government must provide billions of pounds in support to millions of poorer households who faced major financial stress and “heat or eat” decisions.

“We absolutely know we need a substantial increase in the billions of pounds funding to vulnerable people, and people on low incomes, or it is not an exaggeration to say some will have to choose between heating or eating, and that is not appropriate in one of the world’s richest economies and a civilised nation,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “What we can’t get away from is we are going to need to put money into the system or we are going to have an absolute, not a relative, an absolute poverty crisis in this country, with people really being unable to eat or dying because of the cold.”

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Rollout is tomorrow.

“The ripple effects across both passenger and cargo operations, our workforce and the broader economy are simply incalculable… To be blunt, the nation’s commerce will grind to a halt.”

Airlines Say 5G Will Create ‘Economic Calamity’ (RT)

Some of the US’ largest commercial and cargo airlines have sounded the alarm about the potentially “devastating” effects of 5G service around airports, saying the technology could effectively grind travel and shipping to a halt. Airlines for America – a lobbying group that represents JetBlue, American Airlines, Southwest, United, Delta, UPS, and FedEx, among others – issued a letter on Monday warning that the new 5G C-Band service could have a massive impact on aircraft operations around the country and create a “completely avoidable economic calamity.” “Unless our major hubs are cleared to fly, the vast majority of the traveling and shipping public will essentially be grounded,” it said, adding that up to 1,100 flights and 100,000 passengers could experience delays and cancelations per day.


While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has acknowledged the new cell network could interfere with key aircraft systems – namely radio altimeters, which help pilots land in low visibility – as of Sunday, the agency said it had cleared less than half of the US fleet to operate alongside C-Band towers. The latest update came just days ahead of a planned rollout set for January 19, which itself followed several delays due to the ongoing safety concerns. However, the airlines stressed that the interference goes beyond one system, as altimeters “provide critical information to other safety and navigation systems in modern airplanes,” which could mean that “huge swaths of the operating fleet” are “indefinitely grounded” until the issues are resolved.

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MORE valid.

Eisenhower’s Warning About The Military-industrial Complex Is Still Valid (CST)

President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address of Jan. 17, 1961, is just as relevant today as back then. Ike warned American citizens of the “military-industrial complex” and the dangers it presented to our nation and the world. Eisenhower was rightly wary of the armaments industry, which at that time was relatively new. Ike knew that such a massive arms industry could dominate the nation. Eisenhower said in his speech, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.”

Resources for this arms industry would come from the American people. And if the arms industry is large, that burden becomes substantial. The more you finance the military, the less money you have for other priorities. With people profiting from armaments and their development, there will inevitably be the push for more weapons. Any arms buildup will encourage other nations to build up their weapons. Arms races remain a continuing danger. Eisenhower further warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Ike believed the American people needed to be politically active when it came to regulating the arms industry. He said, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” We need to question military spending, especially when it comes at the expense of social programs. For example, the Build Back Better legislation is being rejected by many senators complaining about its costs. This means important social programs, such as the Child Tax Credit, free school meals and summer feeding for impoverished children won’t get passed because they claim they’re too expensive.

Yet those same senators are not questioning a nearly $2 trillion program of nuclear weapons modernization. Spending on nuclear weapons simply encourages arms races with Russia and China. Eisenhower warned against such reckless military spending that comes at the expense of the American people. Ike said, “As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.” Eisenhower emphasized in his speech the need for diplomacy and peacemaking. He said, “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”

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MLK

 

 

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Jan 172022
 


Rembrandt van Rijn Man with a falcon on his wrist (possibly St. Bavo) 1661

 

Editorial Calls For National Guard To Keep Unvaccinated In Their Homes (Fox)
Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated (Rasmussen)
Djokovic ‘Must Pay Huge Sum To Australia’ (RT)
Australia Deports Novak Djokovic Citing His Threat to Social Cohesion (CTH)
Civil Rights Groups’ Alarm At Government’s Djokovic Case (Age)
Doctor Loses License, Must Have Psych Evaluation For Covid Falsehoods (MH)
The Death Of Science (Exp.)
After 28 Days on Ventilator, Family Loses Legal Battle to Try Ivermectin (ET)
Will the Omicron Wave Carry Us Onto Endemic Beach By March? (Kory)
Greek Seniors To Be Fined For Violating Vaccine Mandate (RT)
Vaccine Mandate for Cross Border Trucking Now in Effect (CTH)
Economics Ripe For A Post-pandemic Shake Up (Janda)

 

 

The madness genie is out of the bottle. And as these things go, it will be very hard to put it back in. It’s not as if the end of the pandemic will end the madness, too. Less than 1 year ago, even people like Biden ad Fauci said never a mandate. And now the Salt Lake City Tribune calls for the National Guard to lock the unvaccinated in their homes, and half of Democrats want a fine or prison time for questioning the efficacy of the vaccines. Australians are en masse cheering the destruction of their main tennis tournament. And destroyed it is. What’s the value of winning with the no. 1 out for political reasons?

The mental damage will be with us for a very long time.

 

 

 

 

 

Covid school money

 

 

 

 

 

Rutte

 

 

No, nobody put anything funny in the drinking water. This is simply the media.

Editorial Calls For National Guard To Keep Unvaccinated In Their Homes (Fox)

The Salt Lake City Tribune editorial board published an editorial on Saturday that called on the Utah governor to use the National Guard to prevent unvaccinated citizens from going anywhere. In an editorial titled, “Utah leaders have surrendered to COVID pandemic, the Editorial Board writes” the paper lays blame at elected officials for failing to mandate the vaccine for all citizens. The paper asserted that if Utah was a “civilized place,” Republican Gov. Spencer Cox would implement a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the state and have the National Guard enforce the mandate by not letting unvaccinated people go “anywhere.”

“Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere,” the editorial board wrote. While the editorial board placed blame at all levels of government, they were more critical of Republicans like Cox. “Government officials, mostly but not exclusively Republicans, were apparently determined not to be caught governing in the face of this challenge. Any move or recommendation to mask up or, when safe and effective vaccines became available, to make vaccination a requirement of admission to public places and society in general was shouted down as an unwarranted imposition on individual freedoms,” it wrote.

“Cox and so many others have not carried the courage of their convictions. Cox, state legislative leaders, our congressional delegation and Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes have so proudly stood against the kind of vaccine mandates that civilized society has used for generations to effectively wipe out everything from polio to diphtheria to the measles.”

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48% of Democrats support prison time for individuals who “publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines”.

Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated (Rasmussen)

A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of voters favor President Joe Biden’s plan to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the employees of large companies and government agencies. That includes 33% who Strongly Favor the mandate. 48% are opposed to Biden’s vaccine mandate, including 40% who Strongly Oppose the mandate. Voters are similarly divided over the federal government’s top COVID-19 expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci. 45% view Fauci favorably, including 28% who have a Very Favorable impression of him. 48% have an unfavorable impression of Fauci, including 34% who have a Very Unfavorable view of him.

The even split among voters is the result of deep partisan divisions. While 78% of Democratic voters support the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate plan, only 22% of Republicans and 41% of voters not affiliated with either major party support the vaccine mandate. And many Democrats would support even harsher measures, including fines for Americans who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine and criminal punishment for vaccine critics. “After two excruciatingly long years, likely voters are beginning to question the federal government’s handling of the pandemic,” said Chris Talgo, senior editor and research fellow at The Heartland Institute, which commissioned this poll. “First and foremost, likely voters are beginning to sour on Dr. Anthony Fauci, who seems to have lost credibility after countless flip-flops.”

Talgo continued: “Moreover, almost half of likely voters oppose President Biden’s vaccine mandates, which seem less about stopping the spread of COVID-19 and more about increasing the power of the federal government. When asked about several other potential strategies, such as fining those who refuse to get vaccinated, the consensus among likely voters is that the federal government should do less, not more.” [..] Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics. 45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a policy would be opposed by a strong majority (71%) of all voters…

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“..a message of support displayed prominently on the Belgrade Tower in the Serbian capital on Sunday evening..”

Djokovic ‘Must Pay Huge Sum To Australia’ (RT)

Novak Djokovic’s stare-down with Australian immigration officials looks set to hit the world number one financially, with a report claiming to reveal the vast costs he is said to have been ordered to pay the country’s government. The unanimous decision by Australian judges to rubber-stamp Djokovic’s deportation ahead of the first Grand Slam of 2022 came with certain caveats including a potential ban for Djokovic on entering Australia for three years. Djokovic is financially liable for “all the costs” associated with the case, which are expected to be around $500,000, according to Telegraf – a sum which would have likely fallen on the Australian taxpayer had the court reached a different conclusion on Sunday.


The world number one, who admitted afterwards that he was “extremely disappointed” with the outcome of the hearing which finally ruled out Djokovic’s drive for a record-breaking 21st Grand Slam title win and a tenth Australian Open crown – accolades that would have set him apart from his peers as the most successful player of the modern era. While it remains unclear exactly when Djokovic will return to Serbia, his home nation has emphasized its support for Serbia’s most famous sporting export after his legal issues down under. The tennis icon, who has already received emphatic backing from the likes of Serbian president Aleksander Vucic and even Serbian royalty, will have a message of support displayed prominently on the Belgrade Tower in the Serbian capital on Sunday evening. “Nole, you are the pride of Serbia,” the message, which will be displayed between 8pm and 9pm local time, will read, before being replaced by the Serbian tricolor.

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“The concept of minority rights or individual sovereignty, restrictions on the mob’s ability to interfere in your life, is unfathomable to Australians.”

Australia Deports Novak Djokovic Citing His Threat to Social Cohesion (CTH)

None of the statements by the government, and none of their legal arguments had anything to do with COVID-19, or any medical issue or threat represented by Mr. Djokovic. The government didn’t even attempt to make any such case in their court arguments. Instead, the government relied upon convincing the court that Djokovic’s physical presence represented a threat to “social cohesion“. To support the position of the government, Australian Chief Justice James Allsop stressed the court was ruling on the “lawfulness and legality” of the decision and not whether it was right or wrong to deport him. The government can arbitrarily decide who comes and goes into the country, therefore, if the government wants to ban Djokovic for whatever reason, they can. That was the determining legal factor, nothing else.

Now we get to the key distinction between Americans and Australians. This is the point where many Americans find it difficult to reconcile with the outlook of Australians. This is where the distinctions in democracy become very important to understand. Americans view any form of tyranny as bad. Americans, in the whole, view any effort to crush your freedom as a negative. Australians only view tyranny as bad if it is not applied equally. As long as everyone suffers the punishment of government equally, the pain is approved. In Australia, government oppression is only bad if it is applied unequally. If every Australian is forced to have their right hand removed to comply with government rules, then the removal of the hand is permitted. Everyone gets in line at the hand-chopper.

However, if someone jumps out of the line and tries to escape, because they don’t want their hand removed, all the other people in line will chase him down, bring him back and hold him down while the government hand-chopper does the removal. The American looks at this mindset with jaw agape and says, “F**k you, my hand isn’t getting removed, and neither should anyone else’s; and I will fight the government hand-chopper if it means stopping them, even if you are okay with your hand getting chopped.” Generally speaking, the line of Americans to get their hands chopped will look scornfully as the two-handed rebel departs, but they accept his decision. (Although this outlook is changing in America) When an American sees a person fighting Australian tyranny (Djokovic), our gut instinct is to support him (we would if his confrontation was inside America – his location is irrelevant).

We support the freedom fight, because we see the underlying reason for him fighting -his medical and health freedom- as having merit. [..] There’s also a weird part of this where we recognize that Australians are unwilling to contemplate or accept that non-Australians might have different inherent rights because, well, they are not Australians. The Australian system of government is based on a pure democracy. Extreme democracy. As soon as 50% plus one is achieved, the other 50% accept the rules of the majority, regardless how small that majority position might be. This is why everyone in Australia is required by law to vote. The concept of minority rights or individual sovereignty, restrictions on the mob’s ability to interfere in your life, is unfathomable to Australians. Once a law is passed by majority consent, they all agree to follow it. That is their social compact.

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“..The crowd went silent as the decision was announced and one woman began to cry.”

Civil Rights Groups’ Alarm At Government’s Djokovic Case (Age)

The government’s barrister, Stephen Lloyd, SC, argued on Sunday that Djokovic’s views were “widely understood” and he had “become an icon for the anti-vaccination groups”. However, he said it was not only what Djokovic had stated in the past that had an impact, but also how people perceived him now and how that might encourage them to reject vaccination. Pauline Wright, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, said it was reasonable for the government to suggest a famous person such as Djokovic who is unvaccinated may influence some people to refuse inoculation. But it was a “big leap” to argue his previous comments on vaccination were serious enough to deem his presence in Australia a public health risk.

“Do the comments in 2020 disentitle him from playing a tennis game in Australia in 2022?” she said. “Does that really pose such a threat to public health in a situation where we’ve got 95 per cent of the adult population vaccinated? “People are free to be sceptical of vaccination … As long as they can prove they are COVID-free, I don’t see why they should be excluded from public life.” Michael Stanton, a barrister and the president of Liberty Victoria, said it was “particularly unfair” to focus on how others might perceive Djokovic’s views, rather than the seriousness of what he has actually said. “It’s very different from [denying a visa] for someone who has expressly said something about inciting violence or encouraging unrest,” he said. “The reliance on how someone might be perceived sets an impossible standard for that person to meet.”

It was also ironic that the government’s attempt to remove Djokovic had given his views a week of international attention, he said. “They have magnified the anti-vax voice.” Mr Stanton and Ms Wright said the case highlighted the danger of the Immigration Minister’s power to make what they described as arbitrary decisions. Under powers described by a former Labor immigration minister as “god-like”, the minister can cancel someone’s visa if they believe the person may – rather than will – risk public health or good order. The debate came as fans of the 20-time grand slam winner protested outside Melbourne’s Federal Court buildings on Sunday. The crowd went silent as the decision was announced and one woman began to cry.

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Yes, ivermectin.

Doctor Loses License, Must Have Psych Evaluation For Covid Falsehoods (MH)

A doctor with decades of experience can’t practice medicine after her license was temporarily suspended over complaints that she shared coronavirus misinformation, according to a Maine licensing board. The board has ordered her to undergo a neuropsychological evaluation, it said. Dr. Meryl J. Nass, who got a license to practice medicine in Maine in 1997, had her license “immediately” suspended for 30 days after a board investigation and review of complaints against her on Jan. 12, according to a suspension order from the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine. Nass, who’s an internist in Ellsworth, must “submit” to an evaluation by a “Board-selected psychologist” on Feb. 1, the board’s evaluation order issued Jan. 11 said.

“I have no comment about submitting to a neuropsych exam, except that the board ordered me to do so on shaky grounds,” Nass told McClatchy News, adding that she’s had her license for a total of 41 years. “The information received by the Board demonstrates that Dr. Nass is or may be unable to practice medicine with reasonable skill and safety to her patients by reason of mental illness, alcohol intemperance, excessive use of drugs, narcotics, or as a result of a mental or physical condition interfering with the competent practice of medicine,” the evaluation order states. The complaints against Nass include how the board was told she engaged in “public dissemination of ‘misinformation’” about COVID-19 and vaccinations “via a video interview and on her website,” the board said about the October 26, 2021 complaint. It lists several comments Nass made that were subject to the board’s investigation.

Roughly 10 days later, the board got another complaint about Nass “spreading COVID and COVID vaccination misinformation on Twitter,” it said. Nass called “disinformation and misinformation” a “fuzzy concept” that the board hasn’t defined for her, she said. “There’s no law that says doctors can’t express their educated opinion on any subject.” Other grounds for her suspension include how Nass treated COVID-19 patients with Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, according to the board. The board noted that Ivermectin isn’t Food and Drug Administration “authorized or approved” as a treatment for COVID-19 in the suspension order. Ivermectin is used as a parasitic treatment for animals, according to the FDA.

“For humans, ivermectin tablets are approved at very specific doses to treat some parasitic worms, and there are topical (on the skin) formulations for head lice and skin conditions like rosacea,” the agency explains online. Additionally, it noted the FDA “revoked’ emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine since it “may not be effective” against COVID-19.

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“This has been a whitewash. This whole thing has killed science. Science is meant to look at evidence. It is truly unbelievable.”

The Death Of Science (Exp.)

Professor Dalgleish co-authored a paper in summer 2020 after spotting “unique fingerprints” in Covid-19 samples that he believes prove they must have been manipulated in a laboratory. The work was rejected by a string of journals, before finally being published in a watered-down form. Prof Dalgleish, an oncologist who discovered how HIV entered and killed cells in 1984, then found himself “ostracised” and frightened. In February 2020, the Lancet had published a letter that “strongly condemned conspiracy theories” suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin. This highly influential letter – subsequently cited in thousands of scientific publications – was signed by 27 experts including Wellcome Trust head and former Sage member Sir Jeremy Farrar.

However, it has since emerged that two weeks before the letter was published, Sir Jeremy stated in private emails that some senior scientists believed a ‘likely explanation’ was that the virus was man-made. He had led a teleconference call on February 1 2020. The emails discuss the call and reveal one virologist was ‘80 percent sure this thing had come out of a lab’. Others shared the view. Sir Jeremy was uncertain, stating “this will remain grey unless there is access to the Wuhan lab”. But virologist Dr Ron Fouchier said: “Further debate about such accusations would . . . do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.” Professor Dalgleish, author of a new book on covid, The Origin of the Virus, warned the affair had profound implications for the scientific community.

He said his team had found amino acids on the spike with a positive charge, allowing the virus to cling to negative parts of the human body. But it was highly unusual to find so many positive charges in a row because they also repel each other, he said. “We realised when they released the sequence of the virus it broke the laws of physics for a natural virus meaning it was genetically modified. “At the time my position was supported by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 who now chairs the University of London board of trustees.” However, when they tried to publish their work they were turned down by numerous papers, including the Lancet. “My paper was rejected within five hours”, he said. “Normally it takes three weeks before it is even peer reviewed.”

Prof Dalgleish said: “It was a political decision for this to be suppressed.” Describing the impact after his paper was finally released, he said: “I was ostracised. I was fearful – really frightened at the way I was being treated. “I was told I was not an expert on coronavirus’ and should just shut up. People tried to push us away. We were told our theory had no rationale and it was a conspiracy theory. I am so angry about this. I have more virus papers cited than most virology experts and they tried to push me aside. “They did not even look at the science. It was obvious it was a gain of function escape from a lab and I say escape, but that is generous. We had this data in late February after the sequences were released. “This has been a whitewash. This whole thing has killed science. Science is meant to look at evidence. It is truly unbelievable.” Last year an expert who has studied the lab leak said the debate about coronavirus will be reduced to “insults on twitter” unless medical journals allow uncensored discussion.

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This is so immoral, where does one begin?

After 28 Days on Ventilator, Family Loses Legal Battle to Try Ivermectin (ET)

A Florida family fighting to give their loved one on a ventilator alternative treatments for COVID-19 have lost another battle—this time in Florida’s First District Court of Appeal. The wife and son of Daniel Pisano first squared off against Mayo Clinic Florida at an emergency hearing on Dec. 30 in Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit. Before that, they’d been begging the hospital to allow them to try treating Pisano—who’s been on a ventilator now for 28 days—with the controversial drug ivermectin, along with a mix of other drugs and supplements, part of a protocol recommended by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). The family’s request for an emergency injunction to force the Mayo Clinic to allow treatments recommended by an outside doctor was denied by Judge Marianne Aho. They appealed the decision.

On Jan. 14, Aho’s decision was upheld by Florida’s First District Court of Appeal. The three-judge panel deciding the case included Judge Thomas “Bo” Winokur, appointed by then-Gov. Rick Scott in 2015; Judge M. Kemmerly Thomas, appointed in 2016 by Scott; and Judge Robert E. Long, Jr., appointed in 2020, by Gov. Ron DeSantis. “An opinion of this Court explaining its reasoning will follow,” the judges stated in the order they issued. “So we wait to see what that looks like, unless it takes too long,” said Jeff Childers, an attorney for the family. Seventy-year-old Daniel Pisano doesn’t have unlimited time, says Eduardo Balbona, M.D., an independent doctor in Jacksonville who’s been advising the family since they reached out to him while researching other treatments that could potentially help their loved one.

Balbona, who has been monitoring Pisano’s treatment at the Mayo Clinic through an online portal, testified on behalf of the Pisano family in the first hearing. The Mayo Clinic has argued that the treatment plan doesn’t fit with the hospital’s standard protocol for treating COVID-19 patients and they don’t know what the effects of following Balbona’s recommendations would be. The hospital has told the family that Pisano has a less-than-five percent chance of survival, and all that’s left to do is wait and see if he recovers on the ventilator.

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“..we should be “getting to the other side” of the wave by March!”

Will the Omicron Wave Carry Us Onto Endemic Beach By March? (Kory)

Woke up last Sunday to a text forwarded to me by my wife. It was a series of notes taken by a good friend of hers which summarized the main points heard on a conference call with the International Head of Infectious Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital (i.e. “Haavaad”). This is what it looked like: I found it remarkable on a number of fronts given that this information; 1/ Comes out of the Top of the Ivory Tower of Ivory Towers (Harvard) 2/ Comes from the Director of International Infectious Disease.

Despite #1 and #2, the Director; 1/ Subtly questions the accuracy of publicly disseminated hospitalization data (a large number of us have long stopped placing high value on the disseminated aggregate U.S data as it is not only severely discordant with other countries’s data (U.K, Israel, S. Africa etc) but the underlying granular, “source” data is almost never supplied to the public. Plus, the U.S agencies history of data shenanigans in the pandemic is terrifying – i.e. remember when they made a rule to stop testing the vaccinated and to advise docs against checking antibodies on anyone prior to vaccinating them?

2/ Says that boosters will not be needed for Omicron. Wait, what? Scientific truth and logic is now coming out of a major academic institution in the U.S? No more of their long-standing, complicit (silent) support of an unending series of illogical policies around these novel vaccines? He openly says this while all the public health agencies and mass media continue to whip up fear of Omicron so as to try to increase vaccination rates? He even implicity brings up the reality that vaccines designed for older and fundamentally different variants have already shown either negligible or negative protection against Omicron. Whoa. He also didn’t bother (or forgot) to parrot the manipulative lie that vaccines are responsible for preventing hospitalization and death in Omicron? Who slipped this guy the Truth Serum?

3/ Offers a highly positive message in line with my growing and large network of COVID-expert colleagues in that the global data on Omicron strongly suggests it will infect such large swaths of society that things will get back to normal, based on the fact that natural immunity to (and displacement of) the more dangerous variants will result. And, we should be “getting to the other side” of the wave by March!

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Petty.

Greek Seniors To Be Fined For Violating Vaccine Mandate (RT)

The Greek prime minister has made a final appeal to the country’s senior citizens to get inoculated before monthly punishments for violating the country’s vaccination mandate kick in next week. “Our fellow citizens who are over 60 and still unvaccinated – I encourage them today: take this step,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said during a visit to a health center in Megara, near Athens, on Saturday. “Protect your life and the lives of those you love, and understand that the vaccine is safe and saves lives.”


Citizens aged over 60 will be fined €50 ($57) from Monday and €100 ($114) each month from February unless they get vaccinated. All proceeds will go to the country’s health system, Greek media said. Those with Covid recovery certificates and proven medical exemptions will not be subject to the fines. People vaccinated abroad will be able to register their vaccination through a government website. The AMNA news agency cited government sources as saying that 90% of citizens aged over 60 have already been vaccinated or have booked an inoculation appointment.

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Do watch the video. And then maybe stock up.

Vaccine Mandate for Cross Border Trucking Now in Effect (CTH)

The cross border vaccine mandate for truckers in/out of Canada is now in effect. The U.S. vaccine mandate takes effect on January 22nd.It will take a few days to see the consequences, but there will be consequences. Keep in mind, any impact is taking place in a supply chain system that is already tenuous and unstable at best. A small disruption that may have been minimally significant against a fully operational supply chain, is more likely to be a much bigger disruption in a supply chain that is already under a severe amount of demand side stress. Somewhere in the range of 16,000 to 38,000 daily loads are likely to be impacted.

When questioned about this, Canadian Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic Leblanc says the trucking industry “has had adequate time to prepare for this.” Keep in mind, the mandate was announced 45 days ago (November 30th). According to the Canadian government, changing the structural rules for all the logistics and commerce in cross border shipping, 45 days is enough notice. […] The mandate throws a “major wrench” in the Canadian and North American supply chains, he added, with grocers, food producers, the auto parts industry and building materials among the sectors expected to be most affected. “I really hope that we’re not at the stage where you see food insecurity, where you’re actually going to grocery stores and there’s nothing on the shelf,” Winder said. “That could be the worst-case scenario.”

Mike Millian, president of the Private Motor Truck Council of Canada, told CTV News Channel on Saturday that there were as many 23,000 vacancies at the end of the third quarter of 2021, with his group’s own studies showing that roughly 20 per cent of Canadian truck drivers operating across the border are unvaccinated. […] “If we remove a fifth of that workforce, we’re going to see shortages on shelves and we’re going to see inflation of prices, because the cost to bring this stuff here is going to go up.”

Canadian truck driver

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“So when 30, 40 or 50 per cent of your staff are absent through COVID illness or isolation, there is no way to keep functioning as usual.”

Economics Ripe For A Post-pandemic Shake Up (Janda)

Who do we miss most when they don’t turn up to work? If I couldn’t work from home and write this column, would it inconvenience you in the slightest? If your employer’s CEO was out of action for a fortnight, would it affect your work? Federal parliament hasn’t sat for a month and a half and won’t sit again until the second week of February. How many of us even noticed? On the other hand, if your garbage collection doesn’t turn up this week and your bin is overflowing, it’ll certainly catch your attention. When you turn up to the supermarket to buy fresh produce for dinner and the shelves are bare, it’s more than a minor annoyance. If your toddler can’t go to childcare, you’ll definitely notice.

As the Centre for Future Work’s Jim Stanford pointed out last week, COVID has shown again and again that the basis of a healthy economy is healthy humans. But it has also reminded those of us paying attention that our most essential workers also happen to be some of our lowest-paid, while our (arguably) less-essential workers are often paid far more. Of course, in a modern capitalist democracy, we need CEOs, politicians and, yes, even journalists. But their temporary absence doesn’t spark a crisis. But take the nurses, chefs and cleaners out of a nursing home and you’ll have a crisis very quickly, as some facilities are already seeing in the Omicron wave.

Yet the fruit and veggie pickers, abattoir workers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, nurses, childcare workers, garbage collectors, cleaners and many others whose daily work is directly essential for others’ wellbeing generally earn much less than the average — which is currently around AUS $90,000 per year for full-time workers. Does that not hint at something fundamentally wrong with a social science concerned with distribution? That many of the people whose work is most valued by others in society are among those least valued by that society in a monetary sense? There’s another hard lesson for economists and managers in the way COVID has exposed weaknesses in supply chains.

Those who run the economy, corporations and public services, perhaps above all, tend to strive for efficiency and productivity. In recent decades, firms, governments and even households have been operating on lean “just-in-time” models, where we keep stocks in hand as low as possible. That’s fine in normal times, but when your usual supply suddenly dries up — whether it’s computer chips, face masks or toilet paper — you very quickly find yourself in a tricky bind, with little time to adapt. The same is true for staffing. So many companies and public services have down-sized, or “right-sized” as it is now sometimes euphemistically termed, that losing just 10 per cent of their workforce is a crisis. So when 30, 40 or 50 per cent of your staff are absent through COVID illness or isolation, there is no way to keep functioning as usual.

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Pollination – Must watch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1482908859454869507

 

 

Amsterdam

Groningen
https://twitter.com/i/status/1482853258897076227

 

 

Spain

Barcelona

Perth

 

 

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Jan 152022
 
 January 15, 2022  Posted by at 6:57 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Willem de Kooning Door to the River 1960

 

 

It’s an honest question. I’ve been looking at it for a while now, and I can’t find an honest answer. Maybe someone out there can help me with that. There are a number of issues: we know that for two years, deaths have been labeled as “Covid” when they were not, or at least that was doubtful. Car crashes may have been the worst of it, and an extreme example, but we might as well have been in a pandemic of the comorbidities.

If and when you qualify an 85-year old, God bless them, with 5 comorbidities as having died from Covid, that’s not science, it’s propaganda. And now that Omicron is here, with a fatality rate reportedly 95% or so lower than Delta, we get the same thing: the news simply says “Covid deaths”. But what does that mean if one variant is 10-20-90x more lethal than the other? It means nothing.

And I’m still looking to find the first person who died from Omicron. I expect to find one at some point, mind you. But that it’s so hard is strange given that this particular variant is said to spread so much faster than all previous ones. Something that leads governments and their “experts” to claim that even if it less severe, the sheer number game makes it very dangerous anyway.

But 100x zero is still zero. Hence my question. If Omicron spreads as fast as it appears to do, why can’t I find any deaths from it? And if I can’t find them, then why all the mandates and closures and measures in places where it has taken over some 90%+ of all new positive tests?

The other day I wrote in a Debt Rattle:

First time (?!) I see a science report claim deaths from Omicron. Well, sort of:

Clinical Outcomes Among Patients Infected With Omicron

“Rates of ICU admission and mortality after an outpatient positive test were 0.26 (0.10-0.73) and 0.09 (0.01-0.75) fold as high among cases with Omicron variant infection ..”

We now have 1 case reported in UK, 1 case US (debunked), 1 case Israel (no evidence), and yesterday 1 case in Greece, “with” Omicron. (Google translate)

The First Death From Omicron Mutation In Greece: 77-Year-old Unvaccinated With Underlying Diseases

A 77-year-old unvaccinated with underlying diseases is the first victim of the Omicron mutation in Greece. According to Mega, a 77-year-old woman, unvaccinated, with serious underlying diseases, who was treated in the ICU of “Sotiria” hospital, is the first patient with the Omicron mutation that ended. Also, according to Mega, the only hospitals that have been genetically tested for those who have or do not carry the Omicron mutation are “Evangelismos” and “Sotiria”.

As case numbers have gone up 5 fold everywhere. If Omicron is at all capable of killing people, we should have seen a lot more reports like these. We do not.

I was “hopeful” that with that first report on medRxiv, we had our first Omicron death. But if and when you define a mortality rate as “0.09 (0.01-0.75)”, what do I really know? At that same time, I wrote:

There we go again: “..just one of the 52,297 people infected with Omicron died..”.

Omicron 91% Less Likely To Be Fatal Compared To Delta: CDC Study

Really? Where is the case description? Where are the details? It would be so unique that surely it would make headlines.

Walensky gives it away:

“We MAY see deaths from Omicron but I suspect that the deaths that we’re seeing now are still from Delta. “

If one person infected with Omicron died, that doesn’t mean they died FROM Omicron. And CDC director Rochelle Walensky herself appears to indicate zero deaths from Omicron.

I looked a bit further, and granted, there are more reports than just 1 in UK, 1 US, 1 Israel, and 1 Greece. But!

On Dec 24/Jan 7, an outlet named Pharmaceutical Technologys reports:

Germany Confirms First Death Attributed To Covid Omicron Variant

Germany: Germany’s health minister said he expects a surge in coronavirus cases around new year and people will probably need a fourth vaccine shot. Germany also confirmed the country’s first death due to the Omicron variant.

But provides no proof or details.

Dec 27, Reuters:

Australia Records First Omicron Death

Australia reported its first confirmed death from the new Omicron variant of COVID-19 on Monday amid its biggest daily surge in infections, but the authorities refrained from imposing new restrictions saying hospitalisation rates remained low. The death, a man in his 80s with underlying health conditions, marked a grim milestone for the country which has had to reverse some parts of a staged reopening after nearly two years of stop-start lockdowns, due to the fresh outbreak.

Again, no proof, just a statement. How do I know it’s not Alpha or Delta, or obesity, or something else? I don’t.

Also Dec 27, BBC. “India’s first death WITH the Omicron variant..” No, “WITH” is not what I’m looking for. I want FROM, and with evidence.

India Records First Death Linked To Omicron Variant

A 74-year-old man who died in the western state of Rajasthan was India’s first death with the Omicron variant, the health ministry said on Wednesday. Officials said the man had been suffering from diabetes and other comorbid conditions. India has reported 2,630 Omicron cases so far. It reported more than 90,000 cases on Thursday – a nearly six-fold rise over the past week that experts say is fuelled by the Omicron variant. India recorded 325 deaths in the 24 hours but only one has been linked to Omicron, officials said.

This is interesting, from Jan 14:

How Deadly Is The Omicron Variant? WHO Releases Death Report

In a report released last month, the [WHO] said that of the 38 countries touched by the variant, none have reported Omicron-specific deaths. Since then, it has spread rapidly, and one person in the UK has died with the new variant.

Interesting because that WHO report is from December, the same time period where we see this:

What Are The Symptoms Of Omicron And Has Anyone Died From It?

The UK Health Security Agency have reported a total of 75 Omicron related deaths in the United Kingdom. These fatalities were recorded in the latest government agency’s Omicron daily overview report on 30 December 2021. Elsewhere in the world, there has been a Omicron-related death in Germany. And America reported their first Omicron death in late December – an unvaccinated man in the state of Texas. The first UK recorded Omicron related death was reported by the Prime Minister on 13 December. During a visit to a vaccination clinic in West London, Boris Johnson said: “Sadly yes Omicron is producing hospitalisations and sadly at least one patient has been confirmed to have died with Omicron.”

This was based on data from the UK Health Security Agency. Who said the individual who died from Omicron was diagnosed in hospital. Sounds reliable. But the report said 54 deaths, not 75, and it provides no details at all. Just numbers.

Omicron daily overview: 30 December 2021

 

 

Either way would be big news, whether it’s no deaths at all, or the first death has been confirmed. But we end up with something in between. And that’s not satisfactory.

We have a first positive test in the UK, followed up for a whole month by no positive test at all. While the variant spreads like wildfire. We have a report of either 72 or 54 positive tests in Germany, while no other country reports more than one. We have the US CDC director saying just days ago that they haven’t seen any Omicron deaths so far, only Delta. We have the WHO saying in December, their latest report, that not one of 38 countries reported even one positive test.

So yeah, help me out here, what am I missing? I’m looking for reports of deaths FROM, not WITH, Omicron, and with reliable proof. How hard could it be?

 

 

 

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Jan 142022
 


Caravaggio Adoration of the Shepherds 1609

 

Clinical Outcomes Among Patients Infected With Omicron (medRxiv)
Omicron 91% Less Likely To Be Fatal Compared To Delta: CDC Study (NYP)
Supreme Court Blocks Biden’s OSHA Vaxx Mandate (ZH)
Not Surprising, And Deserved By All (Denninger)
Rand Paul Labels Fauci ‘Juvenile Political Creature’ For Playing The Victim (SN)
Dr. Oz Calls Fauci A ‘Petty Tyrant,’ Challenges Him To Debate (Hill)
Florida Family Fighting for Ivermectin: Appeals Court Expedites Case (ET)
Do Antigen Tests Work If You Are Asymptomatic? (Kirsch)
Why DID The Science Establishment Try So Hard To Silence Lab Leak Theory? (DM)
Dems’ Voting Bill Is ‘Crass Power Grab’ By ‘Clown Car’ Running DC (JTN)
“Mother Of All” Supply Chain Shocks Looms As China Locks Down Ports (ZH)
What The West Gets Wrong About Putin (Malmgren)
US Envoy In Europe Says ‘Drumbeat Of War Is Sounding Loud’ (Hill)

 

 

The most vaccinated state in the Union:

 

NHS nurse

 

 

Lord Frost
https://twitter.com/i/status/1481574856827232258

 

 

First time (?!) I see a science report claim deaths from Omicron. Well, sort of:

“Rates of ICU admission and mortality after an outpatient positive test were 0.26 (0.10-0.73) and 0.09 (0.01-0.75) fold as high among cases with Omicron variant infection ..”

We now have 1 case reported in UK, 1 case US (debunked), 1 case Israel (no evidence), and yesterday 1 case in Greece, “with” Omicron.

As case numbers have gone up 5 fold everywhere. If Omicron is at all capable of killing people, we should have seen a lot more reports like these. We do not.

Clinical Outcomes Among Patients Infected With Omicron (medRxiv)

Background: The Omicron (B.1.1.529) variant of SARS-CoV-2 has rapidly achieved global dissemination, accounting for most infections in the United States by December 2021. Risk of severe outcomes associated with Omicron infections, as compared to earlier SARS-CoV-2 variants, remains unclear.

Methods: We analyzed clinical and epidemiologic data from cases testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection within the Kaiser Permanente Southern California healthcare system from November 30, 2021 to January 1, 2022, using S gene target failure (SGTF) as assessed by the ThermoFisher TaqPath ComboKit assay as a proxy for Omicron infection. We fit Cox proportional hazards models to compare time to any hospital admission and hospital admissions associated with new-onset respiratory symptoms, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, mechanical ventilation, and mortality among cases with Omicron and Delta (non-SGTF) variant infections. We fit parametric competing risk models to compare lengths of hospital stay among admitted cases with Omicron and Delta variant infections.

Results: Our analyses included 52,297 cases with SGTF (Omicron) and 16,982 cases with non-SGTF (Delta [B.1.617.2]) infections, respectively. Hospital admissions occurred among 235 (0.5%) and 222 (1.3%) of cases with Omicron and Delta variant infections, respectively. Among cases first tested in outpatient settings, the adjusted hazard ratios for any subsequent hospital admission and symptomatic hospital admission associated with Omicron variant infection were 0.48 (0.36-0.64) and 0.47 (0.35-0.62), respectively. Rates of ICU admission and mortality after an outpatient positive test were 0.26 (0.10-0.73) and 0.09 (0.01-0.75) fold as high among cases with Omicron variant infection as compared to cases with Delta variant infection. Zero cases with Omicron variant infection received mechanical ventilation, as compared to 11 cases with Delta variant infections throughout the period of follow-up (two-sided p<0.001). Median duration of hospital stay was 3.4 (2.8-4.1) days shorter for hospitalized cases with Omicron variant infections as compared to hospitalized patients with Delta variant infections, reflecting a 69.6% (64.0-74.5%) reduction in hospital length of stay.

Conclusions: During a period with mixed Delta and Omicron variant circulation, SARS-CoV-2 infections with presumed Omicron variant infection were associated with substantially reduced risk of severe clinical endpoints and shorter durations of hospital stay.

Read more …

There we go again: “..just one of the 52,297 people infected with Omicron died..”.

Really? Where is the case description? Where are the details? It would be so unique that surely it would make headlines.

Walensky gives it away:

“We MAY see deaths from Omicron but I suspect that the deaths that we’re seeing now are still from Delta. ”

Omicron 91% Less Likely To Be Fatal Compared To Delta: CDC Study (NYP)

Omicron poses a “substantially reduced risk” of serious illness compared to Delta — and is more than 90 percent less likely to kill those infected, according to a federally funded study. The study, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Wednesday, said it proved “compelling evidence of an intrinsically less severe infection” from the variant that currently accounts for 90 percent of cases in the US. The evaluation of more than 70,000 infected Californians saw those with Omicron less than half as likely to need hospitalization as those with Delta — and about 75 percent less likely to need intensive care. Those hospitalized also needed to stay approximately 70 percent less time, with a median treatment time of 1.5 days compared to five days for those with the previous dominant variant.


Even though the study looked at three times as many people with Omicron, none of them needed to go on a ventilator in the hospital — compared to 11 in the far smaller group with Delta. Most encouragingly, just one of the 52,297 people infected with Omicron died — a reduction of 91 percent compared to 14 deaths in the 16,982 studied with Delta. It did not say how old those who died were, or if they were vaccinated. CDC director Rochelle Walensky told reporters that it likely means the recent increase in deaths is a lagging effect of the Delta variant, not the one rapidly replacing it. “We may see deaths from Omicron but I suspect that the deaths that we’re seeing now are still from Delta,” Walensky revealed.

Read more …

Threatening people’s lives and livelihoods over taking medicines, experimental or not, has always been a no-go. SCOTUS should not be needed for that. And they still leave the mandate for healthcare workers in place.

Supreme Court Blocks Biden’s OSHA Vaxx Mandate (ZH)

Despite the misinformation spewed forth by Justice Sotomayor, The US Supreme Court has blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test rule for US businesses, but allows vaccine mandate for most health care workers. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) argue against the Department of Labor, in the Court’s first hearing, that: “OSHA’s sweeping regulatory dictate,” will “irreparably injure the very businesses that Americans have counted on to widely distribute COVID-19 vaccines and protective equipment to save lives—and to keep them fed, clothed, and sustained during this now two-year-long pandemic.” The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule would have required 80 million workers to get shots or periodic tests. The OSHA ruling vote was 6-3 with Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan in dissent.

“Permitting OSHA to regulate the hazards of daily life – simply because most Americans have jobs and face those same risks while on the clock – would significantly expand OSHA’s regulatory authority without clear congressional authorization.” Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said during arguments that he thinks it’s hard to argue that the 1970 law governing OSHA “gives free reign to the agencies to enact such broad regulation.” The court allowed a separate rule to take effect requiring shots for workers in nursing homes, hospitals and other facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid payments from the federal government (which will be interesting given that California just allowed COVID positive healthcare workers to go back to work).

The vaccine mandate for healthcare workers vote was 5-4 with Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett in dissent, which means Roberts and Kavanaugh joined liberal justices in allowing the HHS mandate on healthcare workers to stand. So with over 1 million COVID cases per day, record high inflation, Sinema blew out the filibuster, record low approval rating, and now his vaxx mandate in tatters, this seems to sum things up rather well… “This must be Biden’s worst day in office.”

Read more …

Karl is overdoing the I told you so. At some point, it gets ugly.

Not Surprising, And Deserved By All (Denninger)

The OSHA ruling got blown up by the Supremes, 6-3 as I expected. This leaves all the private-sector employers who issued mandates in front of it fully exposed for any and all bad side effects. I expect the lawsuits to start imminently and they will bankrupt plenty of people. Good. I hope every single virtue-signaling CEO and HR Karen gets in the ass. They deserve it. “OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the *****–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here.” Exactly and as I noted the Senate explicitly declined to approve such a measure in the last couple of months and in fact explicitly disapproved it.

Yes, it went nowhere in the House as expected but you need both houses of Congress to concur when it comes to an authority. I said this would get official notice by The Supremes and it did. “In fact, the most noteworthy action concerning the ******* mandate by either House of Congress has been a majority vote of the Senate disapproving the regulation on December 8, 2021. S. J. Res. 29, 117th Cong., 1st Sess. (2021).” With the Senate explicitly disavowing same and nothing in the Congressional Record nor acts over the last two years this was clearly doomed and died a well-deserved death. Now onto CMS. Here I predicted the most-likely outcome was a split decision upholding the mandate in nursing homes and other non-consensual situations.

What we got was a 5-4 upholding it on technical grounds and, having read the opinion, you won’t like why it happened. Let’s be blunt: You ****ed yourself, America, and you deserve this outcome. You put the Federal Government in charge of what it pays for when it comes to medical care. You let them, not you or your doctor, make those decisions. You have in fact cheered this on and allowed it. You even allowed it when Trump promised to stop it during the campaign, along with all of its corruption, and then on election night all three planks dealing with the medical monopolies, which were a mere start, disappeared and yet fully half the nation continued to suck his dick.

[..] Actions — and deliberate inactions — have consequences. I don’t like the outcome but it wasn’t illogical considering what was argued and what we, the people have permitted and set in motion over the last three decades. The solicitors on the State side failed to argue that (1) these are experimental injections and (2) as of now they don’t even ****ing work and even Pfizer’s CEO admits it.

Read more …

“Does he not realise I have people arrested once every month or two who have threatened to attack me, plus I have been attacked, and he’s going to come and blame his attacks on me?”

Rand Paul Labels Fauci ‘Juvenile Political Creature’ For Playing The Victim (SN)

Following the explosive latest exchange between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci Tuesday, Fauci ran to CNN and MSNBC to complain more about how the Senator is attacking him for his own political gain, prompting Paul to label the NIAID head “juvenile”. On Chris Hayes’ show Fauci, stated “What you saw at the hearing today was pure ad hominem. And I called him [Paul] out because that’s exactly what he’s doing: he’s raising money.” Note that during the hearing Fauci did not present any evidence to counter Paul’s claims that the NIAID Director has continually lied under oath and has actively attempted to shut down scientists and doctors who disagree with him. Fauci attempted to shift the narrative to personal attacks against him.

Appearing on Fox News, Paul shot back, claiming that Fauci is now going even beyond saying he ‘is science’ and cannot be questioned, by suggesting that questioning him is encouraging violence. “It was a cheap shot by a politician, not a scientist,” Paul said, further noting “he’s blaming me for a death threat, but when [Republican members of Congress] were shot at by a Bernie Sanders supporter [in 2017], not one Republican stood up and said, oh, this is Bernie Sanders’s fault”. “We were not juvenile enough to do that,” Paul continued, adding “But he [Fauci] came to the hearing today and accused me of somehow inciting some lunatic person.” Paul further urged, “Does he not realise I have people arrested once every month or two who have threatened to attack me, plus I have been attacked, and he’s going to come and blame his attacks on me?”

“I think he has lied to the American public. I think that he funded the lab in Wuhan that in all likelihood this virus came from. I think he as ignored natural immunity. I think he has told people to wear a cloth mask when they don’t work,” Paul emphasised. In a further appearance, Paul said of Fauci “He didn’t answer the question why is he smearing these three doctors? I’m proud of the fact people go to RandPaul.com raising money to fire Fauci because he is a menace.” “Everything he said has been incorrect. And I think he is part of the problem, Paul continued, adding “Even from the very beginning the fact that this virus came from a lab in Wuhan he has denied it and worked to cover it up and denigrated anybody who raises this question as a conspiracy theorist.”

Read more …

I wouldn’t trust Oz at the far end of a ten foot pole, and this makes me think his campaign team is looking for -cheap- publicity, whether over the back of Fauci, or that of Rand Paul.

Dr. Oz Calls Fauci A ‘Petty Tyrant,’ Challenges Him To Debate (Hill)

GOP Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, more commonly known as “Dr. Oz” from his TV program “The Dr. Oz Show,” called infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci a “petty tyrant” and challenged him to a debate on COVID-19. “It’s past time Fauci faces the fact that he got COVID wrong. So, doctor to doctor – let’s debate. This Doctor is in, are you?” Oz said in a tweet Thursday while posting a campaign ad attacking Fauci. “Let’s get the facts straight here. You and me. Let’s have a debate, doctor to doctor, and give the American people the truth about COVID-19. I’m game. Anytime. Anywhere. Dr. Fauci, are you in?” Oz said in the campaign video.


Fauci has been under attack by Republicans throughout the pandemic, as many in the party disagree with how the country’s leading infectious diseases expert has guided the U.S. through the coronavirus. Oz said on Newsmax on Thursday that he wants to debate Fauci on vaccine mandates, natural immunity from COVID-19 infections and delays with drugs such as monoclonal antibodies. “He is a petty tyrant. He got COVID wrong. He continues to get it wrong,” Oz told the outlet, noting that “doctors like me” think Fauci has not managed the pandemic correctly.

Read more …

Mayo Clinic would rather have people die than give in. That redefines “shameless”.

Florida Family Fighting for Ivermectin: Appeals Court Expedites Case (ET)

Florida’s First District Court of Appeal has expedited the process to decide a lawsuit filed by the family of a COVID-19 patient on a ventilator at a Jacksonville hospital. Attorneys for Mayo Clinic Florida have until 10 a.m. Jan. 13 to respond to the appeal filed by the family of 70-year-old Daniel Pisano. Then the family’s attorneys will have until Jan. 14 to file additional arguments. At that time, a three-panel judge could be appointed to decide the case. Mayo Clinic has said Pisano, who has been on a ventilator 22 days, has a slim chance of survival. But an outside doctor, who is not affiliated with Mayo Clinic, testified in an emergency hearing Dec. 30 that there’s still a good chance to save him—although there’s no time to delay, the physician said.

In a desperate attempt to save their loved one, the Pisano family has begged Mayo Clinic to try a protocol widely used by independent physicians around the country and developed by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. Mayo Clinic officials have refused and attorneys have fought the family’s wishes vigorously in court. Claudia Pisano, Daniel Pisano’s wife of 51 years, and their son, Chris, have power of attorney and legally have the right to ask for the treatment of their choice, their attorneys have argued. But Daniel Pisano is declining fast and running out of time, they say. The family’s trusted doctor, Dr. Eduardo Balbona of Jacksonville, testified that in order to save him the hospital must quickly allow treatment—with ivermectin and other drugs and supplements—he’s used to help dozens of critically ill COVID-19 patients recover.

Being on the ventilator is doing harm to Pisano and other patients fighting COVID-19, Balbona testified. After considering the testimony in the three-hour hearing, Judge Marianne Aho, of Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit, denied the family’s plea to force Mayo Clinic doctors to step aside and let Balbona treat their dying loved one. Aho wrote, “An individual’s right to privacy is one of self-determination, the right to accept or refuse. It is not a right to demand a particular treatment. It is not a right to substitute one’s judgment as to which treatments must be made available by others. There is no right, constitutional or otherwise, of a patient to substitute one’s judgment for a medical professional.” The family disagrees saying the Florida Patient’s Bill of Rights gives them the right to choose between treatment options and they’ve offered to release Mayo Clinic from all liability in following through with that care. They filed an appeal Jan. 9.

Read more …

Stop testing healthy people.

Do Antigen Tests Work If You Are Asymptomatic? (Kirsch)

Here’s what you need to know about antigen rapid tests: 1/ In general, each test brand will test for a specific antigen. They may or may not tell you which antigen they detect. 2/ Each brand has a different sensitivity. For low sensitivity tests, it will be fruitless to test if you are not symptomatic because it will almost certainly be negative. It would be nice if they correlated the results with PCR cycle thresholds, but those are non-standard as well. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are no standards to inform you on 1 and 2 above. There is no “reference standard” that they compare to.


This of course means that you can be wasting serious money taking tests when you are asymptomatic because the certain brands will never be positive if you are asymptomatic. I want to thank Dr. Byram Bridle for pointing this out to me. They really should tell you, “Hey, if you aren’t symptomatic, don’t bother to take our test.” The manufacturers are never going to tell you that (since they aren’t required to), but I thought you should know.

Read more …

How about a Special Counsel?

Why DID The Science Establishment Try So Hard To Silence Lab Leak Theory? (DM)

There are now two core questions over the birth of this pandemic: did Covid emerge through some kind of scientific mishap or through natural transmission from animals? And why did the science establishment work so hard to silence dissident voices? Indeed, it seems incredible that not only does Farrar remain in a job in which he directs so much crucial medical research, but even saw his annual salary rise by £28,000 to £512,000 last year, according to latest accounts. For Sir Jeremy is a pivotal figure in the sequence of secretive events that followed the emergence of a new disease in Wuhan in late 2019. Many of the growing concerns revolve around a secretive teleconference Farrar led on February 1 2020, as fears over the emerging pandemic exploded.

And the more we learn through leaks, freedom of information requests, interviews and tenacious investigations, the more it smacks of an establishment conspiracy to stifle debate over high-risk science – ironically by accusing those who challenge the consensus of being conspiracy theorists. The call involved the two most influential scientists in America – controversial presidential adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins, then head of the US major funding body financially supporting high-risk research into bat coronaviruses conducted in Wuhan – plus 11 experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, our government’s chief scientific adviser. We know from Farrar’s book and previous email disclosures that several key participants, including Farrar, were concerned the deadly new virus was linked to research in Wuhan, home to several labs carrying out research into bat coronaviruses.

One Australian-based virologist said he was ‘80 per cent sure this thing had come out of a lab’ while another key participant was ‘60 to 70 per cent’ convinced. After their hour-long discussion, Farrar remained uncertain, saying ‘this will remain grey unless there is access to the Wuhan lab’. Yet, following that call and the airing of those views, the scientists’ public stance changed with bizarre speed for such a vexatious scientific conundrum – especially given the lack of data from Wuhan or any assistance from Beijing. They began publishing punchy statements dismissing lab leaks in the most prestigious science journals, some of which have extensive commercial ties to China. And they were backed by patsy politicians and supine journalists, whose hostility was inflamed by then President Donald Trump’s allegations about the ‘China virus’.

The result was this vital debate was set back at least a year. Farrar and two other Wellcome Trust experts signed a key statement in the Lancet medical journal praising Chinese efforts to tackle the disease while saying they ‘strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid does not have a natural origin’. It later emerged the article was covertly organised within days of the call by Peter Daszak, a British scientist whose New York organisation funnelled US funds to research partners at Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s top biosafety lab. Farrar also quietly assisted five scientists, four of whom were on that call, to write a commentary in Nature Medicine that firmly stated the authors ‘do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible’. This hugely-influential statement has been accessed 5.62 million times and cited by more than 2,000 academic papers.

Read more …

Come for the headline, stay for the content.

Dems’ Voting Bill Is ‘Crass Power Grab’ By ‘Clown Car’ Running DC (JTN)

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a proponent of election integrity reform, said Wednesday that the bills currently making their way through Congress that are designed to federalize elections are part of “the same clown car that has driven this constitutional republic to a disastrous edge.” He made the comments following President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ speeches on Tuesday in Georgia regarding Democrats’ voting legislation. Blackwell, former mayor of Cincinnati, told the John Solomon Reports podcast Wednesday that the Democrats’ election bills are “a crass power grab by the … clown car that is now running Washington, D.C.”

After listing the Biden administration’s unpopular policies and political failures, such as “soaring inflation” and the supply chain crisis, Blackwell explained how the Democrats want to unconstitutionally federalize elections. “[E]lections take place at the local level, in a decentralized way, because, one, that is where you have transparency, that’s where you have familiarity, that’s where you have buy-in,” he said. “And if you start to take it away from states and localities, you run the risk of the same clown car that has driven this constitutional republic to a disastrous edge taking control of our elections. It won’t stand.”

Blackwell criticized Democrats for their inconsistency on showing ID to vote versus providing proof of vaccination as Washington, D.C.’s vaccine mandate — which includes showing a vaccine card and photo ID at venues such as restaurants and gyms — goes into effect Saturday. Regarding voter ID, he said, “To equate these common-sense reforms that states are putting in place to ensure the integrity of the election system as being a throwback to Jim Crow is an insult to all Americans, especially those in the African-American community.”

Read more …

Zero covid will mean zero supplies.

“Mother Of All” Supply Chain Shocks Looms As China Locks Down Ports (ZH)

Over the past month, as Wall Street turned increasingly optimistic on US growth alongside the Fed, with consensus (shaped by the Fed’s leaks and jawboning) now virtually certain of a March rate hike, we have been repeatedly warning that after a huge policy error in 2021 when the Fed erroneously said that inflation is “transitory” (it wasn’t), the central bank is on pace to make another just as big policy mistake in 2022 by hiking as many as 4 times and also running off its massive balance sheet… right into a global growth slowdown.


And, as we have also discussed in recent weeks, one place where this growth slowdown is emerging – besides the upcoming deterioration in US consumption where spending is now being funded to record rates by credit cards before it encounters a troubling air pocket – is China and its “covid-zero” policy in general, and its covid-locked down ports in particular. But what until recently was a minority view confined to our modest website, has since expanded and as Bloomberg writes overnight, the effects of restrictions in China as the country maintains its Covid-zero policy “are starting to hit supply chains in the region.” As a result of the slow movement of goods through some of the country’s busiest and most important ports means shippers are now diverting to Shanghai, causing the types of knock-on delays at the world’s biggest container port that led to massive congestion bottlnecks last summer that eventually translated into a record number of container ships waiting off the coast of California, a glut that hasn’t been cleared to this day.

With sailing schedules already facing delays of about a week, freight forwarders warn of the impact on already back-logged gateways in Europe and the US and is also why HSBC economists are warning that the world economy could be headed for the “mother of all” supply chain shocks if the highly infectious omicron variant which is already swamping much of the global economy spreads across Asia, especially China, at which point disruption to manufacturing will be inevitable. “Temporary, one would hope, but hugely disruptive all the same” in the next few months, they wrote in a research note this week first noted by Bloomberg. For those who have forgotten last year’s global shockwave when China locked down its ports for several days, a quick reminder: it led to an unprecedented hiccup in global logistics and shipping which hasn’t been resolved to this day. That’s because China is the world’s biggest trading nation and its ability to keep its factories humming through the pandemic has been crucial for global supply chains.

Read more …

Disappointing. Advisor to 3 different presidents, Malmgren, tells me nothing I don’t already know about Putin. And he doesn’t appear to say what it is the west gets wrong.

What The West Gets Wrong About Putin (Malmgren)

In 1999, Vladimir Putin suddenly sprang from bureaucratic obscurity to the office of Prime Minister. When, a few months later, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and Putin was voted in as President, governments around the world were taken by surprise yet again. How could this unknown figure have amassed national voter support with so little media attention? I had first met Putin seven years before and was not surprised by his rapid domination of the new Russia. We were introduced by Yevgeny Primakov, widely known as “Russia’s Kissinger”, who I had met in Moscow multiple times during the Cold War years when I advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. Primakov was a no-nonsense thinker and writer. He was also a special emissary for the Kremlin in conducting secret discussions with national leaders around the world.

When Yeltsin tasked his advisor Anatoly Sobchak with identifying and recruiting Russia’s best and brightest, Putin, then a local politician in his hometown of St Petersburg, was top of his list — so Primakov took Putin under his wing to tutor him in global power and security issues. Eventually, Primakov introduced Kissinger to Putin, and they became close. That both Primakov and Kissinger took time to coach Putin on geopolitics and geosecurity was a clear demonstration that they saw in him the characteristics of a powerful leader. It also showed Putin’s capacity for listening to lengthy lessons on geopolitics — as I was soon to learn.

In 1992, I received a call from a meeting organiser at the CSIS think tank inviting me to join a US-Russia St Petersburg Commission to be chaired by Kissinger and Sobchak. The purpose would be to help the new Russian leadership in opening channels of business and banking with the West. Most of the Western members would be CEOs of major US and European companies, as well as key officials of the new Russian government. I would attend as an expert. I was told that a “Mr Primakov” had personally asked if I could make time to participate. I could hardly refuse such a request, and I was intensely curious about the emerging Russian leadership, especially about Putin.

Arriving at the first meeting, I saw several people gathered around Kissinger and a man I was told was Putin. An official identified himself to me and said he had been asked by Primakov to introduce me to Putin. He interrupted the conversation with Kissinger to announce my arrival; Putin warmly responded that he was looking forward to chatting with me about how I see the world from inside Washington. We spoke on several occasions between meetings, and he arranged to sit next to me at a dinner, accompanied by his interpreter. At that dinner, he asked me: “What is the single most important obstacle between your Western businessmen and my fellow Russians in starting up business connections?”

Read more …

The neocons are with Biden now.

US Envoy In Europe Says ‘Drumbeat Of War Is Sounding Loud’ (Hill)

Washington’s envoy in Europe on Thursday issued a stark warning of war in Eastern Europe amid Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s border but said the U.S. and the majority of its allies support ongoing dialogue to tamp down tensions. “We’re facing a crisis in European security. The drumbeat of war is sounding loud, and the rhetoric has gotten rather shrill,” said Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Carpenter spoke with reporters following a meeting of the OSCE focused on advancing diplomacy between the U.S., Europe and Russia, the conclusion of an extraordinary session of three diplomatic meetings on the continent this week and in response to Russian military provocations.


“There’s close to 100,000 troops on the Russian side of its border with Ukraine. Their presence and the live fire measures being carried out are raising many questions about Moscow’s intention,” Carpenter said. The OSCE meeting, which took place in Vienna on Thursday, was the first inaugural permanent council meeting of 2022 but was overtaken by discussions surrounding Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s border. Both nations are members of the security group. It was the first time Russian and Ukrainian officials met in person to discuss what Moscow calls its security concerns and followed bilateral talks between the U.S. and Russia in Geneva on Monday and between Russia and NATO on Wednesday in Brussels.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

Aftter an 8-hour shift wearing a properly fittted N95 mask:

 

 

 

The only half mask that works, according to Steve Kirsch.

 

 

 

Carson

 

 

 

 

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

 

Jan 132022
 


Mattia Preti The Adoration of the Shepherds 1660-99

 

The Pandemic Will Probably Be Over In March (K.)
UK ‘Closest of Any Country’ to Exiting COVID-19 Pandemic (ET)
Covid Is Now Killing Half As Many People Per Day As A Bad Flu Year (DM)
COVID Deaths Jump 40% As US Continues To See More Than 1 Million Cases A Day
CDC-Backed Study Shows Differences Between Delta And Omicron (RT)
Ministry of Health, It’s Time To Admit Failure (Prof. Ehud Qimron )
Israel Is A Trailer Now In Many Ways (Gal.G.)
Danish Newspaper Apologizes For Not Questioning Official COVID Narratives (ZH)
WHO Says Vaccine Mandates Should Be ‘Last Resort’ (SMH)
SARS-COV-2 Vaccines and Neurodegenerative Disease (Seneff)
NY Times Finally Acknowledges ‘Original Antigenic Sin’ (Hammond)
Ronald McDonald House To Evict Families With Unvaccinated Young Children (PM)
Quebec Judge Removes Unvaccinated Father’s Right To Visit Child (WT)
I…TOLD…. YOU…. SO! (Denninger)
Lawsuit Aiming To Break Up Facebook Group Meta Can Go Ahead – US Court (G.)

 

 

World CFR is at its lowest since the beginning of the pandemic, and decreasing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glenn Beck Great Reset

 

 

Malone Bannon

 

 

Valencia

 

 

In Greece.

The Pandemic Will Probably Be Over In March (K.)

Dr Christopher Murray is considered internationally as the “guru” of projections on the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. He is the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and has developed models on the evolution of the pandemic for various countries in the world – including Greece. Dr Murray predicts that about half of the Greek population will be infected with the Omicron variant and believes the peak of the wave will come in mid-January, not at the end, as projected by initial studies. He also believes that the end of the pandemic will come in March, as soon as Omicron is completely gone, and recommends reopening schools as long as there are enough teachers. But his main conclusion is the need to stop dramatizing the pandemic, saying that it does not make sense to focus on the number of cases. He argues that the key figures are the number of hospital admissions, especially to intensive care units.

What is your prognosis as to how long the pandemic will last? Well, as far as we can understand from Omicron, we think that it’s so transmissible it will move through the population in Greece and in each country that it shows up in in a pretty short period from introduction to peak in four to six weeks. So most of the Omicron wave should happen in the month of January in Greece. What percentage of the population do you expect to get infected with this variant? Well, we expect that probably as much as half of the population or more will get infected with Omicron, and that’s despite vaccination levels and past infection with other variants of Covid. So a very large fraction of both Greece but also the world should get Omicron.

So is there any sense in trying to control Omicron, really? Well, what do we know about Omicron? We know that it’s very transmissible; it can infect people that have been previously infected; in terms of infection, it can break through in those that are vaccinated or even those that have had a booster. But it is much less severe than past variances, maybe 90% or 95% less severe. So huge numbers are coming, but much less severe. There still will be pressure on the health system, because of the very big number of infections and a smaller fraction going to hospital. So it’s really going to be hard to control infection. But there still will be some consequences on the population.

Do you expect hospitalizations to go up? We expect hospitalizations to go up, but nothing like past waves, and from what we’ve seen in South Africa now in the United Kingdom and in some of the earlier states in the US, even amongst those that end up in hospital, it’s also 80% to 90% less severe, so many fewer are ending up in the ICU, even amongst those that go to hospital. So all encouraging signs about severity, but just the sheer numbers – half of the population – getting Omicron means that we will see an increase in hospitalizations.

Have you observed any kind of strange effects from Omicron – things you didn’t expect? I think when it first emerged in November – and we had no real data about severity – there was tremendous concern that we would see this nightmare of mass transmission, and then slightly less severe than Delta, and hospitals would be overwhelmed as the death rate would soar. That hasn’t happened fortunately. It’s turned out to be much less severe and today we’re not really seeing anything particularly unusual except this fact that 80% to 90% of people who get infected have no symptoms at all. So that makes a really big difference in terms of impact on the population.

Is this in a way the beginning of the end of the pandemic, because everybody has been saying that at some point it will become like a flu. A severe flu perhaps, but a flu. Are we reaching that point now with Omicron? You know it’s a great question and I think very hard to answer in a strictly scientific way. But many people do think that, because there’ll be so many people infected with Omicron, it’ll give a big boost to the immunity level of populations that it will take a new variant to emerge before we see after the Omicron wave more transmission. So it may be the thing that brings us to the point where we go to an endemic stage, where Covid doesn’t go away, but we should see it may become that seasonal disease that we’ve been expecting for quite some time.

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Endemic or pandemic?

UK ‘Closest of Any Country’ to Exiting COVID-19 Pandemic (ET)

The UK is the closest of any country in the northern hemisphere to exiting the COVID-19 pandemic and seeing it become endemic, an expert has said. Professor David Heymann, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), said the UK is probably one of the countries with the highest levels of population immunity. Talking at a Chatham House online briefing on Tuesday, Heymann said that countries in the northern hemisphere have “varying stages of the pandemic,” and the UK is probably “the closest to any country of being out of the pandemic if it isn’t already out of the pandemic and having the disease as endemic.” He said population immunity is already high and “seems to be keeping the virus and its variants at bay, not causing serious illness or death.”


Heymann cited the Office for National Statistics as saying that about 95 percent of the population in England and a little less in other parts of the UK already have antibodies either from vaccination or from natural infection. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which caused the COVID-19 pandemic, is now “functioning more like an endemic coronavirus than one that is a pandemic,” he said. The leading expert said there would be resurgences of COVID-19 in the future and more variants will arise, though it was not clear of what severity. “We’re fortunate in that we have vaccines which can be modified very rapidly, and put into production very rapidly to deal with an escapee,” he said.

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We need a flu passport.

Covid Is Now Killing Half As Many People Per Day As A Bad Flu Year (DM)

Daily Covid deaths are currently running at less than half the rate expected in a bad flu year, MailOnline analysis suggests as experts claim the UK is finally on the brink of beating the pandemic. There are growing calls for No10 to learn to live with Covid rather than focus on halting the spread of the virus now there is such a big disconnect between infections and deaths. Right now just 130 people are dying from the coronavirus every day in England at what is believed to be the peak of the Omicron outbreak, compared to 1,300 last January before vaccines were widely available. Daily deaths have barely moved since the start of autumn, despite infection rates more than quadrupling over the same time following the emergence of the ultra-transmissible variant.


For comparison, Government estimates show there were more than 400 influenza deaths per day at the peak of the last bad flu season in 2017/18, and almost 300 daily fatalities the previous year. Just like this winter, hospitals were forced to cancel routine operations and patients were told to steer clear of A&E units during both of those outbreaks. Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert from the University of East Anglia, said the figures showed that the burden of Covid is now comparable to flu. He told MailOnline Covid would ‘almost certainly’ get weaker every year as people develop natural immunity and eventually become a common cold that kills only the very vulnerable further down the line. ‘Once we’re past this Omicron peak — excluding another unexpected variant that reverses all of our progress — then we’ll be close to the point of endemic,’ Professor Hunter added.

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Different from UK. Still, none of them are Omicron.

COVID Deaths Jump 40% As US Continues To See More Than 1 Million Cases A Day

Deaths involving patients with COVID increased by 40% over the past week, according to the CDC. But as it happens, almost all of the deaths reported involve patients infected with delta, not the omicron variant which is now responsible for nearly all COVID cases. On average, the US reported about 1,600 cases a day last week, up from about 1,150 the week before, said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. The US has continued to report more than 1 million cases a day, according to Johns Hopkins, with a record-breaking 1.35 million reported yesterday alone. Walensky, who spoke during a White House COVID Response Team briefing, said she believes these deaths are just “left over” fatalities from the delta wave – nothing to worry about.


Of course, there’s no way the CDC can truly know this for certain. The government’s COVID policies are mostly just grasping at straws. Though they would never admit that. So, why is it so hard to believe that delta alone is accounting for these deaths? Well, for one, the government believes the omicron variant accounts for 98.3% of all new cases. Public health officials will monitor “deaths over the next several weeks to see the impact of omicron on mortality,” Walenksy said during the briefing. “Given the sheer number of cases, we may see deaths from omicron, but I suspect the deaths we’re seeing now are still from delta.” Of course, while Walensky delivered the news with her characteristic alarmism, we feel it’s important to take a beat and put it all in context. See the chart. Deaths are nowhere near the highs from last winter.

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“..91% less risk of death, with zero patients requiring ventilators..”

CDC-Backed Study Shows Differences Between Delta And Omicron (RT)

While a study out of southern California shows the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is much milder than the Delta, US health authorities continue to insist on vaccination, boosters and masking due to “strained” hospitals. CDC director Rochelle Walensky shared on Wednesday the results of the latest study backed by the agency, showing the disparity between the two variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A team of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente and the CDC analyzed data from almost 70,000 people in southern California and plugged it into their models. The pre-print results of their study were published on MedRXiv on Tuesday. Walensky tweeted that the study showed Omicron represented 53% less risk of symptomatic hospitalization, 74% less risk of intensive care admission, and 91% less risk of death, with zero patients requiring ventilators.

This is based on the study that analyzed 52,297 people who tested positive for Omicron and 16,982 with Delta between November 30, 2021 and January 1, 2022. Of those, 235 (0.5%) were hospitalized with Omicron and 222 (1.3%) with Delta infections. During a period of both variants circulating, presumed Omicron infections “were associated with substantially reduced risk of severe clinical endpoints and shorter durations of hospital stay,” according to the study. Walensky wasn’t quite taking a victory lap, however, warning in a follow-up tweet that Omicron may be less severe, but is “much more transmissible.” “We are seeing the unprecedented impact,” the CDC director said, pointing to over a million positive tests in a single day and “99% of counties with high transmission [and] strained healthcare systems.” “Protect against Covid-19: get vaccinated + boosted, wear a mask & stay home if sick,” she added.

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“You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.”

Ministry of Health, It’s Time To Admit Failure (Prof. Ehud Qimron )

Udi Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and a leading Israeli immunologist, has taken the opportunity posed by the collapsing narrative to release this open letter to the authorities (this is a mechanical translation from the original Hebrew):

Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure

In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so. Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame. You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge.

You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again. You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007,” p. 26). You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.

You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults, than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020. You refused to adopt the “Great Barrington Declaration,” signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common-sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).

You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did to some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

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Twitter thread. More at the link.

Israel Is A Trailer Now In Many Ways (Gal.G.)

Hi followers from around the world, I feel that we need to take a moment and explain to you what is happening in #Israel today. Everything is so fast & crazy, but as we’ve said many times, Israel is a trailer now in many ways, and if you want time to prepare – read carefully. There is complete chaos in Israel today. The Omicron did not scare parents enough to vaccinate the 5-plus-year-olds, nor did the vaccine teams that came to the schools do the job. So the madness goes up a gear. You are all probably familiar with Macron’s bullying speech. This speech was a whistle calling on all fascists in the public sphere to wake up and call together for our government – “Be Macron” and to embitter the lives of the unvaccinated.

Opinion columns were published one after another – calling for distancing, excluding, marking, degrading, complicating and also imprisoning away from society “the unvaccinated”. And this was just the ground of incitement on which everything rests, the preparation of society. Voices began to address covid in a military-security language, school safety authorities (supposed to protect children from enemy harm) were directed to address dialogue with *parents*, and principals asked parents to treat the school as a closed military area (from them) For a few days there seemed to be HOPE, more people “woke up” to realize that the demand for a 4th booster didn’t make sense, In MSM & medical consensus suddenly they questioned the policy and necessity of the Green Pass, raise possibility that the omicron would naturally V us


Suddenly, overnight, there was again a sharp change in language in public discourse – MSM began to treat any criticism of COVID policy and/or opposition to the vaccine as *national security* offenses in Israel punishable by death or life imprisonment. It is unprecedented and very staggering. It also affects the scope of the critical voices. Then – the regulations and rules and the press releases – did not stop changing. For a moment, malls closed for unvaxxed, a moment later they opened, only to close again in another way. The same goes for education, health services, state borders and more. Most of the public service’s offices – are opened only with Green Pass. The courts are silent and supporting this policy. * As a lawyer- I lost all remaining trust in the legal system that I was a part of for many years and full heartedly believed in despite criticism.

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The first?! Still took two years though.

Danish Newspaper Apologizes For Not Questioning Official COVID Narratives (ZH)

In August, Germany’s top newspaper, Bild, apologized for the outlet’s fear-driven Covid coverage – with special message to children, who were told “that they were going to murder their grandma.” Now, a newspaper in Denmark has publicly apologized for reporting government narratives surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic without questioning them. “We failed,” reads the article’s headline from tabloid Ekstra Bladet, which goes on to admit that “For ALMOST two years, we – the press and the population – have been almost hypnotically preoccupied with the authorities’ daily coronavirus figures. “(translated).

“WE HAVE STARED at the oscillations of the number pendulum when it came to infected, hospitalized and died with corona. And we have been given the significance of the pendulum’s smallest movements laid out by experts, politicians and authorities, who have constantly warned us about the dormant corona monster under our beds. A monster just waiting for us to fall asleep so it can strike in the gloom and darkness of the night.

THE CONSTANT mental alertness has worn out tremendously on all of us. That is why we – the press – must also take stock of our own efforts. And we have failed.

WE HAVE NOT been vigilant enough at the garden gate when the authorities were required to answer what it actually meant that people are hospitalized with corona and not because of corona. Because it makes a difference. A big difference. Exactly, the official hospitalization numbers have been shown to be 27 percent higher than the actual figure for how many there are in the hospital, simply because they have corona. We only know that now.

OF COURSE, it is first and foremost the authorities who are responsible for informing the population correctly, accurately and honestly. The figures for how many are sick and died of corona should, for obvious reasons, have been published long ago, so we got the clearest picture of the monster under the bed.

IN ALL, the messages of the authorities and politicians to the people in this historic crisis leave much to be desired. And therefore they lie as they have ridden when parts of the population lose confidence in them.

ANOTHER example: The vaccines are consistently referred to as our ‘superweapon’. And our hospitals are called ‘superhospitals’. Nevertheless, these super-hospitals are apparently maximally pressured, even though almost the entire population is armed with a super-weapon. Even children have been vaccinated on a huge scale, which has not been done in our neighboring countries.

IN OTHER WORDS, there is something here that does not deserve the term ‘super’. Whether it’s the vaccines, the hospitals, or a mixture of it all, is every man’s bid. But at least the authorities’ communication to the population in no way deserves the term ‘super’. On the contrary.”

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“..because not everyone in the world has the same access to vaccines.”

WHO Says Vaccine Mandates Should Be ‘Last Resort’ (SMH)

The WHO on Wednesday said vaccination status should not be used to disqualify people from travelling internationally and governments should only use vaccine mandates as a “last resort”. The comments came in response to questions from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age about the ongoing row surrounding world’s No.1 men’s tennis player Novak Djokovic. Only vaccinated people are currently eligible to enter Australia after the country’s border reopened on a limited basis late last year. A few hotel quarantine spaces are maintained for the non-vaccinated and those given exemptions. Australia and other jurisdictions around the world have also introduced vaccine passports or apps to allow entry to major events, restaurants and other facilities. They are also now required for workers in some professions.

Djokovic, who has refused to be vaccinated, successfully sought entry to Australia based on claims that a December COVID-19 infection qualified him for an exemption. He was blocked by Australian Border Force officials, but the Federal Circuit Court overturned the cancellation of his visa. Federal Immigration Minister Alex Hawke is now considering whether to use his discretionary ministerial powers to deport the Serbian. The situation in effect means Australian Open spectators will have to be vaccinated to watch Djokovic, despite the player himself remaining unvaccinated. Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said vaccine mandates should be used with caution and only when a government facing a severe outbreak has failed to persuade its population to get jabbed.

“We see mandates as a last resort … in the face of a large epidemic,” he said. “So yes, there are circumstances in which vaccine mandates are supported by WHO but, again, it is subjected to the basic principle that the best way to get people vaccinated is to inform them, to educate, to have a dialogue and to address people’s genuine concerns. “We always ask that those mandates be clear, be explicit, be time-limited and at the same time … governments continue to explain to people why they’re doing things and continue to try and convince people of the benefits of vaccine rather than reverting to mandates as a single approach.” The director of WHO’s Department of Immunisation, Vaccines and Biologicals, Katherine O’Brien, added that no one should be denied access to international travel based on their vaccination status because not everyone in the world has the same access to vaccines.

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“Such unprecedented vaccines normally take twelve years to develop, with only a 2% success rate, but these vaccines were developed and brought to market in less than a year.”

SARS-COV-2 Vaccines and Neurodegenerative Disease (Seneff)

People don’t realize that these vaccines are vastly different from the many childhood vaccines we are now used to getting early in life. I find it shocking that the vaccine developers and the government officials across the globe are wrecklessly pushing these vaccines on an unsuspecting population. Together with Dr. Greg Nigh, I recently published a peer-reviewed paper on the technology behind the mRNA vaccines and the many potentially unknown consequences to health . Such unprecedented vaccines normally take twelve years to develop, with only a 2% success rate, but these vaccines were developed and brought to market in less than a year. As a consequence, we have no direct knowledge of any effects that the vaccines might have on our health over the long term.

However, knowledge about how these vaccines work, how the immune system works and how neurodegenerative diseases come about can be brought to bear on the problem in order to predict potential devastating future consequences of the vaccines. The mRNA in these vaccines codes for the spike protein normally synthesized by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, both the mRNA and the protein it produces have been changed from the original version in the virus with the intent to increase rate of production of the protein in an infected cell and the durability of both the mRNA and the spike protein it codes for. Additional ingredients like cationic lipids and polyethylene glycol are also toxic with unknown consequences. The vaccines were approved for emergency use based on grossly inadequate studies to evaluate safety and effectiveness.

Our paper showed that there are several mechanisms by which these vaccines could lead to severe disease, including autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative diseases, vascular disorders (hemorrhaging and blood clots) and possibly reproductive issues. There is also the risk that the vaccines will accelerate the emergence of new strains of the virus that are no longer sensitive to the antibodies produced by the vaccines. When people are immune compromised (e.g., taking chemotherapy for cancer), the antibodies they produce may not be able to keep the virus in check because the immune system is too impaired. Just as in the case of antibiotic resistance, new strains evolve within an infected immune-compromised person’s body that produce a version of the spike protein that no longer binds with the acquired antibodies.

These new strains quickly come to dominate over the original strain, especially when the general population is heavily vaccinated with a vaccine that is specific to the original strain. This problem is likely going to necessitate the repeated rollout of new versions of the vaccine at periodic intervals that people will have to receive to induce yet another round of antibody production in an endless game of cat and mouse. Like the mRNA vaccines, the DNA vaccines are based on novel biotech gene editing techniques that are brand new, so they too are a massive experiment unleashed on a huge unsuspecting population, with unknown consequences.

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“..original antigenic sin can occur either with infection or with vaccination. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence is that it does not occur with infection.”

NY Times Finally Acknowledges ‘Original Antigenic Sin’ (Hammond)

As the New York Times describes it, “original antigenic sin” is when “the immune system’s response is tailored to the first version of the virus, and its responses to subsequent variants are much less powerful.” The Omicron variant has many mutations in its spike protein, so “antibodies made for the original version of the virus struggle to recognize the latest version.” There are “clues” that original antigenic sin could be a real problem with COVID-19 vaccines, vaccinologist Amy Sherman told the Times. However, the way the Times describes original antigenic sin, it makes it sounds as though it refers simply to a mismatch between the antigen component of the vaccine and circulating strains of the virus. But the term does not simply mean that there is a mismatch. The Times makes it sound as though a mismatch were the definition of original antigenic sin, but that is wrong.

There can be a mismatch between the vaccine antigen and circulating variants without the occurrence of original antigenic sin. What “original antigenic sin” refers to is not just an antigenic mismatch but a phenomenon in which the original priming of the immune system prejudices any subsequent immune response due to reexposure to a different strain of the virus in way that results in suboptimal immunity as compared to the immune response that otherwise would have occurred had the host been immunologically naïve. In the absence of an original antigenic sin phenomena, circulating antibodies from vaccination might not protect against infection because of a mismatch between those antibodies and the circulating strain, but the immune system would nevertheless relearn from the infection and mount newly adapted immune responses that are optimized for the infecting strain of the virus.

Original antigenic sin is when the immune system produces ineffectual immune responses to the newly infecting variant because it is stuck in a mode of producing immune responses specific to the antigen from the initial immunologic priming. To reiterate specifically in the context of COVID-19 vaccines, if original antigenic sin occurs, it means not only that the immune responses from vaccination are a mismatch to a newly infecting variant, but also that the immune system fails to adequately adapt its responses to the new variant. It is stuck mounting responses to the spike protein of an extinct strain of the coronavirus, and so the immune response to any subsequent viral exposures will always be suboptimal.

Depending on the virus, original antigenic sin can occur either with infection or with vaccination. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the evidence is that it does not occur with infection. Natural immunity is not only robust and durable, but also broad and adaptive. There is long-term immunological memory with evolution of antibody-producing cells to generate higher affinity antibodies with increased capability of neutralizing whatever variant. Even if, as with Omicron, a variant emerges that partially escapes the neutralizing capability of existing antibodies, it is likely that the immune system will update itself and start adapting to more effectively fight off the infecting strain.

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Didn’t get the memo that vaccines don’t stop infection or transmission.

Ronald McDonald House To Evict Families With Unvaccinated Young Children (PM)

The Ronald McDonald House in Vancouver British Columbia allegedly served an eviction notice on unvaccinated children with serious illness including cancer and their parents. Austin Furgason, from Kelowna, British Columbia, the father of a 4-year-old boy with leukemia who has been undergoing treatment since October, posted the video to Facebook showing a letter from Ronald McDonald House Charities – British Columbia & Yukon that made the announcement of the evictions. A GoFundMe has been set up to help the family with costs. He wrote, “All tenants, adults and children over the age of 5 who are not vaccinated are out by the end of January. How absolutely wicked and vile.” “They are evicting my son with leukemia and any other children or adults who are suffering with sick children into the snow.”

Furgason added, “The Covid cult is far more dangerous than Covid. If they will evict families with cancer, what won’t they do.” The letter in the video, which was provided to True North dated January 10, 2022, said that everyone five years and older unvaccinated against the coronavirus can no longer stay at the facilities. “Beginning January 17, 2022, everyone five years and older who are working, staying or visiting our facilities (both the House at 4567 Heather St. Vancouver and at the Family Room in Surrey Memorial Hospital) must show proof of full vaccination (two doses), in addition to completing our existing screening, unless an Accommodation has been sought and has been explicitly approved and granted by RMHC (Ronald McDonald House Charities) in writing.”

Families already in the facility have a grace period to get at least one dose of the vaccine which ends on January 31. Fergason told True North on Tuesday night, “My wife Lindsey was crying on the bed. I told her, I’m going to go ask the manager about this because this isn’t even real.” “I said, this couldn’t be real.”

Vancouver

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“Quebec has been a laboratory for COVID-19 restrictions and authoritarian measures.”

Quebec Judge Removes Unvaccinated Father’s Right To Visit Child (WT)

“[…] it would normally have been in the child’s best interest to have contact with his father, but not in his best interest to have contact with him if he is unvaccinated and opposed to health measures in the current epidemiological context”, judge Jean-Sébastien Vaillancourt wrote in his December 23rd opinion. The mother and father had a previously agreed-upon visitation schedule, but their agreement was taken in front of the courts after the father asked for one additional day with his 12-year old child during the holidays. The mother opposed the additional day and asked the court to revoke entirely the father’s visitation rights after learning that he had not received the COVID-19 vaccine. The mother added that he was a “conspiracy theorist”.

The mother and the judge used to father’s opposition against the current COVID-19 restrictions against him: “excerpts from Mr.’s Facebook page produced by Ms. reveal that he does indeed appear to be opposed to vaccines and health measures”, the judge wrote. The mother argued that she lived with her boyfriend and two other young children, therefore the father endangered them by not being vaccinated and risking bringing COVID into the household. Despite the ludicrous argument, the judge agreed in his decision: “Under these circumstances, it is not in the best interests of any of the three children for Mr. to be able to exercise access to [his 12-year-old] at this time.”

In Canada and around the world, the rights of unvaccinated individuals have been slowly degrading. In most Canadian provinces, unvaccinated individuals are not allowed in restaurants or public events. Recently, the Quebec government said it is considering requiring proof of vaccination at grocery stores and pharmacies that also offer at-home delivery. The Quebec government has also announced it would put a “significant” tax on the unvaccinated, possibly leading to criminal offenses and prison if unpaid. Quebec has been a laboratory for COVID-19 restrictions and authoritarian measures. This new judgment shows that the mentality has also infiltrated the court system.

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“The governments involved all knew before the shots were released that they were dangerous and would become worthless.”

I…TOLD…. YOU…. SO! (Denninger)

We knew the *******s would not work and were harmful. We didn’t think so, we knew so, and further we knew that someone who had been infected was at least in part protected from said harm by the mechanism infection uses. I pointed all this out without having what Veritas has now published merely by deduction. We knew in September of 2020 there was a risk issue with the spike in the circulation that was not in most cases present from natural infection and we knew by December of 2020 it was singularly dangerous. It is now confirmed that DARPA and THE GOVERNMENT knew this and proceeded to purchase and deploy the shots anyway.

We also knew that there were other fingers in the pie including American ones before *****-19 was announced to exist because the transfer agreement with a US University was known to exist more than a year ago and it was executed in 2019 before *****-19 was claimed to have “emerged” in China. How can you do something that requires a thing before the second thing happens? You can’t, ergo, the government and the private organizations knew damned well ***** existed before the agreement was signed.

So now have what I’ve maintained all along is in in official government-documented form: The virus was man-made. Ecohealth tried to get funding through DARPA and was told to go to Hell because it violated the constraint on gain-of-function research. Fauci didn’t give a **** and his part of the NIH funded it. BOTH THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA created the virus; it was a joint and intentional project, not rogue actors in Wuhan or Beijing who were responsible. There were people in both China and here in the US (along with presumably other nations) who were involved. They all knew damn well what happened and all of them have lied for the last 2+ years about it. That almost-certainly includes both Trump and Biden, incidentally.

The governments involved all knew before the shots were released that they were dangerous and would become worthless. They knew that natural infection did not, in most cases, carry the same risk because the virus never gets into the bloodstream in other than severe and fatal cases but there is no way to avoid that risk with an injection. We now know this factually from clinical experience (and in fact knew in the early part of 2020) — viremia does not happen in other than severe and fatal cases and yet you can’t give someone an injection without the injected material winding up in the blood in some amount.

The governments also knew that *****-19 itself was not dangerous most of the time to healthy individuals and they knew why. It was deliberately engineered that way in an attempt, this paper alleges, as an experiment to be inoculated intentionally into bats in an attempt to see whether doing so could cut off future zoonotic events. Whether the experiment went wrong by accident or intent is not known, but that it was taking place and both our government and China knew about it, along with knowing that it should not be very dangerous to most people is now established as fact.

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Wait till you meet Zuckerberg’s lawyers.

Lawsuit Aiming To Break Up Facebook Group Meta Can Go Ahead – US Court (G.)

The US competition watchdog can proceed with a breakup lawsuit against Facebook’s owner, a federal judge has ruled. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had asked a court to dismiss an antitrust complaint brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for the second time. However, Judge James Boasberg said on Tuesday that the FTC’s revised lawsuit should be allowed to proceed. “Ultimately, whether the FTC will be able to prove its case and prevail at summary judgment and trial is anyone’s guess. The court declines to engage in such speculation and simply concludes that at this motion-to-dismiss stage, where the FTC’s allegations are treated as true, the agency has stated a plausible claim for relief,” wrote Boasberg, of the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

The FTC, under the new chair, Lina Khan, wants to force Meta to sell its photo-sharing app Instagram and its messaging service WhatsApp in one of the biggest challenges the government has brought against a tech company in decades. Its lawsuit accuses Meta of pursuing a “course of anti-competitive conduct”. The FTC originally sued Facebook during the Trump administration, and its complaint was rejected by the court in June last year. The agency filed an amended complaint in August, adding more detail on the accusation that the social media company had crushed or bought rivals. Meta’s platforms are used by 2.8 billion people around the world on a daily basis.

Boasberg said this time round the FTC had been “far more robust and detailed” in presenting its case. He wrote: “The agency has also explained that Facebook not only possesses monopoly power but that it has wilfully maintained that power through anti-competitive conduct – specifically, the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.”

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Jan 122022
 
 January 12, 2022  Posted by at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  88 Responses »


Caravaggio Burial of St. Lucy 1608

 

Rand Paul Driving Violent Threats Against Me, Fauci Says (R.)
Fauci Confronts Rand Paul Over Murder Plot (RT)
A 30-year Lie On Misplaced Vaccines (Girardot)
Omicron May Be Headed For A Rapid Drop In US and Britain (AP)
Medical Experts Shred Latest CDC COVID-19 Study (JTN)
Spain First EU Country To Suggest Downgrading Covid To ‘Like The Flu’ (Sun)
Repeated Covid Boosters Not Viable Strategy Against New Variants – WHO (G.)
It Turns Out That, If You Doubted Covid’s Deadliness, You Were Correct (AT)
Quebec Plans To Hit Unvaccinated With A ‘Significant’ Tax (NP)
Scots May Have To Wear Facemasks In Public For Years To Come – Sturgeon (DM)
Covid Loses 50% Of Ability To Infect After 10 Seconds In Office Air (NYP)
Biden Backs Calls To Abolish Key Senate Procedure (RT)
Biden, Harris Bash Republicans As ‘Totalitarian’, Wanting ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ (JTN)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Djokovic

 

 

Fauci started out saying that who disagrees with him is against science. This is a lot more dangerous. Now anybody who disagrees with him is trying to kill him.

Rand Paul Driving Violent Threats Against Me, Fauci Says (R.)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official, on Tuesday accused Republican Senator Rand Paul of spreading misinformation that has sparked threats of violence against him and his family while distracting the public from the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. At a Senate health committee hearing, Fauci had his latest heated back-and-forth with Paul, a lawmaker from Kentucky and supporter of former President Donald Trump. Fauci said Paul was focused on misinformed attacks rather than oversight aimed at addressing the health care crisis that has so far killed more than 800,000 people in the United States. Paul’s website accuses Fauci of “ignoring good advice, and lying about everything from masks to the contagiousness of the virus” and on Tuesday the senator accused Fauci of smearing other scientists who disagreed with him.


Fauci said Paul was distorting the truth. “There you go again, you just do the same thing every hearing,” Fauci told the senator, accusing him of making personal attacks that had no relation to reality. ‘ “He’s doing this for political reasons,” Fauci continued, pointing to fundraising appeals on Paul’s website next to a call to have Fauci fired. “It distracts from what we’re all trying to do here today, (which) is get our arms around the epidemic and the pandemic that we’re dealing with, not something imaginary,” Fauci said. Fauci has faced sharp criticism from some conservatives and death threats from people who object to measures such as vaccination and masking that he has advocated to halt the pandemic. Fauci said misinformation had fueled such threats. “What happens when he (Paul) gets out and accuses me of things that are completely untrue is that all of a sudden, that kindles the crazies out there and I have … threats upon my life, harassment of my family and my children,” Fauci said.

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“A planner who believes he is The Science leads to an arrogance that justifies in his mind using government resources to smear and destroy the reputations of other scientists that disagree with him..”

Fauci Confronts Rand Paul Over Murder Plot (RT)

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of being responsible for over 800,000 US deaths from the coronavirus. The Biden administration’s covid czar said Paul’s criticism put his life in danger. The latest clash between Paul and Fauci came on Tuesday at the Senate Health Committee hearing on the US response to Covid-19 variants. At one point, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser held up a printout of a page on the Kentucky senator’s website, with a “Fire Dr. Fauci” banner, to claim that such rhetoric inspired a California man arrested last month for allegedly plotting to murder him. The man, arrested in Iowa on December 21, had an AR-15 rifle and multiple magazines, and told police he was driving to Washington, DC to kill Fauci, the doctor told senators.

“You are making a catastrophic epidemic for your political gain,” Fauci told Paul. Paul pointed to Fauci, as the lead architect of the US government’s pandemic response, and asked how he could call any of it – the lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, boosters – a success when over 800,000 people have died. The libertarian-leaning Republican also called out Fauci for being a central planner whose arrogance led to compounding mistakes. “The idea that a government official like yourself would claim unilaterally to represent science and that any criticism of you would be considered a criticism of science itself is quite dangerous,” Paul said. “A planner who believes he is The Science leads to an arrogance that justifies in his mind using government resources to smear and destroy the reputations of other scientists that disagree with him,” the senator added.

“This is not only antithetical to the scientific method, it is the epitome of cheap politics and it is reprehensible.” This was a reference to last month’s revelations that Fauci had worked with National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins in 2020 to discredit critics of lockdowns who signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Emails released by Congress showed Collins asking Fauci for a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises” and later praising him for an “excellent” job.

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“How can an injection in the deltoid stimulate an immunity in the mucus?”

A 30-year Lie On Misplaced Vaccines (Girardot)

In the accelerated development of anti-COVID vaccines, the focus was essentially on developing the right “code” to transfer to the immune system, mainly on the relatively narrow Spike protein, as you all know by now. They also focused on the best delivery vehicle – the lipid nanoparticle – and optimal manufacturing processes. However, vaccine effectiveness depends on many other factors. A systems approach was needed, not a pinpoint solution approach. It’s not enough to find and to present the right antigens – with the right quality – to the immune system, even packed into the latest and greatest technology…

Unfortunately, after a year of vaccination and 9.5 billion doses, vaccine failure is visible to everybody to acknowledge: unforeseen transmission, explosion of cases… If you believe “Our World In Data”, we’ve had 240 million infections in 2021 – when we vaccinated like never before. We only had 70 million in 2020 when we had no vaccines… Based on case numbers, the vaccine is not even putting a dent in the epidemic. Either by media-induced panic, by sheer incompetence, or possibly by customary corruption, vaccine stakeholders have presented a completely false narrative on anti-COVID vaccine effectiveness.

For nearly a year now, I have been exposing two critical inconsistencies in terms of the location of the vaccine-induced immunity that make it nearly impossible for these vaccines to be effective: How can an injection in the deltoid stimulate an immunity in the mucus? Respiratory virus like SARS-COV-2 typically propagate in the mucus: mouth, nose, digestive tract and lungs. For propagation to be stopped in the mucus, notably in the lungs, a preemptive immune arsenal needs to be stimulated there. This is exactly what occurs once recovered from a natural infection: a sterilising immunity is provided by potent resident memory T and B-cells – along with neutralising IgA antibodies – that are positioned in large numbers as a sentinel force to kill in-the-egg any starting infection.

I have addressed this at length in my June article comparing natural immunity and vaccine-induced immunity as well as in my August article on pre-existing immunity. I am not alone in thinking along these lines; many renowned scientists share a similar perspective that intramuscular vaccines cannot work for mucosal viruses. [..] .. it is very unlikely that any intramuscular vaccines can ever work to stop COVID; the vaccines are injected in the wrong location: the muscle, too far away from the virus entry point to stimulate any response there. This is not related to mRNA or DNA technologies, attenuated virus vaccines are also de facto ineffective. This is simply a question of location of where the vaccine is delivered… And the fact that millions have been vaccinated against the flu in the arm every year for decades, most likely uselessly shouldn’t change this reality …

Given the emphasis of vaccine manufacturers and public health authorities on antibodies, you’re all probably thinking: – “Hey Marc ?! What about neutralising antibodies?” The question is: What can antibodies do to stop a propagation that is cell-to-cell? To start, vaccine-induced antibodies are also misplaced … circulating in the blood away from the mucus. And, even if a few antibodies were to migrate to the mucus, they would very much be useless against a virus that propagates cell-to-cell. Fundamentally, cell-to-cell propagation means the virus expansion happens out-of-reach of antibodies (at least before Omicron). Antibodies can’t bind with viruses that are inside cells, only T-cells can chase down virions inside cells by instructing infected cells to self-destruct…

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..“simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected..”

Omicron May Be Headed For A Rapid Drop In US and Britain (AP)

Scientists are seeing signals that COVID-192 s alarming omicron wave may have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases may start dropping off dramatically. The reason: The variant has proved so wildly contagious that it may already be running out of people to infect, just a month and a half after it was first detected in South Africa. “It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. At the same time, experts warn that much is still uncertain about how the next phase of the pandemic might unfold. The plateauing or ebbing in the two countries is not happening everywhere at the same time or at the same pace.

And weeks or months of misery still lie ahead for patients and overwhelmed hospitals even if the drop-off comes to pass. “There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that reported cases will peak within the week. The University of Washington’s own highly influential model projects that the number of daily reported cases in the U.S. will crest at 1.2 million by Jan. 19 and will then fall sharply “simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected,” according to Mokdad.

In fact, he said, by the university’s complex calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. — an estimate that includes people who were never tested — has already peaked, hitting 6 million on Jan. 6. In Britain, meanwhile, new COVID-19 cases dropped to about 140,000 a day in the last week, after skyrocketing to more than 200,000 a day earlier this month, according to government data. Kevin McConway, a retired professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, said that while cases are still rising in places such as southwest England and the West Midlands, the outbreak may have peaked in London. The figures have raised hopes that the two countries are about to undergo something similar to what happened in South Africa, where in the span of about a month the wave crested at record highs and then fell significantly.

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More about the “Covid leads to diabetes” nonsense.

Medical Experts Shred Latest CDC COVID-19 Study (JTN)

Even as CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has started sounding more like COVID-19 policy skeptics, the agency continues promoting research that fits its agenda but quickly provokes professional challenge. For the second time in less than a month, medical experts pounced on the methodology of a study published in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is not peer-reviewed. The CDC’s COVID and diabetes researchers found that children and teens who recovered from infections are “up to” 2.5 times likelier to develop diabetes, which was uncritically reported across mainstream media Friday. The increased risk to this age group shows the importance of COVID prevention, “including vaccination for all eligible persons,” researchers wrote. “Prevent COVID-19 by using tools like masks and #vaccines for those eligible,” the agency tweeted.

Medical professors at the University of Pittsburgh, University of California San Francisco and Harvard’s medical and public health schools quickly provided informal — and highly critical — peer review. The study has “really really major limitations,” according to Walid Gellad, director of Pitt’s Center for Pharmaceutical Policy & Prescribing, citing its own disclosures. The researchers used a “single ICD-10-CM code, did not include laboratory data at the time of diagnosis, and could not reliably distinguish between type 1 and type 2 diabetes,” the study says. It’s also missing information on “covariates” including obesity that “could have affected the association” between infection and diabetes. “The CDC is back with a new piece of propagan— I mean, a new publication,” UCSF’s Vinay Prasad wrote in a lengthy analysis, calling the study “embarrassing.”

The analysis “hinges on the idea that age-sex matched kids without covid should be comparable to the kids who got covid in terms of risk of diabetes,” but the infection may be more likely to affect “kids of lower socioeconomic status, of certain races, and kids who were already overweight or suffering from medical problems,” he wrote. “Does the CDC attempt to correct for any of these confounders? Not at all,” Prasad said. Also not considered: “the true denominator” of infections as determined by seroprevalance and the increased blood tests for kids who get treated for COVID. He was baffled why the CDC claimed the study showed the need for child vaccinations, “a topic of wide global debate, with differing recommendations by nation (US vs UK).”

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How do you get 27 different countries to agree on this though?

Spain First EU Country To Suggest Downgrading Covid To ‘Like The Flu’ (Sun)

SPAIN could be the first European country to downgrade Covid-19 to a” flu-like” status – just two years after clocking 1,000 deaths a day from the virus. Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez pushed his EU counterparts to debate the possibility of treating Covid like the flu. The European leader told a local radio channel the situation in Spain “is not what we faced a year ago” and that it was time “to evaluate the evolution of COVID to an endemic illness”. The move would see lockdowns and daily infection counts scrapped in favour of a system that would track Covid cases like the regular flu. It comes as a string of positive studies show Omicron is milder than other strains, with data revealing the risk of hospitalisation is 50 to 70 per cent lower than with Delta. Covid booster jabs protect against Omicron and offer the best chance to get through the pandemic, health officials have repeatedly said.


The Sun’s Jabs Army campaign is helping get the vital extra vaccines in Brits’ arms to ward off the need for any new restrictions and protect the NHS. The measure is set to meet stiff resistance from Germany and France where vaccinations rates remain low and where French President Emmanuel Macron has promised to make engaging in public life as tough as possible for the unvaccinated. Sánchez cited Spain’s “exemplary” vaccine uptake which has seen more than 90 per cent of the population over 11 years old become fully vaccinated and 85 per cent of over 60s get a booster as a case for the radical change. Spain has also seen their fatality rate drop to 1 per cent, down from 13 per cent at the height of the first wave of Covid-19 when it experienced 1,000 deaths a day. In the UK, 83 per cent of the population aged 12 and over are fully vaccinated while 63 per cent have had their booster jab, according to the latest government figures.

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Houston, we have a problem.

Repeated Covid Boosters Not Viable Strategy Against New Variants – WHO (G.)

World Health Organization experts have warned that repeating booster doses of the original Covid vaccines is not a viable strategy against emerging variants and called for new jabs that better protect against transmission. “A vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable,” the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Covid-19 Vaccine Composition (TAG-Co-VAC) said in a statement published on Tuesday. The group of experts, who are working to assess the performance of Covid-19 vaccines, called for the development of new vaccines that not only protect people who contract Covid against falling seriously ill but also better prevent people from catching the virus in the first place, in order to deal with emerging Covid variants such as Omicron.

“Covid-19 vaccines that have high impact on prevention of infection and transmission, in addition to the prevention of severe disease and death, are needed and should be developed,” the advisory group said. This, it said, would help lower “community transmission and the need for stringent and broad-reaching public health and social measures”. It also suggested that vaccine developers should strive to create jabs that “elicit immune responses that are broad, strong, and long-lasting in order to reduce the need for successive booster doses”. As the virus evolves and until new vaccines are available, “the composition of current Covid-19 vaccines may need to be updated”, the group said.

According to the WHO, 331 candidate vaccines are being worked on around the world. The UN health agency has so far given its stamp of approval to versions of eight different vaccines. A growing body of evidence indicates that the Omicron Covid variant is not only far more transmissible than previous variants, but also better at dodging some vaccine protections. Earlier this week, Pfizer Inc chief executive Albert Bourla said a redesigned Covid-19 vaccine that specifically targets the Omicron variant is likely to be needed and his company could have one ready to launch by March.

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“We know now that two-thirds of deaths for Americans with COVID are people with six or more comorbidities.”

It Turns Out That, If You Doubted Covid’s Deadliness, You Were Correct (AT)

Walensky has acknowledged that, when it comes to vaccinated people who still died from COVID, almost 80% of them had one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So, really, these are people who were unwell to begin with. And yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron; this means not only just to get your primary series but to get your booster series. And yes, we’re really encouraged by these results.” The study, from the CDC, says: “Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.”

Another interesting thing that emerged during the same appearance is that, as with any other virus, people are most contagious when they’re not yet symptomatic. This renders much of the ten-day lockdown period irrelevant, as even Walensky conceded: “Isolation, we talk about isolation in the context of people who’ve had a positive test, who know that they are infected. And we now have dozens of studies referenced on the CDC website that have demonstrated that you are most infectious in the one to two days before your symptoms and the two to three days after your symptoms. So by five days after your symptoms, the vast majority of your contagiousness is really behind you.”

Dr. Scott Atlas appeared on Tucker Carlson to discuss Walensky’s revelations and was unimpressed. When it comes to morbidity, he said, it’s long been known, only it was kept from the American public. Atlas also reminded Tucker and his audience that there’s a huge difference between being hospitalized for COVID and being hospitalized with COVID. As even Fauci conceded, the latter was mostly true for children. Atlas then said something truly surprising that will further devastate those on the left: “We know now that two-thirds of deaths for Americans with COVID are people with six or more comorbidities.” In other words, unless your health is fragile to begin with, you’re going to be fine

Tucker Atlas

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This is all about control, not health. Otherwise this tax would be levied on smokers and fat people too.

Quebec Plans To Hit Unvaccinated With A ‘Significant’ Tax (NP)

The Quebec government wants to impose a “significant” financial penalty on the “small minority” of Quebecers who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Premier François Legault made the announcement — which would be a first in Canada — during a press conference on Tuesday. He said he was working on the tax with Finance Minister Eric Girard while also reviewing the measure’s legality. “Unfortunately, there is still a small minority, about 10 per cent of the population, that refuses to get vaccinated,” Legault said. “I sense the frustration from Quebecers towards that minority that … is clogging our hospitals.” “That is why I am announcing that we are currently working on a health contribution that will be charged to all Quebec adults who refuse to get vaccinated,” he continued, adding that people with medical exemptions would be excluded from the new tax.


Legault did not announce any details nor a date for the new tax, nor did he specify the amount except to say that it would be “significant.” The premier said that unvaccinated Quebecers currently occupy 50 per cent of intensive care unit beds in the province, despite being one tenth of the population. “It is shocking,” he said. “People who refuse to get vaccinated impose a burden on (health care) personnel and an important financial burden on the majority of Quebecers.” “All adults in Quebec who don’t accept to go get at least a first dose in the next few weeks will have a bill to pay because there are consequences on our health system and its not up to all Quebecers to pay for that,” he added. The measure, which is sure to be controversial both in the province and in Canada, was immediately criticized by opposition party Québec Solidaire as “radical” for “completely” forgetting vulnerable people such as the homeless or those suffering from severe mental health issues.

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WTF guidance.

Scots May Have To Wear Facemasks In Public For Years To Come – Sturgeon (DM)

People in Scotland may have to wear masks in public places for years to come, Nicola Sturgeon has warned. The First Minister insisted that tough curbs dramatically imposed on hospitality venues and large gatherings from Boxing Day had stemmed the spread of Covid, despite official figures showing that Scotland’s virus rate is higher than England’s. And furious business leaders said Miss Sturgeon’s ‘gamble’ with restrictions must end after they failed to make ‘any meaningful difference’ to infections in Scotland. Speaking ahead of today’s announcement about extending restrictions beyond next week, Miss Sturgeon said face coverings ‘might be required in the longer-term to enable us to live with it [Covid] with far fewer protective measures’.

In England, Covid restrictions could start to be lifted this month after Michael Gove said Britain was moving towards a situation where it could ‘live with’ the virus. Downing Street is examining options to lift Plan B measures in stages if cases remain too high to remove them all in one go. Extending Covid passes, due to expire on January 26, would require another bruising clash with Tory backbenchers, which No10 wants to avoid.

But some ministers are pushing for the WFH guidance to be removed first, arguing that it causes the most damage to the economy. Miss Sturgeon told STV’s Scotland Tonight: ‘Sometimes when you hear people talk about learning to live with Covid, what seems to be suggested is that one morning we’ll wake up and not have to worry about it any more, and not have to do anything to try to contain and control it. ‘That’s not what I mean when I say “learning to live with it”. Instead, we will have to ask ourselves what adaptations to pre-pandemic life — face coverings, for example — might be required in the longer-term to enable us to live with it with far fewer protective measures.’

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Is this a good thing, or not?

Covid Loses 50% Of Ability To Infect After 10 Seconds In Office Air (NYP)

The coronavirus loses about 50 percent of its ability to infect about 10 seconds after it becomes airborne in a typical office environment, according to a new study about how the deadly bug survives in exhaled air. “People have been focused on poorly ventilated spaces and thinking about airborne transmission over meters or across a room,” said Prof. Jonathan Reid, director of the University of Bristol’s Aerosol Research Centre, the Guardian reported. “I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but I think still, the greatest risk of exposure is when you’re close to someone,” said Reid, the lead author of the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. “When you move further away, not only is the aerosol diluted down, there’s also less infectious virus because the virus has lost infectivity (as a result of time),” he added.


The UK university researchers’ findings highlight the impact of short-range transmission — and stress the importance of physical distancing and masking up as the best way to avoid infection. While still worthwhile, ventilation was deemed to be less effective, the news outlet reported. The study determined that viral particles quickly lose moisture and dry out after they are expelled from the lungs. The particles’ pH also rises rapidly when the carbon dioxide in their environment drops, the news outlet reported. The relative humidity of the surrounding air affects how fast the particles dry out. When under 50 percent, such as the relatively dry air in an office, the virus had become half as infectious within 10 seconds. But at 90 percent humidity, 52 percent of particles remained infectious after five minutes, dropping to about 10 percent after 20 minutes.

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“..Though Biden had spent 36 years in the Senate and repeatedly defended the filibuster when Democrats were in the minority..”

Biden Backs Calls To Abolish Key Senate Procedure (RT)

US President Joe Biden has called for the Senate to change the rule requiring 60 votes to move a bill forward, saying it was the only way to pass the two Democrat initiatives federalizing elections and ensure “majority rule.” Speaking in Atlanta, Georgia on Tuesday, Biden declared “this is the moment to decide to defend our elections, to defend our democracy.” He said he’d been having “quiet conversations” about the change with members of Congress over the past two months. “I’m tired of being quiet,” Biden said, raising his voice. “Today, I’m making it clear. To protect our democracy, I support changing the Senate rules whichever way they need to be changed, to prevent a minority of senators from blocking actions on voting rights.” “The majority should rule in the US Senate,” he added.

While Democrats have a nine-vote majority in the House of Representatives, the Senate is split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as the tie-breaker. While this 51-vote majority has been used to approve Biden’s nominations, the long-standing filibuster rule requiring at least 60 votes to pass bills stands in the way of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Both have been proposed by Democrats as a way of imposing a federal standard on US elections in response to what they called “voter suppression” bills passed by Republican state legislatures after the controversial 2020 vote. Repeating that accusation on Tuesday, Biden argued that “history has never been kind to those who sided with voter suppression over voter rights,” and compared anyone opposed to the bills to racists and segregationists.

Though Biden had spent 36 years in the Senate and repeatedly defended the filibuster when Democrats were in the minority, on Tuesday, he argued that “the threat to our democracy is so grave that we must find a way to pass these voting rights bills.” Last week, on the anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot, Biden called the 2020 election “the greatest demonstration of democracy in the history of this country.” Officially, Biden won the highest number of votes in US history.

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On track to lose the midterms.

“..Jan. 6, which he described as a moment “so stark” it “stopped time”..”

Biden, Harris Bash Republicans As ‘Totalitarian’, Wanting ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ (JTN)

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at a rally Tuesday in Georgia bashed Republicans several times throughout voting rights speeches. Former President Donald Trump and the GOP were accused by Biden and Harris of making it more difficult for people to vote, trying to create a totalitarian state and being on the side of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Both officials mentioned the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “Across our nation anti-voter laws could make it more difficult for as many as 55 million Americans to vote. That is one out of six people in our country,” Harris said during her push to institute national election reform through the Democrat-led Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Republicans have stood against these laws, which they say will eviscerate state voter ID laws and create more election fraud.

“The proponents of these laws are not only putting in place obstacles to the ballot box, they are also working to interfere with our election to get the outcomes they want and to discredit those that they don’t,” Harris jabbed at the GOP over Jan. 6 and possibly over the discredited Trump-Russia scandal. “If we stand idly by, our entire nation will pay the price for generations to come,” Harris grimly said. She also voiced her support for abolishing the filibuster, which she said was not constitutionally protected. “Senate Republicans have exploited arcane rules to block these bills. And let us be clear: the Constitution of the United States gives the Congress the power to pass legislation and nowhere, nowhere does the constitution give a minority the right to unilaterally block legislation.”

Biden began his speech by reflecting on Jan. 6, which he described as a moment “so stark” it “stopped time” and divides “all that came before and everything that followed.” He also said Jan. 6 was a “dreadful day when a dagger was literally held at the throat of American democracy.” While several Jan. 6 rioters have been charged with carrying knifes, such as Douglas Jensen who allegedly carried a knife with a 3-inch blade in his pocket at the time, there is no evidence to support anyone “literally” brought a dagger into the Capitol, much less held it against someone’s throat.

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GOAT

 

 

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Jan 112022
 
 January 11, 2022  Posted by at 4:24 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  22 Responses »


Giovanni Strazza The Veiled Virgin 1850s
(Hard to believe this sculpture is made of -Carrera- marble)

 

 

With Omicron taking over at lightning speed, and what we know about it from South Africa and Denmark, it would seem that we can relax. It’s reported to be 100x less deadly than Alpha/Delta, and perhaps less deadly than the common flu. If you’ve had Alpha/Delta, you can still get Omicron, but an Omicron infection appears to make you immune to Alpha/Delta.

As far as we can see, nobody’s dying from Omicron, intubations are rare at best, and positive tests, even if they do end up in hospital, are mostly released as fast as they came in. It’s simply over. It’ll take another few weeks for this to become impossible to ignore, but it’s already there. A number of voices have called for treating it like the flu; Spain appears to have made that its official policy.

It’s over. And media, politicians and “experts” will need to jockey for position. They will not apologize for all the fear induced, or the human rights broken, they will make you believe that their new position is perfectly in line with what they’ve done over the past two years, and all that has changed is “The Science”.

The WHO hasn’t given up yet, and is giving it its last best according to today’s headlines:
“WHO Gives Grim Prediction On Omicron Spread”,
“WHO: More Than Half of Europeans Will Get Omicron”.
Half of Europeans will be “infected” with a “virus” that is 100x less virulent than Alpha/Delta, so who cares? They’ll catch the flu too. But the media will label them: “Covid cases”, making no difference between “variants”. And making you afraid of something you have no reason to be afraid of.

The best example I saw was in a local Greek paper -in English- that not just called every positive test a “case”, a widely accepted piece of nonsense, they labeled 31,000 positive testing kids “patients”. You go from a disputable “positive test” to a “case” to “patients”. How many of these kids needed medical attention? Maybe 100?

At least half of what people think they know about the past two years of their lives has been based on the distortion of language. And that distortion continues as the jockeying for position takes off. It works something like this, as illustrated by a tweet from the UK yesterday:

“MSM this morning:
• BBC: Cut self isolation period
• Guardian: End Mass Jabs
• The Times: End Free Tests
• Daily Mail: Scotland Against Lockdown
• Telegraph: Dodgy Covid Data
• Evening Standard: Covid is endemic


Can you see what’s happening? They’re moving to the winning side.”

 

 

The greatest proponents for all of these ruinous Covid measures… will be rewriting their own history..
https://twitter.com/i/status/1480295361549946880

 

This from CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky is almost verbatim the Great Barrington Declaration, mocked by the NIH’s Fauci and Collins for being written by “fringe epidemiologists”.

 

 

More Walensky: “US May See ‘Precipitous Decline’ In Omicron Cases”.

Also Walensky: “..the overwhelming number of deaths over 75% occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with”. She said that in a video I posted January 9, that has now been pulled from YouTube. What it all adds up to so far is that the CDC secretly admits the number people who actually died FROM Covid has been exaggerated by a factor of between 10 and 100%.

And that the CDC, as Omicron cases skyrocket, prepares you for a ‘Precipitous Decline’ in these cases. Just so they can say: “I told you so” in a few weeks. It’s not only the worst comedy we have for you, it’s also the only one.

 

CNN has a lot of rewriting to do too, and they’ve started (it took them, and their team of experts, only 2 years to figure this out:)

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1480682158238752770

 

 

Sadly, the spread of Covid may be over, having been “tranquillized” by Omicron, but the story is not. People are, and will be, talking about a return to normal, but there is no normal to return to. Not after two years. Take a child, anywhere between 0 and 7 years old. Anywhere in that age range, two years of their lives have been deeply disrupted, by school closings, other lockdowns, and maybe most by face masks. They’ve never had normal interaction with smiles, and other facial expressions, exactly when that is elementary to their development.

Restrictions have led many people into depressions, suicides, and less severe hence less detectable mental consequences. How many of them will never return to “normal”? We don’t know, but the numbers will be huge. We cannot return to normal, there’s nothing left to return to, we will have to build a new normal.

And we should build that on the rejection of governments trampling on our rights and freedoms, on rejecting media that censor those who don’t share their one-dimensional “The Science” clickbait message, and on rejecting “The Science” itself, as incorporated by the likes of Tony Fauci. And Pfizer. If we don’t, our normal will be 1984.

The media is slowly admitting they overcounted any threats to your health, only one in ten of positive tests was a “case”, as in required a doctor, not all of them, but now they try to make you believe that you should lock up with an N95 mask because of a “variant” that is only a threat for one in 100 positive tests, if that.

 

 

What remains, however, is another threat. That of the consequences of mRNA “vaccines”, and even more, that of boosters. Carefully silenced by the media, but very real. The US VAERS system, which registers adverse events to vaccines, reported its 1 millionth case a few days ago, and some 20,000 deaths. This is just the US, and it registers only between 1% and 10% of what actually goes on. Health personnel are by law required to report to it, but they don’t, and nobody challenges them on it.

The EU has a system like that too, EudraVigilance, with the exact same issues. You set up a system with a legal mandate, and then let it slowly evaporate if that suits your purpose. It seems reasonable to presume total global deaths from the vaccines are at about 500,000 now. But those are just the people that drop dead immediately -like football players-, or within weeks.

More concerning is the effect of unleashing spike proteins with “vaccines”, and more with “boosters”, into organs all over the body of millions upon millions of so far reasonably healthy looking people. They can last for at least many months, and spread way beyond the site of injection. That is the real danger, and we won’t know how severe it is for a long time, because it has never been tested.

An interview Geert Vanden Bossche did with Dutch outlet OverNu (Google translate) provides one vision of where we’re headed. Geert is the guy who has warned for almost two years that mass vaccination into a pandemic is the worst idea ever.

 

 

The World after Omicron | The Beginning of the End

“Omicron will infect almost everyone,” says Vanden Bossche. “This will initially lead to a drastic increase in the number of sick people, especially among the vaccinated. Because their vaccinated antibodies can do little against Omicron, but at the same time will interfere with their innate immune system, I expect that the vaccinated will become seriously ill more often than the unvaccinated.”

The virologist sees the wave of contamination from Omicron as a blessing in disguise. The collective upgrade of the innate antibodies will lead to herd immunity, which will bring the transmission of the virus under control, and the Omicron wave will rapidly decrease in strength. “Actually, Omicron is a kind of natural vaccine,” says Vanden Bossche. “Omicron could be the last chance to get out of this crisis unscathed.”

However, the booster programs that have started worldwide imply that governments are not seizing the opportunity. Vanden Bossche fears those programs will have the opposite effect. To start with, they are once again exposing the population to the as yet little known side effects of the vaccines. Although the vaccines will cause a temporary increase in antibodies, those antibodies are still intended for the corona variant from two years ago. They won’t be able to stop the chance of infection with Omicron and the transmission of Omicron, but they will increase the pressure on the virus to change.

“These booster vaccinations will only cause even more problems,” Vanden Bossche concludes. Those problems will extend beyond the emergence of virus variants that will enter cells via a different domain of the spike protein. In those variants, the vaccinal antibodies will not attack the new binding domain. The vaccinal antibodies will also no longer prevent the virus from entering cells. The vaccinated antibodies that have become ineffective will sit like a cap around the virus. As a result, not only will the innate antibodies no longer recognize the virus, but the virus will also be able to slip into host cells even more easily, without having to take the usual route.

The scientific term for this type of phenomenon is antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). ADE is a notorious phenomenon, which has surfaced in studies into the possibilities of making vaccines against SARS-CoV-1, dengue and RSV. The major danger of ADE is the acceleration of the onset of the disease symptoms. They develop so quickly that the help of the body’s own immune system or medical treatment can come too late. In this way, ADE would make the successor to Omicron an extremely formidable pathogen. If nature really is ill-disposed towards humanity, the phenomenon may even start playing with an omicron vaccine a few months after mass vaccinations, although Vanden Bossche does not dare to put his hand into the fire.

Vanden Bossche cannot predict exactly what the clinical picture of an infection with the post-Omicron virus will look like in vaccinated people. He fears that older people with underlying chronic diseases will no longer be the main target of post-Omicron, but that the occurrence of ADE will mainly affect children. After all, their innate antibodies are still little ‘trained’ by previous exposure to coronaviruses, which means that they will quickly be outcompeted by vaccinated antibodies. The chance of death from infection with the original coronavirus from Wuhan was a fraction of one percent, according to calculations by John Ioannides. “If the scenarios we are now talking about come true, we may be talking about percentages,” says Vanden Bossche. “Or maybe even tens of percents.”

If that pitch-black scenario materializes, the unvaccinated with well-functioning immune systems will be significantly more likely to escape than the vaccinated. That is certainly the case if those unvaccinated have recently come into contact with coronaviruses. But also unvaccinated people can still fall victim to the social disruption that such a disaster scenario will cause. In retrospect, historians will no doubt determine that a grossly wrong approach to the pandemic, followed by the collapse of all infrastructures and the outbreak of chaos, caused countless more victims than the original Wuhan virus itself could ever have caused.

“Of course I hope it doesn’t come to that”, Vanden Bossche sighs. “I hope we will be wise enough to stop mass vaccinations in time. I hope that we will still take measures that curb both the infection pressure and the disease at an early stage. But should those hopes fail, global catastrophe is the only logical outcome. There will be regions that will escape this coming catastrophe, but our regions are not one of them. “I see a gloomy outlook for Western countries, from the US to the EU, and from Israel to Australia,” says Vanden Bossche. “For Western culture, this could well mean the end.”

Africa probably still has the best chances, Vanden Bossche suspects. “I don’t mean the North African countries, nor South Africa, but the countries in between, where only a small percentage of the population has been vaccinated.” The virologist is aware that it sounds unlikely, as we have learned to associate Africa with hunger, bloody civil wars and corruption. “It is indeed ironic. Yet I suspect that if the rest of the planet continues on its path, Africa will be humanity’s last hope.”

 

 

 

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Jan 112022
 
 January 11, 2022  Posted by at 10:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  84 Responses »


Rembrandt van Rijn The Adoration of the Magi 16xx

 

USCF Covid Doctor: The Hospital Surge Isn’t What You May Think (SFGate)
Gloomsters Admit They Were Wildly Wrong About 75,000 Omicron Deaths (DM)
Huge Number of Vax Deaths & It’s Getting Worse – Dr. Pierre Kory (USAW)
Numbers Killed by Vaccines Much Worse than We Thought (Bhakdi, Yeadon)
Double Vaccinated Have Double the Infection Rate (DS)
Omicron 105% More Transmissible Than Delta, Says Study (BS)
Has The Great Barrington Declaration Been Vindicated? (Unherd)
T-Cells From Common Colds Can Provide Protection Against Covid-19 (R.)
Health Officials Let Covid-infected Staff Stay On The Job (AP)
Light It Up! (Kunstler)
Where’s The Wood? (Denninger)
80% of Airline Pilots Aren’t Going To Take The Booster (Kirsch)
Military Documents About Gain Of Function Contradict Fauci Testimony (Veritas)
International Finance Leaders Hold ‘War Game’ Exercise (CHD)

 

 

Trends: 99% of Omicron infections are harmless. Vaccine injuries and deaths are now coming to the fore. Can the narrative be controlled for much longer?

 

 

“Omicron has learned how to read!!! Of the 30 mutations in its spike gene, 24 have been characterized in scientific publications. Also, it borrowed defining mutations from alpha, beta, delta, eta, epsilon, iota and mu. Even though it was in hiding when these variants emerged.”

 

 

 

Pfizer CEO Vaccine 1.1

 

 

The greatest proponents for all of these ruinous Covid measures… will be rewriting their own history..
https://twitter.com/i/status/1480295361549946880

 

 

Rewriting as we speak….
https://twitter.com/i/status/1480682158238752770

 

 

 

 

“As currently reported, COVID hospitalization rates greatly exaggerate COVID burden. Incidental positives account for large majority of hospitalized cases in both LA and Bay Area.”

“The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance.”

USCF Covid Doctor: The Hospital Surge Isn’t What You May Think (SFGate)

On Saturday, in response to hospitals begging for relief from a massive staffing crisis, the California Department of Public Health announced that most hospitals and skilled nursing facilities can bring COVID-positive and exposed staff back to work without testing or quarantines. The staffers must be asymptomatic, are required to wear N95 masks and are encouraged to work with patients who are already COVID-positive as much as possible. This news might come as a surprise to people who have been reading dire warnings about omicron and some public health officials’ pleas to cancel plans and stay home. Many public health officials have argued these measures are necessary to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID patients.

Indeed, for the past few weeks, San Francisco hospitals have been in dire straits. But it’s not because people are sick — it’s because of staffing shortages driven by overly strict state quarantine rules, the director of COVID response at UCSF’s emergency department said. After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons. “The real COVID crisis that our hospitals are facing is a severe staffing shortage that is compromising the quality of our care,” Noble said Friday, shortly before the policy change was announced. Staffing shortages are so severe that California is considering canceling elective surgeries, as happened during the worst of last year’s peak.

“The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations,” Noble wrote in an email to SFGATE. “The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines. … The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance.” It’s true that case counts are shattering records set last year, and Noble predicts the peak is still a week away. But fewer people are hospitalized with COVID today in California compared with this time last year. And, especially in highly vaccinated areas, few of those patients are actually in the hospital because of COVID illness. In LA, where 71% of eligible people are fully vaccinated, two-thirds of hospital cases were caught on screening for the virus, the LA Times reported.

[..] she identified 44 hospitalized patients (both adults and children) with COVID. Of those, just 13 were admitted because of COVID. “I do not expect that number to increase substantially, or become unmanageable in the coming week,” she wrote. “The death rate in California is actually falling. And the predicted peak of cases is only about a week away.” The remaining 31, or 70%, of patients tested positive after being admitted for unrelated reasons, including a hip fracture and a bowel obstruction. They’re all “completely asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic,” Noble said. “[Emergency departments] are flooded with the worried well that are simply seeking testing and reassurance,” she added. “I have not intubated a single COVID patient during this Omicron surge. We have a total of 5 patients with COVID on ventilators across our 4 hospitals. An average of 1.25 intubated COVID patients per hospital is a good news story.”

Read more …

Neil Ferguson, anyone?

Gloomsters Admit They Were Wildly Wrong About 75,000 Omicron Deaths (DM)

The scientists who warned that Britain had little option but to impose severe restrictions or face tens of thousands of deaths from Omicron were last night in retreat. First, modellers who advise the Government said winter deaths from the highly transmissible variant would be ‘substantially’ lower than they had originally believed, then Independent SAGE, a group of Left-leaning scientists who have pushed for lockdowns, distanced themselves from the need to impose further curbs. Before Christmas, epidemiologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine produced a series of dire scenarios in which they warned Omicron could lead to between 25,000 and 75,000 deaths by the end of April. But one of its leading modellers said last night he believes the true figure will be far lower, mainly due to Omicron being less lethal than originally feared.

Dr Davies said that since mid-December he and his team had been in constant communication with senior civil servants and government scientific advisers, discussing emerging data that pointed towards Omicron having lower severity than originally feared, and the implications this could have for policy Tory MP William Wragg, a member of the party’s Covid Recovery Group, said the U-turn provided evidence that many in the scientific community had been too gloomy about the threat from coronavirus. ‘Once again, it appears that certain scientists and experts so quick to spread gloom and panic at the arrival of Omicron are having to come to terms with a reality that is far from the catastrophe they were predicting,’ he said. ‘It all shows that Boris Johnson and his Cabinet were right to avoid condemning us to another lockdown with the dismal effects on people’s livelihoods and liberties.’

The School of Hygiene’s team built its original models – published on December 11 – on the assumption that Omicron was as naturally lethal as the Delta strain, meaning it would kill the same proportion of unvaccinated people who had not been exposed to Covid before. Dr Davies argued that while South African doctors were already finding Omicron appeared to be less severe, the reports were ‘anecdotal’ so the School of Hygiene’s supposition was ‘a reasonable assumption to make at the time’. Over the past month, however, considerable evidence has built up that Omicron is less dangerous. This includes statistical studies by Imperial College London, Edinburgh University and the UK Health Security Agency, as well as research from South Africa and Denmark. Laboratory studies have also found Omicron is less adept at infecting the lungs.

Read more …

This is the story coming out, that needs to be suppressed.

Huge Number of Vax Deaths & It’s Getting Worse – Dr. Pierre Kory (USAW)

Former Pfizer VP Dr. Michael Yeadon said this week, “Max vaccination is leading to mass death.” Dr. Kory agrees and explains, “It’s not only data from a life insurance company that came out this week that is based on CDC data that can’t be explained by Covid alone, there are huge increases of dying in this country this year. . . . They have done huge analysis of the European mortality data as well as the U.S. mortality data and they controlled for vaccination status. They found that for every age range that they looked at, the all-cause mortality of the vaccinated were increased over the unvaccinated. All-cause mortality and that means that you are more likely to die of something if you are vaccinated. . . .


All-cause mortality are coming out of actual databases by credible scientists. You have life insurance companies showing the data, and you have our own federal government showing unexplained large rises in dying. . . . Don’t you think a good scientific question and a good hypothesis to test would be ‘Could these be the vaccines?’ The answer is ‘the vaccines,’ and I cannot find a better fit to answering that hypothesis than that, it’s this mass explosion of this vaccination policy with single, double and booster shots. It’s going like wildfire through the population. If the mortality of the vaccinated is higher than the unvaccinated, you have the data that you can safely and confidently conclude the vaccines are associated with and causing death.”

Read more …

But it will be hard to keep it silent much longer.

Numbers Killed by Vaccines Much Worse than We Thought (Bhakdi, Yeadon)

My good friend Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, with whom we and others wrote a series of open letters to the European Medicines Agency, is utterly distraught. Listen carefully. He and his colleague, a pathologist, have confirmed that, even in people who’ve died post-covid-19 vaccination and where their death was not attributed to the adverse effects of vaccination, in almost all cases they DID die as a result of the vaccination. The numbers killed by these vaccines is much worse than what we thought, already. But it’s what they’ve just discovered that’s much worse. We knew of blood clots from expressing spike protein. We were aware of autoimmune attacks on ones own tissues expressing spike protein to which our killer lymphocytes were primed, such as myocarditis.

But what’s new is the revelation that lymph node cells are also being invaded by the gene-based agents and marking THEM for auto destruction. When you destroy that part of the immune system, which we loosely call “immune surveillance”, every manner of nasty, latent infections, by viruses & also bacteria, explode, uncontrolled. Hundreds of millions of people are going to die of unrestrained tuberculosis, Epstein Barr virus, toxoplasmosis etc etc etc AND on top of this, the daily accidental production of cancer cells, normally deleted swiftly by immune surveillance, before they can divide, ceases. Guess what happens next? I don’t care where you’ve sat during this ridiculous “pandemic”. Whether you’ve gone along with it, knowing it was an overreaction. Or even in ignorance.

I am telling you right now: IF YOU PERSONALLY HAVING WATCHED THIS CHOOSE TO SETTLE BACK TO WATCH A FILM, INSTEAD OF CALLING SOME PEOPLE YOU KNOW & TELLING THEM ABOUT IT, THE END OF HUMANITY IS A SHARED BURDEN WITH THE PERPETRATORS. Please put this on every platform. Swamp the ‘fact checkers’. Please do it now. Rescue our civilization while there are innocents to save, ESPECIALLY our children and grandchildren. Thank you sincerely,

Read more …

And triple?

Double Vaccinated Have Double the Infection Rate (DS)

The double-vaccinated are almost twice as likely to be infected as unvaccinated people, data from Iceland shows. This is the same pattern as found in data from the U.K. Thorsteinn Siglaugsson has written about the trend in Morgunbladid, the main national newspaper in Iceland, and put up a translation on his website.

“After December 20th, the 14-day incidence of COVID-19 infection by vaccination status took a very unexpected turn in Iceland. The infection rate per 100,000 of fully vaccinated adults with booster is now eleven times higher than on December 20th, and the infection rate of double-vaccinated adults seven times higher. At the same time, infections among unvaccinated people have grown by a factor of 2.6 only. Among children, we see a similar change: a tenfold increase among the fully vaccinated while the rate among the unvaccinated is 2.4 times higher than on December 20th. This change can hardly be explained away by changes in behaviour, such a sudden and decisive change of behavior between groups is impossible. It is also unlikely that testing has suddenly increased this sharply among some groups and not others.

We know the protection against infection from vaccination wanes rapidly, but it is out of the question that it should drop so suddenly. The most likely explanation is the new Omicron variant. Foreign data also indicate that the currently available vaccines have little or no effect against Omicron infection. The data published on covid.is are weighted; the different size of the groups is adjusted for. This means we can use them to conclude regarding probability of infection. At present, triple-vaccinated people are only 30% less likely to get infected than unvaccinated adults, and for vaccinated children the difference is only 15%. This small difference decreases rapidly in both groups. The biggest news, however, is that double-vaccinated people are now 90% more likely to get infected than the unvaccinated. This suggests that the protection provided by two doses of vaccine is in fact less than none, it is the opposite.”

After Siglaugsson’s article was published on January 8th, the Icelandic Chief Epidemiologist claimed the finding was an artefact of the official data overestimating the number of unvaccinated people. However, Siglaugsson suggests the overestimate would have to be an implausible 90% to bring the infection rates level.

Read more …

Double Vaccinated =2x. Omicron=2x. Are we looking at 22?

Omicron 105% More Transmissible Than Delta, Says Study (BS)

The Omicron Covid-19 variant may be 105 per cent more transmissible than Delta, according to a research by French scientists. The study, published on the medRxiv site and yet to be peer-reviewed, analysed 131,478 tests in France from October 25 to December 18, 2021. The team applied statistical models to variant-specific screening tests and full genome sequencing. They compared the number of infections with the Omicron, Alpha and the Delta variants over a 21-day period. The difference in rate of transmissibility in people with the Delta and Omicron was approximately 105 per cent.


“We estimate that the transmission advantage of the Omicron variant over the Delta variant is more than 105 per cent,” said Samuel Alizon, from Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology (CIRB) France. Further, the results showed that tests consistent with the presence of the Omicron variant exhibit significantly higher cycle threshold Ct values, which could indicate lower amounts of virus genetic material. “Epidemiological modelling indicates that even if the virulence of the Omicron variant is reduced compared to that of the Delta variant, the increase in reproduction number we estimate from the data can has the potential to maintain critical Covid-19 activity at a high level in French hospitals, if not overloading them,” Alizon said adding that “swift mitigation of the epidemic wave” is essential.

Read more …

Not as long as Fauci is around.

Has The Great Barrington Declaration Been Vindicated? (Unherd)

Over the course of the past two years, Italy has implemented some of the strictest and longest lockdowns in the world (indeed, it is the country that “invented” the concept of national lockdown), topping every other Western country in terms of average stringency of anti-Covid measures. Yet Italy is also one of the countries with the highest mortality rate per capita — well above the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden and several other countries that adopted much less restrictive measures. And there’s evidence that this isn’t despite the lockdowns but, most likely, because of them.

As Piero Stanig and Gianmarco Daniele, two professors at Bocconi University, explain in their book Fallimento lockdown (“Lockdown Failure”), the worst possible thing you can do when dealing with a highly infectious disease that spreads almost exclusively indoors and targets the elderly is to lock old people up inside their homes with other family members, and ban citizens from spending time in arguably the safest place of all: outdoors. In other words, even from the narrow perspective of saving lives, not only were lockdowns not in the collective interest of society, they weren’t even in the interest of those whose lives were actually at risk. Such an outcome was easily predictable. Indeed, the WHO’s 2019 report on pandemic preparedness states that the quarantine of exposed individuals — let alone of the entire population — “is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure”.

The grotesquery of the global responses becomes even more apparent when we take into account the fact that while governments went out of their way to keep healthy people locked in, chasing runners down solitary beaches or checking shopping trolleys to make sure people were only buying essentials, they all but abandoned those most vulnerable: nursing home residents. According to a recent Collateral Global study, Covid deaths in nursing homes amount on average to a staggering 40% of all Covid deaths in Western countries, despite representing less than 1% of the population. In some countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US), more than 5% of all care home residents were killed.

In view of this, it seems obvious that the focused protection approach championed by the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — based on “allow[ing] those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — was the right course of action. It would have avoided inflicting needless pain on workers, women and children through repeated lockdowns, while arguably saving countless lives, by focusing first and foremost on the elderly and especially on nursing homes.

Read more …

Exactly what Great Barrington Professor @SunetraGupta said from the very beginning. The common cold had given many of us some protection against Covid.

T-Cells From Common Colds Can Provide Protection Against Covid-19 (R.)

High levels of T-cells from common cold coronaviruses can provide protection against Covid-19, an Imperial College London study published on Monday has found, which could inform approaches for second-generation vaccines. Immunity against Covid-19 is a complex picture, and while there is evidence of waning antibody levels six months after vaccination, T-cells are also believed to play a vital role in providing protection. The study, which began in September 2020, looked at levels of cross-reactive T-cells generated by previous common colds in 52 household contacts of positive Covid-19 cases shortly after exposure, to see if they went on to develop infection.

It found that the 26 who did not develop infection had significantly higher levels of those T-cells than people who did get infected. Imperial did not say how long protection from the T-cells would last. “We found that high levels of pre-existing T cells, created by the body when infected with other human coronaviruses like the common cold, can protect against Covid-19 infection,” study author Dr Rhia Kundu said. The authors of the study, published in Nature Communications, said that the internal proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which are targeted by the T-cells could offer an alternative target for vaccine makers.

Current Covid-19 vaccines target the spike protein, which mutates regularly, creating variants such as Omicron which lessen the efficacy of vaccines against symptomatic infection. “In contrast, the internal proteins targeted by the protective T-cells we identified mutate much less,” Professor Ajit Lalvani, co-author of the study, said. “Consequently, they are highly conserved between the various SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron. New vaccines that include these conserved, internal proteins would therefore induce broadly protective T cell responses that should protect against current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants.”

Read more …

But only when vaccinated… You know, to replace the healthy unvaxxed…

Health Officials Let Covid-infected Staff Stay On The Job (AP)

Health authorities around the U.S. are increasingly taking the extraordinary step of allowing nurses and other workers infected with the coronavirus to stay on the job if they have mild symptoms or none at all. The move is a reaction to the severe hospital staffing shortages and crushing caseloads that the omicron variant is causing. California health authorities announced over the weekend that hospital staff members who test positive but are symptom-free can continue working. Some hospitals in Rhode Island and Arizona have likewise told employees they can stay on the job if they have no symptoms or just mild ones. The highly contagious omicron variant has sent new cases of COVID-19 exploding to over 700,000 a day in the U.S. on average, obliterating the record set a year ago.

The number of Americans in the hospital with the virus is running at about 110,000, just short of the peak of 124,000 last January. Many hospitals are not only swamped with cases but severely shorthanded because of so many employees out with COVID-19. At the same time, omicron appears to be causing milder illness than the delta variant. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that health care workers who have no symptoms can return to work after seven days with a negative test, but that the isolation time can be cut further if there are staffing shortages. France last week announced it is allowing health care workers with mild or no symptoms to keep treating patients rather than isolate.

[..] In California, the Department of Public Health said the new policy was prompted by “critical staffing shortages.” It asked hospitals to make every attempt to fill openings by bringing in employees from outside staffing agencies. Also, infected workers will be required to wear extra-protective N95 masks and should be assigned to treat other COVID-19-positive patients, the department said. “We did not ask for this guidance, and we don’t have any information on whether hospitals will adopt this approach or not,” said Jan Emerson-Shea, a spokesperson for the California Hospital Association. “But what we do know is that hospitals are expecting many more patients in the coming days than they’re going to be able to care for with the current resources.”

Cali
https://twitter.com/i/status/1480547659895169038

Read more …

“The ballyhooed and mandated vaxxes apparently have the ability to kill and maim people who have taken them long after Covid-19 exits stage-left.”

Light It Up! (Kunstler)

We are at a strange pass in The Saga of Covid. It seems the spikey virus wants to leave center stage… is weary of all the attention… wants to fade into the eternal parade of microorganisms that cozily coexist within the human life-stream — like Tony Fauci’s HIV, a fellow traveler in the old-time throng of human viruses, now semi-retired, and yet still every bit as mysterious in the actual mechanism of AIDS as it was when Dr. Fauci pinned his NIAID distinguished service medal on its elusive bosom, so to speak (but you’d have to read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci to get the drift of that). Omicron is sweeping the country, as love once did in George Gershwin’s day. (We are a different country now, as anyone tuned into the Turner Classics Movie channel can discover.)

Omicron: the 36-hour head cold that Covid-19 has been demoted to. Omicron: a mere wise-cracking gecko compared to the roaring dragon that was Covid-19 in the winter of 2020. Omicron: kind of an embarrassment to “vaccine” tyrants who still seek to jab every arm on earth, and at ever-shortening intervals — like a med school version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, only with syringes running amok instead of brooms. The Party-of-Chaos (the one headed by the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden”) does not want to let go of Covid-19, its Swiss army knife of destruction. With Covid-19, you can push people around and mess with their lives every which way, shut down their businesses, lock them in their homes, screw them out of their livelihoods, delete their reputations, board-up their social venues, cancel their careers, revoke their licenses, drag them into court, fine them into penury, cram them into prison camps, and much more.

[..] Which brings us back to the virus. In The Saga of Covid there is a monster under the bed. The ballyhooed and mandated vaxxes apparently have the ability to kill and maim people who have taken them long after Covid-19 exits stage-left. We don’t really know how this works out, but we have plenty of clues: kids dropping dead of heart attacks, pro athletes, ditto, the VAERS numbers reporting over 21,000 vaccine-implicated deaths (out of a grossly under-reported actual figure) plus over a million adverse reaction reports (ditto under-reported). The time may not be far off when we make the ghastly discovery that the “vaccines” actually killed more Americans than the virus did.

Read more …

“There were safety signals — screaming red flags — in September of 2020, four months before the first shots went into arms on the EUAs and during the trials themselves.”

Where’s The Wood? (Denninger)

You know, wood, nails, saws, hammers…. and boiled rope? Now Pfizer and Moderna’s CEOs are apparently on Corrupt National Bull**** crowing that a fourth shot is necessary. May I remind you of the lies? How did all this work out for AOC? Or Geraldo, both of whom were “true believers” that if you got the first two shots you absolutely would not get *****. Both got ***** recently after taking the booster, which was the “second” set of lies. There are many words you may choose to describe a drug you have taken three times within a year and shortly thereafter get the disease but if you use the word “*******” given that personal record of ineffectiveness you deserve an immediate Clue-by-4 to the face in a (likely futile) attempt to correct your vapid stupidity.

Nobody in their right mind would expect a condom that only lasts for 15 seconds of sex before breaking to prevent pregnancy or deter transmission of STDs. That’s how ****ing stupid everyone is being at this point with regard to the jabs. I remind you that the original EUA studies were not designed to, and thus did not, demonstrate that the jabs were sterilizing — that is, that having taken them you would neither get or transmit *****-19. The representations that they in fact had that property were knowing, intentional lies; there was no evidence that was the case and in fact the trials were never intended to show that. Even worse was that although the entire case for the EUAs was built around reducing the risk of severe disease the sub-group of people who need that risk reduction — the seriously morbid — were deliberately excluded from the trials! We thus had zero evidence as to whether what we did observe in healthy young adults would translate into older, fatter, sicker people.

The entire edifice built around the jabs was in fact born of lies. Lies repeated by Donald Trump, Geraldo, AOC, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci and thousands of others. They were not errors or mistakes; they were lies. In addition to the lies on efficacy the manufacturers and so-called “experts” have also lied about safety. There were safety signals in the original trials but they were deliberately ignored. There were safety signals — screaming red flags — in September of 2020, four months before the first shots went into arms on the EUAs and during the trials themselves. Said science strongly implicated the spike protein alone being pathogenic and that in the circulation it was specifically harmful to the endothelial layer that is in all blood vessels. It was known in December of 2020 that the presence of the spike protein in the circulation could lead the body to attack its own circulatory system. We knew at the same time that viremia, that is, virus in the bloodstream, was essentially never happening except in severe, critical and fatal *****-19 infections and that when it killed you this was usually the means by which it happened.

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” If 20% of the pilots walk off the job, it’s the end of the commercial airline industry.”

80% of Airline Pilots Aren’t Going To Take The Booster (Kirsch)

I interviewed Latane Campbell who is a pilot for a major US airline. Key points:

  • He knows about 100 pilots and 80% are not going to take the booster. They’ll quit if they are forced to take it.
  • Virtually all of the pilots know that masks are completely useless.
  • The pilots all take off their masks as soon as they close the cockpit door. Wearing masks makes flying dangerous.
  • If 20% of the pilots walk off the job, it’s the end of the commercial airline industry.
  • The airlines tried to strong arm the pilots into taking the vaccines or else. The pilots resisted and the airlines immediately recanted allowing religious and medical exemptions.
  • The more you vaccinate, the sicker people get. Most pilots have figured this out.

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DARPA.

Military Documents About Gain Of Function Contradict Fauci Testimony (Veritas)

Project Veritas has obtained startling never-before-seen documents regarding the origins of COVID-19, gain of function research, vaccines, potential treatments which have been suppressed, and the government’s effort to conceal all of this. The documents in question stem from a report at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, which were hidden in a top-secret shared drive. DARPA is an agency under the U.S. Department of Defense in charge of facilitating research in technology with potential military applications. Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.

The report states that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the basis gain of function research moratorium. According to the documents, NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the U.S.

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IMF,BIS,WEF.

International Finance Leaders Hold ‘War Game’ Exercise (CHD)

High-level international banking officials and organizations last month gathered in Israel for a global “war game” exercise simulating the collapse of the global financial system. The tabletop exercise was reminiscent of “Event 201” — the pandemic simulation exercise that took place in October 2019, shortly before COVID-19 entered the global scene. The “Collective Strength” initiative was held for 10 days, beginning Dec. 9, 2021, at the Israeli Finance Ministry in Jerusalem. It was relocated to Jerusalem from the Dubai World Expo over concerns about the Omicron variant. Israel led a 10-country contingent that also included treasury officials from the U.S., Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.

Representatives from supranational organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Bank of International Settlements (BIS), also participated. Described as a simulated “war game,” the exercise sought to model the response to various hypothetical large-scale cyberattacks on the global financial system, including the leaking of sensitive financial data on the “Dark Web,” hacks targeting the global foreign exchange system, and subsequent bank runs and market chaos fueled by “fake news.” However, the main theme of “Collective Strength” appears not so much the simulation of such cyberattacks but, as the name of the initiative implies, the strengthening of global cooperation in cybersecurity and the financial sector.

As reported by Reuters, participants in the simulation discussed multilateral responses to a hypothetical global financial crisis. Proposed policy solutions included debt repayment grace periods, SWAP/REPO agreements, coordinated bank holidays and coordinated delinking from major currencies. The idea of simulated delinking from major currencies raised some eyebrows because of its timing — on the same day participants gathered to launch “Collective Strength,” reports circulated that the Biden administration was considering removing Russia from the global electronic-payment-messaging system known as SWIFT, short for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.

This measure would be part of a package of economic sanctions the U.S. would levy against Russia should it attack Ukraine. However, what may raise even more eyebrows is the list of participants in the “Collective Strength” simulation, which includes: the IMF and World Bank, and indirectly, the World Economic Forum (WEF). It was the WEF, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which ran the simulated “Event 201” in October 2019. As previously reported by The Defender, the WEF also supported the development of financial instruments, such as credit and debit cards, that would track “personal carbon allowances” on an individualized basis.

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Michael Jackson

 

 

 

 

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

 

Jan 092022
 


Giovanni Bellini St. Francis in ecstasy 1480

 

Pandemic Soon Over, De-Escalation In 2-3 Weeks (KTG)
End Mass Jabs And Live With Covid, Says Ex-head Of Vaccine Taskforce (G.)
Omicron May Be 100 Times Less Deadly Than Delta (DM)
Propaganda Institutions Collaborate to Refute “Mass Formation Psychosis” (CTH)
Wendepunkt (eugyppius)
Re: Review of Child Vaccination Programme (DS)
New Symptom Of Omicron In Young Children Revealed (RT)
Does Covid19 Cause Diabetes In Kids? (Prasad)
Federal Vaccine Mandate Enters ‘Major Question’ Land (Turley)
People Injured by COVID-19 Vaccine Are Left in the Dark (ET)
2021 Year in Review: The Rise of Centralized Healthcare (Collum)
Household Expense Data, the Same House for 80 Years (Mish)
The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages (Pollock)

 

 

The success story of mass vaccination:

 

 

The pic is not very clear, but the message is: so-called “cases” are spiking, but deaths are falling.

 

 

 

McCullough Needle

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Rochelle Walensky @CDCDirector: “the overwhelming number of deaths over 75% occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with”

 

 

 

 

Greek Deputy Health Minister Mina (aka Lady) Gaga drops this bombshell (echoing Denmark’s chief epidemiologist) on the same day the government says another 40,000 kid vaccines are ready, and vaccines are to become mandatory for everyone over 50.

Don’t think they coordinated the messages. Why would anyone want a vaccine if the pandemic is basically over?

Yes, hospitals will be busy for a while, but that’s what you get when you ramp up rapid testing and those who test positive seek an opinion (I feel fine, doctor, but I guess I’m sick). For a “disease” that is 100x less deadly than Alpha or Delta, during which 99.97% already survived. Or even less deadly than the flu…

But yeah, keep your mask on says Lady Gaga!

Pandemic Soon Over, De-Escalation In 2-3 Weeks (KTG)

Deputy Health Minister Mina Gaga told media on Saturday that the Covid-19 pandemic will soon be over and that people will have to live with it like with a common flu. In an interview with news website iefirmerida.gr, Gaga estimated that things will be better in two to three weeks. however, people should comply with the measures. She predicted a quick de-escalation saying that soon the whole issue will be over. The deputy health minister, who is a medical doctor by profession said that the Omicron variant seems to be now the dominant strain of the virus in Greece, as it concerns up to 90% of new Covid-19 cases. “Internationally – and in our country – with the predominance of Omicron, there is a tendency of stabilization in the so-called hard markers (admissions to ICUs and deaths), which supports the view that this mutation causes a milder disease, especially in the fully vaccinated population,” Gaga told iefimerida.gr.

She stressed that the great contamination caused by Omicron should not be underestimated and that this can affect the proper operation of the health system. With these data, it is still early to predict the end of the pandemic and it is very important to adhere to the measures, namely masks, avoiding crowding and the booster vaccination shot that provides a strong protection, the minister said. “However, I am one of those who believe that we are heading towards the end. We have concluded two years, I think we are close to seeing Covid-19 evolve from now on like the flu. Of course, the virus will still exist, it will not disappear, it will be part of our lives. But we will return to normalcy,” Gaga said adding the whole story will be soon over, it’s a matter of weeks, as long as we have in mind to balance. We are in times of intense transmission, we have to wear mask, keep the measures, be careful.”

[..] Meanwhile, in Cyprus a new variant has been identified, the Deltacron, a mutation with both the strains of Delta and Omicron. According to professor Leontios Kostrikis at the Biological Science Department of the University of Cyprus, the Deltacron mutation has been identified in 25 cases and it seems that the strains have a genetic background of the Delta mutation. The new mutation was detected in 11 hospitalized patients and in 14 people of the general population and its frequency was higher among Covid-patients in hospitalization.

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“Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”

End Mass Jabs And Live With Covid, Says Ex-head Of Vaccine Taskforce (G.)

Covid should now be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said. With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the last two years and returning to a “new normality”. “We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”

He said that ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells), which could be used to create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.” His intervention comes as it was revealed more than 150,000 people across the UK have now died from Covid. Official figures published yesterday recorded a further 313 deaths, the highest daily number since February last year when the last peak was receding. It takes the total recorded deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test to 150,057.

Meanwhile, NHS officials are warning that patient safety has been compromised this winter because of a crippling health and social care staff shortage that requires a million additional workers by the next decade. Writing in the Observer, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said that the pandemic had exposed “its weakest links”. “There is a clear, regrettable, impact on quality of care and, in the most pressured parts of the system, a worrying increase in patient safety risk,” he writes. “It is now very clear that the NHS and our social care system do not have sufficient capacity. That asking staff to work harder and harder to address that gap is simply not sustainable. That we need a long-term, fully funded, workforce plan to attract and retain the extra one million health and care staff the Health Foundation estimates will be needed by 2031.”

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“..researchers at Washington University modelling the next stage of the pandemic expect Omicron to kill up to 99 per cent fewer people than Delta, in another hint it could be less deadly than flu..”

Omicron May Be 100 Times Less Deadly Than Delta (DM)

Omicron could be even less deadly than flu, scientists believe in a boost to hopes that the worst of the pandemic is over. Some experts have always maintained that the coronavirus would eventually morph into a seasonal cold-like virus as the world develops immunity through vaccines and natural infection. But the emergence of the highly-mutated Omicron variant appears to have sped the process up. MailOnline analysis shows Covid killed one in 33 people who tested positive at the peak of the devastating second wave last January, compared to just one in 670 now. But experts believe the figure could be even lower because of Omicron. The case fatality rate — the proportion of confirmed infections that end in death — for seasonal influenza is 0.1, the equivalent of one in 1,000.

One former Government adviser today said if the trend continues to drop then ‘we should be asking whether we are justified in having any measures we would not bring for a bad flu season’. But other experts say coronavirus is much more transmissible than flu, meaning it will inevitably cause more deaths. Meanwhile, researchers at Washington University modelling the next stage of the pandemic expect Omicron to kill up to 99 per cent fewer people than Delta, in another hint it could be less deadly than flu. No accurate infection-fatality rate (IFR), which is always just a fraction of the CFR because it reflects deaths among everyone who catches the virus, has yet been published for Delta.

But UK Government advisers estimated the overall figure stood at around 0.25 per cent before Omicron burst onto the scene, down from highs of around 1.5 per cent before the advent of life-saving vaccines. If Omicron is 99 per cent less lethal than Delta, it suggests the current IFR could be as low as 0.0025 per cent, the equivalent of one in 40,000, although experts say this is unlikely. Instead, the Washington modelling estimates the figure actually sits in the region of 0.07 per cent, meaning approximately one in 1,430 people who get infected will succumb to the illness. Leading researchers estimate flu’s IFR to sit between 0.01 and 0.05 per cent but argue comparing rates for the two illnesses is complicated.

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“There is no such thing as mass formation psychosis and the masses who believe otherwise have fallen prey to some type of… you know… mass formation psychosis.”

Propaganda Institutions Collaborate to Refute “Mass Formation Psychosis” (CTH)

Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit… if this ain’t the biggest revealing tell in years. Apparently Big Tech and big propaganda media, Reuters and the Associated Press, have joined together to refute the concept of “Mass Formation Psychosis”, and pushed their collective narrative into the narrative engineering system: The Associated Press and Reuters, quickly rush to the “fact check” typeset to stop people from recognizing what is most likely the cause of their own psychosis. In a world where things are no longer shocking, this is, well, a little shocking, in a weird and seemingly Orwellian kind of way. Yes Alice, the same “experts” and media who are credibly accused of creating/enabling the mass formation psychosis would like to assure us that no such reality exists. This is almost too funny.

(AP) – […] “The concept has no academic credibility,” Stephen Reicher, a social psychology professor at the University of St Andrews in the U.K., wrote in an email to The Associated Press. The term also does not appear in the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology. “Psychosis” is a term that refers to conditions that involve some disconnect from reality. According to a National Institutes of Health estimate, about 3% of people experience some form of psychosis at some time in their lives. […] The description of “mass formation psychosis” offered by Malone resembles discredited concepts, such as “mob mentality” and “group mind,” according to John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. who studies collective behavior.

The ideas suggest that “when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control; they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate,” he said in an email. That notion has been discredited by decades of research on crowd behavior, Drury said. “No respectable psychologist agrees with these ideas now,” he said. Multiple experts told the AP that while there is evidence that groups can shape or influence one’s behaviors — and that people can and do believe falsehoods that are put forward by the leader of a group — those concepts do not involve the masses experiencing “psychosis” or “hypnosis.”

Reuters offers this simultaneous rebuttal: (Reuters) – “Mass formation psychosis” is not an academic term recognized in the field of psychology, nor is there evidence of any such phenomenon occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple experts in crowd psychology have told Reuters. […] There is no evidence to suggest a “mass formation psychosis” has occurred during the pandemic, experts told Reuters. The term itself is not recognised among academics, and modern research into crowd psychology has shown that crowds do not behave in mindless or non-individualistic ways. Once a collective group creates an alternate reality of itself, in this case a totalitarian reality based on government needing to create an irrational illusion of fear that becomes part of the accepted national identity, how can anyone call attention to the outcomes without finding themselves in front of the board of inquisition who organizes the collective?

Put another way… if the pod under your bed malfunctioned, but the pods under all the other beds in the city worked, what happens when you awaken and realize you are not one of them, but you must engage in the world of them while looking for others -like yourself- whose pods hopefully malfunctioned? That is the current challenge for anyone trying to communicate on contrary evidence and yet avoid the ire from the collective board of COVID compliance who have successfully brainwashed the audience. As a rather prescient Lewis Carroll shared so brilliantly in his novel of Alice, Through The Looking Glass:

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”

McCullough MFP

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“This is the first time since the Floyd riots in America, that major political leaders and public health authorities have said that preventing Corona can no longer be the highest goal of western society.”

Wendepunkt (eugyppius)

“Where’s the vaccine mandate they promised us?” whines Daniel Brössler, reporter for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, disappointed because yesterday’s Corona summit of German minister presidents returned nothing but some adjustments to quarantine and sharpened testing rules. The double vaccinated will now have to submit negative tests if they want to eat at restaurants. Markus Söder, lockdown- and vaccine mandate-loving minister president of Bavaria, criticised even these milquetoast restrictions, with some bluster about how he’d already taken a hard line against bars and discos. This is after leading German Corona astrologer, Christian Drosten, used his state media podcast to suggest that Germany should start tolerating some of degree of SARS-2 transmission, and that breakthrough infections among the vaccinated should be considered normal. Such statements, which almost surely reflect sentiments within the coalition government, destroy most of the rationale for ongoing restrictions and vaccine mandates.

Meanwhile, in Austria, the thrice-vaccinated chancellor Karl Nehammer has tested positive for Corona. The news comes as Austria announces they will delay implementing their vaccine mandate by two months. It will now take effect in April, if at all. Gerald Gartlehner, an epidemiologist and sometime governmental adviser, suggested that mandates (or at least their enforcement) might have to be re-evaluated in light of Omicron and the widespread immunity the new variant will elicit across the Austrian population. There is every reason to think that Austria will be past the peak of the Omicron wave in April, and that a majority of Austrians with have SARS-2 antibodies by then.

In the United States, former Biden advisers have published a series of editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguing that it is time to normalise containment and begin managing SARS-2 as one of various seasonal respiratory infections. It is obvious that we are at a turning point, even if everyone has yet to realise it – even if France is sharpening vaccine requirements, even if Italy has imposed vaccine mandates for everyone over 50, and even if Canada is for the moment determined to remain a prison state. This is the first time since the Floyd riots in America, that major political leaders and public health authorities have said that preventing Corona can no longer be the highest goal of western society.

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“In an open letter to the Government’s vaccination advisory committee – the JCVI – the MPs including Miriam Cates, Esther McVey and Sir Desmond Swayne and scientists including Professor Allyson Pollock, Dr Roland Salmon and Professor Brent Taylor write that “the risk to benefit ratio for child Covid vaccination has worsened since September”.

Re: Review of Child Vaccination Programme (DS)

January 2021 – To Members of the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation, – On September 3rd 2021 the JCVI advised against recommending the mass vaccination of healthy 12-15-year-olds against COVID-19. The principal reason given for this was that, while the known benefits and harms from vaccination to this age group were both very small, the Committee was concerned about the unknown potential harms of the new vaccine, particularly the long-term and possibly serious risks of myocarditis. The JCVI estimated that for every one million 12-15-year-olds vaccinated with two doses, 2.54 ICU admissions would be avoided and up to 51 cases of myocarditis caused. Subsequently, the risk of myocarditis and other adverse events has been shown to be greater than believed by the JCVI at the time.

The Government referred the matter to the CMO, asking him to consider the ‘wider benefits’ to children of vaccination. On September 13th 2021 Professor Chris Whitty recommended that one dose of the vaccine be given to healthy 12-15-year-olds on the basis that it would possibly provide ‘marginal benefits’, specifically in reducing the time spent out of school as a result of Covid infection. This was calculated as a saving of, on average, 15 mins of education per child. (This estimate did not take into account disruption even from short term vaccine side effects and is also based on assumptions about the level of protection one dose of the vaccine gives against infection which have proved to be over-optimistic.)

The risk and benefit calculations made by the JCVI and the CMO were based on less complete data on both the harms and benefits of vaccinating children compared to the evidence now available. Four months later, we are in a very different position, with the virulent Delta variant almost completely replaced by the milder Omicron variant. Additionally, society now has a higher level of robust immunity from natural infection than it had when teenage vaccination was approved. We have seen in recent weeks that Omicron is significantly more infectious than Delta (based on secondary attack rates, it was originally twice as transmissible as Delta, but this has declined to 1.3 times as transmissible as naturally acquired variant-specific immunity to it has risen). Vaccines are also far less effective at stemming the transmission of Omicron, compared to Delta (protection appears to fall to zero, three months after vaccination).

More data have emerged about the frequency of harmful side effects of Covid vaccination. One study found that for males under 40, risk of myocarditis was up to 14 times higher after vaccination than after infection (101 cases after the Moderna second dose, compared to seven cases after infection). It is particularly important to note that the risks of myocarditis in young men and boys seems to increase significantly after a second dose of the vaccine – which is why Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty initially recommended just one dose be given to 12-15 year olds – and yet we are now offering second doses to children, despite the evidence of risk growing.

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A symptom found only in one place?

New Symptom Of Omicron In Young Children Revealed (RT)

American scientists have identified a new symptom of the Omicron variant in children under five; a “barking” cough that may sound frightening when parents hear it. According to Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, some Covid patients in the youngest age group develop “croup-like” coughs which can be identified by a “barking” sound. That happens, Creech told NBC news, because “little kids’ airways are so narrow that it takes far less inflammation to clog them.” The best way to protect the youngest children, who are not yet eligible for the vaccines, is to “cocoon” them around vaccinated people, he said.


Croup, which is an infection of the vocal cords, windpipe, and bronchial tubes, is a well-known and usually easily treatable disease, so doctors are telling parents not to panic. While the croup cough may be “scary to hear,” it does not necessarily mean there are any problems with the lungs, said Dr. Amy Edwards, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at the University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland.

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No, it’s upside down. Diabetic kids are more vulnerable to Covid. Actually, quite a sinister suggestion.

Does Covid19 Cause Diabetes In Kids? (Prasad)

The CDC is back with a new piece of propagan—- I mean, a new publication. It claims that kids (<18) with COVID are more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes in the next 30 days than kids without COVID or kids with other pre-pandemic respiratory viruses. It asserts this is a causal effect. COVID causes diabetes in kids. To make this claim, the CDC examines 2 databases: IQVIA and HealthVerity. From IQVIA, they pull out kids <18 with COVID19 diagnosis, and age and sex matched kids without the diagnosis, as well as those with a prior non-covid respiratory infection. From HealthVerity, they pull out kids <18 with COVID19 diagnosis and kids <18 who got tested for COVID19 and were negative*. (we shall return to this).

In all cases, administrative/billing codes for COVID19 and diabetes were used to see who had COVID19 and who developed diabetes within 30 days of the index encounter. Of course, many, many more kids had COVID who are not in the database. Some may not have even had symptoms, and others may not have sought testing. In IQVIA, among kids with COVID19, a whopping 68 out of 80,000+ or 0.08% ended with diabetes; among kids without COVID19, it was 132 out of 400,000+ or 0.03% ended up with diabetes, and among kids with prior respiratory infection it was ~0.06% The absolute risk of diabetes due to COVID (if you believed this is causal) appears to be an increase on par with a swiftly eaten bag of skittles.

Now in the HealthVerity database, the risk of diabetes post COVID19 was 0.25% (a quarter of 1 percent), if you were tested for COVID19 but negative, it was 0.19% (one fifth of 1 percent). Here, COVID appears as risky as a McDonalds supersized soda. The CDC trumpets this finding as “children and teens 18 years & younger who have had #COVID19 are up to 2.5 times more likely to have a #diabetes diagnosis after infection” Is that a fair take away or a fear-mongering distortion? First, the whole analysis hinges on the idea that age-sex matched kids without covid should be comparable to the kids who got covid in terms of risk of diabetes. The only difference between the kids should be that some, unfortunately, had covid. But COVID may be more likely to affect kids of lower socioeconomic status, of certain races, and kids who were already overweight or suffering from medical problems.

Does the CDC attempt to correct for any of these confounders? Not at all. They surely have height and weight, and could adjust for BMI, but do not. I am truly puzzled as to why. Second, they don’t have the true denominator. This is only kids who present and have a COVID19 diagnosis. Seroprevalence is needed to find the real denominator of kids with COVID19. This will lower the absolute risks. COVID19 may be downgraded from a whole bag of skittles to a single, red skittle. Does the CDC adjust for this? Nope. Third, kids who seek medical care for COVID19 may get more blood tests than those without COVID19, and perhaps more than those with other respiratory viruses in yesteryear. This too may capture more diabetes. Does the CDC correct for ascertainment? Not at all.

Joe Rogan AF Neil
https://twitter.com/i/status/1479887329925996547

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Turley on Twitter: “Would quoting Justice Breyer or Sotomayor from the vaccine mandate oral argument get one suspension by Twitter for covid disinformation?”

Federal Vaccine Mandate Enters ‘Major Question’ Land (Turley)

“Major-question-land,” the term coined by Louisiana solicitor general Elizabeth Murrill during Friday’s oral arguments over the Biden vaccine mandates, has an almost Disneyesque sound to it. However, unlike Yesterland or Tomorrowland, major-question-land clearly holds no attraction for the Biden administration or the court’s liberal justices. The defenders of the mandates worked mightily to avoid the fact that it’s the first-ever national vaccine mandate and was decided without the approval of Congress. Chief Justice John Roberts, a vital vote needed by the administration, noted that this administration was relying on language passed roughly 50 years ago — closer to the Spanish Flu than the novel coronavirus — and stated ominously, “This is something the federal government has never done before.”

That sounds not just like a question but a major one. The major-questions doctrine maintains that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations when the underlying questions concern “vast economic or political significance.” The controversy over the mandates shows the wisdom of the doctrine demanding that Congress not only take action but responsibility, too, for such major decisions. With increasing confusion over changing CDC guidelines and the risk profile associated with the Omicron variant, congressional action could bring both greater legitimacy and clarity to questions swirling around mandates.

Instead, the Supreme Court is grappling with an executive move that was openly discussed not only as an avoidance of Congress but a circumvention of constitutional limitations. It was not a good sign for the administration that the most referenced individual during oral argument was Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, who tweeted that the mandates were “workarounds” of the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and others referred to Klain’s admission as the administration’s lawyers tried to argue that the executive had the constitutional authority to implement a national mandate.

The liberal justices took the “time is of the essence” argument to an almost apocalyptic degree: Justice Stephen Breyer kept mentioning that every second they wait, more people are getting COVID, and he incorrectly stated there were “750 million new cases yesterday.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated as a fact that “Omicron is as deadly as Delta and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as Delta did.” That is not true. Omicron appears to be far more virulent, but less lethal than Delta. Sotomayor also claimed that “we have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators.” That is also untrue. For patients, up to 17 years old, the seven-day average for hospitalizations was 797.

Tucker Sotomayor

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Agricultural pilot “was told that his inner ears were ruptured, and fluid inside was leaking inward toward the inside of his skull.”

People Injured by COVID-19 Vaccine Are Left in the Dark (ET)

People injured by the COVID-19 vaccine have no meaningful way to get compensated and have been ignored by the federal government, according to an agricultural pilot who has been seriously injured by taking the COVID-19 vaccine. “At this point, the government has totally abandoned us,” Cody Flint, a vaccine-injured pilot, told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” program in an interview broadcast on Jan. 1. [..] On Feb. 1, 2021, Flint volunteered to get the vaccine. “Just an exciting day—thought we were gonna put this behind us,” Flint recalled.

But within 30 minutes, he developed an odd headache after receiving the vaccine. Two days later, he took his first flight that year. Immediately after takeoff, he had tunnel vision. Flint tried to push forward to keep his commitment to his client. But he felt like a bomb went off inside his head in the end. He couldn’t remember how he landed the plane back on the runway. “Really by the grace of God that there was not an accident. I went to my family doctor immediately,” Flint said. Later, he was told that his inner ears were ruptured, and fluid inside was leaking inward toward the inside of his skull. Doctors explained that only highly elevated intracranial pressure from things like a car wreck, major head trauma, or things of that nature could make that happen to both of his ears at the same time on the same day.

“Obviously, I had none of those. The only thing that changed in my life was I got the vaccine and developed a severe headache immediately that got worse leading up to that point,” Flint said. Flint went through two surgeries and dozens of doctor visits afterward. His condition improved, but he still has trouble driving. “I don’t know what my next stepping stone in life is going to be. I don’t know,” Flint said, noting that his pilot license was taken away. “I don’t know what to do at this point. I spent every dime I’ve saved my entire life on the surgeries and just trying to survive and feed my family since the incident happened.”

Having been an agricultural pilot for 15 years, Flint said he’s not an anti-vaxxer. “I signed up and got it the first day I could possibly get it. I believed in vaccines,” Flint told The Epoch Times last month. Now Flint is critical of the vaccine mandate. “That’s the Achilles heel of the mandate. This does not fit everyone. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Flint told NTD. “There are thousands and thousands of people around the country. I’ve been in touch with a lot of them that have had absolutely life-altering, career-ending injuries from these vaccines. A lot of them are pilots. It is scary that how many pilots are being injured by this.”

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Dave seems to think we already finished part 1.

2021 Year in Review: The Rise of Centralized Healthcare (Collum)

1/The US and the World appeared to need a vaccine developed and produced. We forked up serious Federal support and threw caution to the wind via Operation Warp Speed. The vaccine policies were coming from the healthcare authorities. In our haste, all safeguards were removed, which led via shoddy methodology to produce a product of questionable efficacy pushed on the public with oppressive tactics. The medium and long-term risks are unknown.

2/ Ivermectin. Early treatment of the disease was completely neglected by policy. Frontline doctors trying to McGyver their way into solutions using Ivermectin and other drugs were shut down completely. Careers were destroyed. The public was duped by a massive media campaign and overt censorship. All this was to ensure that the vaccines and patent-protected antiviral drugs could be developed and sold. There are, however, darker and more sinister interpretations.

3/The lockdowns and social distancing policies came almost exclusively from the medical authorities paying no attention whatsoever to the socioeconomic and other health consequences.

In short, we gave healthcare “authorities” autocratic control over every facet of our society. Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the CDC, went so far as to set policy on apartment evictions. How fucked up is that? We socialized the healthcare costs and privatized the profits. Where have I heard that one before? The Overton Window is now stuck wide open. The FDA and CDC won’t go quiescent, and many of us won’t trust them now. The next crisis will be sooner than you can imagine and be accompanied by calls for further largesse and lockdowns. It will seem so natural to comply. The new normal is in society’s DNA.

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Great data. Since two thirds of the rise is taxation, I would be very careful about calling this inflation.

“My Grandfather was in the same job and same house his entire life. He maintained the same standard of living in all the years I knew him.”

Household Expense Data, the Same House for 80 Years (Mish)

Reader Holly Writes: Dear Mish, Recently I came into possession of the financial records of my grandfather. I plugged a bunch of the numbers into a spreadsheet just for kicks. What is most interesting about these numbers is they start in 1941 when he purchased the home. It was left to my mother, and then to me in 2020 (80 years of finances for the same home!) My Grandfather was in the same job and same house his entire life. He maintained the same standard of living in all the years I knew him. The numbers show that the cost of maintaining a stable standard of living reflects a much higher inflation rate than any of the indexes I have compared it too. After my grandfather passed in 2003 until I acquired the home in 2020 I had to approximate some expenses. I took the records I had from 2020 and 2021 and filled in the missing gaps.


Regards, Holly

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“..24% of all outstanding residential mortgages in this whole big country reside in the central bank..”

There’s neither a housing market nor a mortgage market. Both are cornered.

The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages (Pollock)

Runaway house price inflation continues to characterize the U.S. market. House prices across the country rose 15.8% on average in October 2021 from the year before. U.S. house prices are far over their 2006 Bubble peak, and remain over the Bubble peak even after adjustment for consumer price inflation. They will keep on rising at the annual rate of 14–16% for the rest of 2021, according to the AEI Housing Center. Unbelievably, in this situation the Federal Reserve keeps on buying mortgages. It buys a lot of them and continues to be the price-setting marginal buyer or Big Bid in the mortgage market, expanding its mortgage portfolio with one hand, and printing money with the other. It should have stopped before now, but the purchases, financed by newly created fiat money, or monetization, go on.

They proceed at the rate of tens of billions of dollars a month, stoking the house price inflation, making it harder and harder for new families to afford a house. A recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece was entitled “How the Fed Rigs the Bond Market”—it rigs the mortgage market, too. The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve has grown to a size that would have amazed previous generations of Federal Reserve governors and economists. Although we have become somewhat accustomed to it, so fast do perceptions adjust, it would also have surprised readers of Housing Finance International of five years ago, and readers of 15 years ago would probably have judged the current reality simply impossible. Over time, we keep discovering how feeble are our judgments of what is possible or impossible.

The total assets of the Federal Reserve reached $8.7 trillion in November 2021. This is just about double the $4.5 trillion of November 2016, five years before—and we thought it was really big then. Today’s Federal Reserve assets are ten times what they were in November 2006, 15 years ago, when they were $861 billion, and none were mortgages. The Federal Reserve now owns on its balance sheet $2.6 trillion in mortgages. That means about 24% of all outstanding residential mortgages in this whole big country reside in the central bank, which has thereby earned the remarkable status of becoming by far the largest savings and loan institution in the world. Like the historical U.S. savings and loans associations, the Federal Reserve owns very long-term mortgages, with their interest rates fixed for 15 to 30 years, and neither marks its investments to market in its financial statements nor hedges its substantial interest rate risk.

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Size comparison between Hubble and JWST (Webb telescope) primary mirror

 

 

 

Tucker Viagra

 

 

Leave me alone!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1479765306675539970

 

 

God save the queen

 

 

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