Vietnam Archives - The Automatic Earth

Debt Rattle December 8 2023

Dec 082023

December 8, 2023 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: Alex Jones, death rattle, Gaza, Hunter Biden, Mar-a-Lago, Netanyahu, prisoners, Trump, Vietnam 38 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Self-Portrait with Straw Hat 1887

• Netanyahu’s Game Of Russian Roulette (Cradle)

• Behind Enemy Bars: Palestinian and Israeli Prisoners (Inlakesh)

• Gaza Divides the World, Again (Patrick Lawrence)

• ‘The Death Rattle of The Western Empire’: US Hegemony Crumbling (Sp.)

• The Military/Security Complex Proved to be Too Strong for Peace (PCR)

• The Military-Industrial Complex (RFK Jr)

• Russian Intel Chief Warns US Of ‘Second Vietnam’ (RT)

• Pentagon Threatens Americans Over Ukraine – Tucker Carlson (RT)

• Moscow Rejects US Narrative On Aid For Kiev (RT)

• The Diamond Crack-Up (John Helmer)

• Hunter Biden Indicted by Feds on 9 Counts Related to Tax Evasion (Sp.)

• “If People Think Things Are Bad Now…” Tucker And Alex Jones (ZH)

• Trump Witness Says He Valued Mar-a-Lago at More Than $1 Billion (ET)

Today, the world mourns the loss of Professor Refaat Al-Areer, one of Palestine’s most prolific poets and activists. There is reason to believe that the Zionist regime deliberately targeted his sister’s home, killing his brother, sister, and her 4 kids

Elon Musk: “Drops more bombs than a B-52“

Biden
https://twitter.com/i/status/1732462667107865071

Noted among Putin’s entourage in Saudi Arabia: Chechen leader Kadyrov and central bank head Elvira Nabiullina
https://twitter.com/i/status/1732474995366875435

Weaponizing AI
https://twitter.com/i/status/1732569528817607133

Vivek

If you’d have told me nearly 3 years ago when I was just a CEO that Jan. 6 was an inside job, I would’ve said that’s crazy talk. It’s not. There is now clear evidence that there was at the very least entrapment of peaceful protestors, similar to the fake Gretchen Whitmer… pic.twitter.com/6FgSggMlM1

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 7, 2023

Elon Musk in response via email to an Axios reporter asking about X: “I have never lost money for those who invest in me and I am not starting now.”

Since Elon Musk Bought X:

-SEC sues Musk over the purchase
-FTC demands internal X documents
-Biden DOJ sues SpaceX for not hiring refugees for secret rocket technology
-Biden DOJ and SEC open investigations against Tesla over a literal glass house
-Biden DOJ opens criminal investigation against Tesla over self-driving cars
-Federal investigation into Neuralink
-EOCC sues Tesla over harassment
-Massive media campaign against X
-Massive corporate boycott campaign

“Netanyahu, however, harbors a different agenda, seeking to prolong the conflict for personal gains rather than political success..”

• Netanyahu’s Game Of Russian Roulette (Cradle)

Forced into a Gaza truce by an angry public demanding prisoner exchanges, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now faces his toughest challenge since launching air and land assaults on the Gaza Strip in October. The frequency of his threats to both Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah on Israel’s northern front has spiked since Netanyahu’s reluctant acceptance of the Qatar-brokered truce. While the prime minister and Washington’s goals align on waging a war on the Palestinian resistance, and, by extension, on Gaza, their policies diverge on the strategy and duration of the conflict. Faced with threats of its own and attacks by resistance factions in West Asia, the US prefers employing a leveraged military approach without any extensive involvement on the ground.

Lately, the Biden administration has been taking a sterner approach towards Tel Aviv’s actions in the northern Gaza Strip, and has called for Israeli coordination with the US on the ground war. Hours ahead of the truce being implemented, Secretary of State Antony Blinken underscored that “the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale that we saw in Northern Gaza [should] not be repeated in the South.” The spokesman for the White House National Security Council, John Kirby, has also recently told reporters that the Biden administration “does not support southern operations unless or until the Israelis can show that they have accounted for all the internally displaced people of Gaza.” Netanyahu, however, harbors a different agenda, seeking to prolong the conflict for personal gains rather than political success.

The continuation of the war means he will stay in office longer, and have the time to strike internal and external deals that ensure his post-conflict survival. For now, “King Bibi” faces mounting pressure from both allies and adversaries. International calls for tangible outcomes from the conflict are intensifying, with the mainstream media increasingly compelled – by social media – to highlight Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Domestically, Netanyahu is grappling with almost daily demands for his resignation or for the removal of extremist cabinet ministers from the Otzma Yehudit and religious Zionist parties. In the aftermath of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the Israeli opposition tempted Netanyahu’s Likud party with offers to dismiss Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir – as well as the removal of the prime minister himself – as a condition for participating in an emergency government.

These proposals aimed to resolve Israel’s ongoing political and social unrest since 2019, which has led to five consecutive electoral cycles in four years and frequent mass anti-government protests. A national unity government would also be able to resume and possibly develop the Abraham Accords, strained by the presence of extremist parties in the government. Netanyahu’s radical ministers have often negatively affected both these nascent Israeli-Arab relations and Tel Aviv’s relationship with US Democrats.

“We were sitting in the tunnels and we were terribly afraid not that Hamas but Israel would kill us, and then they would say – Hamas killed you.”

• Behind Enemy Bars: Palestinian and Israeli Prisoners (Inlakesh)

The issue of Prisoners of War (POWs) taken captive by Hamas-led Palestinian resistance forces has become one of the key justifications for Israel’s military assault on the Gaza Strip. While western audiences are often presented with the image of these groups as bloodthirsty terrorists, a closer look reveals that Hamas and other factions may have treated Israeli captives more humanely than how Israel treats Palestinian political prisoners. While the Israeli POW issue spans eight weeks, the plight of Palestinian captives has persisted since at least 1967. There are said to be some 137 Israelis that are currently being held captive in Gaza, whom Hamas claims all are males and/or soldiers.

In the seven-day truce struck in November between Hamas and Israel, the Palestinian resistance released 108 women and children held captive in Gaza. In return, Israel was to release 300 Palestinian women and children held in detention and permit much-needed aid into Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. Stanley Cohen, a US attorney who has represented both Hamas and Hezbollah members, tells The Cradle that “the laws of war do not limit Prisoners of War to State actors.” He says that “all the laws of war apply, whether it’s state actors or non-state actors.” This would mean that the same legal obligations on the treatment of POWs should apply to both Hamas and Israel, despite there being a greater moral expectation often placed on UN member states.

Access to interviews with detainees is limited due to Israeli government restrictions on media interaction with the recently freed captives, especially since the embarrassing PR blunder in late October when one of the four Israelis unconditionally released before the truce – 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz – said at a presser that “they treated us very well” in Gaza, but had endured “hell” while being taken captive. But despite the challenges in obtaining their full stories, certain facts stand out. Recent audio recordings quoted by Israeli media have revealed statements from freed prisoners who claim they were more fearful of Israeli actions than those by Hamas. One former detainee, criticizing the Israeli government, highlighted the lack of support and the challenges faced during their captivity:

“We were sitting in the tunnels and we were terribly afraid not that Hamas but Israel would kill us, and then they would say – Hamas killed you.” Another former Israeli captive went further in expressing disdain for the Israeli government’s responses on and after the events of 7 October: “The feeling we had there was that no one was doing anything for us. The fact is that I was in a hiding place that was shelled and we had to be smuggled out and were wounded. Not including the helicopter that shot at us on the way to Gaza. You claim that there is intelligence, but the fact is that we are being shelled. My husband was separated from us three days before we returned to Israel and taken to the tunnels. And you are talking about washing the tunnels with sea water? You are shelling the route of tunnels in the exact area where they are.”

“It is repugnant to see how, despite the cruelty of the facts on view to the world, the government of the United States of America and its satellites aim to justify the unjustifiable..”

• Gaza Divides the World, Again (Patrick Lawrence)

My award for courageous elocution of the week goes hands-down to Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, who addressed the General Assembly last Tuesday on the topic of Israel and its barbaric attacks on the Palestinians of Gaza. His remarks, which Consortium News reproduced, were appropriately lengthy. Here I draw from his introductory paragraphs: “The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela robustly condemns the Israeli aggression against the civilian population in the occupied Palestinian territories. This is an operation of mass expulsion of an entire people in order to annex their territory by the occupying power. It’s a new cycle of expansionist terror, of so much that has been suffered by the Palestinian people over 75 years of occupation…. It is repugnant to see how, despite the cruelty of the facts on view to the world, the government of the United States of America and its satellites aim to justify the unjustifiable:

That the occupying power is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people as defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court. We ask ourselves where are those who in other cases rush to apply the responsibility to protect but now are ignoring the human rights of Palestinians submitted to the Israeli occupation?” It is one thing, I have to say, for publications such as ScheerPost and Consortium News to publish commentary of this kind, or for many thousands of honorable people to march in the name of decency and justice. It is quite, quite another for a sovereign state to denounce Israel and the U.S. in a chamber such as the General Assembly. It all counts, everything we do. But Moncada and the government he represents just elevated the condemnation of apartheid Israel to the level of global diplomacy and state-to-state relations.

Jump-cut to the Land of Eire. Members of the Dáil, the lower house of Ireland’s national assembly, were the first in Europe—and remain alone in this—to speak for Palestinian rights and against the Israel Defense Forces’ savagery after Hamas’s October 7 incursion into southern Israel (which the Dáil also denounced). As noted previously in this space, the Dáil voted last month on expelling the Israeli ambassador and referring Israel to the ICC. These motions were defeated, narrowly. But the government’s countermotions nonetheless “deplore the escalation of violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory since [October 7].” As to the ICC referral, the government pointed out that an investigation into Israeli war crimes has been in train since 2021—so, no point.

These are specific cases suggesting a larger whole. After the U.S., in February 2022, finally succeeded in provoking Russia to intervene in Ukraine, we recall, 90 percent of humanity declined to line up behind Washington and its European client states. “The international community” whose support the Biden regime incessantly cited, turned out to be the 20–odd nations we refer to as the West. Hamas’s attacks on noncombatants on October 7 have been more or less universally condemned, as they should be. But Israel’s unrestrained response and the Biden regime’s unrestrained support of it have again divided the world. The trans–Atlantic alliance, with the U.S. per usual in the lead, is full-tilt behind Israel’s outright genocide. Support for it is scarce in the non–West, while expressions of support for the Palestinians of Gaza are many if in some cases muted.

Ireland is, of course, an exceptional and interesting case, I should pause to note. The government of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar won the day in the Dáil last month, yes, but Ireland’s identity is nonetheless as non–Western as it is Western. The Irish know Western colonialism firsthand and have not forgotten their time under it. During the Troubles, the Irish Republican Army insisted Ireland must be understood as a Third World country. If you want to go further back, Ireland lay beyond the Roman walls; Rome never attempted to conquer it. These historical realities are often detectable in Dublin’s foreign policies and certainly, I would argue, in its position on the Israel–Gaza crisis. How fine it is to know the Dublin City Council began Wednesday to fly the Palestinian flag atop it for a week.

But as a country, we don’t really have the intellectual resources to dig our way out of the hole that we’re in…”

• ‘The Death Rattle of The Western Empire’: US Hegemony Crumbling (Sp.)

Speaking to Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Wednesday, Jon Jeter, an award-winning foreign correspondent, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a former Washington Post bureau chief, said the wider perception of the United States as a the world’s most prominent political and military locomotive has shifted dramatically. He put that sea-change down to the developments within the Ukrainian and Gaza crises. “The events since October 7th, I think that’s the death rattle of the Western empire of the United States as the single greatest political and economic and military power in the world,” said Jeter. That to me is the final nail in the coffin, because we can’t go back to the world the way it was before October 6th.” The fading of US international hegemony has its roots at home too.

Dimming global engagement among the general public and the ineptitude of current US political establishment have added to the overall weakening US foothold on the international arena. “But as a country, we don’t really have the intellectual resources to dig our way out of the hole that we’re in. <…> I’ve seen this transition from a country that was very much engaged with the world. As a teenager, you could see it in the 1970s, and the 1980s up until Reagan, and then it started to change. We started to dumb down the conversation”, Jeter believes. The speakers also discussed the effect developments on the African continent earlier this year on the status-quo the US desperately seeks to uphold.

“One of the things that happened was the African summit [in Russia]. A bunch of African leaders came and the next week they went back and started overthrowing countries and kicking the French out. <…> the world that was scared of the big bully. And after they saw somebody punch back, people aren’t as afraid anymore,” noted Garland Nixon, The Critical Hour’s co-host. Jeter stressed the irreversible changes over the past couple of years to the balance of power and their lasting effect on the global political makeup. “I don’t think the United States or the West can put that genie back in the bottle. You know, Germany is de-industrializing. There’s turn to the right by many countries in Europe, Italy and now the Netherlands. And I don’t think they’re going to find answers that can really help to restore the West to its past glory,” Jeter concluded.

“Truth is not very powerful as it does not serve very many powerful interests..”

• The Military/Security Complex Proved to be Too Strong for Peace (PCR)

Henry Kissinger’s death resulted in an outpouring of hatred toward the former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, especially from CounterPunch. Even a few of my readers mistook my explanation of Kissinger as a justification of the war crimes so many accuse him of. I have noticed over recent decades the increasing tendency of Americans to respond emotionally, instead of rationally, to information. Since I explained Kissinger, instead of denouncing him, I was seen as apologizing for him or justifying him. I have no doubt that large numbers of civilians were killed and maimed in the bombings associated with the Vietnam war, some of which–Cambodia for example–Kissinger approved. But, of course, the Secretary of State is not the official who orders bombings.

Moreover, there is no indication that Kissinger engaged in bombing civilians simply because he enjoyed killing people and committing war crimes or because he believed in ethnic cleansing like the Zionist government in Israel. The Democrats and the left-wing have been very adroit at shifting the blame for the Vietnam War to Republican Nixon from Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Nixon and Kissinger wanted to end the war, but they had to do so in a way that did not discredit Nixon with his conservative base, a base that believed in the Domino Theory and that the Soviet Union’s mission was world conquest. The same base made it difficult for Nixon to defuse Cold War tensions with arms control agreements, such as SALT I. The North Vietnamese were not in much of a hurry to enable Nixon to exit the war on comfortable terms.

The only option remaining was to increase the violence in order to force an acceptable exit. That is what produced Cambodia, not blood-lust on the part of Kissinger and Nixon. Because Kissinger was a Jew, in denouncing him today some compare him to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. This is to misread both Kissinger and the events of his time. Nixon was distrusted by the ruling establishment because he worked to defuse both the tensions of the Cold War and the hostile relationship with China. This went against many vested interests and belief about communist motives. As I have explained, the CIA used Watergate and the Washington Post to assassinate Nixon. The liberal-left hated Nixon for his work as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee that led to the conviction of Alger Hiss and for his rhetoric, which was nothing but a sop to his base. The liberal-left was too busy enjoying Nixon’s discrediting to notice that he was another victim of the CIA like they believed Salvador Allende to be.

In my life I have seen close up so much that is then falsely explained and goes down in history books as wrongful accounts. Truth is not very powerful as it does not serve very many powerful interests. The fact remains that the Cambodia bombing was the desperate act of a government that wanted to end the Vietnam War. A legitimate question is: why didn’t Nixon simply walk away from the war? The answer is that he would have lost his conservative base, and, of course, the liberal-left would have piled on as well. Nixon and Kissinger hoped to create a more stable world by defusing the tensions between the West and the communist powers. This is also the reason left-leaning governments were overthrown elsewhere. The reasoning was that stability was impossible if Soviet leaning governments kept popping up in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

The Nixon/Kissinger decision is not everyone’s. But, the Cuban Missile Crisis had made clear that one alternative to stability was conflict that could result in nuclear war. Reagan faced the same conundrum, but was able to reconcile with Gorbachev. It is a crime that subsequent administrations threw Reagan’s accomplishment away. The military/security complex proved to be too strong for peace.

X thread.

• The Military-Industrial Complex (RFK Jr)

On my seventh birthday, January 17, 1961—three days before my uncle, John F. Kennedy, took his oath of office as United States President—his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, appeared on national television to deliver his farewell address, which history increasingly regards as one of the most important and prophetic speeches in American history. “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. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.””

President Eisenhower took special care to include an expanded definition of his term “military-industrial complex” that would include the top bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Eisenhower warned that the federal government’s rising medical and scientific technocracy posed its own unique threats toward our democracy and freedom. “In this revolution, [scientific/medical] research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government . . . Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity . . . The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded . . .

[W]e must also be alert to the . . . danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Eisenhower ended his speech with an admonition that echoes now in rebuke as we emerge from the COVID era that trampled the core principles that had, for 240 years, maintained America as the global exemplar for democracy, constitutional government, and personal freedom. “It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”

The Wuhan Cover Up
Robert F Kennedy, Jr

Wasn’t that Afghanistan?

• Russian Intel Chief Warns US Of ‘Second Vietnam’ (RT)

By backing Kiev in its fight with Moscow, the US risks sleepwalking into another Vietnam War-style debacle, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), has said. In an opinion piece for Razvedchik magazine issued by the SVR and published on Thursday, Naryshkin predicted tectonic geopolitical shifts in the coming year, which he said would be marked by an intensified confrontation between the West and those countries that oppose its hegemony. The intelligence chief suggested that the Western bloc would try to defend the dominance that is slipping from its grasp, with the ripples of the struggle likely to spread across the world.

The West will be particularly focused on the Ukraine conflict, Naryshkin said, predicting that it “would try to prolong the fighting as much as possible” in a bid to turn hostilities into “a second Afghanistan” and defeat Russia in a battle of attrition, using unprecedented sanctions and pumping Kiev with weapons. However, he warned that there is a high chance that continued support for the “Kiev junta” – given that the Ukraine conflict is becoming an increasingly “toxic” issue in the eyes of the global community – would lead to a rapid erosion of Western authority. The further we go, the more Ukraine will turn into a ‘black hole’, absorbing material and human resources. In the end, the US risks bringing upon itself a ‘second Vietnam’.”

According to Naryshkin, should this come to pass, every US administration will have to deal with this conundrum until “a more or less reasonable person comes to power in Washington” with enough courage and determination to extinguish the crisis. The 1955-1975 Vietnam War, in which the US actively supported anti-Communist forces, is widely regarded as one of the worst conflicts in America’s recent history. Apart from claiming the lives of about 58,000 US soldiers, it shattered public confidence in the government, in no small measure due to several controversies surrounding alleged war crimes committed by Washington. Under relentless public pressure, US forces completely withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, with the Washington-backed government being defeated a few years later. Russian officials have repeatedly warned the West against arming Ukraine, arguing that it will only prolong the conflict but not change its ultimate outcome. Moscow has also said that by supporting Kiev, NATO is essentially waging a war against Russia.

“Pay the oligarchs or we’ll kill your kids.”

• Pentagon Threatens Americans Over Ukraine – Tucker Carlson (RT)

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reportedly told members of Congress that unless they approve more funding to Ukraine, Americans will be sent to fight Russia directly, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on Thursday. According to Carlson, Austin spoke at a classified briefing for members of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, and at one point told members that “we’ll send your uncles, cousins and sons to fight Russia” unless Kiev gets the $60 billion in aid requested by the White House. “The Biden administration is openly threatening Americans over Ukraine,” said Carlson said on X (formerly Twitter), summarizing Austin’s message as “Pay the oligarchs or we’ll kill your kids.” “He really said this?” asked X owner Elon Musk. “He really did. Confirmed,” Carlson replied.

Carlson was by far the most popular host of an evening talk show on cable TV when Fox News mysteriously chose to part ways with him in April. He has since speculated that its corporate owners “really didn’t like” some of his coverage that challenged official narratives. In May, he launched his own show on Musk’s platform in a format similar to his long-form interviews for Fox. On Tuesday, his guest was Congressman Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican opposed to sending any more money to Ukraine – on account of the US being too heavily in debt. “How could Washington possibly send tens of billions more to sleazy oligarchs in Ukraine now that the whole enterprise has been revealed as a fruitless, corrupt and incredibly destructive disaster?” Carlson wondered in the introduction to that interview.

The US Congress has approved over $120 billion worth of aid to Kiev since the conflict with Russia escalated in February 2022, in the form of weapons and ammunition coming from the Pentagon’s stockpiles as well as cash payments to the Ukrainian government. That money has mostly run out at this point, and the White House has asked for $60 billion more – choosing to bundle it with aid for Israel, weapons for Taiwan and “border security.” Some Republicans in both the House and the Senate have refused to go along, however. GOP senators stormed out of their briefing on Wednesday and later voted against advancing the aid package. Meanwhile, Republican chairs of the Foreign Affairs, Armed Services and Intelligence committees in the House of Representatives have embraced the White House talking points in a memo aiming to persuade their party members to back the Ukraine funding bill, according to Axios.

“In an attempt to ‘add fuel’ to the fire of the Ukrainian proxy war, [US] authorities have finally lost touch with reality..”

• Moscow Rejects US Narrative On Aid For Kiev (RT)

Claims in Washington that Russian President Vladimir Putin may attack NATO, unless Congress allocates tens of billions of dollars in additional Ukraine funding are “bogeyman stories,” Moscow’s top diplomat in the US capital said on Wednesday. White House officials, including President Joe Biden, have claimed that by withholding aid from Kiev, American lawmakers were increasing the risk of a direct US-Russia war. “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden said in an address on Wednesday, in which he made a last-ditch appeal to lawmakers to appropriate over $110 billion in assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Touting the scenario of a Russian attack on NATO, Biden stressed that then American troops will have to get involved directly. The Russian leadership has not expressed an intention to “take Ukraine,” let alone invade any NATO member.

Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov called the narrative “myth-making and [the] propagation of dangerous lies” about his nation. “In an attempt to ‘add fuel’ to the fire of the Ukrainian proxy war, [US] authorities have finally lost touch with reality,” he claimed in remarks posted by the embassy. “Washington and [the] insatiable US military-industrial complex are direct beneficiaries of the bloodshed in Ukraine,” Antonov added. In his pitch to Congress, Biden claimed that the Russian leader’s ambition was to “dominate Ukraine” and warned that “the entire world is watching” Washington’s actions. America is “the reason Putin has not totally overrun Ukraine and moved beyond that,” he claimed. Moscow has cited NATO’s expansion in Europe and the pledge that Ukraine will eventually join the US-led military bloc among the causes of the crisis. It was willing to seal a truce with Kiev in the early phase of the conflict in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality.

However, Russia’s opponent ditched a proposed peace agreement and opted for continued hostilities, after then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the country to “just make war,” according to David Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation at the Türkiye-mediated negotiations. Biden accused Republican opponents of his request of being willing to “literally kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield” and “give Putin the greatest gift he could hope for and abandon our global leadership not just to Ukraine.” Nevertheless, Republican senators voted unanimously against the aid, which was bundled in a spending package, later in the day. The GOP legislators insisted that the White House and Democratic lawmakers make concessions on immigration reform and border security before they were willing to approve additional tens of billions of aid to Kiev.

“I hope and believe business rises above the political nonsense.”

• The Diamond Crack-Up (John Helmer)

It has never happened before among the world’s diamond-producing and diamond-processing countries. Meeting together last month in Zimbabwe in what is called the Kimberley Process (KP), the 57-member states refused to agree to the US and European Union (EU) attempt to exclude Russia, producer of half the diamonds in global trade. To camouflage the outcome of the fight, the KP delegates decided not to issue a communiqué. Without that, the rules of the meeting nullified all points of agreement which the Kimberley Process states had accepted during their two-day sessions. This dramatic collapse of the Kimberley Process happened in Harare on November 10. The disagreement and deadlock came over a letter from the Kiev regime, backed by the US, the EU, Japan, and Canada (the G7 member states) to impose a full ban on the trade in Russian diamonds.

The Ukrainian attempt was backed by intense pressure from the US State Department and by Jewish diamantaires in New York for the international diamond trade to accept the US Diamond Protocol, a scheme of registration, inspection, auditing, and certification enforced by US intelligence and Treasury agents, to prevent any Russian-mined diamond from entering the international diamond jewellery market. Instead, what has happened is that the global diamond industry has been cracked in half by the sanctions war. The defeat of the so-called “western bloc” in Zimbabwe is big news in Africa and India. It has not been reported in the New York and London financial press. Diamonds are now likely to follow oil, gas, coal, gold, and other commodities into parallel and competing global market operations.

In the diamond war, however, the outcome is also going to backfire on the Israeli diamond industry and the traditional Jewish centres in Antwerp, Belgium, and New York City, which have combined to take sides against Russia. In time, they will be replaced by the Arabs, Indians, and perhaps the Chinese. The Israelis don’t think so. They are calculating that in the short run they will gain from the recovery of diamond prices when the shortage of Russian supplies hits much harder than it has to date. A source in Antwerp reports “absolutely no backlash [against the Gaza war] here from any of the five main diamond communities including the Lebanese. The Israeli industry has been declining for many years anyway, especially manufacturing – it’s uncompetitive with the Indians — but also trading. There is no diamantaire sympathy with any Arab country (or Iran). I hope and believe business rises above the political nonsense.”

The Kimberley Process, first created in 2003 to stop “blood diamonds” from entering the market from the genocidal wars of western Africa, is about to be confronted by blood diamonds from Israel. The story of the US attempt to start sanctions against Russian diamonds from the US and its allies began here when the Belgian government was resisting to save the multi-billion dollar Antwerp diamond business.

This does not yet include anything FARA related.

• Hunter Biden Indicted by Feds on 9 Counts Related to Tax Evasion (Sp.)

US federal prosecutors filed nine new counts against Hunter Biden and alleged he engaged in a scheme to evade over a million in taxes, a court filing revealed. “The Defendant engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019, from in or about January 2017 through in or about October 15, 2020, and to evade the assessment of taxes for tax year 2018 when he filed false returns in or about February 2020,” the document, filed in a federal court in California on Thursday, said. The indictment alleges that Hunter Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.” He evaded taxes while getting paid millions, the document revealed.

Between 2016 and October 15, 2020, according to the document, Hunter Biden received more than $7 million in total gross income. The document also said Burisma agreed to pay the defendant $1 million annually, which they reduced to $500,000 a year in March 2017. The indictment also details Hunter Biden’s business dealings with other foreign contacts. Between 2015 and 2017, Hunter Biden and two business associates split a payment of $3.1 million tied to attempts to help a Romanian businessperson contest bribery charges he was facing in his home country. Hunter Biden and business associates in 2015 met with individuals tied to CEFC China Energy company for talks on infrastructure projects.

“On or about March 1, 2017, State Energy HK, a Hong Kong entity associated with CEFC, paid approximately $3 million to Business Associate 1’s entity for sourcing deals and for identifying other potential ventures. The Defendant [Hunter Biden] had an oral agreement with Business Associate 1 to receive one-third of those funds, or a million dollars. The Defendant, in turn, directed a portion of those million dollars to Business Associate 3,” the document said. Republican-led House panels are probing Hunter Biden for alleged criminal activity, including foreign bribery and influence peddling. Last month, the Oversight Committee subpoenaed Hunter Biden to appear for a deposition.

NEW – CBS's Catherine Herridge highlights that Hunter Biden's federal charges revolve around income earned from China, Ukraine, and Romania, but Hunter never registered as a foreign lobbyist, in violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act.pic.twitter.com/DjaPpy5hHZ

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) December 8, 2023

Perhaps Elon Musk WILL reinstate him..

• “If People Think Things Are Bad Now…” Tucker And Alex Jones (ZH)

Dubbed “the most censored man in the world”, Jones began by discussing his (correct) prediction about 9/11. As Tucker points out, “the 9/11 thing, you called it in public.” But Jones says his most accurate prediction was around a decade ago when he read the “Rockefeller Foundation Operation Lockstep report,” which he says: “described using a virus to bring in world government, a world medical ID, which they would then build a social credit score off of……that they would make people wear masks for fear, shut down sporting events and things like that… and basically phase in this new tyranny.” These warnings, among other things, were the reason, Carlson argues, why Jones was so widely deplatformed. “Fundamentally, Alex Jones is right about a lot of things. And in fact, that’s why they don’t like him.”

“To this day, nobody has been more aggressively censored, I don’t think, than you… I read about it, and I felt that it was a major moment in the history of American media. I don’t think anybody defended you when that happened. Anybody, with any kind of audience,” To which Jones replied: “When Tim Cook admitted that he met on the weekend in August of 2017 with the other big tech heads, and they made the decision to “curate” like it’s a museum – and take me off, it was hundreds of platforms. It wasn’t just the big ones. Everything from LinkedIn, to our bank accounts being taken away, to everything ensuing over the next week and that month. And I knew I was a test case.” “It was the questioning the school shooting thing that came later. They kind of dredged that up from my past, blew that up after I’d been deplatformed, and said I’d been deplatformed for that.

“Once they deplatformed me, it made the show in ways only get bigger… So then they panicked and said ‘okay, let’s look at his record and create more of a reason,’ so they took things out of context from 5-6 years before, blew em up as a current thing out of context, and deceptively reported on what I said to create a strawman argument to then facilitate the reason.”

The discussion turns to the current state of America with Jones laying the blame for the growing division of the nation by race squarely at the feet of China. “The CCP, along with the SPLC and ADL, see America’s weakness and they are literally coming in and saying ‘white people are inherently bad because of the color of their skin……and then they organize all them into race-based groups under the Democratic party flag to attack who is left… which tends to be more conservative.” Jones warns however that “they are panicking” because “more and more blacks and hispanics are voting Republican,” which, he explains is why the open border policy is being allowed. “They are bringing in all these totally disenfranchised people from around the world… putting them in camps where they indoctrinated into a subdued political under-class… that’s then going to be turned loose on America.”

Tucker Carlson Drops Opening Monologue About Alex Jones:

We have a ruling class in the United States defined by its hatreds. Not its loves, not its hopes, but by its hatreds. They hate all kinds of people, large groups of people: the deplorables, the bitter clingers, America's… pic.twitter.com/msvQN1VzcJ

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) December 7, 2023

Alex Jones says he has Government sources that confirm Biden wanders around the White House naked at night, “doesn’t know who he is”

Tucker says a makeup artist confirmed Biden is pumped full of Amphetamines to perform his duties

WOW! pic.twitter.com/h3HzI7n6Ev

— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) December 7, 2023

Ep. 46 The Alex Jones Interview

TIMESTAMPS:

2:46 Alex Jones predictions
15:07 Deplatforming
21:59 Dividing us on race
25:37 The border
28:09 Austin
32:12 New World Order
42:09 Brian Stelter demon video
50:57 Depopulation
1:07:51 Food
1:13:51 Whiskey
1:16:22 Presidential… pic.twitter.com/IsJAQDUzDc

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 7, 2023

“If they want the best house in the country, that would be one of the top two or three that would be available if they were for sale..”

• Trump Witness Says He Valued Mar-a-Lago at More Than $1 Billion (ET)

A Florida real estate agent this week testified in former President Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York that his Mar-a-Lago property is worth at least $1 billion. Lawrence Moens, who was called as a witness by the defense, testified that the Florida property could be sold as a home, saying he would value it at over $1 billion as of 2021. “It’s something breathtaking. It’s something amazing to see,” he said of Mar-a-Lago, adding that he had valued it at over $1.2 billion in 2021. He also told the court that President Trump’s company had actually undervalued Mar-a-Lago by about half. Mr. Moens’s valuation assumes that Mar-a-Lago is a personal residence, a premise that a judge already has rejected in the ongoing civil fraud trial.

“I work very hard to sell rich people property in Palm Beach,” testified Mr. Moens. “I’m on the front lines every day of selling properties, and I have a pretty good handle on what’s happening in the market.” Spanning 17 acres with waterfront on two sides, the Trump estate and social club is his home, a place where the former president and current Republican 2024 front-runner has conducted high-profile meetings while in and out of office, and the spot where federal special counsel Jack Smith alleges he improperly stashed classified documents, which President Trump denies. Mar-a-Lago also is a key element of the current New York civil case. State Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit claims that the ex-president and his company deceived lenders and others by giving them financial statements that greatly overstated the values of some of his prime assets, including Mar-a-Lago.

Testifying for Trump’s defense, a Florida real estate attorney said the property could be sold as a home, notwithstanding decades-old legal documents in which Trump said he intended to forswear its use as anything but a club. Then a Palm Beach luxury real estate broker testified that he’d value the historic estate at over $1 billion as of 2021. Judge Arthur Engoron, in a pretrial ruling declaring that Trump and his company engaged in fraud, found that he exaggerated Mar-a-Lago’s worth by as much as 2,300 percent, compared to the Palm Beach County tax appraiser’s valuations. They ranged from $18 million to $28 million. However, some real estate professionals who aren’t involved in the case expressed concern about the judge’s ruling several months ago, suggesting that he made an error by relying solely on the tax appraiser’s valuations.

Some Palm Beach luxury real estate agents have told The Associated Press that the property would sell for $300 million to $600 million, and possibly $1 billion or more if it sparked a bidding war among uber-wealthy contenders.
During a short cross-examination Tuesday, state attorney Kevin Wallace asked whether he was a member of the Mar-a-Lago club. “I am,” Mr. Moens said, saying that he joined in 1995 or 1996. “I don’t go too often. I don’t like clubs,” he added. “You’re not running a process that is re-creatable … is that fair?” Mr. Wallace asked about his valuations of Mar-a-Lago. “That’s fair,” Mr. Moens said. In a pre-trial deposition over the summer, Mr. Moens had said that he “could dream up anyone from Elon Musk to Bill Gates and everyone in between” to purchase Mar-a-Lago. “Kings, emperors, heads of state.”

“If they want the best house in the country, that would be one of the top two or three that would be available if they were for sale,” he added. “I wish he’d let me sell it, but it’s not for sale,” he said. Another defense witness, Miami-based real estate attorney John Shubin, also testified that “there is absolutely no prohibition on the use of Mar-a-Lago as a single-family residence.” He noted that the property is simultaneously a club and President Trump’s residence. Mr. Shubin also pointed to a 1993 agreement between the former president and the city that said Mar-a-Lago would revert to private residential use if the club were “abandoned.”

Kirsch Brand
https://twitter.com/i/status/1732804423783432628

Steve Kirsch Calls NZ Vax Data Whistleblower a Hero: "He Was Willing to Sacrifice Himself to Save Lives"

"He [Barry Young] knew he would be sentenced to seven years in jail for this. And the reason he did it is because this guy has courage, and he's a hero. He's the first person… pic.twitter.com/soKDXodXz5

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) December 7, 2023

Malabar giant squirrel found in India

Easy

Looks so easy.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/zaVgP6BpgU

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 7, 2023

Elephant shoe

An elephant gently returns a child's shoe that fell into a zoo enclosure
pic.twitter.com/iPucWdqXy6

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) December 7, 2023

Mommy
https://twitter.com/i/status/1732662224374915560

The water quality in Warsaw, the capital city of Poland, is monitored by clams. If the water gets too toxic, they close, and the triggers shut off the city’s water supply automatically

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

Debt Rattle December 21 2021

Dec 212021

December 21, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: Capitol Riot, Christmas, Durham, Fauci, myocarditis, Omicron, reelection, science, Vietnam 50 Responses »

Edouard Manet Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets 1872

• Omicron is Not Normal (eugyp)

• Omicron Accounted For 73% Of New US Infections Last Week (AP)

• No, 73% of US COVID-19 Cases Aren’t Omicron Yet (Prep.)

• The Omicron Fake-out (Jim Kunstler)

• Fauci’s War on Science: The Smoking Gun (Tucker)

• 5 Essential Truths About COVID-19 (McCullough)

• Pfizer Vaccines Withheld From Vietnamese Children After Deaths & AEs (TSN)

• 26-Year-Old’s Death From Myocarditis ‘Probably’ Caused by Pfizer Vaccine (CHD)

• How Biden Blew It (NR)

• Two More House Democrats Not to Run for Reelection, Total Now 23 (CTH)

• Alex Jones Sues Pelosi, US Capitol Riot Committee (RT)

• It’s Official: Durham Is Investigating The Clinton Campaign (Technofog)

Massie

Is anyone working on a vaccine to stop the spread of COVID?

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 20, 2021

Biden: “For the unvaccinated, you can expect a winter of death”

DeSantis: “You’re free to get vaccinated or not, but if you get sick either way, you can get monoclonal antibodies to survive. And if you can’t get vaccinated, you can always get Evusheld for protection.”

Malone Big Bird

“Big pharma has turned Big Bird into a child predator”@RWMaloneMD pic.twitter.com/fo51hwQNYy

— Melly (@Belondyy) December 18, 2021

Jordan/Makary

Congressman @Jim_Jordan During A Select Subcommittee…

You Might Want To Hear This… pic.twitter.com/Zng7qv6fSM

— Covid-1984 (@Orwells_Ghost_) December 20, 2021

“The balance of the evidence is that Omicron leaked from a lab engaged in SARS-2 vaccine research.”

• Omicron is Not Normal (eugyp)

Omicron is not normal. No immediate progenitors are known; its closest relatives are viruses last seen in early- to mid-2020. The orthodox explanation for this awkward fact, is that it has spent the last 18 months lurking “in a geography with poor genomic surveillance … or … in a chronically infected individual.” The simpler explanation is that it leaked from a laboratory. As el gato malo and others have indicated, evidence is strong that Omicron circulates preferentially in the vaccinated. In all likelihood, it is the result of gain-of-function research, in which SARS-2 was passaged repeatedly through convalescent or vaccinated plasma, in the hopes of helping the virus evade acquired immunity. The purpose of this research would be to anticipate future immune-escape variants that vaccines might target.

Omicron carries a series of highly unlikely and suspicious mutations in its spike protein. It is hard to imagine that these mutations can have arisen via natural processes, because all but one of them are nonsynonymous – that is, they code for different amino acid sequences. Starkly mutated variants favoured by natural selection should have a great many meaningless synonymous mutations as well. Omicron’s ancestors may have spent a significant amount of time adapting to mouse cells, before re-entering human hosts. Omicron appears selected to replicate primarily in the bronchial tract. Deeper in the human lung, it functions far less efficiently than Delta or the first strains from Wuhan. This is probably why it causes mostly mild illness, and it is reminiscent of techniques used to make live attenuated influenza vaccines safer for use in humans.

Such vaccines are cold-adapted, that is, selected to circulate primarily in the cooler upper respiratory tract rather than in the warmer, more vulnerable lungs. The balance of the evidence is that Omicron leaked from a lab engaged in SARS-2 vaccine research. There are many possibilities: It might represent a live, attenuated virus vaccine used informally among researchers, that mutated back to virulence and escaped; it might have been released accidentally; it could even be an attempt to develop a self-spreading vaccine to immunise animals or third world populations.

“..federal health officials said on Monday..”

Uh, no, they did not.

• Omicron Accounted For 73% Of New US Infections Last Week (AP)

Omicron is now the dominant version of the coronavirus in the US, federal health officials said on Monday, racing ahead of Delta and other variants and accounting for 73% of new infections last week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers showed nearly a six-fold increase in Omicron’s share of infections in only one week. In much of the country, omicron’s prevalence is even higher. It’s responsible for an estimated 90% of new infections in the New York area, the south-east, the industrial midwest and the Pacific north-west. Since the end of June, the Delta variant has been the main version causing US infections. As recently as the end of November, more than 99.5% of coronaviruses were Delta, according to CDC data.

Scientists in Africa first sounded the alarm about omicron less than a month ago and on 26 November the World Health Organization designated it as a “variant of concern”. The mutant has since shown up in about 90 countries. Much about the omicron variant remains unknown, including whether it causes more or less severe illness. Early studies suggest the vaccinated will need a booster shot for the best chance at preventing omicron infection but even without the extra dose, vaccination still should offer strong protection against severe illness and death. “All of us have a date with Omicron,” said Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “If you’re going to interact with society, if you’re going to have any type of life, Omicron will be something you encounter, and the best way you can encounter this is to be fully vaccinated.”

“..No humans at the CDC stood up in front of a podium and announced the 73% number, or wrote a press release. It came from the CDC’s automated COVID data tracker website.”

• No, 73% of US COVID-19 Cases Aren’t Omicron Yet (Prep.)

Something extremely odd happened this afternoon. The press, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Axios, reported that the CDC had announced that 73% of US COVID-19 cases were now being caused by the Omicron variant, and major public health gurus like Ashish Jha, Eric Topol, Florian Krammer, Eric Feigl-Ding, and Scott Gottlieb circulated the reports at face value. But that’s not really what’s happening. There was some kind of bug in an automated statistical algorithm at the CDC, known as the variant proportions Nowcast. Omicron isn’t really dominant in most of the USA yet (although all evidence continues to indicate it will be soon). And the bug in Nowcast went from a quiet database update on a quiet CDC web page, to a national press sensation, in a matter of hours.

What actually happened? No humans at the CDC stood up in front of a podium and announced the 73% number, or wrote a press release. It came from the CDC’s automated COVID data tracker website. But it’s also not a statement of hard data, it’s the output of an algorithm called the Nowcast. The Nowcast algorithm is based on the CDC’s variant proportions data. Every week a small percentage of US COVID-19 cases are subjected to genome sequencing, which identifies them by strain. Right now it’s about 3.6%, but it varies by state. The CDC collates this data to produce weekly reports on the prevalence of each variant in each of ten regions of the continental USA. However, the genomic data takes time to generate and process, then get deposited into genomics databanks, then get analyzed by the CDC, so the newest data is about two weeks old at each weekly refresh (today, sixteen days old; the week ending December 4).

To display an estimate of current prevalence, the CDC uses an algorithm it calls a “Nowcast,” to project forward from two weeks ago and give an estimate of current prevalence for different strains. The Nowcast algorithm has been remarkably accurate and useful in the past; I followed it with great interest as Alpha, Gamma, Delta, Mu, and other strains washed across the USA from early 2021 until Delta attained total dominance in the summer. It’s a significant achievement for the CDC, and I celebrate them for it. But something is on the fritz now. In this week’s update, which dropped Monday afternoon, the Nowcast algorithm is presenting results that don’t make sense.

“..the “Joe Biden” regime’s main chance for retaining any power is to keep the Covid panic going long enough to re-run the mail-in voting scams of 2020..”

• The Omicron Fake-out (Jim Kunstler)

Omicron supposedly started in South Africa some weeks ago and Covid deaths there are at an 18-month low. The existing “vaccines” appear to be completely ineffective against omicron, so how is more of that stuff going to help? And then why all the hysteria about vaxxing up the vaxx-resistant? Insofar as the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines present not insignificant risks of harmful-to-fatal side effects, plus being ineffective, what is the prudent bet there? Speaking of which, will the public even be able to discern whether the alleged winter death surge is a result of Covid or of adverse reactions to the vaxxes? My money would be on adverse vaxx events. Why is there absolutely no talk — except in the state of Florida, run by Governor Ron DeSantis — about comprehensive early treatment of Covid?

Why is the CDC not setting up early treatment centers around the USA, where people with symptoms can receive monoclonal antibody infusions and kits of well-known, cheap, safe and effective oral medicines that can be used easily at home to defeat the virus? (Those medicines have been surreptitiously outlawed by our own CDC, you know.) Is it outlandish to suppose that the official “Joe Biden” government objective is to allow as many people to die as possible in order to keep the public terrorized? Meanwhile, they’ve provoked the public to line up for Covid tests using a PCR system so discredited for Covid detection that months ago the CDC scheduled it to go offline on December 31st, (And, uh, why the long time-lag between the decision and the action? Answer: it allows the CDC to falsely jack up case numbers until the year’s bitter end.)

With the apparent defeat of the Build Back Better boondoggle, following a long list of other failures, the “Joe Biden” regime’s main chance for retaining any power is to keep the Covid panic going long enough to re-run the mail-in voting scams of 2020 in the 2022 congressional elections. It’s a weak play, though, since the opposition is fully onto it. And if the Democratic Party loses as many seats in Congress and the Senate as it deserves to lose, not a single piece of their toxic legislation will see daylight until the mastodons come home in the next ice age. Also consider that Democratic Party operatives by the limousine-load will be hauled in to testify before opposition-controlled committees and many of these will be subject to criminal referrals.

Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) are top scientists. Fauci labeled them “fringe epidemiologists”. That’s how much respect he has for science and scientists.

• Fauci’s War on Science: The Smoking Gun (Tucker)

Those weeks following the release of the Great Barrington Declaration did feel odd. On the good side, medical doctors, scientists, public health workers, and citizens all over the world were thrilled that three top scholars in fields of public health and epidemiology had spoken out against lockdowns and for a reasoned approach to Covid. They eagerly signed the document. Yes, there were some attempts to sabotage it too, with fake names and so on, which should have been a clue about what was coming. The fakes were deleted in days and new methods of confirming signatures were deployed. The document, on the one hand, said nothing controversial. The right way to deal with this pandemic, it said, was to focus on those who could face severe outcomes from disease – a very plain point and nothing new.

There was nothing to be gained by locking down the whole of society because of a pathogen with such a huge differential in its demographic impact. The virus would have to become endemic in any case (including the realization of “herd immunity,” which is not a “strategy” but a descriptive term widely accepted in epidemiology) and certainly would not be stopped by destroying peoples’ lives and liberties. The hope of the Declaration was simply that journalists would pay attention to a different point of view and a debate would begin on the unprecedented experiment in lockdowns. Perhaps science could prevail, even in this climate. On the bad side, and at the very same time, following the release, the attacks began pouring in, and they were brutal, structured to destroy.

The three main signers – Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) – made the statement as a matter of principle. It was also born of frustration with the prevailing narrative. Mostly this declaration was intended as an educational effort. But the authors were being called vicious names and treated like heretics that should be burned. There certainly was no civil debate; quite the contrary. It was all quite shocking given that the Declaration was a statement concerning what almost everyone in these professional circles believed earlier in the year. They were merely stating the consensus based on science and experience. Nothing more.

Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. It was sponsored by Yale University. Today it reads nearly like a first draft of the Great Barrington Declaration. Indeed on that same day, Fauci wrote to a Washington Post reporter: “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.” But following the March 13-16, 2020 lockdowns, the orthodoxy had evidently changed. And suddenly. The signers of the GBD had declined to change with it. Thus did they endure astonishingly brutal smears. What felt odd at the time was the sheer intensity of the attacks, as well as their dogmatism and ferocity. These attacks also had a strong political flavor that had little regard for science.

” I’m calling for an immediate pause, a pause in the public program on Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson, until we can do a deep dive on the safety review.”

• 5 Essential Truths About COVID-19 (McCullough)

1) COVID-19 is ONLY spread when symptoms are present. “The virus cannot be spread unless someone has symptoms, unless someone’s sick,” McCullough said in an address on December 12. “They cannot spread COVID-19 They’re not contagious. That’s been shown now.” He elaborated: “It’s only symptoms that are related to the spread of illness and there is no asymptomatic spread. So, if there’s no asymptomatic spread, as long as nobody in this arena has symptoms, there will not be a single case that comes out of this auditorium. That is an important principle. Now, that means if you’re sick, if you’re sick, and you’re susceptible to COVID-19, please stay home. If your children are sick and they’re susceptible to COVID-19, that could be the case, stay home.”

2) Asymptomatic testing is not FDA cleared or supported by any regulatory bodies. “Because there’s no asymptomatic spread … we never needed to close down the schools,” McCullough continued. “That means we never needed to wear masks, right, because you can’t spread it asymptomatically. That means that there should be no asymptomatic testing.” McCullough observed the World Health Organization (WHO) has agreed with this assessment since the end of June. “Widespread screening of asymptomatic individuals is not a currently recommended strategy due to the significant costs associated with it and the lack of data on its operational effectiveness,” WHO stated.

3) Natural immunity is robust, complete, and durable–it’s “one and done.” “Once somebody is recovered from COVID-19 It’s one and done,” McCullough emphasized. “It’s one and done. You’re done.”New York Attorney Elizabeth Brehm asked the CDC for “documents reflecting any documented case of an individual who: (1) never received a COVID-19 vaccine; (2) was infected with COVID-19 once, recovered, and then later became infected again; and (3) transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to another person when reinfected.” The response from Roger Andoh at CDC was: “A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request. The CDC Emergency Operations Center (EOC) conveyed that this information is not collected.” “Now the CDC has got 41,000 cases, sadly, of full-blown vaccine failures that resulted in hospitalization and death,” McCullough went on, adding, “41,000 vaccine failures, they don’t have a single failure of natural immunity.”

4) COVID-19 is a treatable illness in high-risk patients with early sequenced multidrug therapy. “The illness is imminently treatable … we can treat COVID-19, and we can actually markedly influence the natural history of the disease by intercepting it early, and those innovations were discovered early in 2020,” McCullough noted. “Everybody should have a COVID-19 survival kit at home,” he stressed. “We should really take charge of this. This viral pandemic is a war. It’s a war and it’s up to us to step up and start to fight this thing.”

5) The genetic COVID-19 vaccines are not sufficiently safe or effective for the public. Vaccine mandates should be dropped, and the vaccine program should be paused for safety review. “I don’t think anybody had a problem with vaccines a year ago. But we now know as they’re broadly used in the general population, like many new products, it has not worked out and we have seen unacceptably high rates of death that occurs after vaccination. About 50% of the deaths that are recorded happen within 48 hours, 80% within a week. “In the U.S. CDC VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] we have 19,000 deaths, about half of those are domestic,” he observed, adding: “We have 31,000 now that are permanently disabled. That is unacceptable for a medicinal product in the United States.

And it’s unacceptable for our agencies not to review safety for us. And it’s unacceptable for our FDA or CDC or NIH and our White House Task Force. It’s unacceptable for them not to provide a safeguard for our citizens. “Moving forward, the vaccines are not enough to bring us out of the pandemic. I am going to close by calling for, at this point in time, a complete and total ban on any vaccine mandates. I’m calling for an immediate pause, a pause in the public program on Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson, until we can do a deep dive on the safety review.

A batch?!

• Pfizer Vaccines Withheld From Vietnamese Children After Deaths & AEs (TSN)

Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are approved for use on children by the Vietnamese government. Children are divided into three age groups for vaccination: 3-11, 12-15, and 16-17 years old. The Ministry of Health predicted that by the fourth quarter of 2021, 95% of the 8.1 million youngsters aged 12 to 17 would have had two COVID-19 vaccine doses. A girl in Hanoi’s Thuong Tin District died only one day after vaccination in November. The cause of death was Grade IV anaphylaxis, according to the Post-Vaccination Events Expert Panel. Anaphylaxis is a set of symptoms caused by an allergic reaction to a foreign substance. The most severe form of anaphylaxis is Grade IV, which includes respiratory and cardiac collapse. However, it was concluded the case had nothing to do with the quality of the vaccine or vaccination methods.

The Hanoi Department of Health consequently spoke with the Ministry of Health regarding two batches of Pfizer vaccines, no. 124001 and 123002, which had been used to vaccinate students. These two batches were initially printed with an expiry date of November 30, 2021, but had their expiry extended to February 28, 2022. After receiving feedback from parents, Hanoi stopped injecting the two vaccines and consulted the Ministry of Health, the other batches were injected normally,” said Director of the Hanoi Department of Health, Tran Thi Nhi Ha. The Hanoi Department of Health published a press release on December 1 verifying that the Covid-19 vaccine is still being administered to students in Hanoi. TrialSite reports that news media in North America and Europe kept far away from this story.

Mobile injection sites are set up at schools in Thanh Hoa, south of Hanoi in the far northern reaches of this Southeast Asian nation. They primarily provide the COVID-19 vaccination to children in high schools, as well as students in vocational and continuing education institutes. However, more than 120 youngsters were hospitalised in the province for post-injection treatment. The provincial health department has taken steps to prevent injection of the suspect batches of vaccines, according to the international version of the VN Express, a popular online news media owned by FPT Group, the largest information technology service company in Vietnam.

At least New Zealand reports it.

• 26-Year-Old’s Death From Myocarditis ‘Probably’ Caused by Pfizer Vaccine (CHD)

Pfizer’s COVID vaccine “probably” caused the death of a healthy 26-year-old man, New Zealand health authorities said Monday. The health officials attributed Rory James Nairn’s death, 12 days after his first COVID shot, to myocarditis. “With the current available information, the board has considered that the myocarditis was probably due to vaccination in this individual,” a COVID-19 Vaccine Independent Safety Monitoring Board said in a statement. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death. It can also result from infections, but more commonly myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to initial heart damage. Nairn’s death is New Zealand’s second reported death linked to myocarditis.

Health authorities in August reported a woman died from heart inflammation likely due to the vaccine.The board said: “The circumstances of these cases do not impact or change the known information on myocarditis, and the benefits of vaccination with the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19 continue to greatly outweigh the risk of such rare side effects. “The Board has recommended actions to be taken by the COVID-19 Vaccine and Immunization Program to continue to highlight myocarditis as a very rare side effect of the Pfizer vaccine.” A Pfizer spokesperson said the company was aware of the reported death in New Zealand, and that it monitors all reports of possible adverse events and continues to believe the benefit-risk profile for its vaccine is positive.

Nairn’s fiancée, Ashleigh Wilson, is searching for answers after the “traumatic” ordeal. In a video interview with Chantelle Baker from B-2020, Wilson said her fiancé passed away from what paramedics believe was a heart attack. Wilson said Nairn began experiencing heart palpitations on Nov. 5, the same day he received his first shot but that didn’t recognize the severity of his symptoms. Wilson told the NZ Herald Nairn went into the bathroom as the two were preparing to leave for the hospital. That’s when she heard a thud. “He had fallen, his body was blocking the door, his full weight was against it and I couldn’t get it open,” Wilson said. “I could just see him through a crack in the door, I could see that he was gone.” “I watched him die and I could not get to him,” she said.

I don’t want to get into US party politics, but this is well written.

• How Biden Blew It (NR)

If he had wanted to, President Biden could have fulfilled the promises that he made during his campaign and set himself and his party up for a successful 2022. He could have ignored the hollow passions of Twitter and cable TV, lowered the temperatures that so mar our quotidian politics, and delivered the quiet, limited, competent leadership that he promised during his inconspicuous run for the office. Recognizing that his party enjoyed only the barest of congressional majorities, he could have scaled back his lofty ambitions and ensured that his own focus and the focus of the public at large were as tightly aligned as possible. He could have narrowed his initial COVID bill, eschewing the entreaties to go big and limiting the scope of its relief to the desperate alone.

He could have made the bipartisan infrastructure bill a centerpiece, rather than an afterthought, of his first year. He could have grasped that, because federal power is so limited, his role in fighting the pandemic would be exclusively oratorical. He could have understood that people care deeply about illegal immigration and gotten serious about limiting it, even as he struck a kinder tone. Having realized that inflation was clearly not set to be “transitory,” he could have directed the sum of his efforts toward alleviating it. And, while he was doing all that, he could have paid attention to the details that his job throws up in abundance — particularly in the foreign-policy realm — and thereby avoided the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan that drove a stake through his presidency within six months of his taking his oath.

A little more humility, a greater willingness to say “no,” and a more acute understanding of why he won in the first instance would all have gone a long way. Instead? Well, instead he did precisely none of that. Instead, he ignored all evidence to the contrary and concluded that he was a world-historical figure. Instead, he began talking about “transforming” the country. Instead, he proposed the largest spending program in modern American history. Instead, he sent a welcome message to would-be border-hoppers. Instead, he embraced every ridiculous neologism that progressives saw fit to throw at him: “Latinx,” “BIPOC,” “birthing person,” the lot.

No sooner had Biden won the election, NPR reports, than a bunch of irresponsible voices had begun “flattering him with comparisons to two legendary Democratic presidents of the 20th century — Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.” And Biden, fool that he is, believed them. In March, Axios confirmed to general derision that Biden was exhibiting a sincere “determination to be one of the most consequential presidents” in American history, and — euphemism alert! — to explore the “elasticity of presidential power.” The correct response to being told that he might be the next FDR would have been to laugh the speaker out of the Oval Office. Instead, flattered, Biden said, “Tell me more.”

Rats and ships?

• Two More House Democrats Not to Run for Reelection, Total Now 23 (CTH)

Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), the powerful chair of an Appropriations subcommittee overseeing immigration issues, becomes the 23rd House Democrat to announce she will not seek reelection in 2022. Roybal-Allard was first elected to the House in 1993 and was going to have a redistricting battle. Additionally: “Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), a leader of the moderate Blue Dog Democrats, announced earlier Monday that she was retiring in 2022 to spend more time with her young children.” Over the weekend, there were also reports Rep. Albio Sires (D-N.J.) plans to retire. The southern border is a mess, and border state Latino Democrats are switching to the Republican Party. Inflation is skyrocketing and will likely continue getting worse through 2022 due to fiscal and monetary policy.

Wage growth (3%) is nowhere near enough to keep up with food inflation (15%+). Making things worse, gas prices have doubled in most areas and will continue to increase into 2022 due to Biden energy policy. The Democrat regulatory environmental programs in coastal areas and ports are continuing to create massive supply chain issues. Home heating costs this winter will be 60 to 70 percent higher due to Biden energy policy. The Joe Biden vaccination mandate is creating a workforce crisis and escalating backlash created by toxic federal overreach. Several blue states (CA, NY, IL) are losing congressional seats due to population losses, while red states are gaining congressional districts due to population growth. Insane spending by Democrats continues without pause or consideration for the inflation they are creating.

The great ideological cleaving between Democrat communists and middle-class Americans continues. Polling indicates there is a major storm on the horizon for Democrats, as their ideological thirst for power is transparent and being rejected. Every single policy the Biden administration touches creates a crap storm of anxiety for the ‘Main Street’ American worker. The only group benefiting from JoeBama policies is the same group that funds them, Wall Street. Making matters worse, the political communists behind the policy execution are brazen in showcasing how the destruction of the American economy is their intent. Now the White House is promising “a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.” Not exactly an optimistic message.

Even the New York Times has gone from panic to ‘shock’: “The numbers are even worse for Democrats in the eight states expected to have the closest Senate elections, according to Langer — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Not only is Biden’s overall job approval rating in those states 33 percent, 10 points lower than it is in the rest of the country, but registered voters in those eight states say they are more likely to vote for Republican House candidates than for Democrats by 23 points (at 58 percent to 35 percent).”

“Jones claimed that the committee is violating his 1st Amendment rights as a journalist, his 4th Amendment right of privacy in his papers, and his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.”

• Alex Jones Sues Pelosi, US Capitol Riot Committee (RT)

Shock jock Alex Jones has sued US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the congressional committee that’s investigating last January’s US Capitol riot to block the panel from accessing his phone records and forcing him to testify. The lawsuit, which was filed on Monday in US District Court in Washington, alleges that Pelosi and the investigative committee that she appointed are trying to suspend constitutional liberties “in coercive secret proceedings specifically designed to satiate a political witch hunt.” The committee subpoenaed Jones in November, demanding documents related to his role in organizing an election-fraud protest that escalated into the Capitol riot, according to the lawsuit. The panel also ignored the radio host’s constitutional objections, insisting that he testify in Washington on January 10, and it sought to obtain his phone records through AT&T.

“The select committee’s members have made it abundantly clear that they are only interested in prosecuting political adversaries,” the lawsuit said, adding that Jones was put in the “unconscionable position” of facing imprisonment if he exercises his constitutional rights. Jones claimed that the committee is violating his 1st Amendment rights as a journalist, his 4th Amendment right of privacy in his papers, and his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. The lawsuit noted that committee chairman US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) showed his disregard for those protections when he suggested in an MSNBC interview earlier this month that invoking the 5th Amendment may show that a witness is “part and parcel guilty to what occurred.”

“If the Clinton Campaign was being informed of the work by Fusion GPS, what of the likelihood that the Clinton Campaign was informing the work of Fusion GPS?”

• It’s Official: Durham Is Investigating The Clinton Campaign (Technofog)

Igor Danchenko, the primary subsource of Christopher Steele, was arrested on November 3, 2021 for giving multiple false statements to federal officials during his 2017 interviews with the FBI. These included lies about Danchenko’s sources, his travels to Russia, and his falsified contacts with Sergei Millian. We laid out Danchenko’s indictment here. Notably, Special Counsel John Durham alleges that one of Danchenko’s real “sources” was Charles Dolan, Jr. (perhaps first identified by Aaron Mate), who served in various leadership positions to elect Bill Clinton in the 1992 and 1996 campaigns and was an advisor to Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign for president. With Dolan’s involvement, the obvious question becomes whether he was the intermediary between the Clinton Campaign and Danchenko.

After all, we know that the Hillary Clinton Campaign paid for the Steele dossiers and the work by Fusion GPS. This was arranged through their attorneys (and the DNC attorneys) at Perkins Coie – notably Mark Elias and Michael Sussmann. Elias left the firm this summer. Sussmann was indicted in September 2021 by Special Counsel Durham for giving false statements relating to the Alfa Bank/Trump hoax. It is highly likely that the Clinton Campaign was receiving updates on the Fusion GPS/Christopher Steele work once they were hired by Perkins Coie in the spring of 2016. This is work the client – the Clinton Campaign – paid for. (The sharing of this info would be consistent with the Clinton Campaign – notably Jake Sullivan – receiving backchannel updates on the Alfa Bank hoax.)

If the Clinton Campaign was being informed of the work by Fusion GPS, what of the likelihood that the Clinton Campaign was informing the work of Fusion GPS? It was Clintons’ idea to link Trump and Russia in the first place. And associates of the Clinton Campaign (Sidney Blumenthal) were working to corroborate parts of the dossier. With that in mind, I leave you this bit of information provided by the New York Times in September (emphasis added) suggesting the complicity of the Clinton Campaign: “Some of the questions that Mr. Durham’s team has been asking in recent months — including of witnesses it subpoenaed before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions — suggest he has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign.”

Now let’s review what’s going on in Danchenko’s criminal case. He was originally represented by Chris Schafbuch and Mark Schamel. On December 6, 2021, Stuart Sears appeared on behalf of Danchenko. Schafbuch and Schamel dropped out of the case. According to Durham’s latest filing, Stuart Sears is a partner at the law firm Schertler Onorato Mead & Sears. Notably, the firm is currently representing the 2016 “Hillary for America” presidential campaign (the “Clinton Campaign”), as well as multiple former employees of that campaign, in matters before the Special Counsel.”

V for Vendetta virus

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

Debt Rattle December 5 2021

Dec 052021

December 5, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:57 am Finance Tagged with: EUA, fluvoxamine, Molnupiravir, myocarditis, Nuremberg Code, Omicron, pericarditis, Pfizer, Russiagate, secrecy, Vietnam 59 Responses »

Rembrandt van Rijn Study of the Head and Clasped Hands of a Young Man as Christ in Prayer 1655

• 1 In 2680 Young Men In Hong Kong Get Acute Myocarditis From Comirnaty (Malone)

• 120 Children Hospitalized In Vietnam Pfizer Vaccine Batch Suspended (Vne)

• Twitter: Research On Potential Heart Risks Of Covid Vaccine ‘Unsafe’ (JTN)

• WHO: Omicron in 38 Countries, No Deaths Reported (ET)

• Do You Know Why There Isn’t An EUA For Fluvoxamine? (Kirsch)

• ‘Wall Of Secrecy’ In Pfizer Contracts As Company Accused Of Profiteering (G.)

• Australian Children Aged 5 To 11 Set To Receive Pfizer Covid Vaccine

• Molnupiravir Set For UK At-Home Trials (G.)

• EU Chief Calls For Throwing Out Nuremberg Code (PM)

• Hundreds Of NY Corrections Officers Put On Leave For Refusing Covid Jab (NYP)

• Joe Biden Warns Vladimir Putin Not to Invade Ukraine (GR)

• Obituary for Russiagate (Patrick Lawrence)

So we don’t blame them

They're not demonising the unvaccinated to get more people protected against COVID. Nearly 93% of adults in England have COVID antibodies.

Politicians want the majority to blame the minority for one reason and one reason only: so we don't blame them.

— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) December 4, 2021

Below is an article by Robert Malone about myocarditis in Hong Kong, which says 37.32 per 100,000 = 1 in 2680 young men are afflicted.

But Eric Topol says there are no cases among 5 million kids in the US. At the same ratio (and why shouldn’t there be), there should be 1,850. Irresponsible nonsense, Topol. 2nd hand car salesman.

Topol
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1467242562285092865

“..Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere.” – Hannah Arendt

They never found a cure for the “common” cold because the cold IS the cure.

“37.32 per 100,000 = 1 in 2680 young men who develop myocarditis/pericarditis within two weeks of their second vaccination..”

• 1 In 2680 Young Men In Hong Kong Get Acute Myocarditis From Comirnaty (Malone)

Strong data from a peer reviewed article in the journal of Clinical Infectious Disease shows that there is a significant increase in the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis following Comirnaty vaccination among Chinese male adolescents, especially after the second dose. Onset of myocarditis was a median of 2 days after vaccination. The clinically significant (acute and/or “mild”) myocarditis/pericarditis incidence rate came in at one out of every 2680 young males. The results conclude with : “Among male adolescents, the incidence after the first and second doses were 5.57 (95% CI 2.38-12.53) and 37.32 (95% CI 26.98-51.25) per 100,000 persons vaccinated.”

Analysis: 37.32 per 100,000 = 1 in 2680 young men who develop myocarditis/pericarditis within two weeks of their second vaccination (median time to disease: 2 days). This study was an analysis of hospital records of myocarditis/pericarditis, so did not include adolescents who may have developed the disease but did not seek medical attention. Many pediatric cardiologists including my colleague and friend Dr. Kirk Milhoan, MD, PhD (MD board certified in pediatric cardiology, PhD. in vascular inflammation) assert that there is no such thing as “mild” myocarditis in children. Myocarditis causes heart damage. Heart damage is for life – the heart does not heal by replacing damaged cells. It scars. Scars in the heart can lead to changes in electrical conduction in heart muscle, which in turn can result in “sudden death” due to changes in heart beat regularity and muscular contraction of the heart. These events may happen at any time, particularly when the heart is stressed in some way.

Results (from the abstract) Between 14 June 2021 and 4 September 2021, 33 Chinese adolescents who developed acute myocarditis/pericarditis following Comirnaty vaccination were identified. 29 (87.88%) were males and 4 (12.12%) were females, with a median age of 15.25 years. 27 (81.82%) and 6 (18.18%) cases developed acute myocarditis/pericarditis after receiving the second and first dose, respectively. All cases are mild and required only conservative management. The overall incidence of acute myocarditis/pericarditis was 18.52 (95% Confidence Interval [CI], 11.67-29.01) per 100,000 persons vaccinated. The incidence after the first and second doses were 3.37 (95%CI 1.12-9.51) and 21.22 (95%CI 13.78-32.28 per 100,000 persons vaccinated, respectively. Among male adolescents, the incidence after the first and second doses were 5.57 (95% CI 2.38-12.53) and 37.32 (95% CI 26.98-51.25) per 100,000 persons vaccinated.

Conclusion from the Abstract “There is a significant increase in the risk of acute myocarditis/pericarditis following Comirnaty vaccination among Chinese male adolescents, especially after the second dose.”

Just a batch? Let’s see the follow-up.

• 120 Children Hospitalized In Vietnam Pfizer Vaccine Batch Suspended (Vne)

Thanh Hoa has suspended the use of a Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine batch after over 120 students were hospitalized following their inoculation. Since November 30, the central province has been vaccinating children aged 15-17 with the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. However, over 120 of the children were admitted to hospitals after exhibiting symptoms like nausea, high fever or breathing difficulties, the provincial Center for Disease Control (CDC) said Thursday. Of these, 17 had severe reactions, but their health has stabilized and they continue to be monitored at the hospital, the center said. The cause of their symptoms has yet to be confirmed by Thanh Hoa authorities.

Thanh Hoa CDC director Luong Ngoc Truong said the province has stopped using the current vaccine batch. “We still have other batches, also Pfizer vaccines, so we will continue vaccinating the children,” he said. The suspended batch would be put into storage and could be used later for other groups like adults, Truong added. Vu Van Chinh, director of the Ha Trung District General Hospital, said side-effects following vaccination was normal, but are more likely to happen in children than adults. “Those who have reactions or faint need to be separated so no chain reaction occurs,” said Chinh.

The Thanh Hoa CDC has distributed around 117,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses to 27 districts and towns. Over 56,700 doses have been administered. Over the past week, three children have died following their vaccination with the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in Bac Giang, Hanoi and Binh Phuoc. The cause of death has been determined as “overreaction to the vaccine.” Last week, four workers in Thanh Hoa’s Kim Viet Shoe factory died following their Vero Cell Covid-19 vaccination, also due to “overreaction.”

It’s not the vaccine that’s unsafe, it’s the research.

• Twitter: Research On Potential Heart Risks Of Covid Vaccine ‘Unsafe’ (JTN)

Twitter this week ignited controversy when it slapped an “unsafe” label on a research abstract regarding potential heart effects arising from the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The abstract in question, “Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning,” claims that research suggests those vaccines “dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle” and that the purported side effects “may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.” The abstract, published in the American Heart Association-affiliated journal Circulation, drew an “expression of concern” from the AHA’s Committee on Scientific Sessions Program.

That statement claimed that, within the article, “there are several typographical errors, there is no data in the abstract regarding myocardial T-cell infiltration, there are no statistical analyses for significance provided, and the author is not clear that only anecdotal data was used.” Twitter subsequently applied the “unsafe” warning to the original article, with users who click through to the abstract being told that the research “could” constitute, among other potential categories, “violent or misleading content that could lead to real-world harm.” The original abstract was published by controversial American cardiac surgeon Steven Gundry, who has been criticized for his theories on the link between heart inflammation and lectins.

Some people must be disappointed. They’ll find a way.

• WHO: Omicron in 38 Countries, No Deaths Reported (ET)

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday said the COVID-19 omicron variant is now in 38 countries, up from 23 two days ago, suggesting that the variant may be more contagious than Delta. During a news conference, WHO official Maria Van Kerkhove said the U.N. health body has seen “an increasing growth rate,” and “we see increasing numbers of Omicron being detected.” No deaths have been reported so far in connection to the COVID-19 strain, another WHO spokesperson told reporters Friday. “There is a suggestion that there is increased transmissibility, what we need to understand is if it’s more or less transmissible compared to Delta,” Van Kerkhove said. The Delta variant is the dominant strain throughout the world, she said.

In the United States, at least six U.S. states have confirmed Omicron cases so far, including a fully vaccinated male who traveled from an anime convention in New York City to Minnesota this week, according to health officials, who said the individual had mild symptoms and recovered. The first American case was detected in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. A previous update from WHO said Omicron has numerous mutations to its spike protein, which is what it uses to bind to human cells, which may lead to higher transmission rates. It’s not yet clear, however, officials have cautioned. But whether the new strain causes more severe disease or not is unclear, Van Kerkhove said. Early reports from South Africa and Israel suggest many patients experience mild symptoms.

Van Kerkhove said that the first Omicron cases were based on a cluster of college students, noting that younger people tend to experience milder symptoms than older people. A top South African doctor this week told news outlets that the symptoms were unusual but “extremely mild.” “There was initial reports that it tended to be more mild, but it’s really too soon,” Van Kerkhove said. “Everybody who is infected with SARS-CoV-2 regardless of what variant will always start out with a mild disease. And so maybe it will stop there with mild, some people are asymptomatic of course, but it may stop with mild disease or it may take some time.”

“Basically, the system is set up so that only proprietary drugs that can kill you are approved.”

• Do You Know Why There Isn’t An EUA For Fluvoxamine? (Kirsch)

The reason is simple. We tried. And after 6 weeks of waiting, we were told that to get an EUA for a repurposed drug, you have to partner with a drug company in the EUA application. Because no drug company will partner with us, even if we pay all the filing costs, there won’t be an EUA. Ever. So most doctors will never prescribe it for COVID, even thought it works better than anything else. And the NIH won’t do anything with fluvoxamine either like add it to their guidelines. It will never be upgraded on the NIH COVID treatment guidelines. It is currently sitting at “NEUTRAL” after two trials where it had a 100% risk reduction in both trials without any downside risk. In short, if deployed it would likely save a lot of lives and there is no risk of deployment since the risks of the drug are well known.

It’s a very safe drug when properly prescribed. I took it myself and I couldn’t tell I was on it the side-effects were so negligible. When the fluvoxamine Phase 3 study published in Lancet showed the drug worked better than any other drug (including the new antiviral pills from Merck and Pfizer), the NIH simply ignored the study. They didn’t even mention it. Even 60 Minutes which did a story on fluvoxamine didn’t mention the Phase 3 study proved it worked when the study came out (normally, they’d do this at the end of a show to let their audience know they got it right). Fluvoxamine provides a 12-fold reduction in death if you started the drug early, but the NIH basically said “Ho hum. Only 12X reduction in death? That’s better than anything including the vaccines (which according to the Pfizer 6 month Phase 3 study was only a 2X reduction in mortality).

So not even worth mentioning in the guidelines. It would save too many lives. Best to ignore it. And if we ignore it, no doctor in America will dare to prescribe it. So the vaccine will be the only option just like we planned.” Cliff Lane, who heads the guidelines committee, reports to Fauci. Cliff simply isn’t going to allow the NIH recommendation to be modified no matter what the science says. This is not about saving lives. It never was. When the key opinion leader (KOL) panel of NIH, CDC, FDA and academia experts recommended fluvoxamine be used back in January 2021, the NIH ignored that too. Jeffrey Klausner, who convened the panel, wrote a great op-ed about it in the Washington Post right after the meeting so everyone would know. Doctors ignored it.

Klausner shopped the KOL meeting notes to 10 journals, all of whom refused to publish it. Truly stunning! Life saving drug and nobody would publish the recommendation of an expert panel to use it. Wow. When the KOL meeting notes were finally published in the peer-reviewed medical literature on December 1, 2021, only 12 months after the meeting, the NIH again did absolutely nothing, ignoring the advice of these key experts, even though now they have more data from the Together trial showing it works. Basically, the system is set up so that only proprietary drugs that can kill you are approved.

The Guardian turns on Pfizer?

• ‘Wall Of Secrecy’ In Pfizer Contracts As Company Accused Of Profiteering (G.)

Ministers have agreed a secrecy clause in any dispute with the drugs manufacturer Pfizer over Britain’s Covid vaccine supply. Large portions of the government’s contracts with the company over the supply of 189m vaccine doses have been redacted and any arbitration proceedings will be kept secret. The revelation comes as Pfizer is accused by a former senior US health official of “war profiteering’’ during the pandemic. In a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation to be broadcast this week, Tom Frieden, who was director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Barack Obama, said: “If you’re just focusing on maximising your profits and you’re a vaccine manufacturer … you are war profiteering.”

Zain Rizvi, research director at Public Citizen, a US consumer advocacy organisation which has examined Pfizer’s global vaccine contracts, said: “There is a wall of secrecy surrounding these contracts and it’s unacceptable, particularly in a public health crisis.” Rizvi said the UK needed to explain why it had agreed to secret arbitration proceedings. He said: “It’s the only high-income country we have seen that has agreed to this provision. It allows pharmaceutical companies to bypass domestic legal processes. “The UK government has allowed the drug firms to call the shots. How did we end up in a situation where a handful of drug firms were able to exert so much control over the most powerful governments in the world? It points to a broken system.”

Pfizer has won plaudits for its vaccine delivery programme, but the US multinational faces growing scrutiny over the scale of its profits and the proportion of doses it has delivered to low-income countries. While AstraZeneca agreed to sell its vaccine at cost during the pandemic, Pfizer wanted to secure its profits. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which now has the brand name Comirnaty, will be one of the most lucrative drugs in pharmaceutical history. The Channel 4 investigation reveals analysis by one biological engineering expert claiming the Pfizer vaccine costs just 76p to manufacture for each shot. It is reportedly being sold for £22 a dose to the UK government.

The estimated manufacturing costs do not include research, distribution and other costs, but Pfizer says its profit margin as a percentage before tax are in the “high-20s”. Pfizer expects to deliver 2.3bn vaccines this year with predicted revenues of $36bn (£26.3bn).

Big trial. Population wide.

• Australian Children Aged 5 To 11 Set To Receive Pfizer Covid Vaccine

Australian children aged five to 11 could receive the Pfizer vaccine against Covid as soon as 10 January, following provisional approval by the country’s drugs regulator. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) green light, announced by the federal health minister, Greg Hunt, on Sunday will likely be followed by an independent recommendation from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (Atagi) to use the vaccine in that age group. Hunt told reporters the provisional approval was “about keeping our kids safe, keeping our families safe, keeping all Australians safe”. “From 10 January, Australian children will have access to Pfizer vaccines, and it is recommended for children right across Australia,” he said in Melbourne.

Hunt said the TGA was also considering children’s doses of Moderna, the other mRNA vaccine, and will form a view on that “in the coming weeks”. The head of the TGA, Prof John Skerritt, said the Pfizer vaccine had been “extensively clinically tested” including a trial of 2,500 children aged five to 11. “The response of the body, the immune response, was identical to that in young adults,” he said. “There were … no safety problems identified in those trials. The children had some of the same things that adults get – tiredness, sore arms, headache and so forth – but these tended to be brief and fairly short-lived.” Skerritt said the children’s Pfizer was the “same vaccine” but “formulated differently for children” – using one-third of an adult dose.

[..] Hunt said 92.8% of Australians aged 16 and over have now had a first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and 88% were double-dosed. Since vaccinations were opened to the 12 to 15 age group in September, more than three quarters (76.7%) in that cohort have received a first dose while two-thirds (67.8%) have had two doses.

We know Molnupiravir doesn’t work. But:

“The UK has proven itself to be a world leader in identifying and rolling out effective treatments for Covid-19..”

Yeah, they have humor..

• Molnupiravir Set For UK At-Home Trials (G.)

The first at-home treatment for Covid-19 could reportedly be offered to UK patients before Christmas as an attempt to protect the most vulnerable from the Omicron variant. The Sunday Telegraph reported that Sajid Javid is set to launch a national pilot of the Molnupiravir antiviral pill, marketed as Lagevrio. The newspaper said that under the plans, the NHS was expected to deliver courses of the tablet to clinically vulnerable and immunosuppressed patients within as little as 48 hours of them testing positive for Covid. It said hospitals and GPs had been told a series of Covid medicines delivery units were being established to ensure the treatment gets to patients as quickly as possible once it is confirmed they have the virus. Last month, the UK became the first country in the world to license its use – a move described as a “gamechanger” by Javid, the health secretary.

But just over a week ago, England’s chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, warned its use may have to be reconsidered in the light of the emergence of Omicron. “I think we probably need to do a rethink of it just to make sure with the new variant, we’re targeting in the right direction.” A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “The UK has proven itself to be a world leader in identifying and rolling out effective treatments for Covid-19, including through government-backed national trials. “The government’s antivirals taskforce was launched to identify treatments for UK patients who have been exposed to Covid-19 to take at home, stopping the infection spreading and speeding up recovery time. “There are a number of exciting opportunities in the pipeline and we will provide further details in due course.”

This warrants a lot more scrutiny.

• EU Chief Calls For Throwing Out Nuremberg Code (PM)

Ursula Van Der Leyen, the head of the EU commission, told the press on Wednesday that she is in favour of scrapping the long-standing Nuremburg Code and forcing people to get vaccinated against COVID. In an interview she gave to the BBC, the EU chief said that it was “understandable and appropriate” to consider vaccine mandates, especially due to the new Omicron variant of COVID 19, which has been now detected in 12 different member nations of the EU. “How we can encourage and potentially think about mandatory vaccination within the European Union? This needs discussion. This needs a common approach, but it is a discussion that I think has to be led,” commented Van Der Leyen to the BBC.

The WHO, however, has strongly encouraged countries not to enact travel bans because of Omicron, and further iterated that early data points to the fact that most Omicron cases are not severe. Most of the world’s governments are not paying attention to the WHO’s guidelines on this occasion, however. The Nuremberg Code was enacted in 1947, immediately after the Second World War to prevent many of the egregious human rights abuses enacted by the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese during the war. Especially were at issue the performance of medical procedures on subjects without their consent. These procedures, often performed under the command of people such as Dr. Josef Mengele or Hideki Tojo, often were akin to the worst kinds of torture. Since then, full and proactive ongoing consent has been required.

It’s all about safety.

• Hundreds Of NY Corrections Officers Put On Leave For Refusing Covid Jab (NYP)

More than 500 officers with the already depleted city Department of Corrections are still refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and remain on unpaid leave. New data released by the city shows 17% of DOC uniform officers had yet to receive at least one jab as of Thursday night – two days after a deadline imposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio kicked in requiring proof of inoculation for them to continue working. Most city workers had until Oct. 29 to get vaccinated or be placed on unpaid leave until they provide proof of vaccination. However, de Blasio gave uniformed correction officers extra time — until Dec. 1 — to receive their first jab, because of the ongoing staffing shortage at the troubled Rikers Island jail complex.

Although the DOC’s 83% vaccination rate is the lowest of any city agency, the DOC has seen its rate rise significantly from 46% when de Blasio’s October mandate went into effect, and 77% when the correction officer deadline recently kicked in. Another 9% of DOC uniformed staff who have applied for medical or religious exemptions are continuing to report to work as the city reviews their cases, meaning 92% of the uniformed workforce is active. Councilman Keith Powers (D-Manhattan), who chairs the criminal justice committee that oversees city jails, said the mandates are working, adding “we still have work to do, but the current numbers present progress.” The mayor gave the DOC permission to assign 12-hour shifts and “any other measures necessary to address the current staffing shortage” earlier this week as the agency prepared for an employee shortage.

Russia invading Ukraine is a story the US made up. So it can warn against it.

• Joe Biden Warns Vladimir Putin Not to Invade Ukraine (GR)

President Joe Biden said on Friday that he and his administration have plans to make it “very, very difficult” for Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Biden and his team are creating a new set of initiatives to check Russia and make sure Ukraine is protected. But Biden made sure to calmly issue a warning to Putin before any of said initiatives become necessary. The U.S. President is primarily concerned with an increased presence of Russian troops at the Ukrainian border. The Kremlin has also boasted war-ready rhetoric in its recent language. “What I am doing is putting together what I believe will be the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Mr. Putin to go ahead and do what people are worried he may do,” Biden told the press.

There are indications that the tensions are high enough that a meeting between the White House and the Kremlin may be held as soon as next week. Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov told the press that the Kremlin had been organizing a call between the two leaders in the next coming days. Will Biden has made sure not to name any specific consequences he is considering, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that he believes that Biden will put pressure on Russia with new sanctions. Lavrov spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Stockholm, Sweden on Thursday, where Blinken said that the U.S. would “have to respond” if Russia acted on Ukraine:

“We don’t know President Putin’s intent. We don’t know if he’s made a decision to take renewed, aggressive action against Ukraine, but what we do know is that he’s putting in place the capacity to do so and to do so on short, on short notice,” Blinken said in a statement to Euronews following the meeting. But Lavrov seemed unshaken by Blinken’s remark and Biden’s warning, saying that “If the new ‘sanctions from hell’ come, we will respond. We can’t fail to respond.”

Anybody can write one of these now. But how, looking at the fall-out, can you leave out the Covid hysteria? It’s lessons learned from Russiagate, on steroids.

• Obituary for Russiagate (Patrick Lawrence)

There is, of course, the more dangerous world Russiagate has done so much to create. In the culture of unreason, the Deep State has a discouraging record of success in gaining wide public support for any aggressive campaign against any nation or people it wishes to act against. In this dimension, Russiagate has destroyed the Democrats as a party willing to stand against the imperial project in its late phase. A war with China over the Taiwan question is now spoken of as a logical possibility. Washington is now raising the temperature on the Ukraine–Russia border, just as it did when it cultivated the 2014 coup in Kiev, and this is put across as a Democratic administration’s sound policy. Rampant Russophobia is a direct consequence of the Russiagate ruse, Sinophobia its uglier sibling — uglier for its racist subtext.

We have active subversion operations in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Peru, all progressive states in the true meaning of this term, and Democrats of all stripes — including “progressives” with the necessary quotation marks — cheer on every one of them. We cannot view this as distinct from the elevation of institutions dedicated to campaigns of covert subterfuge — chiefly but not only the C.I.A. — to wholly inappropriate positions of respect. The damage Russiagate has done to the press … let me rephrase this. The damage the press has inflicted upon itself in the cause of Russiagate is so extensive it is hard to calculate with any precision. We watch now as their credibility collapses in real time. Those running the mainstream newspapers and networks seem to understand this, as they rush to protect what remains of their reputations with rearguard actions to obscure their grossly irresponsible conduct.

The long list of those who caved to the Russiagate orthodoxy includes some stunning names. Among publications that should have known better we find Mother Jones, The Nation, The Intercept, and Democracy Now! Was it conformity, pressure from donors or Democratic Party ventriloquists, or some combination of ideology, ignorance and inexperience that caused them to flip? The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the major dailies, the networks — they have all sustained one or another degree of discredit, left either to craven rewrites in their archives, denial in the Corn–Frum mode, or silence. None will do: They will never regain lost ground without first acknowledging what they have done, and this appears out of the question.

Melbourne
https://twitter.com/i/status/1466965416283029506

Vienna

Wow! More than 40,000 people demonstrate in Vienna against a lockdown and plans to make Covid vaccines compulsorypic.twitter.com/jHkErYPGl3

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) December 4, 2021

This photo is the most detailed model of a human cell to date, obtained using X-ray, NMR, and cryo-electron microscopy data sets

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

Debt Rattle September 7 2021

Sep 072021

September 7, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:24 am Finance Tagged with: exempt, Hippocratic oath, JAMA, lock out, lockdown, monoclonal antibodies, unvaccinated, Vietnam 55 Responses »

Henry Bacon Étretat 1890

• Florida Doctor Will Refuse To Treat Unvaccinated Patients (NYP)

• Victoria, Australia Will ‘LOCK OUT’ Unvaccinated People From Its Economy (RT)

• UK Government Already Preparing For Another Lockdown in October (SN)

• Vietnam Man Jailed For Five Years For Spreading Coronavirus (G.)

• From JAMA: Proof They’re AT BEST Worthless (Denninger)

• The Government Is Disrupting the Distribution of Monoclonal Antibodies (PJM)

• Third Person Dies In Japan After Taking Contaminated Moderna Vaccine (G.)

• Ticket Sales “Flatlining” as Rebellion Against Vaccine Passports Grows (SN)

• New Details Emerge About Coronavirus Research At Chinese Lab (IC)

• The Game in Review (Kunstler)

From last October FT piece with UK Govt Vaccine Task Force Chief, Kate Bingham

https://twitter.com/OutspokenlyNW/status/1434485789321162754

“The Hippocratic Oath is very science-based. I am following the science. I’m applying this to the benefit of the sick.”

• Florida Doctor Will Refuse To Treat Unvaccinated Patients (NYP)

A South Florida doctor became the second physician to make the contentious decision to refuse treatment to unvaccinated patients in a COVID-ravaged state. Lina Marraccini, a primary care doctor in South Miami, chastised patients for a “lack of selflessness” in a letter that claimed the unvaxxed pose too great a risk to her staff. “This is a public health emergency — the health of the public takes priority over the rights of any given individual in this situation,” said Marraccini wrote in the letter, obtained by NBC 6. “It appears that there is a lack of selflessness and concern for the burden on the health and well-being of our society from our encounters.” The doctor said the ban on unvaccinated patients was due to the FDA’s approval of the Pfzier vaccine.

On Sept. 15, she will no longer see unvaccinated patients if they haven’t received their first shot. But exceptions can be made. “If any of our patients have a valid medical reason for not having the vaccine or have their first shot by September 15, please let us know,” she wrote. Patients will have one month to find another provider if they desire, during which she said her office will continue to provide virtual appointments for unvaccinated patients. Florida is experiencing a major surge in the infectious and more deadly Delta variant throughout the state, overburdening hospitals. According to the latest data released on Sept. 2, the Sunshine State saw 129,240 new cases and 433 new deaths.

Marraccini joins Dr. Jason Valentine of Alabama — the state with the lowest vaccination rate in the country — who announced in Aug. that he would no longer see unvaccinated patients beginning Oct. 1. “We do not yet have any great treatments for severe disease, but we do have great prevention with vaccines,” Valentine wrote in a letter to his patients. “Unfortunately, many have declined to take the vaccine, and some end up severely ill or dead. I cannot and will not force anyone to take the vaccine, but I also cannot continue to watch my patients suffer and die from an eminently preventable disease.” Marraccini contends that she is not breaking her Hippocratic Oath, an ancient ethics oath taken by physicians that compels doctors to treat all patients to the best of their ability, she told Newsweek.

She told the paper that she has to consider her other patients who are immunocompromised or have other medical conditions that can make the virus more deadly. “The Hippocratic Oath is very science-based. I am following the science. I’m applying this to the benefit of the sick.” Under the Civil Rights Act, doctors can’t deny treatment based on a patient’s age, sex, race, sexual orientation, religion, or national origin, but its unclear if a doctor can refuse to treat a patient over vaccination status.

Seen the pics of the vaccination camps?

• Victoria, Australia Will ‘LOCK OUT’ Unvaccinated People From Its Economy (RT)

The Australian state of Victoria will “lock out” unvaccinated people from participating in the economy, Premier Dan Andrews has announced. Victoria is currently under draconian lockdown restrictions, with residents of Melbourne – who make up the vast majority of the state’s population – living under a 9pm to 5am curfew, forbidden from leaving their homes except to work, buy groceries, or get a Covid-19 vaccination. When the lockdown is lifted, Premier Dan Andrews said on Sunday, future restrictions will apply only to those who are unvaccinated. “There is going to be a vaccinated economy, and you get to participate in that if you are vaccinated,” Andrews stated. “We’re going to move to a situation where, to protect the health system, we are going to lock out people who are not vaccinated and can be.”

“If you’re making the choice not to get vaccinated, then you’re making the wrong choice,” he added. Andrews did not say what kind of services and venues unvaccinated people would be locked out of, but he said that once Victoria reopens, “it’s not going to be safe for people who are not vaccinated to be roaming around the place spreading the virus.” Despite Andrews’ plan to beat Covid-19 by segregating the vaccinated and unvaccinated, current research holds that vaccinated people can still catch the virus and spread it to others, and case counts are rising while hospitalizations and deaths are still prevalent in even the most widely vaccinated countries worldwide. Though vaccines can reduce the risk of serious symptoms and death, their efficacy at that falls with time too.

“89 per cent of Brits over the age of 16 have had at least one dose of the COVID vaccine, but even this exercise in mass compliance will not prevent them from being subjected to yet another lockdown – because the first three worked so well.”

• UK Government Already Preparing For Another Lockdown in October (SN)

Despite the vaccine rollout now having covered almost all adults, the UK government is already preparing for another lockdown in October which will also see the reintroduction of mandatory mask rules. It truly never ends. “The member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said the UK is about to enter “an extended peak” of infections and hospitalisations, which are in danger of pushing the NHS beyond breaking point and could force the Government to re-introduce restrictions over the school half term period at the end of next month,” reports inews. The same SAGE advisors whose dire predictions proved spectacularly wrong are once again hyping the threat of NHS hospitals “overflowing” due to increased COVID cases and the impact of the flu season.

“Boris Johnson is also believed to be prepared to re-introduce mask wearing and social distancing inside public spaces and on transport as early as this month in a move designed to stem hospital admissions and prevent the UK’s fourth lockdown,” states the report. In other words, the population is yet again going to be forced to muzzle up as part of a mass conformity social engineering scheme despite studies proving that face masks provide no statistically significant protection against COVID. [..] The report adds that all the measures imposed during the first lockdown, including the closure of all but ‘essential’ shops, travel restrictions, limits on guests in private homes, and a “full, but short term closing of the economy” are all being readied for rollout once again.

A government source told the news outlet, “If the current high levels of admissions for Covid continue the NHS will not be able to cope, so a firebreak lockdown is by no means out of the question.” In other words, the wonderful “envy of the world” socialized NHS healthcare system will once again prove it’s not fit for purpose, and million Brits will be placed under another debilitating, draconian lockdown. 89 per cent of Brits over the age of 16 have had at least one dose of the COVID vaccine, but even this exercise in mass compliance will not prevent them from being subjected to yet another lockdown – because the first three worked so well.

How do they know it was him?

• Vietnam Man Jailed For Five Years For Spreading Coronavirus (G.)

A court in Vietnam has jailed a man for five years for breaking strict Covid quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported. Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial on Monday at the people’s court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency reported. Vietnam had been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung travelled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City … and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said. “Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added. Reuters did not immediately reach the Ca Mau court for comment. Ca Mau, Vietnam’s southernmost province, has reported only 191 cases and two deaths since the pandemic began, much fewer than the nearly 260,000 cases and 10,685 deaths in the country’s coronavirus hotspot, Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam is battling a worsening Covid outbreak that has infected more than 536,000 people and killed 13,385, the vast majority in the past few months. The country has sentenced two other people to 18-month and two-year suspended jail terms on the same charges.

“JAMA has proved that the jabs do exactly nothing to prevent the spread of disease.”

• From JAMA: Proof They’re AT BEST Worthless (Denninger)

I hate being right, and it’s even nastier when a peer-reviewed medical journal publishes proof without realizing what they’re doing, and thus doesn’t make a recommendation based on the data they present. “Findings In this repeated cross-sectional study that included 1 443 519 blood donation specimens from a catchment area representing 74% of the US population, estimated SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence weighted for differences between the study sample and general population increased from 3.5% in July 2020 to 20.2% for infection-induced antibodies and 83.3% for combined infection- and vaccine-induced antibodies in May 2021.”

Remember the basic rule of epidemics: Herd suppression begins to bend the curve of infection at about 1/2 of the actual suppression number and widespread epidemic spread is mathematically impossible when you reach that number. That doesn’t mean a light switch is thrown and nobody gets sick. It means the outbreaks are spotty and of no major consequence because they don’t go beyond the concentrated places where immunity does not exist. The basic formula for herd suppression is 1 – 1/R0. Therefore at 83.3% total immunity as of May 2021 a virus with a given R0 can be computed. .83 = 1 – (1/R0) In other words a virus with an R0 of 5.88 or less is suppressed. That’s well beyond the necessary level to suppress Covid-19.

But it didn’t, did it? Since May we’ve seen a serious outbreak and screaming from everyone. We know natural immunity works because every study of persons previously infected, where said previous infection was documented by more than PCR test, that is, medical certainty and not a BS, flawed test has shown that an effective zero persons get re-infected and, there is no evidence said persons can spread the disease either. Non-sterilizing vaccines do not suppress anything; if you can still get and spread the virus, and we now know that is true despite the claims of the lying media, the CDC, NIH, Fauci and everyone else originally back to December and January when those false claims were used to CON people into taking jabs then until and unless you actually acquire an infection and build natural protection spread does not stop because you are not part of the herd that suppresses spread.

The JAMA study now proves that:

The jabs are worthless to inhibit the spread of Covid-19. The legal, ethical and moral arguments for “forced vaccination” are now dust. The anecdotal evidence from places like Cornell, which is taking a case rate five times that of last year despite near 100% vaccination rates, are now converted into hard, irrefutable science. The debate on “passports”, “digital certificates” and demands by employers and others to get jabbed is over. JAMA has proved that the jabs do exactly nothing to prevent the spread of disease.

If you are jabbed you are just as likely, if not more-likely, to give the virus to others. This is particularly important if the “others” are seriously medically-compromised (e.g. elderly and morbid, immune-suppressed, etc.) and take no precautions because they believe they’re safe around you. The reason you may be more-likely to spread the virus to others is that if the jab suppresses your symptoms you will not know you’re sick, and thus you will have no reason to limit contact with others. This makes the jabbed literal Typhoid Marys; an un-jabbed person who feels ill will (unless they’re psychotic) self-isolate to the extent it is practical, even without a quarantine order.

The insistence of jabs in medical settings is now, on the science, converted from “will protect patients” to will, with scientific certainty, screw unvaccinated patients, some of whom cannot be vaccinated and thus now constitutes gross negligence and depraved indifference to human life. Since we know that prior infection in fact confers sterilizing immunity the only rational act for health care providers dealing with high-risk patients who either cannot be vaccinated or show no sufficient immune response is to only allow convalescent, recovered health-care workers to care for them because they are the only sterile immune individuals. To do anything else, when there is a sizeable reservoir of said persons in the community (one in five, and almost-certainly much higher as medical personnel were exposed preferentially for the last 18 months) is voluntary manslaughter or even Murder 2.

Control.

• The Government Is Disrupting the Distribution of Monoclonal Antibodies (PJM)

After demonizing nearly every medication with the potential to reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) finally recommended monoclonal antibodies earlier this summer. Before the official recommendation, some providers used them under an emergency use authorization (EUA) granted by the FDA in November 2020. The FDA just granted an EUA to allow their use for SARS-CoV-2 post-exposure and ongoing prophylaxis. This approval will increase demand. Recently, the treatment has gotten quite a bit of media coverage. While the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been promoting the treatment on the Combat Covid website since early summer, one man ensured a nationwide media campaign.

Once Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to promote outpatient treatment using the antibodies and establish infusion centers, the media reacted because he is a very dangerous Republican. During the week leading into the Labor Day holiday, DeSantis was on the road again, touting the success of Florida’s program in disconnecting COVID-19 infection from hospitalization in the state. Patients gave personal testimony about their experience with the treatment. Hospitalizations in the state declined 20% during the first few weeks the infusion centers were up and running. Then something interesting happened. On Friday, someone who claimed to be an urgent care specialist tweeted that HHS had informed him that the government would now decide which facilities would receive doses of monoclonal antibodies.

Jim Jackson wrote: “So now the government is getting involved in [read: restricting] monoclonal antibody distribution. Before, I could just order as much as we needed, and they shipped it next day air. Now a govt. commission will decide when, if, and how much I will be able to get for my pts [patients]. ‘Should you have any questions regarding this update in ordering and distribution procedures, please email the Federal COVID-19 Response Team.’ Wonderful.” He added the alert from HHS that confirmed his assertion. Now, only facilities participating in the HHS Protect program can order the treatment, and the agency will review all orders.

Not one word about other vaccine deaths. It’s statistically impossible that there are none.

• Third Person Dies In Japan After Taking Contaminated Moderna Vaccine (G.)

A third man has died in Japan after being receiving an injection from one of three batches of Moderna vaccines since identified as contaminated, though authorities say no causal link has yet been found. The 49-year-old man had his second shot on 11 August and died the following day. His only known health issue was an allergy to buckwheat, the health ministry said on Monday. As with the previous two deaths, the ministry said it had yet to establish if the latest fatality was linked to the vaccine. The shot came from the same batches that were found to have fragments of stainless steel in them, leading to a recall of 1.63m doses of the Moderna vaccine on 26 August. The three batches were manufactured in Spain under contract by Moderna.

The company has yet to comment on the most recent fatality, but last week issued a joint statement with local distributor Takeda Pharmaceutical, saying: “The rare presence of stainless steel particles in the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine does not pose an undue risk to patient safety and it does not adversely affect the benefit/risk profile of the product.” Early last month, two men in their 30s with no underlying health conditions died within days of getting their second dose of the Moderna vaccine. Contaminants believed to be pieces of rubber fragments from vial stoppers that entered the vaccine liquid due to incorrectly inserted needles were found in Okinawa, Gunma and Kanagawa in late August and early September.

No problems were reported among those injected with the contaminated vaccines, which came from different batches to the previously recalled ones. More than 500,000 people have been injected with vaccines from the three faulty batches, according to the minister in charge of the vaccine programme, Taro Kono. Most of the vaccines used in Japan are made by Pfizer, though at least 12.2m doses of Moderna have been administered. Nearly 136m coronavirus doses in total have been given in Japan, where 48% of the population is full vaccinated and more than 59% have received at least one shot.

Not funny anymore.

• Ticket Sales “Flatlining” as Rebellion Against Vaccine Passports Grows (SN)

Ticket sales for events in the UK that could require vaccine passports are “flatlining” according to industry insiders, as the rebellion against the onerous system grows. The government has asserted that it will continue to pursue the policy despite multiple warnings that it will create a two tier society and put countless venues out of business. From the end of the month, people seeking to enter a nightclub in the UK will have to prove that they have been double jabbed. Proof of a negative test will no longer be accepted despite the fact that vaccinated people can still carry and pass on the virus.

With nightclubs operating at a net profit margin of 15 per cent, and with around 25 per cent of young adults in the UK remaining unvaccinated, the industry faces potential financial ruin. The scheme is also expected to cover all venues where crowds of over 500 people gather, which includes some of London’s larger west end theatres. “There is a significant proportion of people who don’t want to use passports or are not vaccinated. It has settled at 20 per cent in France. We expect something similar here,” said Kate Nicholls, the chief executive of Hospitality UK. Nicholls noted that with the industry already struggling desperately as a result of lockdowns, the administrative costs combined with the loss of income as a result of people staying away will deliver “a further nail in the coffin of returning for many venues.”

According to Michael Kill, of the Night Time Industries Association, ticket sales for events at the end of September and beyond are already “flatlining.” “We are seeing a lot of pushback from people who don’t want to come and have to show their health status on entry,” he told the Telegraph.

“..humanized mice..”

• New Details Emerge About Coronavirus Research At Chinese Lab (IC)

The bat coronavirus grant provided the EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that the EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?” According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, the documents contain critical information about the research done in Wuhan, including about the creation of novel viruses. “The viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,” Ebright wrote to The Intercept after reviewing the documents.

Ebright also said that the documents make it clear that two different types of novel coronaviruses were able to infect humanized mice. “While they were working on SARS-related coronavirus, they were carrying out a parallel project at the same time on MERS-related coronavirus,” Ebright said, referring to the virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Asked about the grant materials, Robert Kessler, communications manager at EcoHealth Alliance, said, “We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it. So I don’t know that there’s a whole lot to say.” The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period — from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020.

“In that world, it is you who survive and the governments, the banks, and the power elites who do not. You can already begin to see it happen. Move toward it.”

• The Game in Review (Kunstler)

[..] in 2019 interest rates in the re-po market shot up suddenly from 2 percent to 10.5 percent, which would have left a smoldering crater there and turned the global banking system into the biggest ashtray in human history. The Federal Reserve stuffed “money” into its patron banks like straw into so many scarecrows. But, really, the re-po event was just a manifestation of the unresolved perversions that ignited the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008. The whole banking system had a) disconnected from the gruesome climacteric of industrial activity, and b) was drowning in debt created to animate the appearance of financial life in the system.

Apparently, the “solution” arrived at by those obscure power elites was to lock down the retail economy of common everyman money transactions in small businesses and direct the remaining “money” to save the phony economy of elite banking hokey-pokey. The lockdowns thus kept “money” flowing into the phony-baloney stock and bond markets, and kept the tremendously profitable games going in the shadowland of derivatives and other transactional dreck. But the main stack of the building — remember, we started with the buildings — was crumbling in slow-motion.

And here we are… in the season of collapse… when things traditionally fall apart… when zombies, ghouls, and monsters stalk the earth. The catch is: we-the-people are cast in the role of those zombies, et cetera. Yes, Oscar Wilde was right when he quipped that “life imitates art.” Twenty years of zombie movies have left us perfectly positioned to enter the new economy of the walking dead. That’s us. No more middle class for you, America! No more paychecks. No more blue light specials. No more auto loans. No more McHouses. And pretty soon, maybe, no more food even. What then? How about: Oh, just go die….

That seems to be the next chapter, if you let it be, for instance, if you let them vax you up. But you can actually choose to scramble and adapt to what’s coming: which is human life at a lower pitch… what I like to call a World Made by Hand. In that world, it is you who survive and the governments, the banks, and the power elites who do not. You can already begin to see it happen. Move toward it.

Best lesson

Golf balls..

The best lesson for life.. pic.twitter.com/IPSV7dU1XT

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) September 6, 2021

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

Debt Rattle August 30 2021

Aug 302021

August 30, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: adverse reactions, cytokine storm, graphene oxide, Ida, informed consent, mutations, NOLA, Vietnam, WHO 74 Responses »

John French Sloan Sunset, West Twenty-Third Street 1905-6

• Informed Consent Disclosure To Vaccine Trial Subjects (NIH)

• COVID-19 Mandates Will Not Work for the Delta Variant (AIER)

• The WHO Oversold the Vaccine and Deprecated Natural Immunity (Tucker)

• Americans Traded Their Freedoms for Safety, And Now We Have Neither (TFTP)

• UK Gov’t Release 30th Report On Adverse Reactions To Covid-19 Vaccines (Tap)

• Interleukin-6 and the Covid-19 Cytokine Storm Syndrome (ERJ)

• Burial Costs Covered For Canadians Killed By Approved Vaccines TSun)

• Insanity in Vietnam (Berenson)

• The Delta Scam (Jim Quinn)

• Fears Over Metal Flakes In Moderna Vaccine After Two Deaths (Times)

• New Covid Variant Detected In South Africa, Most Mutated Variant So Far (JPost)

• Australian Truckers Protest Mandatory Vaccines And Lockdowns (ET)

• Hurricane Ida Reversed the Course of the Mississippi River (Gizmodo)

Ivermectin used as a parasitic. Nice coincidence.

From Dec 2020.

How many people have been warned of the ADE risk since? This is mandatory. For everyone with a syringe in their hands.

Note: they are all “Vaccine Trial Subjects”.

• Informed Consent Disclosure To Vaccine Trial Subjects (NIH)

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

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

Results of the study: COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated.

Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern : that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.

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

Mandatory vaccines, vaccine passports, lockdowns, facemasks, the protests if they try will be ferocious.

• COVID-19 Mandates Will Not Work for the Delta Variant (AIER)

Our core position since the start of the Covid-19 response in February 2020 (and which remains fixed for how the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Caribbean nations, European nations, and all other global nations must presently respond to the Delta variant/mutation) is that we do not lock the society down or close schools or impose mask mandates, etc. These policies did not apply to this emergency and certainly not after the first 3 to 4 weeks or so. This applies just as much for the initial Wuhan variant and now for the Covid-19 Delta variant or any other variant to come, if the variant is not one with an extremely high level of lethality, as was presumed erroneously for the initial Wuhan variant. In fact, even with respect to the initial variant it became clear very early on in the pandemic that it was probably no more lethal than annual influenza, yet we persisted with draconian devastating lockdown policies that only served to harm the people.

These restrictive policies worked to ruin and kill (direct and indirect) more persons than SARS-CoV-2 itself. It is why leading infectious diseases experts especially with regards to pandemics (such as Dr. Donald Henderson of Johns Hopkins) never supported the non-pharmacological measures noted above, as they knew that such policies would be catastrophic; even for more lethal pathogens. “As experience shows, there is no basis for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals. The problems in implementing such measures are formidable, and secondary effects of absenteeism and community disruption as well as possible adverse consequences, such as loss of public trust in government and stigmatization of quarantined people and groups, are likely to be considerable.”

None of these restrictive policy measures such as lockdowns and school closures have worked in the past for Covid-19 and they will not work now with this media-driven hysteria over the Delta variant. If reimposed, they will once again cause crushing harms and deaths due to the collateral effects. The leaders in public health and government spokespersons as well as the corrupted media are quickly progressing towards endorsing and implementing and registering of individuals under the guise of a public health emergency. That our Governments are even considering the issuance of what have become known as Covid-19 ‘vaccine passports’ is very troubling on many levels. The very idea is anathema to our democratic principles and rights that are enshrined in the US Constitution.

Athens Demo

Whoa! Look at the demonstration against forced vaccines in Greece. pic.twitter.com/qWZqlmUxxB

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) August 30, 2021

“People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered.”

• The WHO Oversold the Vaccine and Deprecated Natural Immunity (Tucker)

Experience with Covid-19 is a textbook case of how the immune system scales naturally to take on the newest pathogens that have always and will always vex the world. The vaccine (especially one using a new innovation rather than a traditional inoculation) for this type of virus – respiratory, widespread, and mild for most – will necessarily be more hit-and-miss, simply because of the pace of mutation and the emergence of variants. The Isreali study is notable only because of the scope of the study and the precision of the results. Reuters summarizes the study in English: “The results are good news for patients who already successfully battled Covid-19, but show the challenge of relying exclusively on immunizations to move past the pandemic. People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered”.

Now to the problem: the overselling of the vaccine and the deprecation of natural immunity. Who was responsible? Indeed, WHO was responsible. Let’s have a look at their FAQ concerning herd immunity. The site was actually changed dramatically over the last twelve months, at one point even removing entirely the possibility that natural infection makes any contribution at all to creating herd immunity. The head of the WHO routinely pushed the idea that the new vaccines have created a great new way to be immune without ever being exposed to the virus. Herd immunity is a fascinating observation that you can trace to biological reality or statistical probability theory, whichever you prefer. It is certainly not a “strategy” so ignore any media source that describes it that way. When a virus kills its host – that is, when a virus overtaxes the body’s ability to integrate it, its host dies and so the virus does not spread to others.

The more this occurs, the less it spreads. If the virus doesn’t kill its host, it can hop to others through all the usual means. When you get such a virus and fight it off, your immune system encodes that information in a way that builds immunity to it. When it happens to enough people (and each case is different so we can’t put a clear number on it, especially given so many cross immunities) the virus loses its pandemic quality and becomes endemic, which is to say predictable and manageable. Each new generation incorporates that information through more exposure. This is what one would call virology/immunology 101. It’s what you read in every textbook. It’s been taught in 9th-grade cell biology for probably 80 years. Observing the operations of this evolutionary phenomenon is pretty wonderful because it increases one’s respect for the way in which human biology has adapted to the presence of pathogens without absolutely freaking out.

And the discovery of this fascinating dynamic in cell biology is a major reason why public health became so smart in the 20th century. We kept calm. We managed viruses with medical professionals: doctor/patient relationships. We avoided the Medieval tendency to run around with hair on fire but rather used rationality and intelligence. One day, this strange institution called the World Health Organization – once glorious because it was mainly responsible for the eradication of smallpox – suddenly decided to delete everything I just wrote from cell biology basics. It has literally changed the science in a Soviet-like way. It has removed with the delete key any mention of natural immunities from its website. It has taken the additional step of actually mischaracterizing the structure and functioning of vaccines.

“You can’t tyranny your way out of a pandemic — but you can pandemic your way into tyranny.”

“Since George W. Bush declared a national emergency on September 14, 2001, every president after him has extended it.”

• Americans Traded Their Freedoms for Safety, And Now We Have Neither (TFTP)

To be clear, no one here is claiming that COVID-19 is not serious and you shouldn’t take precautions. However, granting government tyrannical powers in the form of business closures, mandates, vaccine passports, and more lockdowns, is most assuredly not the answer. As John Locke famously stated in A Letter Concerning Toleration, “It is one thing to persuade, another to command; one thing to press with arguments, another with penalties. This the civil power alone has a right to do; to the other good-will is authority enough.” In summary, good ideas do not require force. What’s more, as the data analyses above illustrate, it is difficult to tell the difference between places which had strict lockdowns and mandates verses the ones that did not. You can’t tyranny your way out of a pandemic — but you can pandemic your way into tyranny.

Sadly, Americans have a short memory when it comes to giving up their freedoms for a false sense of security. When a society surrenders individual liberty to the state, the state never gives it back. Case in point: 9/11. After the tragic attacks on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government declared a state of emergency. That order granted the Office of the President broad discretionary powers over the military, powers that the President normally does not have. It also gives the Executive far more power than it should have which allowed for the creation of the massive surveillance state we see today. Since that September day, we’ve entered into multiple wars of aggression while bypassing Congress, waged a massive domestic spying campaign, eroded the Bill of Rights, and constructed a monumental police state hear at home.

Under the National Emergencies Act, national emergencies expire after a year, unless the president renews them by notifying Congress. Since George W. Bush declared a national emergency on September 14, 2001, every president after him has extended it. Because Americans have such short memories, we are once again yielding our freedom for the perception of safety. And, just like the government has done since 9/11, they will hold on to those freedoms and refuse to give them back. Now, as the bogus and freedom-diminishing war on terror comes crumbling down, the tyrant class needs a new war to keep you in line and ready and willing to relinquish your rights. The targeted “terrorists” are no longer brown people in the Middle East, the new enemies are those who refuse to give up their rights at home.

10% reported, says the MHRA itself. How many vaccine deaths are labeled Covid deaths?

• UK Gov’t Release 30th Report On Adverse Reactions To Covid-19 Vaccines (Tap)

[..] the number of reported adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine has increased to 302,146 as of the 18th August. The AstraZeneca jab has fared much worse though, with the total number of adverse reactions now standing at 816,393. There have also been 43,949 adverse reactions to the Moderna jab of which 2.1 million doses have been administered, and 3,148 adverse reactions reported where the brand of vaccine was not specified. This now means the current rate of people suffering a serious adverse reaction after having one of the experimental Covid vaccines stands at 1 in every 142 people, with 1,165,636 adverse reactions having now been reported to the MHRA Yellow Card scheme. But it’s important to remember that this rate only accounts for the adverse reactions that are actually reported, which is estimated to be around only 10% according to the MHRA themselves, meaning the actual rate of adverse reactions occurring is frighteningly higher.

[..] The most concerning disorder to have occurred due to the Covid-19 vaccines, is one that has only recently been reported – Congenital disorders. A congenital disorder is a medical condition that is present at or before birth. These conditions, also referred to as birth defects, can be acquired during the foetal stage of development or from the genetic makeup of the parents. There have been 59 birth defects reported as adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine, 93 birth defects reported as adverse reactions to the AstraZeneca vaccine, and 6 birth defects reported as adverse reactions to the Moderna vaccine. Birth defects which include heart disease, cerebral palsy, foetal malformation, and congenital cystic lung –

[..] The total number of nervous system disorders reported as adverse reactions to the Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna vaccines now stands at 234,270. This includes serious events such as seizure, brain damage, paralysis and stroke. There have been an array of strokes reported to the Pfizer jab and they include 41 cases of cerebral hemorrhage resulting in 8 deaths, 33 cases of ischaemic stroke resulting in 1 death, and 313 cases of cerebrovascular accidents resulting in 13 deaths. The AstraZeneca viral vector injection has however fared much worse so far causing at least 165 cases of cerebral haemmorhage resulting in 45 deaths, 90 cases of cerebral infarction resulting in 5 deaths, and 1,157 cases of cerebrovascular accidents resulting in 44 deaths.

[..] As of the 18th August there have been 302,146 adverse reactions and 508 deaths reported to the MHRA against the Pfizer mRNA injection. As well as 816,393 adverse reactions and 1,056 deaths reported to the MHRA against the AstraZeneca viral vector injection. The Moderna mRNA injection meanwhile has caused at least 43,949 adverse reactions and 17 deaths as of the 18th August 2021. This vaccine has also mainly been administered to younger adults who are least at risk of suffering debilitating disease if infected with Covid-19. Around 1.4 million people have received the Moderna jab which means at least 1 in every 31 people have suffered and adverse reaction and at least 1 in every 82,000 people have sadly died. The overall number of deaths due to all three jabs now stands at 1,609 when including the 28 deaths that have been reported where the brand of vaccine was not specified.

Good graphs, excellent article.

• Interleukin-6 and the Covid-19 Cytokine Storm Syndrome (ERJ)

Morbid humor, Justin?

• Burial Costs Covered For Canadians Killed By Approved Vaccines TSun)

Burial costs will now be covered by Ottawa for individuals killed by federally approved vaccines. According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the department of health will pick up the tab and says the new program “addresses a longstanding gap in Canada’s national immunization programming by providing a timely, no-fault financial support mechanism for all people in Canada, in rare instances where they are seriously and permanently injured performing a public good, being immunized.” A briefing note from the department says vaccine injuries are rare but do happen. “The program will provide death benefits and support for funeral expenses in the rare case of a death as a result of having received a Health Canada authorized vaccine,” said the note Vaccine Injury Support Program.

The department has budgeted $75 million for all claims but said it was unclear how many submissions there could be. Management of the program is contracted to RCGT Consulting. “In the rare event a person in Canada is seriously and permanently injured as a result of vaccination, they should be fairly supported,” wrote department staff. “The Vaccine Injury Support Programprovides financial support to individuals who are seriously and permanently injured due to vaccination with a Health Canada authorized vaccine.” Canada’s COVID-19 health experts admit there are unknown long-term effects of vaccines, but they provide another layer of protection.

Dr. Theresa Tam, chief public health officer, said she has always been realistic about vaccines. “We have never said the vaccine was going to be a 100% effective. But people pick at that concept for unrealistic expectations. So, we have to go out there and set some expectations,” she said, adding the pandemic has been stressful and that “everyone is an armchair epidemiologist.”

“..the post-first-dose spike..”

• Insanity in Vietnam (Berenson)

Vietnam’s success at containing Covid abruptly ended this spring. Its coronavirus epidemic began in May and exploded in late June. Since then, cases have risen 25-fold. On Friday, Vietnam reported more than 17,000 cases, its most ever – more than 10 times as many as it had in all of 2020. Deaths are soaring too. Over the last week, Vietnam has averaged more deaths per-capita than the United States. With this number of cases, individual contact tracing is effectively impossible, even for a centralized and authoritarian state. So Vietnam has implemented far more aggressive lockdowns than it did last year, including bringing in soldiers to enforce quarantines in the southern metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

[..] maybe the biggest question of all remains unanswered: why now? Inevitably, the media and government are blaming the Delta variant. But the variant was widespread worldwide well before the explosion in cases Vietnam saw two months ago. But Vietnam did see one big change this summer: the beginning of a mass vaccination program. Vietnam didn’t depend on Chinese vaccines, either (not surprising, given the long history of conflict between the two countries). It has mostly used the AstraZeneca DNA/AAV vaccine, along with the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines – the same trio that have dominated Europe. As of early June, almost no one in Vietnam was vaccinated. Today, almost 20 percent of the country has received at least one dose.

The pattern is exactly the same as we saw in Israel and Britain in January, and many other countries over the spring. The first dose of mass vaccination campaigns is associated with a huge spike in cases. Too many countries have seen this trend for it to be called coincidental. The question is what’s causing it. Possibilities include post-vaccine behavioral changes (hot vaxxed summer!), vulnerable people clustering together at vaccination sites, or (most likely) some short-term vaccine-driven suppression of the immune system. Given that we know now peak mRNA vaccine protection lasts a matter of months at most, the post-first-dose spike is even more important in judging the costs and benefits of vaccines. But vaccine advocates will not even acknowledge the existence of the post-first-dose spike, much less admit that it leaves the case for mass vaccinations even murkier than before.

Ha ha ha, US testing went up 500% AFTER the FDA called the PCR test unreliable?

• The Delta Scam (Jim Quinn)

As of July 4, the entire covid fear narrative was dying out, with cases crashing to new lows and the Big Pharma vaccine profit machine sputtering. That is when those controlling the media narrative began running the stories about the Indian variant and the imminent tragedy. As cases soared over 350,000 per day, the MSM was predicting bodies piling up in the streets. They failed to give context that India has 1.4 billion people, four times the population of the U.S. On a cases per million basis, India’s surge was still 70% lower than the U.S. peak in January. And then the cases collapsed by 75% in a matter of weeks, with no mass rollout of vaccines. But they did distribute copious amounts of ivermectin. Must just be a coincidence. Everyone knows ivermectin is only for cows and horses, per the “experts” at the FDA.

With the Indian case collapse, the purveyors of fear needed to give the Indian variant a new scary name – Delta Variant. So India, with a 10% vaccination rate has seen a complete collapse in cases. Meanwhile, the UK and Israel, with some of the highest vaccination rates in the world, 64% and 60% respectively, have seen huge surges in Delta cases. It’s almost as if the vaccines have created the Delta surge. You might even conclude the vaccines are a complete and utter failure, with significant numbers of adverse reactions, 5 months of limited efficacy, and unknown long-term health effects.

The U.S. “surge” began shortly after July 4th, with the MSM building the Delta fear narrative day after day. Biden, Fauci, Walensky and the rest of the Big Pharma whores did their daily duty of feeding bullshit to the sheep. They bribed corporations, universities and left wing governors to mandate the jab, since they couldn’t mandate it Federally. As they began reporting the case totals again, despite the fact the PCR test was already completely discredited, with the FDA pulling its EUA and taking it off the market as of 12/31, I noticed what they were not reporting – number of tests. The number of reported cases in the U.S. went up by 750% since July 4. Coincidentally, the number of tests grew by over 500% since July 4. Why the tremendous increase in testing? If you want more cases, just do more mass testing of people showing no signs of illness. This is why the death rate is 65% lower than when cases were at the same level in February.

A critically thinking individual might look at the data and conclude these vaccines are enhancing the virus and creating the variants. They might also conclude the Delta variant is far less lethal than the original virus. They might also conclude the unholy alliance between the government, mass media, social media, and Big Pharma have ramped up the fear in order to force vaccinations into the veins of vaxx resisters, instilling vaccine passports, and attempting to install a digital surveillance system to track those who resist and destroy their lives.

Must be real hard to find out what metal this is. Either that or they won’t tell. Started out with “contaminants”, but yeah, those magnets…

• Fears Over Metal Flakes In Moderna Vaccine After Two Deaths (Times)

Two men with no pre-existing illnesses died days after receiving Moderna vaccines from a batch in Japan contaminated with tiny metal flakes. Thirty-nine vaccine vials were found to contain the fragments last week at eight centres in five prefectures, including Tokyo. They were part of three batches made for Moderna in Spain. At least 180,000 people are understood to have been injected from the batches. More than 1.6 million doses have been withdrawn. The men, aged 30 and 38, developed fevers shortly after receiving their second doses early this month and died within days. “At this time we do not have any evidence that these deaths are caused by the Moderna vaccine, and it is important to conduct a formal investigation to determine whether there is any connection,” Moderna and the distributor Takeda Pharmaceutical said.

The material has not yet been identified and experts in Japan doubt that the fragments could pass down needles. The government released the batch numbers so that people would know if they had been injected from the potentially contaminated vials. Norihisa Tamura, the health minister, told Sunday Debate on the public broadcaster NHK that an investigation would establish whether the contamination was linked to the deaths. On Saturday authorities on Okinawa announced that they had found Moderna vials with foreign bodies that did not belong to the identified batches. About 44 per cent of the Japanese population is now fully vaccinated. The country registered nearly 23,000 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday, with cases of serious illness topping 2,000, a new record.

I get the feeling the community is trying to separate the mutations from the vaccines.

• New Covid Variant Detected In South Africa, Most Mutated Variant So Far (JPost)

A new coronavirus variant, C.1.2, has been detected in South Africa and a number of other countries, with concerns that it could be more infectious and evade vaccines, according to a new preprint study by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform. The study is awaiting peer review. Scientists first detected C.1.2 in May 2021, finding that it was descended from C.1, which scientists found surprising as C.1 had last been detected in January. The new variant has “mutated substantially” compared to C.1 and is more mutations away from the original virus detected in Wuhan than any other Variant of Concern (VOC) or Variant of Interest (VOI) detected so far worldwide.

While first detected in South Africa, C.1.2 has since been found in England, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mauritius, New Zealand, Portugal and Switzerland. The scientists believe that the number of available sequences of C.1.2 may be an underrepresentation of the spread and frequency of the variant in South Africa and around the world. The study found consistent increases in the number of C.1.2 genomes in South Africa on a monthly basis, rising from 0.2% of genomes sequenced in May to 1.6% in June and then to 2% in July, similar to the increases seen with the Beta and Delta variants there. The study also found that the C.1.2 lineage has a mutation rate of about 41.8 mutations per year, which is nearly twice as fast as the current global mutation rate of the other variants. The scientists stated that this short period of increased evolution was also seen with the Alpha, Beta and Gamma variants, suggesting that a single event, followed by a spike in cases, drove faster mutation rates.

More than half of the C.1.2 sequences have 14 mutations, but additional mutations have been noticed in some of the sequences, suggesting that evolution within the lineage is ongoing, according to the study. More than half (about 52%) of the mutations in the spike region of the C.1.2 sequences have previously been seen in other VOCs and VOIs. The mutations N440K and Y449H, which have been associated with escape from certain antibodies, have also been noticed in C.1.2 sequences. The scientists stressed that the combination of these mutations, as well as changes in other parts of the virus, likely help the virus evade antibodies and immune responses, including in patients who have already been infected with the Alpha or Beta variants.

Ha ha, they actually did it.

“But it’s all about choice at the end of the day. If you don’t want to get the vax, don’t get the vax. If you do want to get it, get it. But just don’t keep locking up people.”

• Australian Truckers Protest Mandatory Vaccines And Lockdowns (ET)

Australian truck drivers have blocked a major highway in the north-eastern state of Queensland in a protest against vaccine mandates and tough border restrictions, causing traffic to back up for several kilometres. The action marks a series of ongoing protests from Australians frustrated with state government COVID-19 lockdowns and mandated restrictions based on emergency public health orders. The drivers parked their prime movers at 5:30 a.m. on the southbound lanes of the M1 highway at Reedy Creek in the Gold Coast portion of the arterial on Monday. The highway is used by tens of thousands of Queenslanders each morning. A banner was unfurled and covered the front of both vehicles, reading: “Truckies Keep Australia Moving, Not Politicians.”

One driver named Brock, who did not give his surname, said the drivers were protesting the Queensland government’s strict health orders that prevented all individuals from entering the state, except for essential workers. Those deemed essential workers need to be involved in skilled construction, farming, or healthcare, and must prove that a Queensland resident cannot do their job. Further, they need to prove they have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. “End all lockdowns, people go back to work, and kids go back to school,” Brock told Nine’s Today show. “That’s all we want out of it; we’ve had enough of it.

“We’ve had a lot the support mate, the people that showed up today is amazing. We appreciate everyone that’s come down,” he added, saying the police had been lenient about the protest, and he respected what they did. “But it’s all about choice at the end of the day. If you don’t want to get the vax, don’t get the vax. If you do want to get it, get it. But just don’t keep locking up people.”

It can take weeks before power is restored in NOLA. Load imbalance likely took out major transformers.

• Hurricane Ida Reversed the Course of the Mississippi River (Gizmodo)

The incredible power of Hurricane Ida was on display on Sunday as the storm reversed the course of the mighty Mississippi River. The river temporarily flowed from south to north on Sunday afternoon after Ida made landfall as a Category 4 storm that underwent rapid intensification. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey shows that a river gauge at Belle Chasse, just southeast of New Orleans, recorded the stunning about-face of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi was discharging roughly 350,000 cubic feet (9,910 cubic meters) of water per second in the days prior to Ida’s arrival. Water moved upstream at a rate of 40,000 cubic feet (1,132 cubic meters) per second. That’s a staggering amount of water to turn around.

Ida is expected to push 16 feet (about 5 meters) of storm surge inland, with the highest inundation covering an area from the petrochemical hub of Port Fourchon to the mouth of the Mississippi. The turnaround of the river is indicative of how powerful that surge has been. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen with other storms, notably Hurricane Florence in 2018. That contributed to what’s known as compound flooding, in which storm surge pushes water inland where rain is falling. With water pushing ashore, there’s nowhere for the rain to drain. With Ida, that could become a bigger concern as day turns into evening and the storm lingers. The National Hurricane Center noted in its most recent forecast discussion that “Ida’s forward motion has slowed.” Slower motion means bands of rain can repeatedly sweep over a given location, leading to higher rainfall totals and more flooding.

George Carlin – Germs, Immune System

Lake Peigneur: The craziest thing you’ve ever seen. h/t Dave Collum

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

Debt Rattle May 30 2021

May 302021

May 30, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: COVID, crypto, DeSantis, Dr. Strangelove, mortality, vaccine, Victoria, Vietnam, volatility, Wuhan 59 Responses »

René Magritte The secret player 1927

• Harder To Attribute Mortality To Vaccine Than To Covid? (JTN)

• Vietnam Sees Hybrid Of Covid-19 Variants Identified In India And Britain (ST)

• ‘Wuhan Lab Is Still Conducting The Same Research’: Mike Pompeo (DM)

• Victoria: 5 New Local Covid Cases, ‘Extremely Concerning’ Mystery Case (G.)

• Restricting Freedom Didn’t Defeat COVID (ZH)

• DeSantis Pushes Back On Big Tech Social Media Censorship (JTN)

• Climate Crisis Inflicting Huge ‘Hidden Costs’ On Mental Health (G.)

• Could Facebook’s Diem Become FedCoin By Default? (Jeftovic)

• Increasingly Chaotic Volatility Ahead (CHS)

Moving the yardsticks.

• Harder To Attribute Mortality To Vaccine Than To Covid? (JTN)

Stephanie Dubois, a British model aged 39, and Lisa Shaw, a BBC radio presenter aged 44, died within a day of each other due to serious thrombotic episodes after receiving the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Neither had underlying health conditions. Dubois’ case has now been referred to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), as she lived in Cyprus, but she left her own account of her tragic decline on her Facebook page: May 6: “So I had the vaccination today! I hate needles, today was no exception … And now I feel horrendous … pizza and bed for me.” May 14: “Woke up feeling fine and then within an hour I had full body shakes, all my joints seized, and I was struggling to breathe and was cold to the bone with a persistent headache and dizziness … Mum and dad came to look after me and took me for a Covid test, which thankfully was negative … but it still doesn’t explain what the problem is. Maybe I’m having a prolonged reaction to my Covid jab last week.”

That same day she was admitted to the hospital. May 18: “Done being ill now … Couple more tests today! PS — I still don’t like needles — feeling tired.” May 19: Dubois went into a coma. Shaw’s family said in a statement: “Lisa developed severe headaches a week after receiving her AstraZeneca vaccine and fell seriously ill a few days later … She was treated by the [Royal Victoria Infirmary’s] intensive care team for blood clots and bleeding in her head.” According to Britain’s medical watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), there have been 332 cases of blood clotting leading to 58 deaths from the AZ vaccine. Statistically, that is very small compared to the estimated 23.9 million first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and 9.0 million second doses administered in the U.K. by the same date.

The death of Dubois highlights how much harder it is to attribute deaths to the vaccines than it is to claim death by COVID. Deutsche Welle has even run a fact-check article on other cases titled “No links found between vaccinations and deaths.” The German state broadcaster and publisher sought to debunk claims made in many other countries, including Italy, Austria, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Belgium and the U.S. In a case in a Norwegian nursing home, it quoted the EMA stating: “Pre-existing diseases seemed to be a plausible explanation for death. In some individuals, palliative care had already been initiated before vaccination.” Statens Legemiddelverk of the Norwegian Medicines Agency claimed, “Every day, an average of 45 people die in Norwegian nursing homes … therefore, deaths that occur close to the time of vaccination is expected, but it does not imply a causal relationship to the vaccine.”

Figures for deaths attributed to COVID, meanwhile, are not scrutinized to the same level. Comorbidities are downplayed as causal factors in death when they overlap with COVID — whether the latter is verified or even merely suspected. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the U.K., “Of the 50,335 deaths that occurred in March to June 2020 involving COVID-19 in England and Wales, 45,859 (91.1%) had at least one pre-existing condition, while 4,476 (8.9%) had none.” The average age of COVID fatalities in the U.K. up to January 2021 was 81. Finding out if COVID was the dominant cause of death is hard to discern without a full autopsy, but the British government document “Guidance for Doctors Completing Medical Certificates of Cause of Death in England and Wales — FOR USE DURING THE EMERGENCY PERIOD ONLY” explains this is not required for COVID cases: “Covid-19 is not a reason on its own to refer a death to a coroner under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 … Medical practitioners are required to certify causes of death to the best of their knowledge and belief.”

Even medical proof is not necessary under the guidance: “If before death the patient had symptoms typical of COVID- 19 infection, but the test result has not been received, it would be satisfactory to give ‘COVID-19’ as the cause of death … In the circumstances of there being no swab, it is satisfactory to apply clinical judgement.”

Cue VanDenBossche.

• Vietnam Sees Hybrid Of Covid-19 Variants Identified In India And Britain (ST)

Authorities in Vietnam have detected a new coronavirus variant that is a combination of the Covid-19 variants first found in India and Britain, and spreads quickly by air, the health minister said on Saturday (May 29). After successfully containing the virus for most of last year, Vietnam is grappling with a spike in infections since late April that accounts for more than half of the total 6,713 registered cases. So far, there have been 47 deaths. “Vietnam has uncovered a new Covid-19 variant combining characteristics of the two existing variants first found in India and the UK,” Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long said, describing it as a hybrid of the two known variants.

“That the new one is an Indian variant with mutations that originally belong to the UK variant is very dangerous,” he told a government meeting. The South-east Asian country had previously detected seven virus variants: B1222, B1619, D614G, B117 – known as the variant from Britain, B1351, A231 and B16172 – the variant from India. Mr Long said Vietnam would soon publish genome data of the newly identified variant, which he said was more transmissible than the previously known types.

‘That coverup alone suggests that there’s a lot more that we need to know.’

• ‘Wuhan Lab Is Still Conducting The Same Research’: Mike Pompeo (DM)

Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and secretary of state, has said that Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting secret military research and claims there is ‘enormous evidence’ that the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from the lab. Donald Trump’s former top aide also warned that the dangerous experimentation is ongoing at the lab, raising the specter of another potentially deadly virus leak. ‘What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts connected to the People’s Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research,’ Pompeo told Fox News on Saturday. ‘They refuse to tell us what it was, they refuse to describe the nature of either of those, they refuse to allow access to the World Health Organization,’ Pompeo said.

‘That coverup alone suggests that there’s a lot more that we need to know.’ ‘That virology lab is still up and running. It’s still probably conducting the same kinds of research it was conducting that may have well led to this virus escaping from that laboratory,’ he said. ‘Only the Chinese Communist Party knows the answer, the world deserves the answers and they have to tell us, I hope there will be bipartisan push to demand and hold accountable,’ said Pompeo. He spoke after President Joe Biden ordered an intensive 90-day probe to reinvestigate the possibility of a lab leak origin in the pandemic. ‘It’s really unfortunate they took the position early on that there was nothing to see here,’ Pompeo said in response to the new probe.

‘I’m glad now that they’re looking at this. I hope it’s a serious investigation when they say they are giving 90 days for the intelligence community to look at this. The intelligence community has been looking at this for an awfully long time,’ he said. Pompeo, a former CIA spy chief, has promoted the lab leak theory since the early days of the pandemic, a theory that until recently much of the U.S. media and academia scoffed at as a fringe conspiracy theory. ‘I’ve known since spring of last year, 2020, when I first spoke about this that there is enormous evidence that this escaped from that laboratory in Wuhan,’ he said on Saturday. ‘We know there were people who got sick there, scientists who got sick there, we know they were doing the gain of function research — essentially taking viruses and making them more contagious, potentially more lethal, this administration has to get after this.’

Not exactly winning, are they?

• Victoria: 5 New Local Covid Cases, ‘Extremely Concerning’ Mystery Case (G.)

The Morrison government is continuing to declare getting vaccinated is “not a race” even as Victorian health authorities confirmed five new locally acquired infections – including one mystery case in aged care – on day three of the state’s fourth Covid lockdown. The new cases reported on Sunday morning take the total number in the Melbourne-based outbreak to 40. Victoria’s acting premier, James Merlino, announced a $250m support package for businesses on Sunday while stating he was “beyond disappointed” the prime minister and federal treasurer had declined to help workers with financial assistance. The vaccine roll-out was a race, Merlino insisted. Victoria wanted to go faster but was being held back by the federal government failing to secure enough supply, he said.

One of the new positive cases reported on Sunday was a healthcare provider in an aged care home in the western suburb of Maidstone. Colin Singh, the Arcare chief executive, said the worker had received her first dose of a Covid vaccine, was wearing a mask and had not displayed symptoms when she last worked at the centre on Thursday. “I want to assure you that, whilst we hoped that this would not happen again, we are well prepared, and our infection control practices put us in a good place to manage this outbreak effectively,” he said in the statement on Sunday. Arcare Maidstone has capacity for 90 residents, according to its website. It was relatively untouched by Covid last year – compared to other Victorian facilities – recording only seven cases.

Victoria’s Covid commander, Jeroen Weimar, said on Sunday the case in the aged care home was of “extreme concern” because it was a mystery case. “I am concerned that at this point in time we don’t have an original acquisition source,” for the healthcare worker, Weimar told reporters.

“The more threatening a virus is presumed to be, the more superfluous government force is.”

• Restricting Freedom Didn’t Defeat COVID (ZH)

Let’s travel back in time to March of 2020, when predictions of mass death related to the new coronavirus started to gain currency. One study, conducted by Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, indicated that U.S. deaths alone would exceed 2 million. The above number is often used, even by conservatives and libertarians, as justification for the initial lockdowns. “We knew so little” is the excuse, and with so many deaths expected, can anyone blame local, state, and national politicians for panicking? The answer is a resounding yes. To see why, imagine if Ferguson had predicted 30 million American deaths. Imagine the fear among the American people then—which is precisely the point: The more threatening a virus is presumed to be, the more superfluous government force is. Really, who needs to be told to be careful if a failure to take precautions could reasonably result in death?

Death predictions aside, the other justification bruited in March of 2020 was that brief lockdowns (two weeks was the number often thrown around) would flatten the hospitalization curve. In this case, the taking of freedom allegedly made sense as a way of protecting hospitals from a massive inflow of sick patients that they wouldn’t have been able to handle, and that would have resulted in a public health catastrophe. Such a view similarly vandalizes reason. Think about it. Who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization? Better yet, who needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in hospitalization at a time when doctors and hospitals would be so short-staffed as to not be able to take care of admitted patients? Translated for those who need it, the dire predictions made over a year ago about the corona-horrors that awaited us don’t justify the lockdowns; rather they should remind the mildly sentient among us of how cruel and pointless they were.

The common sense that we are to varying degrees born with, along with our genetic predisposition to survive, dictates that a fear of hospitalization or death would have caused Americans to take virus-avoidance precautions that would have well exceeded any rules foisted on them by politicians. To which some will reply with something along the lines of “Not everyone has common sense. In truth, there are lots of dumb, low-information types out there who would have disregarded all the warnings. Lockdowns weren’t necessary for the wise among us; rather they were essential precisely because there are so many who aren’t wise.” Actually, such a response is the best argument of all against lockdowns.

Why is he the only one? 2024.

• DeSantis Pushes Back On Big Tech Social Media Censorship (JTN)

Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that takes on Big Tech companies in his state. The law, however, is taking criticism — from both right and left — that parts of it may be unconstitutional and that its notable exemptions for some big companies undermine its goal of standing up to domineering industry giants. Florida’s “Big Tech Bill” aims to protect social media users — whether political candidates, journalistic outlets or ordinary users — from ideologically selective censorship by internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Among its major provisions, the law will:
• Fine companies up to $250,000 per day for suspending political candidates from a platform during the run-up to an election
• Require platforms to make public the rules they use to regulate their user content and provide users with explanations as to why they have been censored
• Require companies to provide users an appeals process or chance to “correct” their flagged content
• Prohibit companies from censoring any “journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast.”

Perhaps most importantly, the bill would empower individuals and the office of the Florida attorney general to much more easily sue these companies under the Florida Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Yet critics see the law as little more than a symbolic gesture destined to be struck down by the courts on constitutional grounds. “I see this bill as purely performative: It was never designed to be law but simply to send a message to voters,” Santa Clara University Law School professor Eric Goldman told the Washington Post. He argues that the bill will unconstitutionally restrict the editorial discretion of platforms that act as online publishers — a First Amendment violation.

Get ready.

• Climate Crisis Inflicting Huge ‘Hidden Costs’ On Mental Health (G.)

The climate crisis is damaging the mental health of hundreds of millions of people around the world but the huge costs are hidden, scientists have warned. Heatwaves are increasing rates of suicide, extreme weather such as floods and wildfires are leaving victims traumatised, and loss of food security, homes and livelihoods is resulting in stress and depression. Anxiety about the future is also harming people’s mental health, especially the young, the scientists said in a report. Mental health conditions already affect a billion people and cost trillions of dollars a year. The researchers said global heating would worsen the issue unless action was taken. They described a vicious circle where climate impacts increase mental health difficulties, leaving people even more vulnerable to further consequences.

However, they said tackling climate change could turn this into a virtuous circle. Action by individuals, communities and governments not only cuts the impacts of heating but also boosts people’s mental wellbeing by giving them healthier lives and a sense of hope and agency. “Mental health is the unseen impact of climate change at the moment,” said Emma Lawrance of Imperial College London, who led the report. “It is a big problem that is going to affect more and more people into the future, and in particular exacerbate inequality. It is very likely to be a really big unaccounted cost.

“If you have lost your home, if you’re at risk of repeated flooding, if you’re grieving because you’ve lost a family member to a fire or your livelihood because of a drought, that is shock and trauma that translates for some into very prolonged distress and diagnoses of PTSD, anxiety, depression and increased risk of suicide.”

“That was the moment when the establishment elites realized that non-state money had arrived..”

• Could Facebook’s Diem Become FedCoin By Default? (Jeftovic)

I had a reader ask me about Silvergate Capital. They’re a bank holding company with a lot of exposure to the crypto currency space. I hadn’t yet analyzed them deeply, but I did notice that they recently announced a partnership with Facebook on their DiemUSD stablecoin. Diem is Facebook’s rebrand of Libra. Libra was a private crypto currency Facebook proposed to launch which in my mind was a transformative event for nation states and central banks. That was the moment when the establishment elites realized that non-state money had arrived and it posed an existential threat to the status quo. They were able to hold off Facebook’s Libra, for awhile. They fought dirty.

US Senators sent straight up extortion letters to members of Facebook’s Libra Consortium threatening to investigate them for ostensible ties to child pornography on Facebook’s platform if they went through with the project. They all dropped out. My heart didn’t exactly bleed for Facebook, but the incident was instructive. I wrote about it at the time, but I will repeat the salient point here: Should a gigantic platform like Facebook successfully launch their own digital currency, a person’s Facebook account will become more important in their day-to-day lives than their nation state issued passport. Especially if we’re entering an era of drastically curtailed travel for plebeians. The battle between the US, France, et al and Facebook over Libra was an early round in the struggle between waning Nation States and ascendent Network States.

Facebook kept working on their Libra, first under a wallet program called Novi and now as Diem, and Diem USD will be their stablecoin. One can only surmise that behind the scenes something has shifted so that Facebook thinks they can proceed with launching a new stablecoin. This partnership with Silvergate, as well as relocating their Diem Association, which oversees their digital currency projects, from Switzerland back to the United States may be part of that calculus. There have been some rumblings that the US is losing the Central Bank Digital Currency race and that one way to jumpstart a program would be to partner with a private entity who is already further down the road with it. Who would be uniquely situated to provide a solution in some manner of public-private partnership? Facebook, for one.

Balance.

• Increasingly Chaotic Volatility Ahead (CHS)

The standard debate about the future of the economy is: which will we get, high inflation or a deflationary collapse of defaults and asset bubbles popping? The debate goes round and round in widening circles of complexity as analysts delve into every nuance of the debate. A recent conversation with my friend A.T. raised a third possibility few seem to consider: increasingly chaotic volatility will be the new normal, as wild swings between inflation and deflation will increase in amplitude and ferocity as the system destabilizes. Increasingly chaotic volatility is a classic sign of a system that has lost equilibrium and is attempting to regain its dynamic stability by going into overdrive. The amplitude and violence of these fluctuations increase as each attempt to restore stability fails.

This loss of stability is not what people expect. The experience of the past 60 years has been that any hiccup in financial stability–a recession or market crash–is temporary, as the system responds with monetary and fiscal stimulus which quickly restores the system’s stability. That the era of stability has ended and a new era of increasingly chaotic volatility has begun is not on anyone’s radar as a possibility. Human physiology offers a useful analogy: blood glucose homeostasis, which is the system of insulin production and sensitivity that maintains the dynamic stability of glucose in our bloodstream for use as energy. Insulin is produced as needed after a meal to regulate the level of glucose within the ideal bandwidth of homeostasis, i.e. the range of dynamic stability that optimizes insulin production and glucose levels. (3.5 to 5.5 mmol/L or 70 to 130 mg/dL)

In metabolic disorders, the body’s sensitivity to insulin declines, and in response the body increases the production of insulin to compensate for the decline in sensitivity. As the disease progresses, sensitivity drops further, forcing the production of insulin into overdrive. Eventually this overdrive degrades the body’s ability to produce insulin and the regulatory system managing glucose levels crashes.

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

Debt Rattle May 16 2020

May 162020

May 16, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:24 am Finance Tagged with: Big Pharma, Bill Gates, conspiracy theory, coronavirus, Covid19, Flynn, health insurers, Huawei, overreaction, Remdesivir, testing, vaccine, Vietnam 22 Responses »

John French Sloan Backyards, Greenwich Village 1926

• China Unauthorised Labs Were Told To Destroy Early Coronavirus Samples (SCMP)

• French Doctors Think They May Have Treated COVID19 Patients Last Fall (Hill)

• How ‘Overreaction’ Made Vietnam A Virus Success (BBC)

• China Ready To Put Apple, Other US Companies In ‘Unreliable Entity List’

• Dems’ Health Insurer Bailout Follows Bundled Checks from Lobbyists (RS)

• Gilead To End Coronavirus Drug Trials, Adding To Access Worry (R.)

• FDA Halts Bill Gates Coronavirus Testing Program (Hill)

• Trump Names Big Pharma Exec Linked To Bill Gates To Head Vaccine Efforts (LAV)

• Ohio Stops Denying Workers Unemployment After Hacker Targets Its Website (V.)

• Coronavirus Could Deliver $8.8 Trillion Hit To Global Economy – ADB (Ind.)

• Obamagate Is Not a Conspiracy Theory (NR)

• US in past 24 hours: 26,337 new cases, 1,680 new deaths. Total deaths 88,507.

• Russia dives below 10K new cases for the 2nd time in 14 days with 9,200. China reports 8.

• Sweden on May 15 had 625 new cases and 117 new deaths. Total 29,207 cases, 3,646 deaths.
• Denmark had zero new deaths and a total of 537.
• Deaths per million: Australia 3.92. Sweden: 346.5
• Finns and Danes are apprehensive about opening the border to Sweden because of Swedish coronavirus protocols

Note: total daily new cases are rising towards 100,000, while deaths are getting lower

• Cases 4,645,386 (+ 99,316 from yesterday’s 4,546,070)

• Deaths 308,980 (+ 5,117 from yesterday’s 303,863)

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

From Worldometer

From SCMP:

From COVID19Info.live:

You would think you’d want to preserve those at all cost, lest you lose a view of the virus’s history.

• China Unauthorised Labs Were Told To Destroy Early Coronavirus Samples (SCMP)

China on Friday confirmed it had ordered unauthorised laboratories to destroy samples of the new coronavirus in the early stage of the outbreak, but said it was done for biosafety reasons. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly said that Beijing declined to provide virus samples taken from patients when the contagion began in China late last year, and that Chinese authorities had destroyed early samples. Liu Dengfeng, an official with the National Health Commission’s science and education department, said this was done at unauthorised labs to “prevent the risk to laboratory biological safety and prevent secondary disasters caused by unidentified pathogens”. “The remarks made by some US officials were taken out of context and intended to confuse,” he said at a briefing in Beijing.

When the pneumonia-like illness was first reported in Wuhan, “national-level professional institutes” were working to identify the pathogen that was causing it, Liu said. “Based on comprehensive research and expert opinion, we decided to temporarily manage the pathogen causing the pneumonia as Class II – highly pathogenic – and imposed biosafety requirements on sample collection, transport and experimental activities, as well as destroying the samples,” he said. Liu added that this was in line with China’s standard practice for handling highly pathogenic samples, which should not be done by labs that do not meet the requirements.

[..] According to a provincial health commission notice issued in February, those handling virus samples were ordered not to provide them to any institutions or labs without approval. Unauthorised labs that obtained samples in the early stage of the outbreak had to destroy them or send them to a municipal centre for disease control and prevention for storage. Chinese magazine Caixin reported in February that some hospitals had sent samples to private gene sequencing companies to identify the mystery virus early in the outbreak. Some of those results came back as early as December 27 and were identified as being from the same coronavirus family as Sars, the report said. One company had been told to destroy all virus samples, according to the report.

[..] The health commission also rejected claims by US officials that China denied a request by the WHO to visit the high-security Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is at the centre of conspiracy theories that the virus was engineered or escaped from the lab. Li Mingzhu, a senior official with the health commission’s international cooperation department, said the WHO did not make any request to visit the lab during two trips to Wuhan, in January and February. “The WHO has never made a request to visit a certain laboratory, so the statement that the WHO was denied a visit to the Wuhan laboratory is untrue,” Li said.

One reason why you would want to preserve samples.

• French Doctors Think They May Have Treated COVID19 Patients Last Fall (Hill)

In what would mark a massive shift in the timeline of coronavirus spread, French researchers believe there is evidence coronavirus may have been in Europe as early as November 2019. X-rays obtained exclusively by NBC News show two patients with symptoms in their lungs consistent with the novel coronavirus dated Nov. 16 and Nov. 18, months before COVID-19 was believed to be spreading in the country. Researchers from Colmar, France, announced the X-rays last week and are working to confirm whether the patients had coronavirus. France had originally believed its first case to have been Jan. 24.

The study comes in conjunction with a study by other French scientists who discovered last week that a coronavirus patient had been treated in the country in December. The doctors from the Groupe Hospitalier Paris Seine in Saint-Denis said a sample taken from a 42-year-old fishmonger admitted to the emergency room on Dec. 27 had tested positive for the coronavirus. Similarly, the U.S. recently discovered coronavirus had spread among citizens earlier than previously expected when a medical examiner’s report reclassified a California woman’s death in February as being due to COVID-19 — the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — three weeks prior to what was originally believed to be the first U.S. coronavirus death.

All winning countries have been told at some stage that they were overreacting.

• How ‘Overreaction’ Made Vietnam A Virus Success (BBC)

Despite a long border with China and a population of 97 million people, Vietnam has recorded only just over 300 cases of Covid-19 on its soil and not a single death. Nearly a month has passed since its last community transmission and the country is already starting to open up. Experts say that unlike other countries now seeing infections and deaths on a huge scale, Vietnam saw a small window to act early on and used it fully. But though cost-effective, its intrusive and labour intensive approach has its drawbacks and experts say it may be too late for most other countries to learn from its success. “When you’re dealing with these kinds of unknown novel potentially dangerous pathogens, it’s better to overreact,” says Dr Todd Pollack of Harvard’s Partnership for Health Advancement in Vietnam in Hanoi.

Recognising that its medical system would soon become overwhelmed by even mild spread of the virus, Vietnam instead chose prevention early, and on a massive scale. By early January, before it had any confirmed cases, Vietnam’s government was initiating “drastic action” to prepare for this mysterious new pneumonia which had at that point killed two people in Wuhan. When the first virus case was confirmed on 23 January – a man who had travelled from Wuhan to visit his son in Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam’s emergency plan was in action. “It very, very quickly acted in ways which seemed to be quite extreme at the time but were subsequently shown to be rather sensible,” says Prof Guy Thwaites, director of Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) in Ho Chi Minh City, which works with the government on its infectious disease programmes.

Vietnam enacted measures other countries would take months to move on, bringing in travel restrictions, closely monitoring and eventually closing the border with China and increasing health checks at borders and other vulnerable places. Schools were closed for the Lunar New Year holiday at the end of January and remained closed until mid-May. A vast and labour intensive contact tracing operation got under way. “This is a country that has dealt with a lot of outbreaks in the past,” says Prof Thwaites, from Sars in 2003 to avian influenza in 2010 and large outbreaks of measles and dengue.

The Global Times piece itself is too over the top.

• China Ready To Put Apple, Other US Companies In ‘Unreliable Entity List’

China is ready to put U.S. companies in an “unreliable entity list,” as part of countermeasures against Washington’s move to block shipments of semiconductors to Huawei Technologies, the Global Times reported on Friday. The measures include launching investigations and imposing restrictions on U.S. companies such as Apple Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Qualcomm Inc as well as suspending purchase of Boeing Co airplanes, the report said here citing a source. The Global Times is published by the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party. While the Global Times is not an official mouthpiece of the party, its views are believed to reflect those of its leaders. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Commerce Department said it was amending an export rule to “strategically target Huawei’s acquisition of semiconductors that are the direct product of certain U.S. software and technology.”

But no M4A.

• Dems’ Health Insurer Bailout Follows Bundled Checks from Lobbyists (RS)

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, progressives have argued that a single-payer health care system would prevent people who lose their jobs from going without health care and further exacerbating the public health crisis. “Medicare for All means never losing your health insurance if you lose your job,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted on March 26, the day the Labor Department announced that a record 3.3 million people had filed for unemployment insurance. (The unemployment figure has since risen to 17 million, and it is expected to keep increasing.) But the Democratic leadership in Congress, none of whom are among the 118 cosponsors of the Medicare for All Act, have embraced a different approach.

The leaders are planning to include a measure in the next coronavirus package to expand subsidies for the COBRA health insurance program, allowing people who lose their jobs to keep the same insurance plan that their employer had made available to them. Under the plan, which was viewed by Vox, the federal government would pay the full cost of the premiums to private health insurance companies to keep laid-off people on their plans. The COBRA expansion would not provide coverage to people who become unemployed but were not receiving coverage through their employers. It would also not cover people’s deductibles.

“The Democrats could push to simply expand Medicaid, but instead they are pushing new subsidies for private health insurance companies,” David Sirota, a journalist and former Sanders campaign staffer wrote on Twitter. [..] The Democrats’ proposal mirrors a recommendation put forward recently by the health insurance industry. Less than a week before the Democrats floated their plan, the presidents and CEOs of Blue Cross Blue Shield and America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the health insurance industry’s top lobbying group, sent a list of policy proposals to Congress including a recommendation that it provide full federal subsidization of COBRA premiums.

Yeah, let’s worry about NOT having access to a drug that does NOT work.

• Gilead To End Coronavirus Drug Trials, Adding To Access Worry (R.)

Gilead Sciences Inc’s two clinical studies of its potential coronavirus treatment remdesivir will wind down by the end of May, closing off a path of patient access to the antiviral medication, according to U.S. researchers involved in the studies. The drug was given emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on May 1, but hospitals are concerned about access. “We would like to see equitable and transparent distribution of this very precious resource,” Dr. Helen Boucher, chief of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, told Reuters. Gilead’s studies – one in patients with severe COVID-19 and the other in moderate disease – have enrolled around 8,000 subjects, according to FDA statistics.

The trials are “open label” meaning they do not compare the treatment to a placebo and participants know they are getting the drug. Interest in Gilead’s drug has been high given some promising early data and the lack of approved treatments or preventive vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has infected over 4 million people and killed more than 305,000 worldwide. Preliminary results from a trial conducted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health showed that remdesivir cut hospital stays by 31% compared to a placebo. The NIH is now studying remdesivir alone compared to remdesivir in combination with Olumiant, an anti-inflammatory drug approved for rheumatoid arthritis and sold by Eli Lilly and Co.

Remdesivir is still available on a compassionate use basis for pregnant women or children under the age of 18, but most COVID-19 patients will soon have access only under the emergency use authorization. “We participate in the Gilead clinical trials here at Tufts,” Dr. Boucher said. “We were notified that they will wind down … no later than the end of May.” Gilead told Tufts it is transitioning to product distribution under the emergency use authorization.

The tests used at the White House don’t appear very accurate, either. Can we shift some of the billions spent on elusive vaccines to better testing?

• FDA Halts Bill Gates Coronavirus Testing Program (Hill)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) halted a coronavirus testing program promoted by billionaire Bill Gates and Seattle health officials pending reviews. The program sought to send test kits to the homes of people both healthy and sick to try to bring the country to the level of testing officials say is necessary before states can begin safely reopening. The program, which had already gone through thousands of tests, found dozens of cases that had been previously undiagnosed. The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN) said on its website that the FDA had asked it to pause testing while it receives additional authorizations, but maintained its procedures are safe.

“[T]he Food & Drug Administration (FDA) recently clarified its guidance for home-based, self-collected samples to test for COVID-19. We have been notified that a separate federal emergency use authorization (EUA) is required to return results for self-collected tests,” the program said. “The FDA has not raised any concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of SCAN’s test, but we have been asked to pause testing until we receive that additional authorization.” The pause is emblematic of the fractured national response to the coronavirus, with federal officials proposing guidelines but leaving much of the implementation and administering of tests to states and localities.

Concerns have recently arisen over the reliability of coronavirus antibody tests, which can gauge if someone previously had the illness. However, the SCAN tests do not test for antibodies, and the program said it is working to get back up and running. “We are actively working to address their questions and resume testing as soon as possible,” the program said. Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft who has dedicated much of his personal fortune to global health issues, said the program could be an effective tool in guiding public health responses. “Not only will it help improve our understanding of the outbreak in Seattle, it will also provide valuable information about the virus for other communities around the world,” Gates wrote in a blog post this week.

This just about has it all: Bill Gates, forced vaccinations, nanochip implants. Only thing missing is a secret plan to depopulate the planet,

• Trump Names Big Pharma Exec Linked To Bill Gates To Head Vaccine Efforts (LAV)

On Friday, Donald Trump announced his appointment of Moncef Slaoui, a former executive with vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, to lead “Operation Warp Speed”, Trump’s plan to fast track the development of vaccines for COVID-19. Slaoui will serve in a volunteer position, assisted by Army Gen. Gustave Perna, the commander of United States Army Materiel Command. According to the Trump administration, Operation Warp Speed program is focusing on four vaccines, with the hopes of testing and producing 100 million doses by October 2020, 200 million by December, and 300 million doses by January. At Friday’s press conference, Slaoui said he believes the goal of vaccines by January 2021 is a “credible goal”.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was more adamant, stating that, “winning matters and we will deliver, by the end of this year, a vaccine”. Operation Warp Speed and the calls for public-private partnerships mimic the National Institutes of Health’s recent call for bringing together pharmaceutical companies to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The NIH plan, Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) partnership, emphasizes “a collaborative framework for prioritizing vaccine and drug candidates, streamlining clinical trials, coordinating regulatory processes and/or leveraging assets among all partners to rapidly respond to the COVID-19 and future pandemics.”

The appointment of Slaoui follows previous statements regarding Trump’s desire to have vaccines available to Americans by the fall. “I think we’re going to have a vaccine by the end of the year, and I think distribution will take place almost simultaneously because we’ve geared up the military,” Trump said Thursday afternoon. Trump also told the Fox Business Network that because of the “massive job to give this vaccine” the military is now being mobilized. “We’re going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very rapidly,” Trump concluded.

At Friday’s press conference Trump said his team has been working 24 hours a day to develop treatments for COVID-19. Despite the heavy focus on vaccines, Trump did state that his administration is working on other treatments, including “therapeutics”. “It’s not solely vaccine based, other things have never had a vaccine and they go away. I don’t people to think this is all dependent on a vaccine, but it would be tremendous,” Trump stated.

Big Tech Rules.

• Ohio Stops Denying Workers Unemployment After Hacker Targets Its Website (V.)

The state of Ohio won’t deny unemployment benefits to people who refuse to work during the COVID-19 pandemic after people targeted the website it was using to track these workers, according to officials at the state’s Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS). The state previously set up a “fraud” website encouraging employers to report those who refused to go back on the job, angering workers and labor rights advocates. State officials say they are now reconsidering the policy after Motherboard reported that a hacker created a script to flood the “COVID-19 Fraud” website with junk data, with the goal of making it impossible to process these claims.

“No benefits are being denied right now as a result of a person’s decision not to return to work while we continue to evaluate the policy,” ODJFS Director Kimberly Hall told Cleveland.com. “Because Ohio is still examining its policies in this area, no adjudications concerning a refusal to return to work have been initiated,” Bret Crow, a spokesperson for the department, told Motherboard in an email. The anonymous hacker previously told Motherboard they created the script as a form of direct action in support of working people. Ohio is among several states that have prematurely reopened against the advice of health experts, forcing many workers to return to their jobs and put themselves at risk of contracting the deadly virus.

Or 88? Your guess is as good as theirs.

• Coronavirus Could Deliver $8.8 Trillion Hit To Global Economy – ADB (Ind.)

Coronavirus could cut global economic output by as much as $8.8 trillion, with the outlook having worsened significantly in the past month, the Asian Development Bank has said. The bank warned on Friday that Covid-19 would result in $5.8 trillion to $8.8 trillion of lost gross domestic product – or 6.4 per cent to 9.7 per cent of the world’s output. That’s more than twice as bad as the ADB forecast in April. However, government measures to mitigate the economic impact could reduce that figure by as much as 40 per cent, ADB’s chief economist Yasuyuki Sawada said. As some countries, including the UK, lay out plans to ease lockdowns and get more people back to work, Mr Sawada cautioned that containing the pandemic is key to reducing the economic cost.

Testing, tracing, isolation, effective social distancing, and securing protective and medical equipment are all “essential elements” of containing Covid-19, he said. He also pointed to the importance of government support for struggling families and businesses to lessen the adverse effects of the pandemic and to avoid long-term consequences for growth and development. “Rapid and effective containment will allow for a faster recovery,” he said. [..] His words came as the UK government faced criticism from scientists over its easing of lockdown restrictions this week. The Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) warned on Tuesday that the UK faces “inevitable” future lockdowns if the government implements its “potentially dangerous” coronavirus strategy.

People who still see it as such will be badly surprised.

• Obamagate Is Not a Conspiracy Theory (NR)

Those sharing #Obamagate hashtags on Twitter would do best to avoid the hysterics we saw from Russian-collusion believers, but they have no reason to ignore the mounting evidence that suggests the Obama administration engaged in serious corruption. Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.

It is not conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the DOJ withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit. We have proof that many of the relevant FISA-warrant applications — almost every one of them, actually — were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn into a guilty plea so it could keep the investigation going.

What’s more, the larger context only makes all of these facts more damning. By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files. His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.”

And though it’s been long forgotten, Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of members of Congress who opposed the Iran nuclear deal. What makes anyone believe these people wouldn’t create a pretext to spy on the opposition party? If anyone does, they shouldn’t, because on top of everything else, we know that Barack Obama was keenly interested in the Russian-collusion investigation’s progress.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1261378778464309249

We try to run the Automatic Earth on people’s kind donations. Since their revenue has collapsed, ads no longer pay for all you read, and your support is now an integral part of the process.

Thank you.

It's not about "reopening the economy." People aren't protesting for the right to BE waitresses and hairdressers, they're fighting for the right to HAVE them. This is about white people demanding service. pic.twitter.com/KMupBTuAha

— jess mcintosh (@jess_mc) May 15, 2020

absolutely obsessed with this massive wave illusion artwork in korea pic.twitter.com/fir3V85geI

— juan (@juanbuis) May 14, 2020

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

Debt Rattle April 30 2020

Apr 302020

April 30, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:05 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, coronavirus, Covid19, FBI, Flynn, Hillary, rally, reinfection, Remdesivir, Sidney Powell, small farms, Steele, Strzok, Sweden, testing, Vietnam, WHO 21 Responses »

Wyland Stanley Golden Gate Bridge under construction 1935

• FBI Notes Detail Effort To Frame Michael Flynn (Solomon)

• Handwritten Notes, Emails Reveal FBI Agents Set Perjury Trap For Flynn (SAC)

• Steele Testifies Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice Knew About His Anti-Trump Research

• The NY Times Used to Correct Its Whoppers. But Not These (Kuntz)

• WHO Declines Comment On Remdesivir In COVID-19, Hopes For Best (R.)

• Fauci Says Leak Concerns Fueled His White House Revelation Of Remdesivir Tests (R.)

• Britain Has Europe’s Second Highest COVID-19 Death Toll (R.)

• UK To Miss 100,000 Coronavirus Tests Target, Minister Admits (G.)

• Seoul Tests Find False Positives, Not Reinfections In Recovered Patients (KH)

• After Aggressive Mass Testing, Vietnam Says It Contains COVID19 Outbreak (R.)

• Los Angeles To Offer Free Coronavirus Tests To All Residents (NBC)

• Small Farms, Stressed And Underfunded, Struggle For Coronavirus Relief (IC)

• COVID19 Crisis Will Wipe Out Demand For Fossil Fuels – IEA (G.)

• Swedish City To Dump Ton Of Chicken Manure In Park To Deter Visitors (G.)

• Stock Surge Is A Bear Market Rally That Will Collapse – Bianco (CNBC)

• US records 2,502 #coronavirus deaths in past 24 hours:

• Ben Hunt @EpsilonTheory
– 2,390 Americans died today of CV-19, the sixth worst day of this nat’l disaster. 2,470 Americans died yesterday, the fifth worst day of this nat’l disaster. I bet you didn’t know that. I bet you thought the death toll was improving. Now ask yourself, WHY wasn’t I told this?

• The coronavirus may have killed more people in the U.S. than is officially known: Total deaths in 7 hard-hit states are nearly 50% above normal, CDC data shows. That’s 9,000 more deaths than were reported as of April 11 in official counts.

Yesterday we had 6,120 new deaths. Today it’s 10,135. Not sure what caused that surge. I did the screenshots at roughly the same time.

• Cases 3,232,992 (+ 83,759 from yesterday’s 3,149,233)

• Deaths 228,520 (+ 10,135 from yesterday’s 218,385)

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

From Worldometer – Among Closed Cases, Deaths have fallen to 18%

From SCMP: Note: SCMP has a new layout for its tracker.

From COVID19Info.live: Note: watch Peru, it’s rising fast. As are Russia and Brazil, Mexico.

Found something not corona to start off with today. What an insane tale this has already become. Sidney Powell has promised more soon.

Think back before she became Flynn’s lawyer, and now look at this. The man had been bankrupted by these shenanigans; I still wonder who pays her.

So we have Comey, McCabe, Priestap. And then what about Obama, Hillary, Biden?

• FBI Notes Detail Effort To Frame Michael Flynn (Solomon)

A senior FBI official’s handwritten notes from the earliest days of the Trump administration expressed concern that the bureau might be “playing games” with a counterintelligence interview of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to get him to lie so “we could prosecute him or get him fired.” The notes and other emails were provided to Flynn’s lawyers under seal last week and released Wednesday night by court order, providing the most damning evidence to date of potential politicalization and misconduct inside the FBI during the Russia probe. The notes show FBI officials discussed not providing Flynn a Miranda-like warning before his January 2017 interview — a practice normally followed in such interviews — so that he could be charged with a crime if he misled the agents, the officials said.

“What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?,” the handwritten notes of the senior official say. The notes express further concern the FBI might be “playing games.” Multiple officials confirmed to Just the News that the author of the notes is William Priestap, the now-retired FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and the ultimate supervisor for fired agent Peter Strzok, who led the Russia probe. Justice Department officials are investigating whether Priestap’s notes were written in conjunction with meetings he had with top leaders like then-Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, officials said.

A special prosecutor is reviewing DOJ’s and the FBI’s handling of the Flynn prosecution, which led to the former Trump adviser and retired general pleading guilty to lying to the FBI under a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia case. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell filed a court motion last week saying new evidence has emerged showing Flynn was “framed” and his conviction should be dismissed. The officials said the notes are part of that new evidence and had been withheld from Flynn’s defense team for years even though they were potential evidence of innocence.

#FLYNN docs just unsealed, including handwritten notes 1/24/2017 day of Flynn FBI interview. Transcript: “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Read transcript notes, copy original just filed. @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/8oqUok8i7m

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) April 29, 2020

There’s plenty to be said against Flynn, that’s not it. I think of his lobbying for Turkey in 2016.

The Sparrow Project @sparrowmedia on Twitter:

PRO TIP: “The FBI are not your friends, don’t lionize the FBI. Also, Michael Flynn is an Islamophobic, criminal, neo-crusader who should be sent to the gallows for the brutality he oversaw in JSOC, and at Camp Bucca in Iraq, brutality that ultimately gave birth to ISIS.”

• Handwritten Notes, Emails Reveal FBI Agents Set Perjury Trap For Flynn (SAC)

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan unsealed four pages of stunning FBI emails and handwritten notes Wednesday, regarding former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, which allegedly reveal the retired three star general was targeted by senior FBI officials for prosecution, stated Flynn’s defense attorney Sidney Powell. Those notes and emails revealed that the retired three-star general appeared to be set up for a perjury trap by the senior members of the bureau and agents charged with investigating the now-debunked allegations that President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia, said Sidney Powell, the defense lawyer representing Flynn. Moreover, the Department of Justice release 11 more pages of documents Wednesday afternoon, according to Powell.

What is especially terrifying is that without the integrity of Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney Jensen, we still would not have this clear exculpatory information as Mr. Van Grack and the prosecutors have opposed every request we have made,” said Powell. It appears, based on the notes and emails that the Department of Justice was determined at the time to prosecute Flynn, regardless of what they found, Powell said. “The FBI pre-planned a deliberate attack on Gen. Flynn and willfully chose to ignore mention of Section 1001 in the interview despite full knowledge of that practice,” Powell said in a statement. “The FBI planned it as a perjury trap at best and in so doing put it in writing stating ‘what is our goal? Truth/ Admission or to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

The documents, reviewed and obtained by SaraACarter.com, reveal that senior FBI officials discussed strategies for targeting and setting up Flynn, prior to interviewing him at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017. It was that interview at the White House with former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Special Agent Joe Pientka that led Flynn, now 61, to plead guilty after months of pressure by prosecutors, financial strain and threats to prosecute his son. Powell filed a motion earlier this year to withdraw Flynn’s guilty plea and to dismiss his case for egregious government misconduct. Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017, under duress by government prosecutors, to lying to investigators about his conversations with Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak about sanctions on Russia. This January, however, he withdrew his guilty plea in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

He stated that he was “innocent of this crime” and was coerced by the FBI and prosecutors under threats that would charge his son with a crime. He filed to withdraw his guilty plea after DOJ prosecutors went back on their word and asked the judge to sentence Flynn to up to six months in prison, accusing him of not cooperating in another case against his former partner. Then prosecutors backtracked and said probation would be fine but by then Powell, his attorney, had already filed to withdraw his guilty plea.

The documents reveal that prior to the interview with Flynn in January, 2017 the FBI had already come to the conclusion that Flynn was guilty and beyond that the officials were working together to see how best to corner the 33-year military veteran and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The bureau deliberately chose not to show him the evidence of his phone conversation to help him in his recollection of events, which is standard procedure. Even stranger, the agents that interviewed Flynn later admitted that they didn’t believe he lied during the interview with them.

.@AndrewCMcCarthy says we’re seeing a planned out scheme to get a 33 year combat vet (@GenFlynn) to say something inaccurate so they could charge him with the a false statement.

Thank God for @SidneyPowell1 pic.twitter.com/X3xborav1Z

— Josh Cremeans “DirtyTruth” (@AKA_RealDirty) April 30, 2020

As if we couldn’t have guessed. Note the role played by Victoria Nuland.

• Steele Testifies Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice Knew About His Anti-Trump Research

Steele recently testified in a British court that he believed both then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and then-Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice were aware of his dossier research as it was going on in summer 2016. The testimony makes his most direct link yet between his Russia collusion research and the top of the Clinton campaign and Obama White House. Steele told a British court he believed he had been hired by the Fusion GPS firm owned by Glenn Simpson through the Democratic National Committee-linked law firm Perkins Coie to assist the Clinton campaign during the election, according to a transcript of the testimony.

“I presumed it was the Clinton campaign, and Glenn Simpson had indicated that. But I was not aware of the technicality of it being the DNC that was actually the client of Perkins Coie,” Steele testified in March under questioning from lawyers for Russian bankers suing over his research. “You knew it was the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign didn’t you?” a lawyer for the businessmen asked. “I believed it was the campaign. Yes,” he answered. “The leadership of the Clinton campaign?” he was asked. “Fine, the leadership of the campaign,” Steele conceded. The lawyer persisted. “You also understood that Hillary Clinton herself was aware of what you were doing?” the lawyer asked. “I think Glenn had mentioned it, but I wasn’t clear,” Steele answered.

Then Steele was confronted with what lawyers said were notes he took at a meeting with the FBI in 2016 in which he purported to tell agents that Clinton was aware of his research. The lawyers read from those notes during the court proceedings. The notes, according to the transcript, read: “We explained that Glenn Simpson/GPS Fusion was our commissioner but the ultimate client were the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign and that we understood the candidate herself was aware of the reporting at least, if not us.” The lawyers prodded: “It’s your note, so we assume it’s accurate?” “Yes,” Steele answered during the March 17 testimony. You can read that testimony here.

[..] A day later in additional testimony, Steele was asked how he came to present some of his dossier findings to the U.S. State Department during an October 2016 meeting with then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec. The former British MI6 agent turned private intelligence investigator said his meeting was set up by State officials Jonathan Winer and Victoria Nuland after longtime Clinton adviser and friend Strobe Talbott had reached out to him. “The meeting was set up by a State Department official called John Winer,” Steele explained. “At your request?” the lawyers asked. “No, at his request, his suggestion. He invited us into meet, as I understood it, at her request, Assistant Secretary of State Nuland,” Steele answered.

Not much use waxing nostalgic about a washed out rag.

• The NY Times Used to Correct Its Whoppers. But Not These (Kuntz)

The New York Times is widely admired for owning up to its errors. In addition to the corrections it runs each day, it has a tradition of publishing extensive Editor’s Notes and even full-length investigations when it has determined that flawed reporting misled readers and botched the rough first draft of history.[..] During the last few years the Times has published two other sets of deeply flawed articles that also demand such extended corrections: “The 1619 Project” and its Trump-Russia coverage. It is a sign of how much the Times, and mainstream journalism in general, have changed that it appears highly unlikely the “paper of record” will correct the record.

[..] The Trump-Russia coverage, even with caveats pinning assertions to sources rather than solid evidence, clearly created a false impression that Donald Trump and his team were in cahoots with the Russians. It’s hard to believe that former Times Executive Editor Max Frankel would have written an op-ed for the paper declaring that an “obvious bargain [was] reached during the campaign of 2016” between the Trump campaign and Russia if he hadn’t read those unmistakable insinuations in the Times. The Trump campaign is suing the Times for libel over Frankel’s claims. (Full disclosure: I was hired as an editor at the Times in 1988 under Frankel.)

A fuller accounting by the Times is especially necessary because the media’s pushing of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories was central to an unprecedented and possibly criminal effort to subvert or remove a president under false pretenses. Unless the Times and other sources come clean about who was feeding them misleading and partisan information, we may never understand this momentous chapter of history. Protecting confidential sources is, of course, one of the bedrocks of journalism. The free flow of information depends on people being able to share hard truths without jeopardizing their careers or lives.

But not when sources lie or mislead. When that happens, the confidentiality deal is off and “your responsibility would be to set the record straight,” Lynn Walsh, ethics chair of the Society of Professional Journalists, confirmed to me recently in a general conversation about SPJ’s standards for anonymous sourcing. When sources engage in gross deception on a matter of such import, even committing national security crimes in the process, the news media involved should honor their higher duty – to their readers or viewers – to expose the malfeasance and correct the record.

Even the WHO won’t commit. A handful scary reports of people dying from 70-year old, tried and tested and never lethal, chloroquines, followed by upbeat though opaque stories on remdesivir.

Note the tweet below about 65,000(!) Italian RA, lupus patiens on long term hydroxychloroquine. Deadly, right? With a 90% reduction in COVID19 infection rate…

One difference: chloroquine patents have run out, so no big profits for “investors”. Which they will get from remdesivir if it “works”.

• WHO Declines Comment On Remdesivir In COVID-19, Hopes For Best (R.)

A top World Health Organization official declined comment on Wednesday on reports that Gilead Science’s remdesivir could help treat COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, but said that further data was needed. “I wouldn’t like to make any specific comment on that, because I haven’t read those publications in detail,” Dr Mike Ryan, head of the WHO’s emergencies programme, told an online briefing in response to a question, adding it can sometimes take a number of publications to determine a drug’s efficacy. “Clearly we have the randomised control trials that are underway both in the UK and US, the ‘Solidarity trials’ with WHO. Remdesivir is one of the drugs under observation in many of those trials. So I think a lot more data will come out,” he said. Ryan added: “But we are hopeful this drug and others may prove to be helpful in treating COVID-19.”

The Italian Society for Rheumatology studied 65,000 patients on longterm hydroxychloroquine for RA and Lupus.

Only 20 patients tested positive for COVID-19. No ICU, no deaths.

This is a 90% reduction in infection rate compared to the rest of Italy.https://t.co/Pta97oBA8O

— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) April 28, 2020

Reauters headline spells it out: “US Stocks Surged As Hopes For An Effective COVID-19 Treatment Prompted A Broad Rally”.

• Fauci Says Leak Concerns Fueled His White House Revelation Of Remdesivir Tests (R.)

Concerns over leaks compelled the top U.S. infectious disease official to reveal data on Gilead Sciences Inc’s experimental drug remdesivir, the first in a scientifically rigorous clincial trial to show benefit in treating COVID-19. The dramatic announcement by Dr Anthony Fauci in the Oval Office on Wednesday prompted concerns among scientists that the Trump administration was raising hopes about a coronavirus treatment before sharing the full data with researchers. As a cautionary example of inflating the potential value of a therapy, some pointed to President Donald Trump’s repeated endorsements of malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, with no evidence that it works. Newer data suggests the malaria treatments may carry significant risks for some sufferers of the respiratory disease caused by the virus.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is running the trial, said he took the first opportunity to get the word out that patients taking a dummy treatment or placebo should be switched to remdesivir in hopes of benefiting from it. He expressed concern that leaks of partial information would lead to confusion. Since the White House was not planning a daily virus briefing, Fauci said he was invited to release the news at a news conference with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards(D). “It was purely driven by ethical concerns,” Fauci told Reuters in a telephone interview. “I would love to wait to present it at a scientific meeting, but it’s just not in the cards when you have a situation where the ethical concern about getting the drug to people on placebo dominates the conversation.”

The numbers tell us it’s a matter of days before Britain overtakes Italy in having most deaths in Europe.

• Britain Has Europe’s Second Highest COVID-19 Death Toll (R.)

Britain now has Europe’s second highest official COVID-19 death toll with more than 26,000, according to figures published on Wednesday that raised questions about Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s response to the outbreak. Some 26,097 people died across the United Kingdom after testing positive for COVID-19 as of April 28 at 1600 GMT, Public Health England (PHE) said, citing daily figures that included deaths outside of hospital settings for the first time. That means the United Kingdom has suffered more COVID-19 deaths than France or Spain have reported, though less than Italy, which has Europe’s highest death toll and the second worst in the world after the United States.

“We must never lose sight of the fact that behind every statistic there are many human lives that have tragically been lost before their time,” Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told reporters. “We are still coming through the peak and…this is a delicate and dangerous moment in the crisis.” Such a high UK death toll increases the pressure on Johnson just as opposition parties accused his government of being too slow to impose a lockdown to limit contagion from the new coronavirus, too slow to introduce mass testing and too slow to get enough protective equipment to hospitals. Johnson returned to work on Monday after recuperating from COVID-19, which had left him gravely ill in intensive care at the peak of the coronavirus outbreak. He celebrated the birth of a baby son on Wednesday.

Opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer criticised Johnson’s response to the world’s worst public health crisis since the 1918 influenza outbreak. Johnson had spoken of Britain’s “apparent success” in tackling COVID-19 in a speech to the nation on Monday. “We are possibly on track to have one of the worst death rates in Europe,” Starmer told parliament. “Far from success, these latest figures are truly dreadful,” he added, referring to previously published data. Starmer said his calculations showed 27,241 had died in the UK from COVID-19, the lung disease caused by the coronavirus. In mid-March the government’s chief scientific adviser said keeping Britain’s death toll below 20,000 would be a “good outcome”.

Government reveal their failures piecemeal, after shouting out loud about BIG targets. This model does require cooperation of the media at all times.

• UK To Miss 100,000 Coronavirus Tests Target, Minister Admits (G.)

The UK government is likely to miss its target of carrying out 100,000 coronavirus tests by the end of April, a cabinet minister has admitted. After weeks of ministers insisting the deadline would be met, Robert Buckland, the justice secretary, said it was “probable that we won’t” reach it on Thursday but said it was likely in the next few days. “Even if we don’t hit it, we will in the next few days hit that target. We are up to 52,000 being tested, capacity is rising and I think it was right to set an ambitious target. Sometimes if you don’t hit a target on the due date, the direction of travel is the most important thing. And I believe we are going to get there and move beyond it because we need more,” he told Sky News.

The target was set by Matt Hancock, the health secretary, on 2 April as the government came under pressure over low testing levels. At that point, there was capacity for 12,799 daily tests in England, with just over 10,650 tests carried out. The total as of 9am on Wednesday was 52,429 tests with capacity to do 73,000, but only 33,000 individuals were tested because of multiple retests. [..] .. hospital leaders launched a strident attack on the government’s testing strategy, regardless of the target. Saffron Cordery, the deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents foundation trusts in England, dismissed the 100,000 target as a “red herring” that distracted from the lack of a coherent overall strategy.

NHS Providers said in a report on Wednesday: “NHS trust leaders believe they have done all they can to support the national testing effort so far but are increasingly frustrated with the lack of clarity on how the testing regime will be developed for this next phase. “At the moment they feel they are on the end of a series of frequent tactical announcements extending the testing criteria to new groups with no visibility on any longer term strategy, and are being expected at the drop of a hat to accommodate these changes with no advance notice or planning.”

Might be good news. Might even be very good. But it’s also yet another condemnationn of testing as a whole.

• Seoul Tests Find False Positives, Not Reinfections In Recovered Patients (KH)

South Korea’s infectious disease experts said Thursday that dead virus fragments were the likely cause of over 260 people here testing positive again for the novel coronavirus days and even weeks after marking full recoveries. Oh Myoung-don, who leads the central clinical committee for emerging disease control, said the committee members found little reason to believe that those cases could be COVID-19 reinfections or reactivations, which would have made global efforts to contain the virus much more daunting. “The tests detected the ribonucleic acid of the dead virus,” said Oh, a Seoul National University hospital doctor, at a press conference Thursday held at the National Medical Center.

He went on to explain that in PCR tests, or polymerase chain reaction tests, used for COVID-19 diagnosis, genetic materials of the virus amplify during testing, whether it is from a live virus or just from fragments of dead virus cells that can take months to clear from recovered patients. The PCR tests cannot distinguish whether the virus is alive or dead, he added, and this can lead to false positives. “PCR testing that amplifies genetics of the virus is used in Korea to test COVID-19, and relapse cases are due to technical limits of the PCR testing.” As of Sunday, 263 people in Korea tested positive for the disease again after being declared virus-free, of which 17 were minors or teens, the National Medical Center said. “The respiratory epithelial cell has a half-life of up to three months, and RNA virus in the cell can be detected with PCR testing one to two months after the elimination of the cell,” Oh said.

I saw the first graph here and thought something doesn’t add up. Vietnam didn’t do mass testing, 213,000 in a country of 96 million people is nothing compared to the 6.1 million in the 320 million US.

What the second graph shows is the clue: Vietnam tests a lot compared to confirmed cases.

• After Aggressive Mass Testing, Vietnam Says It Contains COVID19 Outbreak (R.)

Vietnam, a country of 96 million people which shares a border with China, is signalling that it has succeeded where many wealthier and more developed countries have not by containing the new coronavirus. The government is officially reporting a relatively small 270 cases and zero deaths. That puts the country on course to revive its economy much sooner than most others, according to several public health experts interviewed by Reuters. Its slightly more populous regional neighbour the Philippines, in comparison, has reported almost 30 times as many cases and more than 500 deaths. These public health experts say Vietnam was successful because it made early, decisive moves to restrict travel into the country, put tens of thousands of people into quarantine and quickly scaled up the use of tests and a system to track down people who might have been exposed to the virus.

“The steps are easy to describe but difficult to implement, yet they’ve been very successful at implementing them over and over again,” said Matthew Moore, a Hanoi-based official from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who has been liaising with Vietnam’s government on the outbreak since early January. He added that the CDC has “great confidence” in the Vietnamese government’s response to the crisis. Vietnam increased the number of laboratories that can test for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, from three at the beginning of the outbreak in January, to 112 by April. As of Wednesday, 213,743 tests had been conducted in Vietnam, of which 270 were positive, according to health ministry data. That ratio of 791 tests to every confirmed case is by far the highest in the world, according to data from health ministries compiled by Reuters. The next highest, Taiwan, has conducted 140 tests for every case.

[..] “It is organised, it can make country-wide policy decisions that get enacted quickly and efficiently and without too much controversy,” said Guy Thwaites, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City. Thwaites said the number of positive tests processed by his organisation’s lab was in line with government data. He said the hospital where he works on the wards – Ho Chi Minh City’s 550-bed Hospital for Tropical Diseases, serving a population of 45 million people in southern Vietnam – had not admitted any additional cases not reflected in the government’s numbers. “If there was ongoing and unreported or unappreciated community transmission, we would have seen the patients in our hospital. We have not,” he said. Thwaites said his organisation’s lab increased capacity from being able to do around 100 tests a day to around 1,000 a day.

Get yourself tested. Don’t wait.

• Los Angeles To Offer Free Coronavirus Tests To All Residents (NBC)

Los Angeles will begin offering free coronavirus tests to all residents no matter if they have symptoms or not, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday. Garcetti said that all residents of Los Angeles County can get the tests. The website to schedule tests says it is open to any county resident regardless of symptoms. Those with symptoms will be given priority. The mayor said he believes Los Angeles is the first major city to offer tests to all residents. He said they now have enough testing capacity to handle the increased tests. Testing rules had previously been relaxed to allow grocery store workers, first responders and other essential workers with exposure to the virus to get tests regardless of whether they have symptoms. Health officials say that even those without symptoms can spread the virus.

All you need to know is America doesn’t like small. But people can still buy from small farms. All it may take is some effort.

• Small Farms, Stressed And Underfunded, Struggle For Coronavirus Relief (IC)

Before coronavirus hit, farmers in the U.S. were already hurting from years of falling food prices, severe weather, and, more recently, President Donald Trump’s trade war. “We’ve had a record number of farm bankruptcies [in the U.S.], total farm debt is at $425 billion, [and farmer] incomes have fallen by about half since 2013,” said Eric Deeble, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which supports small and mid-sized family farms. Now, with the global pandemic closing factories and restaurants and disrupting supply chains, already stressed farms are grappling with lower demand and fewer markets to sell in, as well as a presidential administration that favors relief for big businesses over small.

Small farmers in particular — those who sell directly to farmers markets, schools, and other local food hubs — are facing an existential crisis, as they face slim odds of accessing competitive federal stimulus money. They have reason to be pessimistic. In recent years, federal subsidies to help struggling farmers have flowed almost exclusively to large corporate farms. Of the roughly $28 billion the Trump administration has distributed to food producers to offset losses from his trade wars, almost all went to big farms. Advocates for small farmers say this is driven in part by the preference of Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Purdue, who has encouraged farmers to get bigger farms if they wanted to stay in business. “Big get bigger and small go out … and that’s what we’ve seen,” he told a group of Wisconsin dairy farmers in 2018, echoing Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary, who infamously told farmers in the 1970s to “get big or get out.”

While 91 percent of U.S. farms are small — defined by the federal government as an operation with gross cash income under $250,000 — large farms account for 85 percent of the country’s farm production. The public health crisis has already had a devastating impact on agriculture across the country. A report released in mid-March by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition estimated that small farms would see a $689 million decline in sales from March to May this year due to Covid-19, leading to a payroll decline of $103 million and a total loss to the economy of $1.3 billion. Now, as the pandemic shows no sign of slowing, the coalition worries that the impact for small farmers will be even more substantial — which could lead many small farms to permanently close.

When are they planning to tell us that renewable energy is not renewable?

• COVID19 Crisis Will Wipe Out Demand For Fossil Fuels – IEA (G.)

Renewable electricity will be the only source resilient to the biggest global energy shock in 70 years triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, according to the world’s energy watchdog. The International Energy Agency said the outbreak of Covid-19 would wipe out demand for fossil fuels by prompting a collapse in energy demand seven times greater than the slump caused by the global financial crisis. In a report, the IEA said the most severe plunge in energy demand since the second world war would trigger multi-decade lows for the world’s consumption of oil, gas and coal while renewable energy continued to grow. The steady rise of renewable energy combined with the collapse in demand for fossil fuels means clean electricity will play its largest ever role in the global energy system this year, and help erase a decade’s growth of global carbon emissions.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said: “The plunge in demand for nearly all major fuels is staggering, especially for coal, oil and gas. Only renewables are holding up during the previously unheard of slump in electricity use.” Renewable energy is expected to grow by 5% this year, to make up almost 30% of the world’s shrinking demand for electricity. The growth of renewables despite a global crisis could spur fossil fuel companies towards their goals to generate more clean energy, according to Birol, but governments should also include clean energy at the heart of economic stimulus packages to ensure a green recovery. “It is still too early to determine the longer-term impacts,” said Birol. “But the energy industry that emerges from this crisis will be significantly different from the one that came before.”

What makes Sweden so successful.

• Swedish City To Dump Ton Of Chicken Manure In Park To Deter Visitors (G.)

The university town of Lund in Sweden is to dump a tonne of chicken manure in its central park in a bid to deter up to 30,000 residents from gathering there for traditional celebrations to mark Walpurgis Night on Thursday. “Lund could very well become an epicentre for the spread of the coronavirus on the last night in April, [so] I think it was a good initiative,” the chairman of the local council’s environment committee, Gustav Lundblad, told the Sydsvenskan newspaper. “We get the opportunity to fertilise the lawns, and at the same time it will stink and so it may not be so nice to sit and drink beer in the park,” Lundblad said, adding that the only potential drawback was that the smell may not be confined to the park.

“I am not a fertiliser expert, but as I understand it, it is clear that it might smell a bit outside the park as well,” Lundblad admitted. “These are chicken droppings, after all. I cannot guarantee that the rest of the city will be odourless. But the point is to keep people out of the city park.” Sweden has opted for a light touch approach to containing Covid-19, eschewing the strict lockdowns imposed by its Nordic neighbours and much of the rest of Europe and favouring personal responsibility over draconian enforcement. Walpurgis Night, celebrated on 30 April, is widely marked across central and northern Europe with parties and bonfires. The festivities are classed as “spontaneous” so cannot be banned by authorities, but to avoid the risk of spreading the coronavirus many towns and cities in Sweden have asked citizens to give the tradition a miss this year.

Just in case you still thought there are financial markets.

• Stock Surge Is A Bear Market Rally That Will Collapse – Bianco (CNBC)

Market researcher James Bianco warns April’s big run will collapse. His reason: Investors are too bullish. “I understand the market has been up a lot since the March low. But what I see in the market is a retracement rally that looks very similar to the first type of rallies that you get in protracted bear markets,” the Bianco Research president told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Wednesday. Bianco warned last month the coronavirus turmoil would be worse than the financial crisis. In early March, he put all his money in cash and never looked back — despite the bounce. So far this month, the S&P 500 is up almost 14%. If the trend holds, it’ll be the index’s best showing since 1974.

Meanwhile, the Dow is up more than 12% in the same period and is on track for its best monthly performance since January 1987. “We’ll revisit the 2,200 S&P low, if not make a lower low — probably by late summer,” he said. “That’s going to come because we’re going to find out now is a critical time for the market.” Bianco predicts there will be an overwhelming realization that life isn’t getting back to normal when then economy starts to reopen. “What the market seems to be thinking is we’re going to restart, and we’re all going to pretend that it’s 2019,” said Bianco. “And, we’re all going to stand on the subway platform with 500 other people waiting for the next train.”

We try to run the Automatic Earth on people’s kind donations. Since their revenue has collapsed, ads no longer pay for all you read, and your support is now an integral part of the process.

Thanks for your generosity.

Before the lockdowns:

Free America now… from psychopaths! pic.twitter.com/jm9TKY4HTo

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) April 29, 2020

pic.twitter.com/Q833u4Is8h

— General Flynn (@GenFlynn) April 29, 2020

Support the Automatic Earth for your own good.

The Dying Days Of An Empire

Jun 252019

June 25, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:08 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: China, empire, Greece, military, overreach, petrodollar, reserve currency, Rome, ruble, Russia, sanctions, Trump, Vietnam, yuan 11 Responses »

Caravaggio Conversion on the way to Damascus 1600-01

Something’s been nagging me for the past few days, and I’m not sure I’ve figured out why yet. It started when Donald Trump first called off the alleged planned strikes on targets in Iran because they would have cost 150 lives, and then the next day said the US would do sanctions instead. As they did on Monday, even directly targeting Trump’s equal, the “Supreme Leader Khameini”.

When Trump announced the sanctions, I thought: wait a minute, by presenting this the way you did, you effectively turned economic sanctions into a military tool: we chose not to do bombs but sanctions. Sounds the same as not doing a naval invasion but going for air attacks instead. The kind of decisions that were made in Vietnam a thousand times.

However, Vietnam was all out war (well, invasion is a better term). Which shamed the US, killed and maimed the sweet Lord only knows how many promising young Americans as well as millions of Vietnamese, and ended in humiliating defeat. But the US is not in an all out war in Iran, at least not yet. And if they would ever try to be, the outcome would be Vietnam squared.

Still, that’s not really my point here. It’s simply about the use of having the world reserve currency as a military weapon instead of an economic one. And I think that is highly significant. As well as an enormous threat to the US. The issue at hand is overreach.

While you could still argue that economic sanctions on North Korea, Venezuela and Russia are just that, economic and/or political ones, the way Trump phrased it, comparing sanctions one on one with military strikes, no longer leaves that opening when it comes to Iran. The new Iran sanctions are a preliminary act of war. Simply because of how he presented them. He explicitly stated that he swapped one for the other.

There are quite a few people who have been harping on the demise of the USD as reserve currency for a long time, and I always think: look, nobody wants the yuan, let alone the ruble. There’s no trade being executed in these currencies. So taking over from the USD is a pipe dream.

But that may very well change, and perhaps very fast too, if the US uses the dollar not as an economic weapon (and there are plenty issues with that already), but as a military one. That would potentially hugely speed up any efforts to move away from the buck in international trade.

For the simple reason that it becomes unreliable. Traders hate that, they can’t have that. A reserve currency must be neutral -to a point-. The world of trade doesn’t want the yuan because Beijing controls it and can therefore change conditions and values overnight. But if and when the US uses the USD as a military tool, it essentially risks doing exactly the same: it deneutralizes the USD.

Using the USD as an economic weapon is ugly, but something global trade can deal with. A military weapon, though, is something else altogether. And I see no sign that Trump understands this. The thing is, using your currency, which also happens to be the world reserve currency, as a military tool, means you’ve become a threat to everyone, the entire globe, overnight.

And people don’t want to live that way. Not Iran, not Russia, not China, not Europe, no-one. It’s one thing to use the USD for sanctions. But it’s a real different thing to use it as just a military alternative to “bombing a country into obliteration”.

What Trump did comes awfully close to signing the death warrant for the USD as the global reserve currency. And it’s really only because he and his people weren’t paying attention. He could have phrased the entire thing differently, and it would have been business as usual, a business that Moscow and Beijing are actively trying to undermine, but they could have waited a bit longer reacting.

Now, however, their plans have to be sped up. They’re going to be buying a lot of gold, as they’ve already been doing, they’ll try to do their mutual business in their own currencies backed by this gold, and they’ll speed up alternatives-to-USD plans with other countries in their neighborhood. Because they have no choice anymore.

I see Tyler Durden reporting that the US threatens to throw a Chinese state-owned bank out of the SWIFT system, and I think: great idea. Why not force China to quit the reserve currency system, the petrodollar, outright?! Why not force it to hasten the Asian/Russian alternative trade model into existence? What a great and lovely idea.

The US should today make friends. It should preserve the reserve currency status of the USD for as long as it can, by convincing allies and foes alike that it will protect its neutrality in global trade. But Trump and his people are doing the exact opposite, they’re playing all-on-red.

The US no longer has the economic, political or military might to dictate to the entire world any terms it wants to. Those days are long gone. That ended in Vietnam. Trump’s living in the last century, while Bolton and Pompeo, they live in their own time and world.

But yeah, sure, perhaps this is what the dying days of an empire MUST look like. Maybe there’s a model to follow and there’s no escape, maybe it’s all written in the stars. Like Rome and Greece and Genghis Khan. Maybe things simply just have to play out. Still, looking at that Trump statement about the new Iran sanctions that started me off, it doesn’t feel all that smart.

War and Young Americans

May 262019

May 26, 2019 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:47 pm Primers Tagged with: Bolton, Caitlin, Eisenhower, Gabbard, military industrial complex, Pelosi, Pence, Pompeo, Schumer, Springsteen, Trump, Vietnam, war 41 Responses »

Joseph Mallord William Turner Teasing the Donkey 1827

So we’re going to do this all over again? Well, not if I can help it. Not that I have much hope that I can, mind you. As the bastions of war chime on, my voice, like so many others, will be drowned out. The military industrial complex knows how to do propaganda, better than anyone. But I’ll try.

Vietnam gave the US its biggest ever defeat, both militarily and morally, and yet mere years after its deeply humiliating withdrawal was put into action, the country was back at sending its promising young boys and girls not to its school systems, but to far away battle fields to be crippled, traumatized and slaughtered.

I know, I know, the UK and France do that too, but few other places do. Russia today uses its troops to defend its territory, China has yet to reveal its intentions. But the intentions of the US have been known ever since WWII ended.

In 1956, president Eisenhower, himself a longtime military man, warned the country upon taking leave of office, of the military-industrial complex that was threatening to take over its government. Less than 10 years later, that’s exactly what the complex did, and it’s never looked back.

And I’m thinking: you never learned anything at all? Not from Ike, not from Vietnam, not from the non-existent Iraqi WMD, and not from Libya or Syria? How is that even possible? Oh wait, I know, because the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN et al is where you get your so-called news. That’s why. Gotcha.

Today, May 26 2019, and I’m deeply ashamed to say it, I have two stories, one concerning a speech by VP Mike Pence at West Point, the other from Caitlin Johnstone about a Twitter thread initiated by the US military itself. Pence’s speech is heart breaking in its ignorance of US history, Caitlin’s is heart wrenching in its acknowledgment of that same history, and what it does to young Americans.

Now, I think this is not about Trump, as many will undoubtedly claim, it’s about Trump and Pelosi and Pence and McCain and Bolton and Hillary and Pompeo and Obama and all of the people hanging around both administrations. Let’s see what YOU think.

Pence To West Point Grads: You Will Fight On a Battlefield for America at Some Point in Your Life

Vice President Mike Pence told the graduating class of the West Point Military Academy on Saturday that the world is “a dangerous place” and they should expect to see combat. “Men and women of West Point, no matter where you’re deployed, you will be the vanguard of freedom, and you know that the “soldier does not bear the sword in vain.” The work you do has never been more important. America will always seek peace, but peace comes through strength. And you are now that strength. It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.

Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere. And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win. The American people expect nothing less.”

Mike Pence is a very dangerous person. He’s planning to send American children into endless wars once again, 45-odd years after Vietnam and 20-odd years after Iraq. And there’s no-one left to stop him, other than Trump, Not exactly a solid guarantee. The Democrats will cheer this on, and their media will too. They always have.

Now, I’m not old enough to remember the whole story of the US involvement in Vietnam, but I do recall this 1985 video from Paul Hardcastle, which stated that the average age of the US soldier in Vietnam -towards the end- was 19. I have also seen Coppola’s movie “Apocalypse Now”, and many others, and yes, I’m wondering where today’s versions of these movies are.

Because, you know, when I read the Twitter thread picked up by Caitlin Johnstone listing what was supposed to be a promo thing from the army, my heart sinks and hurts and in the end is downright defeated. It’s like reading the accounts from Vietnam, and nothing has changed in 50+ years. How can that be? Says innocent me.

But religious nut Mike Pence has the guts to present this as some sort of heroic thing. For young Americans to go die in a desert for nothing at all other than Exxon’s access to oil and the profits of Boeing and Raytheon. And of course they’ve been setting this up for decades, that young kids -certainly blacks- who have no shot at a proper education, can get one only if they agree to become cannon fodder.

That’s ‘Nam, guys, that’s the 1960’s, history. And just look at how terribly that failed. Well, Mike Pence would like to repeat that failure.

The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut-Wrenching.

After posting a video of a young recruit talking to the camera about how service allows him to better himself “as a man and a warrior”, the US Army tweeted, “How has serving impacted you?” As of this writing, the post has over 5,300 responses. Most of them are heartbreaking. “My daughter was raped while in the army,” said one responder. “They took her to the hospital where an all male staff tried to convince her to give the guy a break because it would ruin his life. She persisted. Wouldn’t back down. Did a tour in Iraq. Now suffers from PTSD.”

“I’ve had the same nightmare almost every night for the past 15 years,” said another. Tweet after tweet after tweet, people used the opportunity that the Army had inadvertently given them to describe how they or their loved one had been chewed up and spit out by a war machine that never cared about them. This article exists solely to document a few of the things that have been posted in that space, partly to help spread public awareness and partly in case the thread gets deleted in the interests of “national security”.

“my grandpa served in vietnam from when he was 18–25. he’s 70 now and every night he still has nightmares where he stands up tugging at the curtains or banging on the walls screaming at the top of his lungs for someone to help him. he refuses to talk about his time and when you mention anything about the war to him his face goes white and he has a panic attack. he cries almost every day and night and had to spend 10 years in a psychiatric facility for suicidal ideations from what he saw there.”

“My best friend joined the Army straight out of high school because his family was poor & he wanted a college education. He served his time & then some. Just as he was ready to retire he was sent to Iraq. You guys sent him back in a box. It destroyed his children.”

“My best friend from high school was denied his mental health treatment and forced to return to a third tour in Iraq, despite having such deep trauma that he could barely function. He took a handful of sleeping pills and shot himself in the head two weeks before deploying.”

If you got the stomach for it, guys, do read it. But I got to tell you, I find it hard.

The US killed millions of people and maimed ten times that in Vietnam, and that very much includes its own young and promising American citizens, and they did it again in Iraq. Mike Pence wants to repeat that in Iran and other theaters. Supported by Pelosi, Pompeo, Schumer, Bolton etc. Shame for them John McCain passed.

There’s only one US presidential candidate who’s explicitly spoken out against this mad repeat of Vietnam, and that’s Tulsi Gabbard, who actually “served” in Iraq. So she will be pushed aside by the DNC. Who are funded by the military industrial complex, don’t you know. Must serve the machine. We have a long way to go.

I always thought that Springsteen talking about Vietnam from Born In The USA is sort of like a haiku, encompassing the essence in just a few words, even if he doesn’t catch all the misery and bloodshed and mental anguish and broken lives and all of it (but how could you?):

I had a brother at Khe San;

Fighting off the Viet Cong

They’re still there, he’s all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon

I got a picture of him in her arms now

I know people older than me have many more examples of this and from the time when the ‘war’ was actually ongoing. Eve of Destruction? Creedence? Please send suggestions.

But also, please recognize the similarities in the madness then and now.

And let’s try and make it stop.

Let’s try and stop history from even rhyming, let alone repeating.

Nassim Taleb likes to point out that in olden days those who declared wars would also be first in line to fight them. By design. The fair thing to do.

Let’s send Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and all of their families into Iran first. And then we can talk.

Older Entries