Jan 232022
 


Ivan Aivazovsky Moonlight Reflecting On Water c1850

 

Organized On Facebook, A Who’s Who Of Anti-Vaccine Activists Head To DC (NBC)
CDC Plans To ‘Pivot The Language’ On Vaccination, Walensky Says (Fox)
Fauci, Walensky Dodge When Asked About Number Of Vaccine Deaths (WND)
Hiding the Bodies (Diana West)
The Omicron Hypothesis, Part 1 (Crawford)
The Omicron Hypothesis, Part 2 (Crawford)
Will These People Be Charged With Genocide? (Mercola)
Wife Stands Off With Hospital to Keep Her Husband Alive, and Wins (ET)
Jacinda Ardern Will Force Household Covid Contacts To Isolate For 24 Days (DM)
Mask Mandates Causing Over 350% Surge In Childhood Speech Delays (NP)
Is It Already Too Late To Say Goodbye? (Cook)
University Slaps A Trigger Warning On George Orwell’s 1984 (DM)
The Hidden Origin Of The Escalating Ukraine-Russia Conflict (CD)
German Navy Chief Resigns After Saying “Putin Deserves Respect” (ZH)
Germany ‘Encouraging Putin’ By Refusing To Supply Weapons: Ukraine (Y!)

 

 

 

 

Sad little man

 

 

 

 

NHS infectious diseases consultant
https://twitter.com/i/status/1484509777631887367

 

 

Croatia Macron
https://twitter.com/i/status/1484426702344359937

 

 

No, really, people like Malone and Rogan are actually anti-vaccine, they just claim they’re against mandates: “They’re using terms that they know are not going to get censored.”

What a stupid hit piece. Is that all you got?

Organized On Facebook, A Who’s Who Of Anti-Vaccine Activists Head To DC (NBC)

Thousands of protesters are expected to descend on Washington this weekend for a rally against Covid-19 vaccine mandates, a sign that the anti-vaccination movement that gained traction on social media during the pandemic is spilling even further into politics and real life. The rally has been largely organized on Facebook and some extremist internet forums, and organizers have raised at least $200,000 on a crowdfunding site. Some nearby hotels in Virginia are sold out ahead of the event, according to the event’s organizers, who are arranging last-minute travel plans for latecomers. The “Defeat the Mandates DC” Facebook group, in which much of the organizing has taken place, now has more than 11,000 members, gaining almost 3,000 in just the last week.

Organizers of the rally, Defeat The Mandates: An American Homecoming, say they are expecting tens of thousands of attendees who will begin their protest at the Washington Monument at 10:30 a.m. ET Sunday. The event adds momentum to activists who continue to find ways to spread false and misleading claims about the Covid vaccines, now often focusing on mandates as an entry point. Among the scheduled speakers is Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist who has recently emerged as a new leader of the anti-vaccination movement after appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in December. Malone, who is president of the Pandemic Health Alliance, the organization soliciting donations for the rally, has pushed anti-Covid vaccine talking points, including tweeting a retracted study falsely claiming Covid vaccines caused a substantial number of deaths. He has instead repeatedly advocated for the use of ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that the Food and Drug Administration does not consider an effective treatment against Covid.

On Rogan’s podcast, which is estimated to reach tens of millions of people and was the top podcast on Spotify in 2021, Malone insisted that Sunday’s event is an anti-mandate rally, and not an anti-vaccine rally. Rogan said he will not be attending the rally. Anti-vaccine groups on Telegram have also pushed local “Defeat the Mandates” rallies planned for Sunday in several cities, including Denver and Sacramento, California. Some of the events have been amplified on Telegram by members of extremist groups like the Proud Boys, with one account adding that the event in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, would feature a “mask burning.” Kolina Koltai, a postdoctoral fellow who researches the anti-vaccine movement at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, said the D.C. event was bringing together some of the most high-profile anti-vaccine activists. “It’s a who’s who of grifters and people who made a profit off the pandemic,” she said.

[..] The permit for the rally was filed by the Children’s Health Defense Fund. Organizers expect 20,000 people, according to the permit, which also requires attendees to wear masks in crowded outdoor areas. Koltai said that while most, if not all, of the speakers at Sunday’s rally oppose vaccines, referring to the rally as being against mandates is a way to drum up wider support and also evade bans from Facebook and Twitter, which frequently take down anti-vaccine misinformation. “As policies have changed on Facebook, we’ve seen anti-vaccine groups rebrand to ‘pro-medical freedom’ or ‘pro-choice,’” she said. “They’re using terms that they know are not going to get censored.”

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We’ve seen from umpteen sources that the vaccines don’t work vs Omicron, but Walensky now says “if you recently got your second dose, you’re not eligible for a booster, you’re up to date”. That should confuse a few people…

CDC Plans To ‘Pivot The Language’ On Vaccination, Walensky Says (Fox)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a Friday briefing that the agency is working to “pivot” its language regarding what it means to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Responding to a question about why the CDC is not changing the definition of the phrase to include a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, the health leader told reporters that it is working to “pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be, should be, based on when they got their last vaccine.” “So, importantly, right now, we’re pivoting our language. We really want to make sure people are up to date.

That means if you recently got your second dose, you’re not eligible for a booster, you’re up to date. If you are eligible for a booster and you haven’t gotten it, you’re not up to date and you need to get your booster in order to be up to date,” she added. Previously, Walensky and others had stated that the definition of being fully vaccinated would not change from those who have received their primary series of their COVID-19 vaccine. “So, individuals are considered fully vaccinated against COVID-19 if they’ve received their primary series. That definition is not changing,” she said during a Jan. 5 White House COVID-19 Response Team briefing. “But consistent with how public health has historically viewed or even talked about how we recommend vaccines, we are now recommending that individuals stay up to date with additional doses that they are eligible for.”

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN on Friday that the CDC had not updated the language because their recommendations are about “how well you are protected rather than a definition.”

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Completely ignoring VAERS. Which should be the first thing they check every morning. Walensky turns it all upside down. While we know a lot (most?) of what is registered as Covid deaths are not really, she now claims vaccinated people dying in a car crash should not be in VAERS. Sly.

Fauci, Walensky Dodge When Asked About Number Of Vaccine Deaths (WND)

How many people have died as a result of COVID-19 vaccines? Nobody can say for sure – because correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation – but it’s clearly a question in the public interest. A “national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines,” called the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, or VAERS, was established for that important purpose. It’s co-managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. So, when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and top White House coronavirus adviser and National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci appeared before a Senate committee hearing Tuesday on the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, a senator posed the question.

But amid the most ambitious vaccination effort in the history of the world, Walensky and Fauci didn’t have an answer. They curiously both began with emphasizing that people can’t rely on VAERS for any indication, because, they said, people who get hit by a car shortly after being vaccinated get recorded as vaccine deaths. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala, noted that the number of COVID-19 vaccine deaths is “in the thousands.” As of Dec. 31, VAERS recorded 21,382 vaccine-related deaths and 113,303 hospitalizations among a total of 1,016,999 adverse event reports. “Is this true?” the senator asked Walensky. “Are we having that many people die after taking one of these vaccines.”

She responded by saying that VAERS is a “mandatory system of any adverse event that happens after being vaccinated.” “So, if you get hit by a car, tragically, after getting vaccinated, that gets reported in the vaccine adverse reporting VAERS system,” Walensky said. “So the vaccines are incredibly safe,” she continued. “They protect us against omicron, they protect us against delta, they protect us against COVID. They don’t protect us against every other form of mortality out there.” Tuberville asked again. “Do we keep numbers of people that die … following taking this vaccine? Do we have any idea?” “Absolutely, yes,” Walensky said. “I couldn’t give you the absolute number off the top of my head, but I can absolutely get back in touch with you with those data.”

Tuberville turned to Biden’s top health adviser. “Do you know, Dr. Fauci? Do you have any clue on that?” “I don’t have a number, but I think part of the confusion is that when you get vaccinated and get hit by a car … that’s the thing that get’s confusing, that everything that happens after the vaccination — even if you die of something completely obviously unrelated, it’s considered a death,” he said. Walensky added, “And every one of those is adjudicated.” Many physicians and scientists believe the true VAERS figures are much higher. Physicians who sued the FDA for documents related to clinical trials for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine estimate the true numbers are five times higher. A recent study led by a researcher at Columbia University estimated the actual figures are higher by a factor of 20. If the underreporting factor is correct, it would mean that there are nearly 400,000 deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services points out that a VAERS report is not documentation that a link has been established between a vaccine and an adverse event. However, HHS also notes that VAERS is a “passive” system of reporting, and it “receives reports for only a small fraction of actual adverse events.” Many health care workers have disclosed they are instructed by their superiors not to report to VAERS any harm caused by COVID vaccines.

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“These are the real bioweapons, not a virus, which, by their own terms, poses a negligible threat to most people.”

Hiding the Bodies (Diana West)

The lethality of the covid “vaccine” is the last thing media and political and money elites want us “useless eaters” to understand. The mantra they have pressed on us is “safe and effective,” which I think of as the new “Sieg Heil.” We’re supposed to repeat after them, while sucking on the same old puff-blah, “Fauci, Walensky testify while omicron prompts many possible changes” (Associated Press); or the same old melodrama, “Criticized by Senators, U.S. Health Officials Defend Omicron Response” (NYT); or, worst of all, the “battle” of Fauci vs. Paul, those fake gladiators in the arena fighting over nothing. (I’ll get back to that.)

Among others, CNBC pushed the latter (“Fauci says Sen. Rand Paul’s false accusations ‘kindles the crazies’ and have incited death threats”), as did Fox, only the other way around (“Rand Paul rips Fauci following latest hearing fireworks: He doesn’t want debate because he ‘is science’). Whatever Fauci and Rand Paul lob at each other in these recurring “showdowns,” their dispute over virus research in Wuhan has nothing, zip, nada, to do with the agony of our nation. We are not dying over the origins of a virus which may not exist, or even over the virus itself (plus “variants”) with its 99+ percent survival rate, and whose average age of death approximates the average age of death. We are dying from the tyrannical “cure”: each and every act of oppression imposed on us by our very own governments and institutions, all in the name of a fake plague called “covid.”

From “flattening the curve (15 days), to “lockdowns” forever, to “social distancing” and other totalitarian measures including incessant “testing” (with a fake test), we find ourselves not on the road to something they mockingly call “public health,” but rather to a state of perpetual fear, vaxx apartheid, “green passes,” concentration camps (happening), digital currency (to come), a vaxx-caused die-off and overall sickening of the world’s peoples, and, I am increasingly persuaded, the goal of ending the human species itself in gene-engineered and nano-wired “transhumanism.”

There is a simple switch to shut down the dystopian juggernaut. If we were to stop “testing” healthy people by the million (or if healthy people were to refuse to be tested by the million) the Xi to Gates Foundation to WEF to WHO to CDC to Johns Hopkins “dashboards” would stop generating the false-positive-“cases” that drive the closures, the stoppages, the firings, the breakdowns, the hysteria, rage and more testing. Without the fake statistical drivers that fuel this “pandemic,” this “pandemic” stops. So, theoretically, does demand for, or submission to the covid shot of Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Astra Zeneca, Comiraty, all of them. These are the real bioweapons, not a virus, which, by their own terms, poses a negligible threat to most people.

Read more …

Mathew Crawford digs deeper. I can’t really cover this in a few words. Click the link and go to his site.

The Omicron Hypothesis, Part 1 (Crawford)

As omicron took over the caseload, the case fatality rate (CFR), which is the proportion of COVID-19 cases that are fatal (cases, not infections), took a nosedive. Per case, COVID-19 is almost 90% less deadly than prior to the omicronification of the pandemic. In fact, we may pass 90% by the time I’m done typing, which has already confused my sense of changing tense in this paragraph… We should still keep an eye out for overall health impact, including the frequency and severity of long haul symptoms. But the extremely good news is that the COVID-19 case count—not that it was ever measured correctly—has officially decoupled from the hospitalization and death counts. That’s okay—sometimes, during changes in functional outcomes, we care more about precision in measurement than accuracy.


And by “officially” I don’t mean that the WHO said so (though they might have…I haven’t bothered to check because why would I?), but rather “look at the charts!” In fact, there are almost no deaths at all associated with the omicron variant! Of course, there will be some. There is no such thing as a respiratory infection that doesn’t kill some of the frail elderly. But unless there is some facet of the omicron outbreak that we don’t yet understand, this is all extremely good news. In fact, it’s such good news that we should probably declare the pandemic over with and stop talking about vaccine mandates and passports altogether.

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See above.

The Omicron Hypothesis, Part 2 (Crawford)

A quick summary of primary open hypotheses explored:

Hypothesis 1: Omicron has been circulating widely for at least several months.

Hypothesis 2: Omicron was genetically engineered—most likely by somebody in the same working group who engineered an mRNA vaccine to stop SARS-CoV-2.

Now, before we really get started again, some places (including those I mentioned in Part 1) where there is now a pandemic of the vaccinated.

United Kingdom: Vaccinated twice as likely to have omicron than unvaccinated
Leaked Dept. of Health memo warns efficacy falls to zero against omicron.
The Imperial College of London finds an increasing affinity among the vaccinated for omicron relative to delta that increases with the number of doses taken.

New South Wales, Australia

Denmark data shows negative vaccine efficacy

Oh, Canada!
Ontario: 95% of omicron cases in the vaccinated
Joel Smalley caught Alberta cooking the books to keep the vaccines from looking bad against omicron.

Dec 13, 2021: The CDC says that 79% of early identified omicron infections are in vaccinated individuals.

The vaccine manufacturers worry that their products do not protect against omicron

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This article will disappear again sometime today.

Will These People Be Charged With Genocide? (Mercola)

According to The Desert Review, a slew of high-power figures in the COVID-19 pandemic and the push to mandate experimental COVID jabs have been accused of several crimes, including crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression in the U.K.: “In a stunning 46-page legal filing2 to the International Criminal Court on December 6 [2021], an intrepid attorney and seven applicants accused Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Melinda Gates, William Gates III, and twelve others of numerous violations of the Nuremberg Code. These included various crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Rome Statutes, Articles 6, 7, 8, 15, 21, and 53.”

The Dirty 16 In all, the 16 defendants named in the legal filing are:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID
Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance
Bill Gates
Melinda Gates
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer
Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna
Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca
Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson
Tedros Adhanhom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO
Boris Johnson, U.K. prime minister
Christopher Whitty, U.K. chief medical adviser
Matthew Hancock, former U.K. secretary of state for Health and Social Care
Medicines and Healthcare, current U.K. secretary of state for Health and Social Care
June Raine, U.K. chief executive of Medicines and Healthcare products
Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation
Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum

The victims, on behalf of whom the complaint was filed, are “the peoples of the United Kingdom.” One of the seven applicants is Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former vice president and chief scientist of allergy and respiratory research at Pfizer. At the end of 2020, he expressed deep concerns about the COVID jabs becoming mandatory, as he could find no medical rationale for their use. In 2021, as we all know, mandates were rolled out around the world. In April 2021, Yeadon went public with concerns that the shots were part of a depopulation agenda. “I believe [COVID-19 booster shots] are going to be used to damage your health and possibly kill you. I can see no sensible interpretation other than a serious attempt at mass depopulation,” he said in a “Planet Lockdown” interview published in late April 2021.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal located in The Hague, Netherlands. Its activities are governed by an international treaty called the Rome Statute, which has been ratified by more than 120 countries, including the U.S. The ICC is a permanent, independent court that investigates crimes that concern the international community, such as claims of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. In theory, member states are supposed to cooperate with the court, but that doesn’t always happen.

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Doctors trying to kill a patient. Why?

Wife Stands Off With Hospital to Keep Her Husband Alive, and Wins (ET)

Sentiments expressed in random phone calls for Anne Quiner as her husband Scott lay in a hospital bed breathing through a ventilator ranged from “I hope your husband dies a vegetable” followed by a litter of profanity, to “he should have taken the vaccine; I hope he dies,” before hanging up. While not the traditional Hallmark expressions for one to get well soon, Quiner said it was a feeling shared among some of the doctors at Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, where Scott had been hospitalized for COVID-19 complications in November. In one recorded phone call with Dr. Linda Soucie in which Quiner was fighting to keep Scott on the ventilator, Soucie told Quiner, “Unfortunately, if we could turn back time and he had gotten the vaccine, then he wouldn’t be here,” just after Soucie had told Quiner,

“After three years, I think we’ve gotten pretty good at determining who’s going to make it and who’s not, and unfortunately Scott’s in that range of the group that is not going to make it.” In a recorded conference call, doctors told Quiner that they would be taking Scott off the ventilator on Jan. 13 because he would not recover due to what they said were his “destroyed lungs from COVID pneumonia,” and that their attempts at decreasing sedation only caused him pain. Quiner told The Epoch Times that her petitions for alternative treatments, as well as to keep Scott on the ventilator, had been met with contempt. With doctors determined to take Scott off the ventilator, Quiner sought legal counsel. Marjorie Holsten, Quiner’s attorney, told The Epoch Times that she filed a motion for a temporary restraining order that prevented the hospital from taking Scott off the ventilator.

Mercy Hospital then hired its own law firm that objected to the temporary restraining order on the basis that Holsten and Quiner’s position isn’t “supported by medical science.” Because of this, the hospital requested that the court issue an order authorizing the hospital to take Scott off the ventilator. The judge sided with Holsten, issuing the order based on the standard that irreparable harm would result if not issued, which Holsten said was easy to establish because if Scott had been taken off, he would have died. On Jan. 15, Scott was transferred out of Mercy Hospital and taken to an undisclosed hospital in Texas, where Holsten said the doctors have reported Scott to be malnourished, having lost 30 pounds underweight, and dehydrated. Both Holsten and Quiner said doctors in Texas were “horrified” by Scott’s condition when he arrived.

“One doctor said he didn’t know how Scott made it out of that hospital alive,” Quiner said. “He looked at his chart and said, ‘I can’t believe the heavy, sedating drugs they put him on.’” The hospital was following a rigid late-treatment COVID protocol that has “very likely killed many people,” Holsten said.

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She is insane. Just not certified yet. Cancelled her own wedding too.

Jacinda Ardern Will Force Household Covid Contacts To Isolate For 24 Days (DM)

New Zealand will make household contacts of Covid cases isolate for 24 days under harsh new rules brought in to combat an impending Omicron outbreak. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has brought in the strict measures as the country battles to stay Covid Zero despite the threat of the highly contagious mutant strain. But critics say the lengthy quarantine period is ‘unworkable’ and will lead people to avoid getting tested. Anyone infected with Covid is now required to isolate for 14 days, up from 10 days under the new interim rules. Household contacts must then stay in quarantine for a further 10 days, stretching the time alone out to three and a half weeks.

The extension to isolation comes as New Zealand recorded 84 new Covid cases on Saturday, with 43 in the community and another 41 caught at the border. It includes an Auckland airport worker who tested positive for the omicron strain, sparking fears case numbers could soar up to 1500 a day or more if the mutant strain spreads across the nation. The NZ Ministry of Health said the changes were made after new scientific data published in Japan revealed the highly infectious strain has a longer incubation period than previous variants with sufferers also shedding the virus for longer. But Ardern’s critics warn the extreme policy is ‘unworkable’ and could lead to more Covid cases with greater number refusing to be tested in order to avoid the lengthy quarantine period.

‘The effect is that if you test positive, members of your household may have to isolate for 24 days,’ Act political party leader David Seymour told NZ’s Stuff. ‘People who cannot afford that will have a strong incentive not to get tested, defeating the purpose of the policy. ‘If the advice is taken seriously, it will cripple the health workforce and supply chains more generally.’

Haka
https://twitter.com/i/status/1484890057232187393

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“Certain words that are key did not flow, so that began to raise a red flag.”

Mask Mandates Causing Over 350% Surge In Childhood Speech Delays (NP)

Mask mandates implemented by the government amidst the COVID-19 appear to be causing speech delays in young children. The regulations, which are still in effect in Democrat-led cities including Washington D.C. and New York City, have had adverse effects on the development of speaking abilities in children and babies. “This has been a very challenging year,” emphasized Jaclyn Theek, a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach, Florida. The clinic experienced a 364 percent increase in patients who were babies and toddlers amidst the pandemic. Prior to the onset of COVID-19, only 5 percent of the clinic’s patients were in the age group, while today it stands at 20 percent.

“There’s no research out there yet saying that this could be causing speech and language delays. But, most definitely, I’m sure it’s a factor,” Theek said. “It’s very important that kids do see your face to learn, so they’re watching your mouth.” Similarly, many parents interviewed by WPBF 25 News felt the irregular speech patterns were “COVID-delayed.” A parent interviewed by the outlet attributed the delays to “social isolation and everyone wearing masks”: Gregg Santos brings his son, Diego, to speech therapy twice a week. “He would just ramble, baby ramble,” Santos said. “Certain words that are key did not flow, so that began to raise a red flag.” Santos said his son was born perfectly healthy at the start of a pandemic.

“We’d go out and walk around the neighborhood, and there would be no one there…everyone just stayed in,” Santos said. Santos said he believes social isolation and everyone wearing masks lead to Diego’s speech delays. “It bothers me,” Santos said. “It bothers me a lot.” “It definitely makes a difference when the world you are growing up in, you can’t interact with people and their face. That’s super important to babies,” cautioned another parent.

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Jonathan Cook on being disappeared.

Is It Already Too Late To Say Goodbye? (Cook)

My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares. Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. “Going viral” is a distant memory. No, I won’t be banned. I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice. Which is why I am saying my goodbyes now while I can still reach you, my most obstinate followers. But this isn’t really about one small light being snuffed out. This isn’t just about our relationship coming to an end. Something bigger, and more disturbing, is taking place.

Journalists like me are part of an experiment – in a new, more democratised media landscape. We have developed new reader-funded models so that we can break free of the media corporations, which until now ensured billionaires and the state controlled the flow of information in one direction only: to speak down to us. The corporate media needs corporate advertising to survive – or the owners’ deep pockets. They don’t need you, except as a captive audience. You’re both their prisoner and their product. But the lifeblood of a reader-funded journalist, as the name suggests, are readers. The more of you we attract, the better chance there is that we can generate donations and income and make the model sustainable. Our Achilles’ heel is our dependence on social media to find you, to keep reaching you, to offer you an alternative from the corporate media.

If Facebook (sorry, the Meta universe) and Twitter stop independent writers from growing their readerships by manipulating the algorithms, by ghosting and shadow-banning us, and by all the other trickery we do not yet understand, then new voices cannot grow their funding base and break free of corporate control. And equally, for those like me who are already established and have significant numbers of readers, these tech giants can whittle them away one by one. Ostensibly, I have many tens of thousands of followers, but for several years now I have been reaching fewer and fewer of you. I am starved of connection. The danger, already only too obvious, is that my readership, and funding model, will slowly start to shrivel and die. Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and a handful of titans of the new media age are so big they can probably weather it out. But the rest of us will not be so lucky.

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Acting out Orwell’s warnings.

University Slaps A Trigger Warning On George Orwell’s 1984 (DM)

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship. Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’. The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book. Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian story – set in a totalitarian state which persecutes individual thinking – gave the world phrases such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘Newspeak’ and ‘thought police’.

[It] makes powerful points about what can happen to a society that doesn’t cherish academic freedoms or its own history. Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’. In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it. ‘Too many of us – and nowhere is it more evident than our universities – have freely given up our rights to instead conform to a homogenised society governed by a liberal elite “protecting” us from ideas that they believe are too extreme for our sensibilities.’

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@dimitrigalanis: “The current propaganda meme in Washington is that #Russia is going to “invade #Ukraine” and absorb it. It will not: Ukraine is a decaying, impoverished, de-industrialised, divided, corrupt and decaying mess; Moscow does not want to take responsibility for the package.”

The Hidden Origin Of The Escalating Ukraine-Russia Conflict (CD)

Western and Russian leaders and their media express deeply conflicting views concerning the escalating conflict in Ukraine and its origins. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other officials have repeatedly blasted the Kremlin for instigating the crisis along Ukraine’s border in an attempt to carve out a sphere of influence. They argue that after the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych was ousted by peaceful protesters in 2014—dozens of whom were massacred by government snipers—Russia annexed Crimea and launched a hybrid war with Ukraine in the Donbas with the help of Russian proxies. Moreover, Western officials maintain that Ukraine is a sovereign state which has a right to join NATO. In contrast, Russian leaders insist that the Ukrainian government was overthrown in a fascist putsch, which led to Crimea voluntary joining Russia and to a civil war without Russian military involvement in the Donbas. They say that Ukraine has been under de facto NATO rule since 2014 and regard unrecognized separatist republics in the Donbas as independent.


Various evidence presented in studies I have authored, which has been echoed by many other Western scholars who research these issues, show that both of these narratives are inaccurate. Indeed, the question of which side carried out the “snipers’ massacre” is central to understanding one of the “bloodiest and most controversial hours of European conflict since the end of the Cold War,” and the main tipping point in the escalating conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. According to testimonies by over 100 wounded protesters, several dozen prosecution witnesses, and forensic ballistic and medical examinations by government experts, the massacre of the absolute majority of protesters and police at the Maidan (central square) in Kyiv on February 20, 2014 was perpetrated principally by members of the Maidan opposition, specifically its far-right elements. This event precipitated the violent removal of the corrupt and oligarchic but democratically elected government in Ukraine, touching off a conflict which has since killed more than 13,000 people. Western governments were at least aware of, or de facto backed, the overthrow.

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The best we have. Gone.

German Navy Chief Resigns After Saying “Putin Deserves Respect” (ZH)

[..] the “Russia is about to invade Ukraine” plotline just suffered a major blow after the chief of Germany’s navy, vice-admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach , said on Friday that Crimea “will never come back”, and that what Putin “really wants is respect…and it is easy to give him the respect he really demands – and probably deserves.” And sure enough, just one day later, on Saturday evening, he resigned from his post for having the temerity to speak out against conventional wisdom. “I have asked Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht to relieve me from my duties with immediate effect,” Schoenbach said in a statement cited by the Reuters news agency. “The minister has accepted my request,” he added.

Speaking at an event organized by the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses on Friday, the vice-admiral redpilled the shocked audience when he dismissed as “nonsense” the notion that Russia was “interested in having a small and tiny strip of Ukraine soil and integrating it into their country.” “Does Russia really want a small and tiny strip of Ukraine soil to integrate into their country? No, this is nonsense. Putin is probably putting pressure because can do it and he splits EU opinion.” Schönbach went on to claim that what President Putin really wanted was the West to “respect” Russia, adding “giving some respect is low cost, even no cost. If I was asked, it is easy to give him the respect he really demands and probably also deserves.” Addressing the issue of Crimea, the German Navy commander opined that the “peninsula is gone” and “will never come back — this is a fact.”

On Ukraine’s possible admission into NATO, Schönbach said, “Ukraine of course cannot meet the requirements because it’s occupied in the Donbas region by the Russian Army or by what they call as militias.” In this context, he also said the Crimea peninsula, which was annexed by Russia, is “gone” and is “not coming back”. Then in an even greater transgression of conventional pro-China etiquette, the German had the temerity to point out the elephant in the room when he slammed China which is “not that nice country we probably thought” and added that that “Russia is an old country, Russia is an important country. Even we India, Germany, need Russia. We need Russia against China…” This, he said, is “easy” and “keeps Russia away from China” because China needs resources of Russia and they [Russia] are willing to give them because the sanctions sometimes do go the “wrong way”.

Read more …

Most corrupt country on the planet?

Germany ‘Encouraging Putin’ By Refusing To Supply Weapons: Ukraine (Y!)

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Saturday condemned Germany for its refusal to supply weapons to Kyiv, urging Berlin to stop “undermining unity” and “encouraging Vladimir Putin” amid fears of a Russian invasion. In a separate development, Germany’s naval chief Kay-Achim Schoenbach announced his resignation late Saturday, after Ukraine summoned the German ambassador to Ukraine, to protest remarks the vice-admiral had made on the crisis. Kyiv’s foreign ministry stressed “the categorical unacceptability” of Schoenbach’s comments, who had said the idea that Russia wanted to invade Ukraine was “nonsense”, and that Putin probably deserved respect.


With tens of thousands of Russian troops gathered on the Ukrainian border, fears are mounting that a major conflict could break out in Europe. Ukraine’s calls to Western allies to bolster its defence capabilities have seen the United States, Britain and Baltic states agree to send to Kyiv weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. Kuleba said on Twitter that Germany’s statements “about the impossibility of supplying defence weapons to Ukraine” did not match “the current security situation”. Ukraine’s minister stressed that “today the unity of the West in relation to Russia is more important than ever. “The German partners must stop undermining unity with such words and actions and encouraging (Russian President) Vladimir Putin to launch a new attack on Ukraine,” Kuleba said.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bilbao

Bern
https://twitter.com/i/status/1484882444792827907

London

Stockholm

 

 

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


Willem de Kooning Door to the River 1960

 

 

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

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

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

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

The other day I wrote in a Debt Rattle:

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

Clinical Outcomes Among Patients Infected With Omicron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walensky gives it away:

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

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

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

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

Germany Confirms First Death Attributed To Covid Omicron Variant

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

But provides no proof or details.

Dec 27, Reuters:

Australia Records First Omicron Death

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

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

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

India Records First Death Linked To Omicron Variant

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

This is interesting, from Jan 14:

How Deadly Is The Omicron Variant? WHO Releases Death Report

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

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

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

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

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

Omicron daily overview: 30 December 2021

 

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

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


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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

The World after Omicron | The Beginning of the End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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Jan 082022
 
 January 8, 2022  Posted by at 9:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  85 Responses »


Pieter Bruegel the Elder Hunters in the snow 1565

 

When That Ol’ Mojo Stops Workin’ (Kunstler)
CDC Director Says US May See ‘Precipitous Decline’ In Omicron Cases (ABC)
Justice Sotomayor Claims 100,000 Children in ‘Serious Condition’ from Covid (Y!)
Top Epidemiologist Harvey Risch Blasts Fauci’s Covid Strategy, CDC Data (JTN)
True Number Of US Covid Deaths Likely Undercounted, Experts Say (G.)
Global Research On Omicron Raises Questions About Unvaccinated Blame Game (JTN)
Victoria Records Huge Spike In Cases (G.)
Scholz Pushes Mandatory Jabs As Resistance Grows In Germany (RFI)
Sajid Javid Directly Challenged On Mandatory Coronavirus Jabs (Sky)
Parents Sue Chicago Teachers Union Over School Closures, ‘Illegal Strike’ (JTN)
Norwegian Conscripts Told To Return Underwear As Covid Hits Supplies (G.)
The Day Jake Tapper Sold His Soul to Pharma (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr)
What the Jan. 6 Panel Won’t Probe (Strassel)
What Kazakhstan Isn’t (Murray)
2022, The Year of The Hangover? (Lacalle)

 

 

 

 

New York has its first official breakdown of what share of people are hospitalized for COVID vs. how many are hospitalized with incidental COVID. In NYC it’s 49% for COVID, everyone else just happened to test positive

 

 

eugyp

 

 

Italy mandatory

 

 

“Lunacy is exhausting.”

When That Ol’ Mojo Stops Workin’ (Kunstler)

You will have to be nimble and resourceful. The Covid lockdowns of the past two years have destroyed many small businesses, but think of that as the tide going out before the blowback of a tsunami that will sweep away the large businesses next. The WalMarts, the automobile industry, the airlines, trucking, Amazon.com, major league sports, the fast-food empires, the oil industry, the mega-banks — all these systems have gone into speed-wobble and most of them will crash hard. It’s an issue of scale. The broken giants will have to be replaced by lower-scaled systems for producing stuff, moving it, and selling it. That includes food, especially, by the way. How are you going to be part of that where you live? What role can you imagine yourself in? What are you good at? What do you dream of being good at? Can you assemble a social network for yourself?

Do you have any ability to look after the public interest? Can you speak coherently? Do you mean what you say? Are you grounded morally in right-and-wrong? Can others depend on you to keep your word? These are the questions that will matter going forward, not whether you were vaccinated, or voted for Mr. Trump, or know the lyrics to God Bless America. It looks like the disorders of economy and community are heading to center stage as the Covid-19 melodrama closes down. Since human nature is perverse, the current mass formation psychosis may transfer its energy onto new hobgoblins. But the mass of Americans — putting aside blue and red insignia for a moment — might simply be tired of lunacy. They may even begin to show some impatience with those who generate it, for instance the cable TV news channels.

Some of the most practiced conveyers of lunacy are heading out the door in the months ahead. Joy Reid of MSNBC is reportedly on her way off-camera (not by choice), and a while back the redoubtably dishonest Rachel Maddow announced her exit for April of this year, probably in anticipation of all her beloved narratives falling apart. Lunacy is exhausting. Soon enough, even the crazed governments of Euroland and Australia will suddenly drop their lockdowns and vaccination tyrannies as reality presses on the bubbles they occupy. In the face of the Omicron fade-out, they’ll turn 180-degrees and try to pretend that the episode of madness never happened. I doubt they will get away with it. Many politicians in these lands will be bum-rushed from office at the first opportunity.

Read more …

Yeah, yeah, more studies needed, yada yada, but they easily know enough already to take their hands off the panic button. They don’t.

CDC Director Says US May See ‘Precipitous Decline’ In Omicron Cases (ABC)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday there is a good chance that the U.S. will follow the “ice-pick”-shaped curve of South Africa’s omicron surge of the COVID variant, but cautioned that it could roll through different parts of the country at various times, as previous waves have. “I do think in places that we are seeing this really steep incline, that we may well see also a precipitous decline, but we’re also a much bigger country than South Africa,” Walensky said in a briefing with reporters. “And so it may very well be that we see this ice-pick shape, but that is it travels across the country,” she said.

As far as the rapid spread of coronavirus cases contributing to that decline, Walensky said there was not yet conclusive data to say for sure that people who recovered from omicron would be protected against reinfection. The CDC is setting up studies to find out more, Walensky said. There is data to show that previous delta infections do not fully protect against omicron infections, but that lab studies have shown omicron infection may protect against future delta infections, she said. “But we don’t yet have data that has demonstrated, at least clinically, that omicron protects against omicron,” Walensky said. “We are setting up studies to evaluate that, but we don’t have that information quite yet.”

As for the record-breaking high rates of pediatric hospitalizations, Walensky described a culmination of winter bringing higher rates of hospitalizations, many kids testing positive in hospitals when they come in for other issues and the low vaccination rates among kids in the face of the most transmissible variant yet. For the week ending Jan. 1, Walensky said the rate of hospitalization for kids up to age four was 4.3 per 100,000, but that the population over 65 was seeing rates of 14.7 hospitalizations per 100,000. “So, rates are higher in the pediatric populations than we’ve seen previously, but they’re also higher among our other populations and many populations that are also vaccinated,” Walensky said, reflecting how much the virus has spread.

Read more …

The SCOTUS justices performed a weird sort of comedy there, showing off their utter ignorance. And THEY get to decide?

Justice Sotomayor Claims 100,000 Children in ‘Serious Condition’ from Covid (Y!)

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor falsely claimed that 100,000 children are in “serious condition” from Covid during oral arguments on the Biden administration’s employer vaccine mandate on Friday. “We have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators,” Sotomayor claimed. The current number of confirmed pediatric hospitalizations with Covid in the U.S. is 3,342, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services released on Friday. The average number of children admitted to the hospital per day with Covid was 776 as of Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Additionally, the total number of children hospitalized with Covid from August 2020 through January 4, 2022 is 81,923, the CDC states.


CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement on Friday that “pediatric hospitalizations are at their highest rate compared to any prior point in the pandemic.” However, Walensky also told reporters that CDC data on pediatric Covid hospitalizations included some patients who were admitted to the hospital for a separate issue. Sotomayor’s comments came as the Court heard arguments on the Biden administration’s employer vaccine mandate, which states that businesses with 100 or more employees must require Covid vaccinations for all workers and weekly testing for those workers who do not get vaccinated. Challengers claim that the agency charged with developing and enforcing the mandate, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, does not have the Constitutional authority to do so.

Read more …

“Fauci [..] not only isn’t trained in public health but “has interests that do not align with the public health interests of the United States,”

Top Epidemiologist Harvey Risch Blasts Fauci’s Covid Strategy, CDC Data (JTN)

President Biden can claim that COVID-19 remains a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” partly because “the CDC has played fast and loose with a lot of studies and data,” Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Harvey Risch says. “We have not been careful or objective with our data,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast Friday. “We don’t even know, for example, the mortality from COVID,” which the CDC pegs at more than 800,000. Risch noted the agency told physicians to put COVID on death certificates regardless of whether they think the infection played a role. Hospitalizations have also conflated admissions “with” and “from” COVID, he said. As a member of a committee advising Connecticut early in the pandemic, Risch urged ignoring case counts and focusing on hospitalizations and deaths.


That advice was largely ignored until the current “sky-high” yet mild Omicron variant wave, but now “finally people are waking up to say that the cases don’t matter,” he said. The U.K. is among countries that more carefully track COVID, according to Risch. Its data show vaccinated adults constitute the majority of cases, “and it’s not a hospitalization of the unvaccinated” either. While vaccines are a “potential and reasonable component” of COVID mitigation, those developed are “somewhat ineffective” and their large-scale deployment has driven an unexpected number of “mutant strains” extending the pandemic and causing higher mortality, Risch said. President Biden’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not only isn’t trained in public health but “has interests that do not align with the public health interests of the United States,” Risch argued.

Read more …

The Guardian manages to draw conclusions from the insurance story that are 180º different. Not one word about vaccine deaths as a possible factor.

True Number Of US Covid Deaths Likely Undercounted, Experts Say (G.)

The true number of deaths from the Covid pandemic in the US are likely being undercounted, due to the long-lasting and little-understood effects of Covid infection and other deadly complications that surged during the past two years. “We are seeing right now the highest death rates we have ever seen in the history of this business,” J Scott Davison, CEO of insurance company OneAmerica, told journalists on 30 December. “Death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said, among working-age people between 18 and 64. Deaths among older Americans have also increased, with one in 100 Americans over the age of 65 dying. There have been an estimated 942,431 excess deaths in the US since February 2020, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hispanic, Black and Native American and Alaska Native populations have been disproportionately affected with high death rates, research shows. The pandemic pales in comparison to other previous crises, Davison said. “A one-in-200-year catastrophe would be a 10% increase over pre-pandemic [levels]. So 40% is just unheard of.” Many of the deaths aren’t counted in the official Covid tally, he said, because they happen months after Covid infections. “The deaths that are being reported as Covid deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. It may not all be Covid on their death certificates, but deaths are up in just huge, huge numbers.”

[..] “We’re seeing the statistics get written as we go, almost,” Micah Pollak, associate professor of economics at Indiana University Northwest, said. And high rates of mortality and disability will only continue as more people get infected, he said. “We really don’t know what the tail of this thing looks like,” Pollak said of long Covid. “The further you get out [from infection], the longer time you have to potentially develop some kind of complications.” The high rates of death haven’t surprised him, Pollak said, given the equally high rates of cases and the unknown effects of a novel virus. “There’s just so much evidence of these long-term effects of Covid that I naturally assumed people realized that, hey, we’re gonna see probably a lot of deaths down the road – not necessarily soon after infection, but indirectly as a result of infection, as well as not just deaths but disability.”

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“..two-dose mRNA vaccines are “not protective against” the new variant, while the booster shot only improves effectiveness to 37% seven or more days later.”

Global Research On Omicron Raises Questions About Unvaccinated Blame Game (JTN)

President Biden’s oft-repeated belief that COVID-19 remains a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is running headlong into global data on the real-world performance of vaccines against the Omicron variant, which the CDC estimates now accounts for 19 in 20 U.S. infections. A new study by Ontario, Canada’s public health agency and health researchers at Canadian universities found that two-dose mRNA vaccines are “not protective against” the new variant, while the booster shot only improves effectiveness to 37% seven or more days later. That’s in stark contrast to the 93% effectiveness against the Delta variant they observed among vaccinated and boosted individuals seven or more days later.

Researchers reviewed provincial data on 3,442 Omicron positives, 9,201 Delta positives and 471,545 “test-negative controls.” There were important differences between the populations testing positive for each variant. Omicron cases were 10 years younger on average, more likely to be male and two-dose vaccinated, and less likely to have “any comorbidities” or a booster, relative to controls. Delta cases were far less likely to be vaccinated at all, relative to controls. Digging further into the preprint, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed, California-based epidemiologist Tracy Hoeg was floored that two-dose vaccination actually reduced protection from reinfection by Omicron 38% four to six months after injection, and 42% by eight months.

“Why mandate?” Hoeg tweeted while acknowledging the Ontario Public Health study didn’t look at vaccine effectiveness against severe COVID infections. The Danish-American citizen highlighted official Denmark data suggesting two-dose vaccine recipients are “equally” protected against ICU admissions as boosted individuals. Their reinfections have surpassed those of the unvaccinated, however, and the boosted are “catching up.”

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The wild success of dictatorship.

And Djokovic had every right to his exemption. But is still locked up.

Australia will have very few politicians left if it does what needs to be done.

Victoria Records Huge Spike In Cases (G.)

Victoria has reported a massive jump in Covid cases, a day after launching its online system allowing people to self-report rapid antigen test results for the first time. New Covid cases surged above 100,000 per day nationally for the first time, with Victoria reporting 51,356 new cases and nine deaths, New South Wales 45,098 cases and nine deaths, Queensland 11,174 cases and two deaths, and South Australia 4,274 cases and five deaths. The Australian Capital Territory recorded 1,305 cases and Tasmania had 2,223 cases. Saturday’s case numbers in Victoria are more than double Friday’s figure, but health authorities say almost half (26,428) the positive cases in the past 24 hours were RAT results, with many of those taken earlier in the week.


Only 5,923 of Saturday’s positive RAT results were from the latest 24-hour reporting period. “We don’t want Victorians to think that the daily transmission has doubled overnight,” the health minister, Martin Foley, said on Saturday. “The reported figure has certainly significantly spiked based on that week’s worth of unreported figures that we are now capturing in the system.” The new RAT reporting system was set up after the PCR testing regime came under extreme pressure, with suspected cases queuing for hours to get tested and results taking several days to come through. Saturday’s figures included a further 24,928 cases identified through PCR lab tests, of which more than 89,000 were conducted.

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No, really, straight faced, and not from the government, but from the opposition:

“..our greatest asset… is and remains our freedom..”

You wouldn’t know freedom if it hit you between the eyes.

Scholz Pushes Mandatory Jabs As Resistance Grows In Germany (RFI)

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted Friday that his plan to introduce mandatory coronavirus jabs was on track, despite fierce debate about the controversial move and growing resistance from his own coalition partners. Scholz, who recently took over as chancellor from Angela Merkel, in late November touted compulsory jabs for all adults as the surest way out of the pandemic. The centre-left Social Democrat asked MPs in the lower of house parliament to draft the necessary legislation with the goal of introducing the measure in “late February or early March”. Little progress has been made since then however, and the fast-spreading but less severe Omicron strain has raised fresh doubts about the project, particularly among the pro-business FDP party.

Speaking after a meeting with the leaders of Germany’s 16 states on tighter coronavirus curbs, Scholz reiterated that “it would be good if we ended up with a general vaccine mandate”. He said all of Germany’s state premiers had declared their backing for the plan. “I feel fully supported” by them, he said. The same cannot be said for the FDP, who along with the Greens make up Scholz’s three-way coalition government. Although coronavirus cases are rising, Germany has so far been spared the steep Omicron surge that has swept other nations — prompting Justice Minister Marco Buschmann from the FDP to call for a wait-and-see approach on a general vaccine mandate.

FDP chief Christian Lindner said new findings “could play a role in the decision”, in a nod to Omicron infecting even the triple jabbed, and studies suggesting a lower hospitalisation rate than with the Delta variant. “Protecting human health and life is highly desirable. But our greatest asset… is and remains our freedom,” he said on Thursday.

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Not everyone is crazy.

“The vaccines are reducing transmission only for about eight weeks for Delta, with Omicron it’s probably less. “And for that, I would be dismissed if I don’t have a vaccine?”

Sajid Javid Directly Challenged On Mandatory Coronavirus Jabs (Sky)

Health Secretary Sajid Javid has been directly challenged by an unvaccinated hospital consultant over the government’s policy of compulsory COVID jabs for NHS staff. During a visit to King’s College Hospital in south London, Mr Javid asked staff members on the intensive care unit about their thoughts on new rules requiring vaccination for NHS workers. And Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist who has been treating coronavirus patients since the start of the pandemic, told the health secretary about his displeasure. “I’m not happy about that,” he said. “I had COVID at some point, I’ve got antibodies, and I’ve been working on COVID ICU since the beginning.


“I have not had a vaccination, I do not want to have a vaccination. The vaccines are reducing transmission only for about eight weeks for Delta, with Omicron it’s probably less. “And for that, I would be dismissed if I don’t have a vaccine? The science isn’t strong enough.” Mr James also revealed another of his colleagues held the same position.

Javid

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“Throughout this entire pandemic, our kids have paid a tremendous price for adults’ mistakes and miscalculations, and now the teachers’ union has hastily and recklessly put them on their political roller coaster again..”

Parents Sue Chicago Teachers Union Over School Closures, ‘Illegal Strike’ (JTN)

Seven parents of Chicago Public Schools students are suing the district’s teachers’ union, calling this week’s closure of schools over union claims they were unsafe an “illegal strike.” The parents are asking the court to rule that the Chicago Teachers Union’s action violates its collective bargaining agreement with CPS and prevent the union from continuing “to authorize its members to stop in-person teaching,” among other demands. “CTU’s resolution calling members to not show up for work in-person is a strike regardless of what CTU calls it and violates both the collective bargaining agreement with CPS and Illinois law,” Jeffrey Schwab, senior attorney at the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing the parents, said in a statement. “CTU cannot unilaterally decide what actions should be taken to keep public schools safe, completely silencing parents’ input about what is best for the health, safety, and well-being of their children.”


The CTU voted late Tuesday to urge Chicago Public Schools to switch to fully remote learning because of a recent spike in COVID-19 cases, and authorized teachers to refuse to report to work is CPS refused. Schools have been closed since Tuesday with no remote learning options, and CPS on Friday said schools also would be closed Monday as negotiations continue with the union. “Throughout this entire pandemic, our kids have paid a tremendous price for adults’ mistakes and miscalculations, and now the teachers’ union has hastily and recklessly put them on their political roller coaster again,” Laurel Golden, one of the parents named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement. “The science is clear, and so is the desire of parents: Our kids need and deserve to be in school. This illegal strike must be ended immediately, and we must get kids back into the classroom.”

Read more …

The crisis hits everywhere!

Norwegian Conscripts Told To Return Underwear As Covid Hits Supplies (G.)

Norwegian conscripts are to return their underwear after completing military service for the next recruits, as the army struggles with dwindling supplies due to Covid. Norway, which guards Nato’s northern borders and shares a border with Russia, calls up about 8,000 young men and women for military service every year and until recently allowed newly discharged conscripts to leave barracks with the underwear they were issued. But the pandemic has seriously strained the flow of supplies with factory shutdowns and transport problems, leading the Norwegian military to ask conscripts to hand over underwear, including bras and socks.


Though originally voluntary, it has now been made mandatory, public broadcaster NRK reported on Friday. “Now that we have chosen to reuse this part of the kit, it helps us. … We don’t have enough in stock,” the defence logistics spokesman Hans Meisingset told NRK. “The textiles are washed, cleaned and checked. What we distribute is in good condition,” he said. A conscripts’ representative, however, criticised recurrent shortcomings, saying they could end up affecting operations. “Severe shortages of equipment and clothing can potentially affect operational readiness and, in the worst case, the safety of the soldier,” Eirik Sjohelle Eiksund told trade publication Forsvarets Forum.

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“..CNN and Tapper provide Pfizer a platform to market its products and allow the drug company — a serial felon — to dictate content on CNN..”

The Day Jake Tapper Sold His Soul to Pharma (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr)

In 1999, in response to exploding epidemics of autism and other neurological disorders, CDC decided to study its vast Vaccine Safety Datalink — the medical and vaccination record of millions of Americans, archived by the top HMOs — to learn whether the dramatic escalation of the vaccine schedule, beginning in 1989, was a culprit. CDC’s in-house epidemiologist, Thomas Verstraeten, led the effort. Verstraeten’s initial data run suggested that mercury-containing hepatitis B vaccines — administered during the first month of life — were associated with a wide range of neurological injuries, including a dramatic 1,135% rise in autism risks among vaccinated children.

[..] Tapper saw an early draft of my Rolling Stone story and proposed that, in exchange for exclusivity, he would do a companion piece for ABC timed to air on the magazine’s publication day. Tapper spent several weeks working on the story with me and a team of enthusiastic ABC reporters and technicians. During his frequent conversations with me over that period, he was on fire with indignation over the Simpsonwood revelations. He acted like a journalist hoping to win an Emmy. The day before the piece was to air, an exasperated Tapper called me to say that ABC’s corporate officials ordered him to pull the story. The network’s pharmaceutical advertisers were threatening to cancel their advertising. “Corporate told us to shut it down,” Tapper fumed. Tapper told me that it was the first time in his career that ABC officials had ordered him to kill a story.

ABC had advertised the Simpsonwood exposé, and its sudden cancellation disappointed an army of vaccine safety advocates and parents of injured children who deluged the network with a maelstrom of angry emails. In response, ABC changed tack and publicly promised to air the piece. Instead, following a one-week delay, the network duplicitously aired a hastily assembled puff piece promoting vaccines and assuring listeners that mercury-laden vaccines were safe. The new “bait and switch” segment precisely followed Pharma’s talking points. “I’m putting my faith in the Institute of Medicine,” ABC’s obsequious medical editor, Dr. Tim Johnson, declared in closing. Two pharmaceutical advertisements bracketed the story. After that piece aired, I called Jake to complain. He neither answered nor returned my calls.

During the 16 intervening years, Pharma has returned Mr. Tapper’s favor by aggressively promoting his career. Pfizer shamelessly sponsors Tapper’s CNN news show, announcing its ownership of the space — and Mr. Tapper’s indentured servitude — before each episode with the loaded phrase: “Brought to you by Pfizer.” Under the apparent terms of that sponsorship, CNN and Tapper provide Pfizer a platform to market its products and allow the drug company — a serial felon — to dictate content on CNN. This arrangement has transformed CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper into a propaganda vehicle for Pharma and effectively reduced Mr. Tapper to the role of a drug rep — shamelessly promoting fear porn, confusion, and germophobia, and ushering his audience toward high-yield patent pharmaceuticals. Tapper’s main thrust during the pandemic has been to promote levels of public terror sufficient to indemnify all the official lies against critical thinking.

Read more …

This one is easy: anything to do with Democrats.

What the Jan. 6 Panel Won’t Probe (Strassel)

Select committees come and go, with varying impact. The growing risk of Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Committee is that it will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. A year after the riot, it’s a fair time to evaluate what that committee has and hasn’t accomplished since its summer creation. By its charter, the committee is assigned with investigating “the facts, circumstances and causes” of the event, as well as those “relating to the preparedness and response of the United States Capitol Police” and other law-enforcement agencies. The country would hugely benefit from a straightforward accounting of that day. Committee members have so far met with some 300 witnesses, received thousands of documents, and subpoenaed some 50 individuals, as well as phone and bank records.

The committee’s leaks, and releases of White House text messages, have provided color, while its litigation and contempt citations have kept the press in gravy. Yet the body’s near-manic focus on Donald Trump’s culpability (the facts of which have been known for a year) has also meant it has produced little that’s new. On “Face the Nation” this week, the committee’s Vice Chairman Elizabeth Cheney waxed about the committee’s “tremendous progress,” yet cited as her only example that it now had “firsthand testimony” that “President Trump was sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office, watching on television as the Capitol was assaulted.” “Six hours of paralysis: Inside Trump’s failure to act after a mob stormed the Capitol,” was a headline from a Jan. 11, 2021, story in the Washington Post, which reported the president “was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding” to listen to pleas from family and colleagues to intervene.

Thanks to the committee we now know where Mr. Trump lounged, and how many people he ignored. More notable is what the committee has failed to find. Members made no secret they hoped to prove a coup plot run from the White House. Yet in all its 725 prosecutions, the Justice Department hasn’t presented a scintilla of evidence supporting the hypothesis. Neither has the committee—even after 300 witnesses, or texts of the former White House chief of staff. Twisting in the wind are the urgent issues the committee won’t explore. In a memo this week to colleagues, Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis—the ranking Republican on the House Administration Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Capitol complex—noted that the select committee, a year after the riot, is “no closer to finding out what led to the catastrophic security failure,” even as the security situation has arguably deteriorated because of Capitol Police resignations and poor morale.

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Between 2002 and 2004, Craig Murray was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan.

What Kazakhstan Isn’t (Murray)

When you jump into a taxi in Kazakhstan, getting your suitcase into the boot is often problematic as it will be already full with a large LPG canister. Roof racks are big in Kazakhstan. Most Kazakh vehicles run on LPG, which has traditionally been a subsidised product of the nation’s massive oil and gas industry. Fuel price rises have become, worldwide, a particular trigger of public discontent. The origins of the gilets jaunes movement in France lay in fuel price rises before spreading to other areas of popular greivance. The legacy of fuel protests in the UK have led for years cowardly politicians to submit to annual real reductions in the rate of fuel duty, despite climate change concerns.

The current political crisis in Kazakhstan was spiked by moves to deregulate the LPG market and end subsidy, which led to sharp price increases. These brought people onto the streets. The government quickly backed down and tried to reinstate price controls but not producer subsidies; that would have led gas stations to sell at a loss. The result was fuel shortages that just made protest worse. Kazakhstan is an authoritarian dictatorship with extreme divisions in wealth and power between the ruling class – often still the old Soviet nomenklatura and their families – and everybody else. No political opposition is permitted. Infamously, after a massacre of striking miners, Tony Blair contacted former dictator Nazarbayev offering his PR services to help limit political fallout.

This resulted in a $4 million per year contract for Blair to assist Kazakhstan’s PR, a contract on which BBC favourites Jonathon Powell and Alastair Campbell both worked. One result of the Blairite media management for Kazakhstan was that the Guardian, publishing US leaked diplomatic cables in cooperation with Wikileaks, refused to publish US Embassy reports on corruption in Kazakhstan. The Kazakh dictatorship is also a favourite destination of troughing royals Prince Andrew and Prince Michael of Kent.

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Not sure what the use is supposed to be of a prediction like this.

2022, The Year of The Hangover? (Lacalle)

The global recovery has slowed down significantly since the peak of the re-opening effect in June 2021. What many expected would be a multi-year cycle of above-trend growth is proving to be a more modest bounce. Furthermore, according to Bloomberg Economics, the global economy will likely grow in the next ten years at a slower pace than in the decade prior to the pandemic. The causes of the slowdown are clear. On one hand, China’s real estate bubble is a larger problem than anticipated, and there is no way in which the Chinese authorities can engineer higher growth from other sectors to offset real estate, which accounts for almost 30% of the country’s GDP and was growing at double-digit rates in the past years.


Additionally, Inflation is rising all over the world due to a combination of excessive monetary policy and supply chain challenges brought by the lockdowns. Global food prices reached a new record-high, making it more difficult for the poor to navigate the crisis. Finally, large stimulus plans have delivered no significant multiplier effect. Why would 2022 be the year of the hangover? Because the signs of overheating of the global economy are multiplying. 2021 was a year of massive demand-side policies. To the effect of the re-opening, policy makers added enormous deficit-spending plans, infrastructure and current spending boosts, and a massive monetary stimulus. The triple effect of the largest monetary stimulus in years, the re-opening and enormous government spending programs have overheated the economy. It is evident in inflationary pressures, housing, indebtedness, and twin deficit imbalances in most large economies. And those effects will not be there, or at least be present in the same proportion, in 2022. 2021 was the year of binge spending. 2022 is likely to be a hangover.

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Canadians are blind to their own madness. Here’s how we know:

 

 

 

Sidney Poitier

 

 

Where in the mouth sounds and letters are formed

 

 

 

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

 

Jan 062022
 
 January 6, 2022  Posted by at 10:06 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  81 Responses »


Caravaggio Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence 1600

 

Omicron Spreads Faster Than Delta Within Vaccinated Individuals (ET)
Illegal Refusal to Fill Prescriptions, Civil Rights Violations, Negligence
If You Have No Symptoms, Please Don’t Get Tested (ET)
Dr. Robert Malone, After Twitter Ban, Has ‘No Choice but to Carry On’ (ET)
Covid-19 Medicine Kits’ Distribution Begins In Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh (HT)
More Bad News On Covid Vaccines And Myocarditis In Men Under 40 (Berenson)
Fauci Says ‘Fully Vaccinated’ Now Includes “Up To Date” Boosters (ZH)
‘Falling Over In A Screaming Heap’ (G.)
Tomorrowland Has Fallen (Greer)
White House Puts Port Envoy on Podium to Discuss Supply Chain Issues (CTH)
FBI To Host First Annual Jan 6 Reunion (BBee)

 

 

 

 

 

 

BBC truther
https://twitter.com/i/status/1478685527251599361

 

 

 

 

 

 

And even faster with a booster.

Omicron Spreads Faster Than Delta Within Vaccinated Individuals (ET)

A Danish study of nearly 12,000 households has discovered that Omicron spreads faster than Delta among those who are fully vaccinated, and even higher between those who have received booster shots, demonstrating strong evidence of the variant’s immune evasiveness. The Omicron variant was found to evade the immunity of vaccinated individuals at a much faster pace compared to Delta, and at a higher rate than the unvaccinated, according to the study conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, Statistics Denmark, and Statens Serum Institut. “Comparing households infected with the Omicron to Delta VOC, we found an 1.17 times higher SAR for unvaccinated, 2.61 times higher for fully vaccinated and 3.66 times higher for booster-vaccinated individuals, demonstrating strong evidence of immune evasiveness of the Omicron VOC,” said the preprint of the study. SAR refers to secondary attack rate.

However, the study also discovered that unvaccinated individuals spread the virus more easily than those who are fully vaccinated, while there was reduced transmission between people who received booster shots. There were altogether 11,937 households involved in the study, out of which 2,225 already had Omicron. After one to 7 days, the team followed up with the households and found 6,397 secondary infections. The SAR was found to be 31 percent with the Omicron, and 21 percent with the Delta variant. Omicron has spread to 90 countries worldwide and has become the dominant variant in the United States. However, the strain has proven to cause mild symptoms compared to earlier variants like Delta, and results in fewer hospitalizations.

“The Omicron VOC (variant of concern) has been reported to be three to six times as infectious as previous variants, with a short doubling time, including early estimates from countries with a high vaccination coverage indicating doubling times of 1.8 days (UK), 1.6 days (Denmark), 2.4 days (Scotland) and 2.0 days (United States),” from the study. The researchers also suggested considering alternate methods for combating the infection. “Our data indicate that the non-pharmaceutical interventions that were used to control the previous variants of SARS-CoV-2 are also likely to be effective against the Omicron VOC.”

Seventy-eight percent of Danish citizens are fully vaccinated with two doses, while almost half have received a booster shot. More than 80 percent have received Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine. The effectiveness of vaccines is reduced to around 40 percent for symptoms and 80 percent for severe disease with the Omicron variant. Numbers were better with booster shots as the effectiveness was reduced only to 86 percent for symptoms and 98 percent respectively for those suffering from severe infection.

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Dr. Brian Tyson had his lawyer write a letter to the pharmacy that refused to fill his ivermection prescriptions. He no longer has that problem.

Illegal Refusal to Fill Prescriptions, Civil Rights Violations, Negligence

CVS Pharmacy #16937, NPI 1366464968
Garfield Beach CVS LLC
CVS Health Corporation
2295 N. Imperial Avenue
El Centro, California 92243-1335
Re: Illegal Refusal to Fill Prescriptions, Civil Rights Violations, Negligence

Dear Managers and Owners:
It has come to my attention that your pharmacy has refused to fill valid prescriptions for ivermectin. Your pharmacy manager told one customer that the refusal was because ivermectin was not FDA-approved for use in treatment of COVID-19. This same manager told the prescribing physician that she was “not comfortable” dispensing a prescription for ivermectin to treat COVID-19 and that there was “no indication” for the prescription. The FDA does not “approve” uses at all. The FDA merely determines whether to approve or clear products for marketing and labelling of the “intended use” submitted to it. To be marketed, a product need only have a single intended use.

All treatments beyond such intended use are a matter of discretionary medical practice by licensed physicians. New “off-label” uses for drugs are often discovered after the FDA approves a package insert. Off-label use is legal and widely accepted practice. A manufacturer’s label is not proscriptive, and does not prohibit use for a longer period, or in any other manner not described in the labeling. The FDA cannot and does not prohibit physicians from prescribing off-label use. Any assertion that a prescription is invalid because it is off-label is utterly devoid of basis in law or fact. It is for the professional judgment of a licensed physician – and not a pharmacist or the FDA – to determine that an off-label prescription is appropriate treatment for a patient.

Ivermectin is an antiparasitic medication approved by the FDA for use in humans. Ivermectin is on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines, and ivermectin oral tablets are used worldwide for treatment of certain parasitic infections. SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19) is such a parasitic infection. SARS-CoV-2 exhibits bacteriophage-like behavior as it replicates in bacterial growth medium such as are found in the human intestines. In vitro studies have shown that ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2. And Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) publishes:

“In 2015, the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in its only award for treatments of infectious diseases since six decades prior, honoured the discovery of ivermectin (IVM), a multifaceted drug deployed against some of the world’s most devastating tropical diseases. Since March 2020, when IVM was first used against a new global scourge, COVID-19, more than 20 randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have tracked such inpatient and outpatient treatments. Six of seven meta-analyses of IVM treatment RCTs reporting in 2021 found notable reductions in COVID-19 fatalities, with a mean 31% relative risk of mortality vs. controls. During mass IVM treatments in Peru, excess deaths fell by a mean of 74% over 30 days in its ten states with the most extensive treatments. Reductions in deaths correlated with the extent of IVM distributions in all 25 states with p < 0.002. Sharp reductions in morbidity using IVM were also observed in two animal models, of SARS-CoV-2 and a related betacoronavirus. The indicated biological mechanism of IVM, competitive binding with SARSCoV-2 spike protein, is likely non-epitope specific, possibly yielding full efficacy against emerging viral mutant strains.”3

Moreover, Dr. Brian Tyson (no relation to yours truly) is the prescribing physician for the prescriptions at issue. Dr. Tyson is a world-renowned expert on the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Tyson has testified nationally and internationally on topic, and he has successfully treated more than 6,500 COVID-19 patients. Dr. Tyson’s professional judgment to prescribe ivermectin for a patient to treat COVID-19 is completely supported by the science, the law, and his extensive experience.

Curiously, CVS had been filling ivermectin prescriptions for patients of Dr. Tyson for roughly two years, and only suddenly decided to stop. That decision is illegal, violates the civil rights of Dr. Tyson’s patients, interferes with Dr. Tyson’s ability to practice medicine, and constitutes the unlicensed and negligent practice of medicine by CVS. This letter is a courtesy request that you immediately resume the longstanding practice of filling Dr. Tyson’s prescriptions for ivermectin. Fail not at your peril, as the next letter will be a formal notice of intent to sue. Thank you.

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Ladapo is fresh air.

If You Have No Symptoms, Please Don’t Get Tested (ET)

Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo issued new guidance for COVID-19 tests on Jan. 4 in a bid to reduce the strain on the state’s testing centers. So many people are using the centers the availability of tests is under pressure. “We are going to scale back,” Ladapo told reporters at a press conference. “We’re coming back to something sensible.” People have been flooding Florida testing sites, leading to long lines, he said. Instead of restricting testing, however, Ladapo said he would place a new emphasis on “high-value” testing against those of “low-value” in order to give priority to tests that would “likely change outcomes” based on a positive or negative result.

For example, someone who is elderly with pre-existing medical conditions and is having symptoms he regards as high value. Someone who is otherwise healthy with no pre-existing medical issues and with no symptoms is low value, he explained. Ladapo said people need to get back to a “sense of normalcy” in society. “We need to unwind this sort of planning and living one’s life around testing,” Ladapo said. “It’s really time for people to be living; to make the decisions they want regarding vaccination; to enjoy the fact that many people have natural immunity; and to unwind this preoccupation with only COVID as determining the boundaries and constraints and possibilities of life. “And we’re going to start that in Florida.”

[..] He said that Florida has seen a rapid increase in cases and hospitalizations, but added it is not comparable to the case rise. “A substantial share, based on the data we have from some of our hospitals of the patients in hospitals with COVID, are there in the hospital with COVID rather than for COVID.” In other words, people who go to the hospital are there for other reasons and then test positive for COVID-19 because hospitals test everyone who comes for treatment, Ladapo said. The surgeon general said that federal leadership had “created a monster” in public health. “What’s happened in the country is that people have forgotten, or abandoned basic public health principles,” he said. “Instead, they have opted for things that are anti-public health.”

He said anti-public health is “taking away people’s options” and “ability to choose.” “Anti-health tends to be mandates,” he continued. “Anti-public health is losing touch with sensibility.” The Surgeon General’s office wants to educate and provide people with the ability to make “better decisions.”

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“I don’t want to tell people what to think I want to help them think and give them the tools to do it.”

Dr. Robert Malone, After Twitter Ban, Has ‘No Choice but to Carry On’ (ET)

Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist and immunologist who has worked on the development of mRNA vaccines, reacted to recent bans handed down by Twitter and LinkedIn. “I felt compelled by my own ethics, that I needed to speak about what I was observing,” Malone told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program on Wednesday in reference to comments he’s made about vaccine mandates. “I may be one of the very few that has this depth of understanding of the technology that doesn’t have a direct financial conflict of interest,” Malone told The Epoch Times. “If I’m not allowed to speak about my concerns, whether they’re right or wrong … who is a valid person to participate in the dialogue?” Malone said due to his publicly vocal opposition to COVID-19 vaccine requirements and mandatory vaccinations in children, he and Dr. Peter McCullough—a cardiologist who recently argued that COVID-19 vaccine mandates should be repealed—have been “shut down, attacked, [and] had purposeful attacks” against their medical licenses or freedom to practice medicine.

Last week, Twitter suspended Malone’s account without warning for alleged violations of the platform’s policies around COVID-19. Malone also reiterated during Wednesday’s interview that LinkedIn suspended his account. “We have no choice but to carry on,” Malone said, adding that if he were “go back to my farm, and hang out with my wife, which is what I would far prefer to do,” he would be “abdicating the responsibility that I now hold as … one of the identified leaders of this globally.” Malone noted during the interview that during his podcast with Joe Rogan about a week ago, he made reference to a theory known as “mass formation psychosis,” also known as mass hysteria.

“I mean, it has been amazing watching it, and what it demonstrates is the lack of self-awareness by Big Tech,” he said in reference to reports of Google allegedly manipulating search results about the term. “They are caught up in the mass formation themselves, or they are intentionally manipulating” results, he added. “It’s more important to me to help people to get access to the data and learn to think for themselves and make their own opinion,” Malone also said. “I don’t want to tell people what to think I want to help them think and give them the tools to do it.”

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The kits double as protection against the vaccine, which they also roll out. Modi is the vaxx man.

Covid-19 Medicine Kits’ Distribution Begins In Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh (HT)

With the help of monitoring committees, the distribution of Covid-19 medicine kits began in Varanasi on Saturday as a preventive measure to check the third wave of Covid-19, said additional chief medical officer (ACMO), Dr Sanjay Rai. District magistrate (DM) Kaushal Raj Sharma had procured a large quantity of Covid medicines for the city from the government and monitoring committees had been roped in to distribute the medicine kits, he said. “A total of 874 committees will distribute the kits in rural areas under eight primary health centers (PHCs) in developmental block areas of Varanasi. Likewise, monitoring committees of all 90 wards will distribute the Covid medicine kits in urban areas under 24 PHCs. These committees will also distribute the kits in Ramnagar and Gangapur areas,” Dr Rai said.

Apart from this, the Covid medicine kits would also be available at five other identified places, including seven Covid hospitals, railway stations, bus stands and jail in the city. Dr Rai said, “The Covid medicine kits comprise different medicines for different age group of people. The kits for children from birth to 1 year, and 1-5 years contain paracetamol drops, ORS and multivitamin drops. While for 5-12 years, it has paracetamol tablets, Ivermectin 6 mg and Vitamin B complex. Azithromycin 500, Ivermectin 12 mg, Vitamin D3, Vitamin C, Zinc, Vitamin B complex and paracetamol tablets are available for those above 12 years.” The total number of Covid-19 active cases in Varanasi increased to 46 on Saturday, with 21 more people testing positive for the virus in the district during the day.

District magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma has appealed to the people to follow Covid protocol, including wearing face masks, sanitising hands frequently and maintaining physical distancing of two yards. Chief medical officer Dr Sandip Chaudhary said, “Vaccination will be done at 529 centers in the district on January 3. This facility will be available for people between 15 and 18 years of age.” He said that slots had been opened for a week from 8pm on Saturday and beneficiaries would be able to get vaccination from 10am. “Now, six people can be registered on the CoWin portal with one mobile number. Day/night special vaccination center at Sigra Stadium and LT College, Orderly Bazar, will also be operational from 7am to 10pm,” he added.

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“For the Moderna vaccine, the risks were even higher, reaching 16-fold after the second shot.”

More Bad News On Covid Vaccines And Myocarditis In Men Under 40 (Berenson)

A huge new study has found the risk of serious heart problems called myocarditis in men under 40 soars with each dose of a Covid mRNA vaccine – and is sharply higher than the risk from a coronavirus infection itself. The findings call into sharp question the efforts by American colleges and universities to make their students receive booster shots before returning to school this January – especially since other studies have shown that the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis is concentrated not merely in men under 40 but in those aged 16-25. The study, which British researchers released in late December, showed that the risk of myocarditis almost doubled after the first Pfizer shot in men under 40.

Then it doubled again after the second and doubled again after the third – to almost eight times the baseline risk. For the Moderna vaccine, the risks were even higher, reaching 16-fold after the second shot. (The risk of a third Moderna shot could not be calculated because too few people received it.) Because each Moderna shot contains 100 micrograms of mRNA, while each Pfizer shot contains 30, the findings suggest strongly that the heart risks are dose-related and likely to continue to rise with each additional shot. The study also contained some evidence that post-vaccine myocarditis might be more dangerous than other forms of myocarditis. It showed a trend towards higher death rates in people hospitalized for myocarditis after vaccination compared to other myocarditis cases.

Both myocarditis and pericarditis are forms of heart inflammation that can be very serious, even deadly. In an appendix, the researchers reported that 263 Britons were hospitalized for myocarditis within four weeks of receiving a Pfizer shot; of those, 38, or 14 percent, died. Only about 9 percent of people hospitalized for myocarditis that did not follow an mRNA vaccination died.

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Bit of a battle emerging between Fauci and Walensky?

Fauci Says ‘Fully Vaccinated’ Now Includes “Up To Date” Boosters (ZH)

A few weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci hinted that the federal government would soon change its definition of “fully vaccinated” to include not just the two original shots but at least one booster dose as well.But in the latest indication that Dr. Fauci has succeeded in pushing this scheme, the good doctor said Tuesday during a lecture at the National Institutes of Health that new terminology would be used in place of the “fully vaccinated” language. Instead of referring to somebody as “fully vaccinated”, they will be referred to as having their vaccinations “up to date” to reflect the notion that they have gotten their booster shots.”We’re using the terminology now ‘keeping your vaccinations up to date,’ rather than what ‘fully vaccinated’ means,” Fauci said during a National Institutes of Health lecture Tuesday. “Right now, optimal protection is with a third shot of an mRNA or a second shot of a J&J.”


This follows a decision by the CDC on Tuesday to shorten the time frame for Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID booster jab, which can now be administered within five months of the initial two-shot series, instead of six. Meanwhile, a CDC advisory panel is expected to recommend boosters for teenagers during a meeting on Wednesday. According to certain research studies, Pfizer’s vaccine provides a 25x increase in neutralizing antibodies that fight the variant while Moderna’s booster produces a 37x increase in antibodies. Meanwhile, two doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine cut hospitalizations in South Africa by 85%. “We are continuing to follow that science and it is literally evolving daily. And as that science evolves, we will continue to review the data and update our recommendations as necessary,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing Dec. 15.

Fauci 2009

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Read this whole thing and then tell me you’re blaming the unvaccinated. Two years into a pandemic, hospital has no staff, no equipment, nada.

‘Falling Over In A Screaming Heap’ (G.)

One of New South Wales’ major regional hospitals had to source its own triage tent, is sending Covid tests six hours away due to a lack of space for its own diagnosis machine, and has had positive patients wait 30 hours to be transferred to a designated hospital for those with the virus. Doctors at the Tweed hospital, which is 1km from the Queensland border in northern NSW and serves a hinterland that includes Byron Bay, are even donning personal protective equipment to drive home, in their own cars, asymptomatic Covid-positive patients because taxis won’t take them. Kristin Ryan-Agnew, president of the local branch of the Nurses and Midwives Association and a senior nurse at the hospital, said local Covid cases were tripling daily, much faster than the 5o% growth in new cases reported for NSW as a whole on Wednesday.

As a result of increased presentations to Tweed’s emergency department, nurses were doing “double shifts every day” with one day off before resuming the toil. “They’re going to fall over in a screaming heap,” she said. “They will not be able to manage.” Eighteen staff, many of them senior, have resigned since December out of a roster of about 150, citing burn-out and the better conditions offered over the border. Queensland offers $1,800 a year for nurses’ education, a Covid bonus – both absent in NSW – and higher wages, Ryan-Agnew said. “They were really top-notch, really good quality staff, and they can walk up to the Gold Coast and they’ll just completely snaffle them.” As Guardian Australia reported on Wednesday, nurses at Lismore Base hospital – the destination for Tweed’s Covid patients needing treatment – are also struggling to cope with a surge in medical needs.

The Tweed hospital is buckling under spiking demand for care and a lack of trained staff and appropriate equipment. A senior manager, for instance, had to phone around themselves and then purchase the triage tent prior to Christmas after months of pleading to the health department, Ryan-Agnew said. The tent, though, remains far from adequate, with no toilet, forcing potentially Covid-positive patients – and anyone waiting for PCR testing to cross the border – to traipse through the main hospital lobby. “You can have people with heart conditions, sick kids, elderly, frail, all sitting there waiting to be seen, and you’ve got a potential Covid patient walking through the waiting room,” Ryan-Agnew said.

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“People couldn’t do anything about the plague, but they could burn witches, and so they did.”

Tomorrowland Has Fallen (Greer)

Watch the way that the people who are shrieking about the Omicron variant fixate on case numbers and go out of their way to avoid talking about how few people have been killed or made seriously ill by it. Watch the way that these same people pounce, with something that looks unsettlingly like delight, on any suggestion that some other microbe is about to spring out of hiding and kill us all. For that matter, the overreaction to the Covid-19 phenomenon is really rather odd, when you think about it. If you subtract all the people who died with rather than of Covid-19 from the statistics, it’s pretty clear that what we’ve dealt with is an ordinary respiratory epidemic like the 1958 and 1967 influenza outbreaks.

Those had comparable fatality rates, and were dealt with by throwing the available resources into protecting the old and vulnerable—not by shutting down whole economies, shredding civil rights, and shoving inadequately tested experimental drugs on entire populations. What we’ve seen over the last two years doesn’t look like a constructive response to a pandemic. It looks like the desperate gyrations of control freaks who are trying to avoid dealing with their fears by piling exorbitant demands on everyone around them. Thus I’d like to suggest that something of the sort may be involved in the love affair between the managerial aristocracy and the Covid-19 virus. I think that it’s a displacement activity. If you know much about ethology—the study of animal behavior—you already know all about displacement activities.

For those who don’t have that background, I’ll summarize. Most social species have ways to deal with aggression short of killing each other. Watch two starlings who are upset at each other. They may suddenly start preening their feathers, or draw themselves up as though about to fight, or even peck suddenly and violently at some object besides each other. Human beings do the same thing: watch an angry man scratch his head in frustration, ball up his fists on his hips, or slam a fist down on a table, rather than punch the daylights out of the person who’s angered him. Those are displacement activities. Anger isn’t the only emotion that generates displacement activities in animals, or for that matter in humans. One of the more interesting details of human collective psychology is the way that fear can drive even more elaborate displacement routines, especially when there’s nothing that can be done about the actual reason for the fear.

Consider the witch hunts that followed in the wake of the Black Death. For three and a half centuries after bubonic plague first swept through Europe, new outbreaks of the disease were a constant threat, and the medical knowledge of the time offered no effective means of prevention or cure. The result? Panic over evil witches became the displacement activity du jour, and around fifty thousand people were burnt or hanged as a result. (No, it wasn’t nine million, nor were they all women; the Neopagan movement, back in its heyday, competed heavily in the Oppression Olympics, with the usual collateral damage to mere historical fact.) People couldn’t do anything about the plague, but they could burn witches, and so they did.

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Supply chains for supermarkets vs restaurants are entirely different entities.

White House Puts Port Envoy on Podium to Discuss Supply Chain Issues (CTH)

The 60/40 supply chain for food away from home (restaurants, fast-food locales, schools, cafeterias etc.), and food at home (supermarkets and grocery stores etc.), is not something you can just fiddle around with. Supply chains are challenging on their own. However, within the various supply chains, the supply chain for U.S. food distribution is the most complex supply chain in the world. There’s nothing even close. It was created by decades of free market operators following efficiencies of scale to produce the best, most wholesome and reliable food supply chain ever created. In many ways it is our best national security advantage. The free-market distribution system would eventually overcome the problem and reestablish its efficiencies.

However, given the scale of disruption -and the fact that catch up harvests are seasonal- it was obviously taking several years. Most Americans were not aware going into the COVID mitigation effort that food consumption in the U.S. was a 60/40 proposition. Approximately 60% of all food was consumed “outside the home” (or food away from home), and 40% of all food consumed was food “inside the home” (grocery shoppers). Food ‘outside the home’ includes restaurants, fast food locales, schools, corporate cafeterias, university lunchrooms, manufacturing cafeterias, hotels, food trucks, park and amusement food sellers and many more. Many of those venues are not thought about when people evaluate the overall U.S. food delivery system; however, this network was approximately 60 percent of all food consumption on a daily basis.

The ‘food away from home‘ sector has its own supply chain. Very few restaurants and venues (cited above) purchase food products from retail grocery outlets. As a result of the coronavirus mitigation effort, the ‘food away from home’ sector was reduced by 75% of daily food delivery operations. However, people still needed to eat. That meant retail food outlets, grocers, would see sales increases of 25 to 50 percent, depending on the area. The retail consumer supply chain for manufactured and processed food products includes bulk storage to compensate for seasonality. As Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue noted in 2020, “There are over 800 commercial and public warehouses in the continental 48 states that store frozen products.”

“Here is a snapshot of the food we had in storage at the end of February 2020: over 302 million pounds of frozen butter; 1.36 billion pounds of frozen cheese; 925 million pounds of frozen chicken; over 1 billion pounds of frozen fruit; nearly 2.04 billion pounds of frozen vegetables; 491 million pounds of frozen beef; and nearly 662 million pounds of frozen pork.” This bulk food storage is how the total U.S. consumer food supply ensures consistent availability even with weather impacts. As a nation, we essentially stay one harvest ahead of demand by storing it and smoothing out any peak/valley shortfalls. There are a total of 175,642 commercial facilities involved in this supply chain across the country

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Enjoy the tribunal!

FBI To Host First Annual Jan 6 Reunion (BBee)

Special agents involved in last year’s ‘January 6th Insurrection Against Democracy™’ are set to reunite as guests of honor at an extravagant gala hosted by the FBI. The event will reportedly feature live music and entertainment, with comedian James Corden acting as master of ceremonies. Numerous celebrities and public figures are expected to be in attendance, including former FBI Director James Comey. “I’m really excited to be relevant again,” he said, excitedly rubbing his hands together. According to sources, several private citizens have questioned why taxpayer money is being used to throw a lavish party for government officials.


White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki addressed these concerns during her daily press briefing. “Well, first I would say, that President Biden is committed to the Build Back Better™ bill,” Psaki reasoned. “Therefore, he cares for the American people and, as such, cares deeply about how their money is utilized. So, obviously, it’s fine.” Psaki went on to applaud the FBI for all their hard work that cannot be disclosed. The event will not be open to the public.

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Jon Stewart: Newsweek et al, may eat my ass.

 

 

Where the elements come from

 

 

 

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

 

Jul 312021
 


Vincent van Gogh Weeping woman 1883

 

UK Gov’t Panel: Covid Mutation With 35% Death Rate ‘Realistic Possibility’ (RT)
CDC Releases Study Showing 3/4 Delta Cases Are Among The Vaccinated (RT)
White House Covid-19 Spokesman Yells At Media For Quoting CDC Documents (RT)
Fauci *ADMITS* I Was Right In Spring of 2020 (Denninger)
Had Covid? You’ll Probably Make Antibodies For A Lifetime (Nature)
Recovered COVID-19 Patients Possess Robust Immunity To Virus (Fed.)
DeSantis: No Mandates, No Lockdowns, No Restrictions, No School Closures (CTH)
Nearly 1.6 Billion Disposable Masks Polluted Oceans In 2020 (JTN)
Things Get Ripe (Kunstler)
Thailand Bans Sharing Of News That ‘Causes Public Fear’ Amid Pandemic Criticism (G.)
Twitter Suspends Commentator for Criticizing Vaccine Policies (Turley)
Get Ready for the ‘No-Buy’ List (David Sacks)
Craig Murray’s Jailing The Latest Move To Kill Independent Journalism (Cook)
Poke (Chuck)

 

 

Brian Tyson

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was either that or 350%. They decided to lowball it.

UK Gov’t Panel: Covid Mutation With 35% Death Rate ‘Realistic Possibility’ (RT)

A British government science panel has claimed that a coronavirus variant could emerge with a 35% fatality rate – akin to that seen in the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) – noting that vaccine booster doses may be needed. A Friday report by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) looked at a series of hypothetical scenarios related to Covid-19 variants, finding it a “realistic possibility” that a mutation could appear with a case fatality rate comparable to SARS (10%) or MERS (35%), both of which belong to the coronavirus family.

While the body said that existing vaccines would remain effective against “serious disease” from such a variant short of “significant drift” or change in the virus’ spike proteins, it nonetheless added that “an increase in morbidity and mortality would be expected even in the face of vaccination,” as the jabs do not “fully prevent infection in most individuals.” The report suggested a number of ways to deal with a more deadly mutation, including “vaccine booster doses to maintain protection against severe disease,” as well as measures to limit the introduction of new variants from abroad. SAGE also considered the likelihood of a variant that “evades current vaccines,” saying that could occur in several different ways. The most likely cause would be a form of genetic variation known as “antigenic drift,” which happens when a virus mutates to a point when antibodies that prevented infection caused by previous strains no longer work.

The panel deemed that “almost certain” to happen to some degree. A “worst case” scenario described in the paper might happen when the immune system will no longer be able to produce antibodies for new emerging variants, either due to its past contact with the virus or as result of “previously experienced vaccines.” Such a doomsday scenario would make it “difficult to revaccinate” patients, however the researchers concluded that outcome is “less likely.” The same agency released a separate report on vaccines on Friday, which found that immunity is “highly likely” to diminish over time, suggesting “there will be vaccination campaigns against SARS-CoV-2 for many years to come.”

However, the report on variants also noted the coronavirus could follow an evolutionary path that sees it become more transmissible but less virulent, with SAGE drawing a comparison to “common colds.” It added that while this is “unlikely in the short term,” it could later become a “realistic possibility” as the virus fully adapts to its human hosts SAGE concluded that the UK should continue to “proactively support” a global vaccination drive, saying that could help to reduce the likelihood of “dangerous variants emerging in other parts of the world,” while also urging for increased investment in viral surveillance to keep tabs on new mutations.

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Not the internal document leaked on Thursday, but this one from Friday.

CDC Releases Study Showing 3/4 Delta Cases Are Among The Vaccinated (RT)

The CDC has released a study backing up its decision to recommend indoor masking for both vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans. The study examined one outbreak and found three-quarters of people testing positive were vaccinated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revised its masking guidelines on Tuesday, urging all Americans in areas with high Covid-19 transmission to mask up when indoors, regardless of vaccination status. Mask mandates in companies, government departments, and certain local jurisdictions followed, as CDC Director Rochelle Walensky insisted the decision was made on the back of fresh scientific evidence. The CDC released that evidence on Friday. In a study of 469 cases of Covid-19 that broke out in the resort town of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, earlier this month, 74% occurred in “fully vaccinated persons.”

Four out of five patients hospitalized were fully vaccinated, and on average the inoculated had completed their two rounds of doses only 86 days before infection. The cases studied occurred in people vaccinated primarily with Pfizer and Moderna shots, with a smaller number having received Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose jab. No one vaccine was singled out as providing better or worse protection, and none appeared to prevent symptoms from developing. Some 79% of vaccinated patients were symptomatic, the study noted. Lab testing revealed that 90% of all the Cape Cod infections involved the Delta variant of the coronavirus. The report lends weight to the argument that the current crop of vaccines aren’t as effective against the Delta variant, although the CDC and WHO both insist that vaccination is effective against “severe disease and death” from the virus, to quote WHO technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove in a briefing earlier on Friday.

[..] The study appears to negate the argument by top health officials that unvaccinated Americans are responsible for the fourfold rise in Covid-19 cases in the US since June. “This is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why we’re out there, practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated,” White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN on Sunday, adding that the US is currently moving “in the wrong direction” with regard to stamping out Covid-19. Whether mask mandates will slow the spread of the Delta variant will be borne out with time. Beyond requiring masks and pressuring Americans to get vaccinated, the White House is running out of options.

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They can’t get their message straight.

Vaccine mandate? Useless.

White House Covid-19 Spokesman Yells At Media For Quoting CDC Documents (RT)

Even as they quoted internal CDC documents backing the renewed mask mandates due to the rise in Delta variant Covid-19 cases, both the New York Times and the Washington Post got a tongue-lashing from the White House. “Vaccinated people do not transmit the virus at the same rate as unvaccinated people and if you fail to include that context you’re doing it wrong,” Ben Wakana, deputy director of strategic communications for the White House Covid-19 response team, tweeted at the New York Times on Friday – in all caps – unhappy about the paper’s coverage of the new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Wakana also had words for the Washington Post, which first published the CDC documents, calling their coverage “completely irresponsible” and countering it with CDC statements from three days prior.

The Twitter meltdown caught the attention of journalist Glenn Greenwald, who called it “super interesting” and suggested that “elite institutions” could find time “in between calling ordinary citizens stupid and selfish” to reflect on the “huge messaging failures, inconsistencies and lies that account for much distrust in official [Covid] messaging.” Wakana’s attempts to whip the corporate media into line follows Friday’s announcement by the CDC that claims 74% of people who recently got infected by the Delta variant of the coronavirus in a Cape Cod, Massachusetts resort were fully vaccinated. The Cape Cod study was “pivotal” in informing the decision to recommend indoor masking, said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. While the White House embraced the masking guidelines earlier this week, it has continued to insist on vaccinations as the way forward and argue that the rise in cases was predominantly a problem “among the unvaccinated.”

Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Friday that a national vaccine mandate is “not under consideration at this time,” and that the US is “not going to head towards a lockdown.” Jean-Pierre specifically cited CDC’s Walensky as an expert the White House defers to on virus matters. “We listen to the scientists, and they tell us that it’s the Delta variant,” she told reporters. “That’s what they’re telling us… These are scientists, they’re the experts.” Speaking with Fox News on Friday afternoon, Walensky said a federal vaccine mandate might be in the cards. “That’s something that I think the administration is looking into,” she said, only to backtrack later and “clarify” that there will be no such mandate.

Walensky kids

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“..it may last for years or even decades and may not be limited to Covid-19 either; any virus that can cross-react with the binding antibodies would be enhanced.”

Fauci *ADMITS* I Was Right In Spring of 2020 (Denninger)

Let’s be clear: Fauci has now admitted, on live camera, that a person with a breakthrough infection is just as dangerous as someone who was never vaccinated and gets infected. This was expected by anyone who has ever studied anything about viral disease and the use of non-sterilizing immunizations when infections are active in a community. We have known this all the way back to Polio and is why we insisted on a sterilizing vaccine (OPV) following the inactivated injected vaccine (IPV) in the United States until 20 years after we were declared polio-free. In addition it is exactly what is expected if a non-sterilizing vaccine produces both binding and neutralizing antibodies and we know, scientifically, that all the existing jabs do exactly that. When levels wane you still have binding antibodies and when the neutralizing level falls below the threshold to protect you now have an enhancement of the disease rather than protection.

A person who was never infected and not vaccinated does not have the binding antibodies and thus, while at risk, doesn’t get the enhancement. Now we have real-world evidence that in fact the jabs produce risk as immunity wanes and that said risk may exceed, on a personal level, what someone has who never been infected or vaccinated is exposed to. As I pointed out the case rate had peaked and was headed down — hard — before the first jab went into the first arm. That which you do after something happens can’t be due to whatever it is you did. Not one group saw that collapse come after vaccination and no sub-group, even the very old, reached even 20% coverage before the case rate was in the ditch Obviously vaccines did not stop Covid in the winter and thus there’s no reason to believe they will materially impact whatever variation may come around — now or in the future.

Got JabbersRemorse yet folks? It appears you may need to continually take boosters to avoid this and accept the risk of blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, PAH and other adverse effects not just once or twice but every six months to a year if not more-often! Oh, and if you choose not to the duration of your increased risk is not known — it may last for years or even decades and may not be limited to Covid-19 either; any virus that can cross-react with the binding antibodies would be enhanced. What I said was the correct path forward in early 2020 and have maintained since is:

• Protect the most-vulnerable who cannot protect themselves. This means locking in all care-givers in institutional settings for the elderly and medically infirm. Yep, you work there, you do not interact with the public until and unless you can prove seroconversion. Period. If we have to pay more to get people to agree to this so be it. It is what it is.

• Urge immediate intervention with suspected or believed effective drugs that are rationally safe at the first sign of infection. If you can buy or use something of statistically similar risk over the counter then you must be able to buy these over the counter on your demand to a pharmacist, with he or she checking for interactions with other drugs you may be taking and warning as appropriate, but with the choice being yours and nobody else’s. Period. The list of said drugs includes hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, budesonide, famotidine and a few others. Why? Because we had no reason to believe originally that natural infection was not sufficient to prevent, in nearly every case, re-infection with a serious or severe instance as that has always been true for every other respiratory pandemic virus and time has proved this up for Covid-19 as well. In short natural infection has now proved superior to vaccination (note that nobody is seriously claiming Delta and other “variants” evade natural immunity) and therefore in those who are at reasonably-low risk infection is preferred as the immunity it produces is at least equal and likely superior, with said infection mitigated as to severity as one chooses. MY ASS, MY CHOICE.

• For those at extremely high risk offer but not mandate whatever prophylactic(s) we can come up with. This includes the current jabs but certainly isn’t limited to them. For example there is some evidence that Ivermectin is effective as a prophylaxis. Vitamin D may be; there is a very strong association between Vitamin D deficiency and severe or fatal Covid infections but association is not proof of cause nor that correcting it would change outcomes. Nonetheless there is nearly zero risk to that path forward and, for Ivermectin, the data is that the serious adverse event risk is 1 in 600,000 people. That’s tiny and less than the risk from Tylenol, to name just one OTC drug in question. Again, the goal here is for infections to happen as they will but not result in serious outcomes as that is the path out of every pandemic through history and there is no evidence this one will be different.

• Those who are at statistically-zero risk of serious harm or death (e.g. healthy children) should be encouraged to live normally and expect to get the virus. Their natural immunity provides a “free of cost” firewall for everyone else. We are criminally insane to do anything that limits or otherwise attempts to prevent that.

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2 months old but very relevant. And then they insert doubts. Antibodies for life, but do get a booster.

Had Covid? You’ll Probably Make Antibodies For A Lifetime (Nature)

Many people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 will probably make antibodies against the virus for most of their lives. So suggest researchers who have identified long-lived antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow of people who have recovered from COVID-191. The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting. Adding to the good news, “the implications are that vaccines will have the same durable effect”, says Menno van Zelm, an immunologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Antibodies — proteins that can recognize and help to inactivate viral particles — are a key immune defence. After a new infection, short-lived cells called plasmablasts are an early source of antibodies.

But these cells recede soon after a virus is cleared from the body, and other, longer-lasting cells make antibodies: memory B cells patrol the blood for reinfection, while bone marrow plasma cells (BMPCs) hide away in bones, trickling out antibodies for decades. “A plasma cell is our life history, in terms of the pathogens we’ve been exposed to,” says Ali Ellebedy, a B-cell immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who led the study, published in Nature on 24 May. Researchers presumed that SARS-CoV-2 infection would trigger the development of BMPCs — nearly all viral infections do — but there have been signs that severe COVID-19 might disrupt the cells’ formation2. Some early COVID-19 immunity studies also stoked worries, when they found that antibody levels plunged not long after recovery.

Ellebedy’s team tracked antibody production in 77 people who had recovered from mostly mild cases of COVID-19. As expected, SARS-CoV-2 antibodies plummeted in the four months after infection. But this decline slowed, and up to 11 months after infection, the researchers could still detect antibodies that recognized the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. To identify the source of the antibodies, Ellebedy’s team collected memory B cells and bone marrow from a subset of participants. Seven months after developing symptoms, most of these participants still had memory B cells that recognized SARS-CoV-2. In 15 of the 18 bone-marrow samples, the scientists found ultra-low but detectable populations of BMPCs whose formation had been triggered by the individuals’ coronavirus infections 7–8 months before. Levels of these cells were stable in all five people who gave another bone-marrow sample several months later.

“This is a very important observation,” given claims of dwindling SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, says Rafi Ahmed, an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, whose team co-discovered the cells in the late 1990s. What’s not clear is what antibody levels will look like in the long term and whether they offer any protection, Ahmed adds. “We’re early in the game. We’re not looking at five years, ten years after infection.” Ellebedy’s team has observed early signs that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine should trigger the production of the same cells4. But the persistence of antibody production, whether elicited by vaccination or by infection, does not ensure long-lasting immunity to COVID-19. The ability of some emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants to blunt the protective effects of antibodies means that additional immunizations may be needed to restore levels, says Ellebedy. “My presumption is, we will need a booster.”

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“..the human immune system produces a multitude of neutralizing antibodies, while also activating certain T and B cells to establish immune memory.”

Recovered COVID-19 Patients Possess Robust Immunity To Virus (Fed.)

A newly released study conducted by Emory University suggests recovered COVID-19 patients possess long-term immunity to the respiratory virus months after infection. Published in Cell Reports Medicine, the comprehensive study analyzed 254 individuals with mostly mild to moderate symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection over an eight-month period and found that patients possessed “durable broad-based immune responses” to the virus after recovering from an infection. “The study serves as a framework to define and predict long-lived immunity to SARS-CoV-2 after natural infection,” said Emory Vaccine Center director Rafi Ahmed. “We also saw indications in this phase that natural immunity could continue to persist.” Ahmed served as a lead author on the study.

The study goes on to note that in response to an active infection in the body, the human immune system produces a multitude of neutralizing antibodies, while also activating certain T and B cells to establish immune memory. Ahmed denotes that these developments make a strong case for some form of lasting immunity to the virus. “We saw that antibody responses, especially IgG antibodies, were not only durable in the vast majority of patients but decayed at a slower rate than previously estimated, which suggests that patients are generating longer-lived plasma cells that can neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein,” he said.

Moreover, the analysis also demonstrates that not only are recovered patients likely to possess lasting immunity to existing SARS-COV-2 variants, but that “SARS-CoV-2 infection also boosts antibody titers to SARS-CoV-1 and common betacoronaviruses.” “While pre-existing exposure and antibodies against HKU1 and OC43 betacoronaviruses are common in adults, pre-existing SARS-CoV-1 exposure is rare and antibody levels to SARS-CoV-1 spike protein were very low (essentially negative) in the pre-pandemic healthy controls,” the study says. “However, SARS-CoV-1 spike-reactive antibodies increased significantly after SARS-CoV-2 infection.” The report later goes on to conclude that taken together, the results of the study “suggest that broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients.”

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Were the teachers elected?

DeSantis: No Mandates, No Lockdowns, No Restrictions, No School Closures (CTH)

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis delivered a statement about the future of Florida today while visiting Cape Coral on the Southwest coast. During his remarks, the governor highlighted his support for parent’s rights, taking the position that parents should be the ones making decisions for their children on masks, schools and vaccines, not government. Governor DeSantis promised Florida residents there will be no lockdowns, no mandates, no restrictions and no school closures. Additionally, the governor urged all local communities to follow common sense science and said he will soon issue an order allowing parents or guardians to choose whether their child wears a mask in schools.

“As of today, very few [school districts] are requiring it. Nevertheless, we have a lot of push from the CDC and others to make every single person, kids and staff have to wear masks all day,” DeSantis said during the event. “That would be a huge mistake.” The Florida Education Association (FEA), the largest teacher union in the state, said they will fight the Florida governor on all measures. The teachers union is considering not going back to work with in-person teaching, and has vowed not to give up control of the (k-12) children to the parents. “Governor DeSantis continues to think that Tallahassee knows best what all Floridians need,” FEA President Andrew Spar said in a statement. “We reject that kind of thinking” Spar continued.

“Instead, we ask Governor DeSantis to allow all Florida’s citizens to have a voice by empowering the elected leaders of cities, counties and school districts to make health and safety decisions locally based on their unique needs and circumstances,” Spar said. Emphasizing how the union feels they have more power in the blue and leftist urban area, and they have vowed to fight any conservative effort in the state to undermine the teachers financial interests and control over Florida students.

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So where’s the rest?

Nearly 1.6 Billion Disposable Masks Polluted Oceans In 2020 (JTN)

Nearly 1.6 billion disposable face masks ended up in the earth’s oceans in 2020, out of the roughly 52 billion produced in response to the pandemic, according to a new study. While governments around the world continue to support mask mandates in public spaces, the impact of disposable masks is only just emerging. The report, by the Hong Kong-based marine conservation group OceansAsia, title “Masks on the Beach,” also estimated that roughly 5,500 tons of plastic pollution entered the ocean in 2020 from masks. The figure is equal to 7% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a mass of plastic debris floating in the ocean that is twice the size of Texas.


While a cigarette butt or plastic bag takes 20 years or less to degrade in the ocean, according to Visual Capitalist, a plastic bottle, disposable diaper or a disposable mask takes nearly 450 years to fully break down. The majority of disposable masks – like N95 respirators and surgical masks – were produced in China factories, which were reportedly producing 450 million masks per day in April 2020.

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“..the toiling myrmidons of Big Pharma..”

Things Get Ripe (Kunstler)

Anyway, the Covid-19 story is now utterly unraveling and the official actions around it look desperately idiotic. It’s back to mass mask-ups and maybe even lockdowns. But don’t get the idea that those mRNA vaccines turned out to have a short half-life — though it kind of looks like they did. In which case, why the panicky rush to get absolutely everybody vaxed up? And how’s that working? I’ll tell you how: only with last-ditch attempts at totalitarian intimidation… you will have no rights to earn a living, go out in public, buy anything, or even protest on the street about any of these insults to human dignity.


The world has never seen the launch of such a gigantic lead balloon. All week, the hysteria has been building and now the balloon is falling to earth as the CDC prepares to announce that the vaxes are a bust against the “Delta variant” and it’s back to the drawing board for all the toiling myrmidons of Big Pharma. Did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi get some insider info on this, having appointed herself mask-sheriff of the US Capitol Building, threatening now to arrest non-masked members and their staffers. Indeed, even a few fully-vaxed-up congresspeople were moved to shout, “Hey wait a minute.”

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Thailand does what all western countries do: censor.

Thailand Bans Sharing Of News That ‘Causes Public Fear’ Amid Pandemic Criticism (G.)

The Thai government has outlawed sharing news that “causes public fear”, even if such reports are true, as officials face mounting criticism over their handling of the pandemic. On Thursday, the government tightened an emergency decree imposed more than a year ago that initially targeted false news. The latest constrictions forbid people from distributing “information causing public fear”, or from sharing “distorted information causing misunderstanding which affects national stability”. The measures have been widely condemned by media groups and rights experts as an attempt to shut down negative news reports and silence debate. Sunai Phasuk, senior researcher on Thailand in Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, described it as a “serious blow” to press freedom in the country.


“I think the government realises it is now facing a credibility crisis because of this disastrous response to the Covid situation, but instead of trying to find better solutions, more efficient solutions, it chooses to gag anyone from speaking about its failures,” said Sunai. “This provision doesn’t care about accuracy or whether it is true or false.” Under the regulations, if false content is spread online, the country’s broadcasting regulator will contact internet service providers to identify the individual’s ISP address and block their internet access. Internet providers who fail to comply will be deemed to have breached the requirements of their operating licences, and action will be taken against them. Sunai said he feared the measures wold be used against online reporters and critics who use social media to share political news and commentaries that do not flatter the government.

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Rubin’s been reinstated, with Twitter apologizing for the “error”.

Twitter Suspends Commentator for Criticizing Vaccine Policies (Turley)

Twitter’s actions against political commentator Dave Rubin is an example of how these companies are now dispensing with any pretense in actively barring criticism of government policies and viewpoints. Rubin was locked out under the common “misinformation” claim by Twitter. However, his tweet was an opinion based on demonstrably true facts. One can certainly disagree with the conclusion but this is an example of core political speech being curtailed by a company with a long history of biased censorship, including the barring of discussions involving Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election. With a new election looming, these companies appear to be ramping up their censorship efforts.

In his tweet, Rubin stated: “They want a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines which are clearly not working as promised just weeks ago. People are getting and transmitting Covid despite vax. Plus now they’re prepping us for booster shots. A sane society would take a pause. We do not live in a sane society.” Even President Biden admitted yesterday that he was wrong weeks ago when he assured people that if they took the vaccine, they would not be at risk for the variants and could dispense with their masks. There are breakthrough cases that have taken many officials by surprise. It is also true that there is now talk of likely booster shots.

Rubin takes those facts and adds his opinion that we should “take a pause.” Twitter declared that to be a violation of its policy “on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.” As always, Twitter simply refuses to explain its censorship decision beyond these generalized, categorical statements. It is not clear if Twitter is calling these facts misinformation or objecting to Rubin’s opinion about a pause. It does not matter. Twitter does not like his viewpoint and does not want others to read it or discuss it. This is precisely what Democratic leaders pressed Twitter to do in past hearings. As previously discussed the hearing with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey who followed up his apology for censoring the Hunter Biden story but pledging more censorship.

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Sacks is one of the co-creators of Paypal.

Get Ready for the ‘No-Buy’ List (David Sacks)

I have no desire to defend genuinely hateful or extremist groups. Indeed, when I was COO at PayPal, we regularly worked with law enforcement to restrict illegal activity on our platform. But we are talking about something very different here: shutting down people and organizations that express views that are entirely lawful, even if they are unpopular in Silicon Valley. As with the censorship of speech, financial deplatforming often begins as something that seems narrow and reasonable — who wouldn’t want to ban the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys? But once the power is granted, it metastasizes into widespread use. We have watched this unfold with online censorship. Many cheered the decision by the largest social media companies to kick President Trump and his most rabid supporters off their platforms after January 6.

They cheered even louder when Apple, Google, and Amazon deplatformed Parler, the one speech platform that didn’t ban Trump. In defense of these policies, we were told that these were private business decisions made by companies that had every right under both the First Amendment and Section 230 to police speech on their platforms. Then, a couple weeks ago, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki casually announced that the Biden administration has been flagging and reporting posts on Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms for removal as Covid-19 “misinformation” (another term with a changing and ever-expanding definition). She even said that when one tech company removes a post, they all should do it, implying that the White House is centrally coordinating a blocklist across social media properties.

The suppression of speech by the government is blatantly unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Given that both Congress and the administration are threatening Big Tech companies with antitrust lawsuits and the repeal of Section 230’s liability protection, it’s disingenuous for Psaki and others to claim Big Tech is doing this policing entirely of their own accord. How could they object when the administration and Congress have hung the sword of Damocles over their heads? The harm is compounded when the loss of speech rights is followed by restrictions on the ability to participate in online economic activity. Within days of the Trump-Parler cancellations, most of the finance tech stack (Stripe, Square, PayPal, Shopify, GoFundMe, and even enterprise SaaS company Okta, which wasn’t used by anyone in the events of January 6) declared they were canceling the accounts of “individuals and organizations connected to the [Capitol] riot.”

Now PayPal has gone much further, creating the economic equivalent of the No-Fly List with the ADL’s assistance. If history is any guide, other fintech companies will soon follow suit. As we saw in the case of speech restrictions, the political monoculture that prevails among employees of these companies will create pressure for all of them to act as a bloc. When someone mistakenly lands on the No-Fly List, they can at least sue or petition the government for redress. But when your name lands on a No-Buy List created by a consortium of private fintech companies, to whom can you appeal?

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is anyone awake anymore in Britain?

Craig Murray’s Jailing The Latest Move To Kill Independent Journalism (Cook)

Craig Murray, a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, the father of a newborn child, a man in very poor health and one who has no prior convictions, will have to hand himself over to the Scottish police on Sunday morning. He becomes the first person ever to be imprisoned on the obscure and vaguely defined charge of “jigsaw identification”. Murray is also the first person to be jailed in Britain for contempt of court in half a century – a period when such different legal and moral values prevailed that the British establishment had only just ended the prosecution of “homosexuals” and the jailing of women for having abortions.

Murray’s imprisonment for eight months by Lady Dorrian, Scotland’s second most senior judge, is of course based entirely on a keen reading of Scottish law rather than evidence of the Scottish and London political establishments seeking revenge on the former diplomat. And the UK supreme court’s refusal on Thursday to hear Murray’s appeal despite many glaring legal anomalies in the case, thereby paving his path to jail, is equally rooted in a strict application of the law, and not influenced in any way by political considerations. Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with the fact that he embarrassed the British state in the early 2000s by becoming that rarest of things: a whistleblowing diplomat. He exposed the British government’s collusion, along with the US, in Uzbekistan’s torture regime.

His jailing also has nothing to do with the fact that Murray has embarrassed the British state more recently by reporting the woeful and continuing legal abuses in a London courtroom as Washington seeks to extradite Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and lock him away for life in a maximum security prison. The US wants to make an example of Assange for exposing its war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and for publishing leaked diplomatic cables that pulled the mask off Washington’s ugly foreign policy. Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with the fact that the contempt proceedings against him allowed the Scottish court to deprive him of his passport so that he could not travel to Spain and testify in a related Assange case that is severely embarrassing Britain and the US.

The Spanish hearing has been presented with reams of evidence that the US illegally spied on Assange inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought political asylum to avoid extradition. Murray was due to testify that his own confidential conversations with Assange were filmed, as were Assange’s privileged meetings with his own lawyers. Such spying should have seen the case against Assange thrown out, had the judge in London actually been applying the law. Similarly, Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with his embarrassing the Scottish political and legal establishments by reporting, almost single-handedly, the defence case in the trial of Scotland’s former First Minister, Alex Salmond. Unreported by the corporate media, the evidence submitted by Salmond’s lawyers led a jury dominated by women to acquit him of a raft of sexual assault charges. It is Murray’s reporting of Salmond’s defence that has been the source of his current troubles.

And most assuredly, Murray’s jailing has precisely nothing to do with his argument – one that might explain why the jury was so unconvinced by the prosecution case – that Salmond was actually the victim of a high-level plot by senior politicians at Holyrood to discredit him and prevent his return to the forefront of Scottish politics. The intention, says Murray, was to deny Salmond the chance to take on London and make a serious case for independence, and thereby expose the SNP’s increasing lip service to that cause.

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Well done. Twitter thread.

Poke (Chuck)

ME: CDC, should I get poke if I already had Covid?
CDC: “Yes, you should be poked regardless of whether you already had COVID-19. That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19.”
ME: Oh, so we don’t know how long natural immunity lasts. So, how long does poke-induced immunity last?
CDC: “There is still a lot we’re learning about pokes and CDC is constantly reviewing evidence and updating guidance. We don’t know how long protection lasts for those poked.”
ME: Okay, but wait a second. I thought you said the reason I need the poke was because we don’t know how long my natural immunity lasts, but you’re saying we ALSO don’t know how long poke immunity lasts either. So, how exactly is the poke immunity better than my natural immunity?
CDC: …

ME: Uh … alright. But, haven’t there been a bunch of studies suggesting that natural immunity could last for years or decades?
CDC: Yes.
NEWYORKTIMES: “Years, maybe decades, according to a new study.”
ME: Ah. So natural immunity might last longer than poke immunity?
CDC: Possibly.
ME: Okay. If I get the poke, does that mean I won’t get sick?
BRITAIN: Nope. We are entering a seasonal spike and half of our infections and hospital admissions are poked people.

ME: CDC, is this true? Are there people in the U.S. catching it after getting poked?
CDC: We stopped tracking breakthrough cases. We accept voluntary reports but aren’t out there looking for them.
ME: Does that mean that if someone comes in the hospital with Covid, you don’t track them because they’ve been poked? You only track the UN-poked Covid cases?
CDC: That’s right.
ME: Hmm. Well, if I can still get sick after I get the poke, how is it helping me?
CDC: We never said you wouldn’t get sick. We said it would reduce your chances of serious illness or death.

ME: Oh, sorry. Alright, exactly how much does it reduce my chances?
CDC: We don’t know “exactly.”
ME: Oh. Then what’s your best estimate for how much risk reduction there is?
CDC: We don’t know, okay? Next question.
ME: Um, if I’m healthy and don’t want the poke, is there any reason I should get it?
CDC: Yes, for the collective.

ME: How does the collective benefit from me getting poked?
CDC: Because you could spread the virus to someone else who might get sick and die.
ME: Can a poked person spread the virus to someone else?
CDC: Yes.
ME: So if I get poked, I could still spread the virus to someone else?
CDC: Yes.

ME: But I thought you just said, the REASON I should get poked was to prevent me spreading the virus? How does that make sense if I can still catch Covid and spread it after getting the poke?
CDC: Never mind that. Also, if you stay unpoked, there’s a chance the virus could possibly mutate into a strain that escapes the pokes protection, putting all poked people at risk.
ME: So the poke stops the virus from mutating?
CDC: No.
ME: So it can still mutate with the poke?
CDC: Yes.
ME: This seems confusing. If the poke doesn’t stop mutations, and it doesn’t stop infections, then how does me getting poked help prevent a more deadly strain from evolving to escape the poke?
CDC:

CDC: You aren’t listening, okay? The bottom line is: as long as you are unpoked, you pose a threat to poked people.
ME: But what KIND of threat??
CDC: The threat that they could get a serious case of Covid and possibly die.
ME: My brain hurts. Didn’t you JUST say that the poke doesn’t stop people from catching Covid, but prevents a serious case or dying? Now it seems like you’re saying poked people can still easily die from Covid even after they got the poke from an unpoked person! Which is it??

CDC: That’s it, we’re hanging up now.
ME: Wait! I just want to make sure I understand all this. So, even if I ALREADY had Covid, I should STILL get poked, because we don’t know how long natural immunity lasts, and we also don’t know how long poke immunity lasts….
…And I should get the poke to keep a poked person from catching Covid from me, but even if I get the poke, I can give it to the poked person anyways. And, the other poked person can still easily catch a serious case of Covid from me and die. Do I have all that right?

……
ME: Um, hello? Is anyone there?

Read more …

 

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Dr. Robert Malone, 2 1/2 hours, the whole story.

 

 

 

 

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Jul 302021
 
 July 30, 2021  Posted by at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  122 Responses »


Paul Gauguin Van Gogh painting sunflowers 1888

 

CDC: Delta Variant Spreads As Easily As Chickenpox, Causes More Severe Infection (CNN)
CDC Expected To Announce Friday That Vaccines Don’t Work on Delta Variant (CTH)
Health Officials Less Confident About Covid Vaccine Due To Delta Variant (JTN)
Gottlieb: Delta Surge May Be Reversing In Hot Spots (ZH)
Antibody Evolution after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination (bioRxiv)
Why Is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug? (WSJ)
US Capitol Police Walk Back Order To Arrest Those Without A Mask (JTN)
Biden Mandates All Federal Workers Must Be Vaccinated… Except Postal Workers (ZH)
CDC To Drop ‘Gold Standard’ PCR Test (JTN)
German Court Tells Facebook To Reinstate Deleted Posts (Pol.eu)

 

 

Things are shifting, and everyone’s busy saving their faulty faces. It’s about time to decree that only the vaccinated need to wear masks, but they’re not quite there yet.

 

 

Those tests? Whenever you feel like it, Pfizer. No hurry.

 

 

FDA approval in September? That’s 2024, right?!

 

 

 

 

Fleming vax or not risk reduction 0.8-1.25%

 

 

If true, it would be game changing (a first?!). A virus that becomes more transmissible and more lethal at the same time. For now, don’t buy it.

As for those MSNBC interviews, that’s where most people get “informed”. Tragic.

CDC: Delta Variant Spreads As Easily As Chickenpox, Causes More Severe Infection (CNN)

The Delta coronavirus variant surging across the United States appears to cause more severe illness and spread as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal document from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The document — a slide presentation — outlines unpublished data that shows fully vaccinated people might spread the Delta variant at the same rate as unvaccinated people. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky confirmed the authenticity of the document, which was first reported by The Washington Post. “I think people need to understand that we’re not crying wolf here. This is serious,” she told CNN. “It’s one of the most transmissible viruses we know about. Measles, chickenpox, this — they’re all up there.”

The CDC is scheduled to publish data Friday that will back Walensky’s controversial decision to change guidance for fully vaccinated people. She said Tuesday the CDC was recommending that even fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors in places where transmission of the virus is sustained or high.[..]The presentation also cites three reports that indicate the Delta variant — originally known as B.1.617.2 — might cause more severe disease. The CDC, the document advises, should “acknowledge the war has changed.” It recommends vaccine mandates and universal mask requirements. The virus is once against surging across the US — especially in areas where fewer people are vaccinated. The US averaged more than 61,300 new daily cases over the last week — an average that’s generally risen since the country hit a 2021 low of 11,299 daily cases on June 22, according to Johns Hopkins University data. “The number of cases we have now is higher than any number we had on any given day last summer,” Walensky told CNN.

WaPo

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Nothing to do with the very very effective vaccines of course.

CDC Expected To Announce Friday That Vaccines Don’t Work on Delta Variant (CTH)

The White House would never credit Donald Trump with the vaccine rollout unless there was something negative about the vaccine that is going to hit the newswires; that is a no-brainer. That baseline is why CTH said two months ago to watch for the moment when the White House credits Trump with the vaccine, because that’s the moment when: (1) the vaccine was going to be identified as dangerous; and/or (2) reports would show the vaccine did not work. Today the White House credited President Trump with the vaccine:

….And right on cue, the late-evening reporting indicates that tomorrow the CDC will announce the vaccine doesn’t work (against the Delta variant). Hence, the need for masks, social distancing and/or possibly lockdowns 2.0. Reminder, when the Intelligence Branch needs to get the public relations engaged, they use the New York Times. [New York Times] – […] New research showed that vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant carry tremendous amounts of the virus in the nose and throat, she said in an email responding to questions from The New York Times. The finding contradicts what scientists had observed in vaccinated people infected with previous versions of the virus, who mostly seemed incapable of infecting others. That conclusion dealt Americans a heavy blow: People with so-called breakthrough infections — cases that occur despite full vaccination — of the Delta variant may be just as contagious as unvaccinated people, even if they have no symptoms.”

Bottom line of this narrative shift… vaccinations don’t work. Everything goes back to square one. Blame Trump, not us. There is also data showing that COVID hospitalizations offer no distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated; and in the example of LA county, the percentage of vaccinated people hospitalized with COVID is identical to the percentage of vaccinated people in the general population. [70% of population vaccinated, 70% of COVID hospitalization patients are vaccinated.] The vaccine offers no benefit from the standing of hospitalization… or so it appears.

In San Francisco, 77% of the population is vaccinated and 83% of the COVID hospitalizations at University of California SF Hospital are previously vaccinated [link]. Again, highlighting the vaccine offers no benefit from the standpoint of hospitalization. Additionally, there’s data from a recent Pfizer study where 44,000 patients were studied. 22,000 were given the vaccine, and 22,000 received the placebo. The results amid both groups was almost identical.

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She keeps at it still: “..in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant after vaccination may be contagious..”

What will the message be tomorrow?

Health Officials Less Confident About Covid Vaccine Due To Delta Variant (JTN)

Public health confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine appears to be waning as officials warn of enhanced danger — even for vaccinated individuals — from the “Delta variant” of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. For most of the past year officials have claimed that vaccinations are the only viable path back to normalcy and away from lockdowns and other aggressive mitigation measures. “Look at the folks in your community who have gotten vaccinated and are getting back to living their lives — their full lives,” President Joe Biden said at a May press conference, arguing that the vaccine was “going to help them and their loved ones be safe, get our businesses open again, and get us back to normal.”

The rollout of the vaccines starting last year and continuing throughout the spring and summer of this year has been hailed as the driving force behind the reopening of the economy and the ending of masking mandates and similar restrictions. Yet over the past week the tone from public officials has grown increasingly grim, with leaders now appearing to doubt that the vaccine is sufficient to forestall COVID transmission and potential catastrophe due to the rise of the Delta variant. A marked shift was seen this week from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reversed its earlier masking guidance and claimed that fully vaccinated individuals should wear masks indoors in areas with high COVID transmission.

The Delta variant “behaves uniquely differently from past strains of the virus that cause COVID-19,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a press conference this week. “Information on the Delta variant from several states and other countries indicate that in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others,” she claimed. “This new science is worrisome and unfortunately warrants an update to our recommendations.” White House coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci signaled a similar shift during an interview with NPR when he called the Delta variant “a different virus.” The Delta variant “is much more capable of transmitting from people to people,” Fauci claimed, stating that when even fully vaccinated people contract the virus “they are capable of transmitting the infection to someone else.”

The shift from strong confidence in the vaccine to the masking of fully vaccinated individuals comes after several weeks of steadily rising COVID-19 cases throughout the United States. Experts have feared that the Delta variant could cause a surge in hospitalizations and deaths, leading to catastrophic scenarios of the kinds hypothesized at the outset of the pandemic last year.

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But wait, wasn’t it as contagious as ebola?

Gottlieb: Delta Surge May Be Reversing In Hot Spots (ZH)

While hospitalizations and deaths are clearly higher in areas where vaccination rates are lower, rates are still well below their levels from just a few months ago. And although Dr. Anthony Fauci would have you believe that Delta might cause the end of the world as we know it, his isn’t the only view on the matter. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former director of the FDA, believes delta will peak within the next two to three weeks. And after breaking the data down to the regional level, Bloomberg has apparently spotted some trends that suggest as Delta’s global conquest has been characterized by “hyperspeed spikes in infections that eased dramatically after about two months.”

s The first US outbreaks that caught officials’ eye were in Missouri and Arkansas, and they both started in earnest around the end of May, per BBG. They noted that the rest of the country will be keeping a close eye on both states (along with a handful of others, including California). The rest of the US will be watching those states closely as infections spread. The cases are prompting authorities to reconsider masking and other public-health measures, but many state and local governments are doing so gingerly and only after outbreaks are well underway. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Wednesday that she would require masks again at indoor county facilities such as libraries.

Bloomberg also cited the following tweet from Dr. Gottlieb where he explained how Rt, a virus’s effective reproductive number, plays into forecasts of the virus’s spread. The logic behind it is pretty simple: If Rt falls below 1, then the virus’s spread should start to slow. Gottlieb cited data from covidestim, a project with contributors from Yale School of Public Health, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Stanford Medicine, showing the Rt rate in the worst hit states is already trending toward 1. When the numbers did this in the UK, seen as being just a few weeks ahead of the US, cases quickly started falling off.

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The conclusion is simple: “..memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination.”.

But they still need to package it in jargon.

Antibody Evolution after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination (bioRxiv)

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection produces B-cell responses that continue to evolve for at least one year. During that time, memory B cells express increasingly broad and potent antibodies that are resistant to mutations found in variants of concern. As a result, vaccination of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) convalescent individuals with currently available mRNA vaccines produces high levels of plasma neutralizing activity against all variants tested. Here, we examine memory B cell evolution 5 months after vaccination with either Moderna (mRNA-1273) or Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) mRNA vaccines in a cohort of SARS-CoV-2 naive individuals.


Between prime and boost, memory B cells produce antibodies that evolve increased neutralizing activity, but there is no further increase in potency or breadth thereafter. Instead, memory B cells that emerge 5 months after vaccination of naive individuals express antibodies that are equivalent to those that dominate the initial response. We conclude that memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination. These results suggest that boosting vaccinated individuals with currently available mRNA vaccines would produce a quantitative increase in plasma neutralizing activity but not the qualitative advantage against variants obtained by vaccinating convalescent individuals.

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The WSJ goes ivermectin. Next up NYT, then CNN?

Why Is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug? (WSJ)

The Food and Drug Administration claims to follow the science. So why is it attacking ivermectin, a medication it certified in 1996? Earlier this year the agency put out a special warning that “you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.” The FDA’s statement included words and phrases such as “serious harm,” “hospitalized,” “dangerous,” “very dangerous,” “seizures,” “coma and even death” and “highly toxic.” Any reader would think the FDA was warning against poison pills. In fact, the drug is FDA-approved as a safe and effective antiparasitic. Ivermectin was developed and marketed by Merck & Co. while one of us (Mr. Hooper) worked there years ago.

William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering and developing avermectin, which Mr. Campbell and associates modified to create ivermectin. Ivermectin is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. Merck has donated four billion doses to prevent river blindness and other diseases in Africa and other places where parasites are common. A group of 10 doctors who call themselves the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance have said ivermectin is “one of the safest, low-cost, and widely available drugs in the history of medicine.” Ivermectin fights 21 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. A single dose reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in cells by 99.8% in 24 hours and 99.98% in 48 hours, according to a June 2020 study published in the journal Antiviral Research.

Some 70 clinical trials are evaluating the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19. The statistically significant evidence suggests that it is safe and works for both treating and preventing the disease. In 115 patients with Covid-19 who received a single dose of ivermectin, none developed pneumonia or cardiovascular complications, while 11.4% of those in the control group did. Fewer ivermectin patients developed respiratory distress (2.6% vs. 15.8%); fewer required oxygen (9.6% vs. 45.9%); fewer required antibiotics (15.7% vs. 60.2%); and fewer entered intensive care (0.1% vs. 8.3%). Ivermectin-treated patients tested negative faster, in four days instead of 15, and stayed in the hospital nine days on average instead of 15. Ivermectin patients experienced 13.3% mortality compared with 24.5% in the control group.

Moreover, the drug can help prevent Covid-19. One 2020 article in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications looked at what happened after the drug was given to family members of confirmed Covid-19 patients. Less than 8% became infected, versus 58.4% of those untreated.Despite the FDA’s claims, ivermectin is safe at approved doses. Out of four billion doses administered since 1998, there have been only 28 cases of serious neurological adverse events, according to an article published this year in the American Journal of Therapeutics. The same study found that ivermectin has been used safely in pregnant women, children and infants.

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Fiddling with Nancy’s new hobby.

US Capitol Police Walk Back Order To Arrest Those Without A Mask (JTN)

Capitol police Thursday night walked back a memo that ordered officers to deny entry and possibly arrest those who enter the United States House of Representatives who are not wearing masks after mask mandates were reintroduced earlier this week. “Regarding the House mask rule, there is no reason it should ever come to someone being arrested. Anyone who does not follow the rule will be asked to wear a mask or leave the premises. The Department’s requirements for officers to wear masks is for their health and safety,” the USCP said in a statement Thursday night.


On Wednesday, newly appointed Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger ordered officers to enforce new mask mandates in the House, including denial of entry and even arrest. “If a visitor or staff member fails to wear a mask after a request is made to do so, the visitor or staff shall be denied entry to the House Office Buildings or House-side of the U.S. Capitol,” Manger said Wednesday. “Any person who fails to either comply or leave the premises after being asked to do so would be subject to an arrest for Unlawful Entry.”

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They must be vaccinated so they spread more virus. A Chinese study claims the viral load is 1,000 times higher.

Biden Mandates All Federal Workers Must Be Vaccinated… Except Postal Workers (ZH)

Earlier in the week Biden suggested that those who are yet to be vaccinated are “sowing enormous confusion.” “We have a pandemic because of the unvaccinated, and they’re sowing enormous confusion,” Biden said. “And there’s only one thing we know for sure, if those other 100 million people got vaccinated, we’d be in a very different world. So get vaccinated. If you haven’t, you’re not nearly as smart as I said you were.” And now he has gone to ’11’ on the ‘your body, no choice’ amplifier, saying tonight that he’ll require federal workers to prove they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19 or wear masks and submit to frequent coronavirus testing. Additionally, the rules will cover millions of federal workers, including the military and on-site contractors.

“What I’m trying to do is keep people safe,” Biden said Thursday at the White House. “If in fact you’re unvaccinated, you present a problem to yourself, to your family and to those with whom you work.” Biden also asked his team to take steps to apply similar standards to all federal contractors and encourage private sector employers to follow the same approach. There’s just one thing… the federal worker mandate does not apply to postal workers? What do postal workers know about the science that Biden doesn’t? We don’t know, but dare we mention it could be related to the 220,000-member strong union’s leaders waiting to be negotiated with. As The Epoch Times’ Isabel van Brugen detailed earlier,

“The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) has said that it opposes mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, amid reports that the White House is considering so-called vaccine passports as a condition of employment for federal employees. The union, which represents over 220,000 postal workers, released a statement late Wednesday saying that while it will encourage postal workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19, it is “not the role of the federal government to mandate vaccinations for the employees we represent.” “Issues related to vaccinations and testing for COVID-19 in the workplace must be negotiated with the APWU. At this time the APWU opposes the mandating of COVID-19 vaccinations in relation to U.S. postal workers,” the statement said.

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Not a word about the flu.

CDC To Drop ‘Gold Standard’ PCR Test (JTN)

PCR tests, long hailed as the “gold standard” in detecting SARS-Cov-2 cases, will be dropped by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the beginning of next year. Polymerase chain reaction tests have been a mainstay of the U.S. and global response to COVID-19 since early in 2020, but health officials have warned the diagnostic tool poses a risk of false-positive results. The test works by amplifying a biological sample through successive cycles until a virus — if it’s present in the assay — can be detected by the testing machine. The CDC announced this month that it would be withdrawing its request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the emergency use authorization of the test. The agency urged laboratories to “begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test.”

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told Just the News that the agency was discontinuing its support for the test “given the availability of commercial options for clinical diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, including multiplexed … and high-throughput options.” “Although the CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus … Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel met an important unmet need when it was developed and deployed and has not demonstrated any performance issues, the demand for this test has declined with the emergence of other higher-throughput and multiplexed assays,” she said via email. Those risks have been acknowledged by multiple prominent public health figures, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In a July 2020 interview on an infectious disease podcast, Fauci warned that the sensitive PCR tests might, if allowed to progress through too many amplification cycles, return a “positive” result when it was actually just detecting “dead nucleotides.” The World Health Organization earlier this year warned in a medical product alert that PCR tests carry with them the risk of “false positives” because the test might only be picking up small fragments of the virus via heavy amplification. “[D]isease prevalence alters the predictive value of test results; as disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases,” the alert stated. “This means that the probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity.”

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“We welcome the ruling of the Court, which upholds the principle that platforms like ours are allowed to remove hate speech according to company policies and block the respective user accounts,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

German Court Tells Facebook To Reinstate Deleted Posts (Pol.eu)

Germany’s Federal Court ruled Thursday that Facebook had to reinstate racist comments because it had improperly removed them. In its ruling, the Karlsruhe-based court said that while Facebook had the right to decide what stays on or off the platform, it needs to be more forthcoming with users on how it does so. The court found that the social media company did not inform two users that it had removed their posts. It added that the company should have also informed and given users an opportunity to respond before suspending them from its platform. The decision sets a major precedent for how social media companies police content on their platforms, likely giving a boost to EU lawmakers in Brussels, who are pushing to add further obligations on social media companies.

It also upends a years-long status quo whereby platforms were effectively free to develop and implement content moderation policies on their own, which critics say has resulted in a lack of transparency, information, and potential recourse for the users. The case in question is from 2018, when Facebook removed posts in which two German users attacked migrants because it said the posts violated its policy on hate speech, and then suspended the users’ accounts for several days. The users complained that the posts’ removal was a violation of free speech. The court said while Facebook was entitled to set strict content rules banning hateful speech and to block users, the way it implemented its content moderation policy was not proper.

“Provisions in general terms and conditions are ineffective if they unreasonably disadvantage the contractual partner of the user contrary to the requirements of good faith,” said the court. Facebook will not be allowed to delete the posts again after they are reinstated. “We welcome the ruling of the Court, which upholds the principle that platforms like ours are allowed to remove hate speech according to company policies and block the respective user accounts,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

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Fauci about delta variant and children…

 

 

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