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Debt Rattle December 20 2021

Dec 202021

December 20, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: CDC, common cold, Denmark, Fauci, Great Reset, mild disease, NATO, Omicron, record deaths, runny nose, SAGE, Yeadon 34 Responses »

Berthe Morisot The old track to Auvers 1863

• My Tweets With The Chairman Of The Sage Covid Modelling Committee (Nelson)

• New York, UK: Covid Case Records, Hospitalizations And Deaths Remain Low (JTN)

• The First 785 SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Cases In Denmark (ES)

• Runny Nose, Headache, And Fatigue Are Commonest Symptoms Of Omicron (BMJ)

• CDC Forecast: Covid Cases Will Jump By 55%, Deaths Will Surge By 73% (DM)

• Fauci Foresees Potential Record Death Rate From Omicron (NW)

• COVID-19 Protocolists are Killing People. By-Demand NOW (Lyons-Weiler)

• ‘The Moment Of Truth Has Come’ For Russia & NATO – Moscow (RT)

• Israeli-led Central Bank Simulation Preparation For Great Reset – Yeadon (DT.nz)

• China & Russia Are Ready To End US Dominance Of Global Finance (Diesen)

RFKjr
https://twitter.com/i/status/1472536661116563457

Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson tweets with Graham Medley—chair of COVID modeling for UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).

Turns out SAGE doesn’t model mild scenarios, because those don’t require government actions. The gov’t sees only extreme scenarios.

• My Tweets With The Chairman Of The Sage Covid Modelling Committee (Nelson)

The latest Sage papers have been published, envisaging anything from 200 to 6,000 deaths a day from Omicron depending on how many more restrictions we’ll get – up to and very much including another lockdown. Earlier today I had an unexpected chance to ask questions of Graham Medley, the chair of the Sage modelling committee. He’s a professor at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) which last weekend published a study on Omicron with very gloomy scenarios and making the case for more restrictions. But JP Morgan had a close look at this study and spotted something big: all the way through, LSHTM assumes that the Omicron variant is just as deadly as Delta. ‘But evidence from South Africa suggests that Omicron infections are milder,’ JP Morgan pointed out in a note to clients. Adjust for this, it found, and the picture changes dramatically:-

“Bed occupancy by Covid-19 patients at the end of January would be 33% of the peak seen in January 2021. This would be manageable without further restrictions.’ So JP Morgan had shown that, if you tweak one assumption (on severity) then – suddenly – no need for lockdown. Why was this scenario left out? Why would this fairly-important and fairly-basic fact on Omicron modelling not presented by SAGE modellers like Prof Medley to ministers – and to the general public? I was thrilled for the chance to speak to him on Twitter. It was kind of him to make the time (he’s still going, as far as I can make out). The Spectator data hub has a page devoted to past Sage modelling vs actual, and I wanted to make sure I was not being unfair to Sage in my selection or presentation of those charts.

The latest Sage paper-drop – the 6,000-deaths-a-day one – refers to ‘scenarios,’ not predictions. Prof Medley emphasises the distinction: saying something could happen is not saying that there’s a realistic chance of it happening. But then why do SAGE modellers publish some scenarios and not others? I then jumped to ask Prof Medley.

Revealingly, he seemed to think my question odd: if it’s quite plausible that Omicron is mild and doesn’t the threaten the NHS, what would be the point of including that as a ‘scenario’? He seemed to suggest that he has been given a very limited brief, and asked to churn out worse-case scenarios without being asked to comment on how plausible they are. “We generally model what we are asked to model. There is a dialogue in which policy teams discuss with the modellers what they need to inform their policy.” Might this remit mean leaving out just-as-plausible, quite-important scenarios that would not require lockdown? “Decision-makers are generally on only interested in situations where decisions have to be made.”

Note how careful he is to stay vague on whether any of the various scenarios in the Sage document are likely or even plausible. What happened to the original system of presenting a ‘reasonable worse-case scenario’ together with a central scenario? And what’s the point of modelling if it doesn’t say how likely any these scenarios are? From what Prof Medley says, it’s unclear that the most-likely scenario is even being presented to ministers this time around. So how are they supposed to make good decisions? I highly doubt that Sajid Javid is only asking to churn out models that make the case for lockdown. That instruction, if it is being issued, will have come from somewhere else.

Mild. A four letter word.

• New York, UK: Covid Case Records, Hospitalizations And Deaths Remain Low (JTN)

Authorities reported record-breaking COVID-19 case counts in multiple major regions across the world late this week, offering further signs of the omicron variant’s high transmissibility. However, hospitalizations and deaths attributable to the disease remained much lower than earlier surges, suggesting a shift in the pandemic after roughly two years of natural immunity and about a year of vaccinations. The United Kingdom had two back-to-back record-breaking days this week, posting case numbers tens of thousands higher than the earlier one-day record almost exactly a year ago in January. New York State had a less-dramatic yet still firmly record-breaking day as it struggles with its own surge there.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said the has set another single-day positive COVID case record with nearly 22,000 positive cases reported in 24 hours, abc7ny.com reported Saturday. Yet in both cases, hospitalizations and deaths have remained markedly lower than in lower surges: In New York deaths have risen slightly since the beginning of the month but have continued on the largely flat trajectory they’ve held since the summer. Deaths in the United Kingdom have remained similarly low, and hospitalizations in both regions are lower than in earlier surges. “The omicron symptoms have been very mild,” Yves Derouseu, the emergency services director at Lenox Hill Hospital, told NBC4 New York. “The impact on those vaccinated has been clinically mild. It’s not converting to admissions to the hospital, or deaths.”

The study is at the link. The text here is Robert Malone’s summary of it (https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/omicron-today).

• The First 785 SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Cases In Denmark (ES)

Denmark, as of December 9, 2021. Denmark has one of the highest RT-PCR testing capacities in the world and screens all positive RT-PCR tests with an Omicron-specific PCR – allowing screening for Omicron. There have been 785 SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant cases identified in Denmark. The earliest Omicron cases in Denmark occurred before South Africa announced the emergence of this variant. Most cases were fully (76%) or booster-vaccinated (7.1%); 34 (4.3%) had a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection. The majority of cases with available information reported symptoms (509/666; 76%) and most were infected in Denmark (588/644; 91%). One in five cases cannot be linked to previous cases, indicating widespread community transmission. Nine cases have been hospitalized, one required intensive care and no deaths have been registered.

Highlights:

· 1.2% of cases have been hospitalized

· 0.3% in intensive care

· 0% deaths.

· 83% were fully or booster vaccinated, 17% not vaccinated (including 2.6 vaccine started)

· 4.3% had previous SARS-CoV-2 infection

· 91% have no travel history, 9% reported travel

My take: this study is important because although there are studies and spokespeople from South Africa stating similar results, the Danish population in terms of age, body weight, life expectancy, etc. is more similar demographically to the US population. This Danish study suggests that Omicron will affect the American population similarly.

The circle is round. If you can’t tell the difference bwteen Covid and a cold, you must get jabbed.

• Runny Nose, Headache, And Fatigue Are Commonest Symptoms Of Omicron (BMJ)

The UK government has been urged to update its list of symptoms for covid-19, after early data showed that cold-like symptoms were the most commonly reported by people with the new omicron variant. Data released on 16 December by the Covid Symptoms Study,1 run by the health science company Zoe and King’s College London, show that the top five symptoms reported in the app for omicron infection were runny nose, headache, fatigue (either mild or severe), sneezing, and sore throat. This initial analysis was based on positive cases in London, which was selected because of its higher prevalence of omicron than in other parts of the UK. The government still lists fever, cough, and loss of sense of smell or taste—which were the most common with the alpha variant—as the covid symptoms to watch out for.

Tim Spector, lead scientist on the Zoe Covid Study app, who has been calling for the list of symptoms to be updated since the emergence of the delta variant,2 said a change was overdue. “The messaging from the government is just not clear on this,” he said. “I think most people know what cold-like symptoms are. I would probably just add [to the list]: ‘Have you got cold-like symptoms?’ We need to educate people, go back to the basics, and say that if you’ve got cold-like symptoms keep away from people. You shouldn’t be waiting for the three classic symptoms.” To compare delta and omicron, London data were selected from a week where delta was dominant (a sample of 363 cases from 3-10 October 2021) and compared with the most recent data (847 cases from 3-10 December 2021).

This initial analysis found no clear differences between delta and omicron in the early symptoms (three days after testing). Spector said it was vital that members of the public were aware of the symptoms to look out for, particularly in areas such as London that have very high rates of omicron infection. “If you do have symptoms of a mild or bad cold, it’s highly likely that you’ve got covid if you’re in an area like London at the moment,” he said. Spector said the UK was now an international exception in not listing cold-like symptoms as likely indicators of covid infection, noting that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and European countries such as Spain and France had all updated their advice. “The UK is the odd one out,” he said. “They should amend it if the majority are presenting that way.”

And after all that “mildness”, the CDC and Fauci think it’s still Halloween…

• CDC Forecast: Covid Cases Will Jump By 55%, Deaths Will Surge By 73% (DM)

Grim new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have predicted that US COVID-19 deaths will soar by 73 per cent to 15,600 a week by January 8, and that cases will rocket to 1.3 million a week by Christmas Day. The agency revealed projections on Wednesday afternoon that show America will suffer up to 15,600 new Covid deaths a week as of January 8 – or 2,228 deaths per day – a 58 per cent increase from 8,900 deaths currently being recorded each week, equivalent to 1,285 deaths a day. Another CDC prediction estimates that between 620,000 and 1.3 million Americans will have been diagnosed with Covid by the week that ends on December 25 – Christmas Day. That represents a 55% leap on the 840,000 cases that have been recorded over the last week.

Omicron will likely become the dominant Covid strain in the coming weeks, and cause a massive surge of cases shortly after Christmas, one expert has warned, likely fueling the surge the CDC predicts. Dr Gregory Poland, a top epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic told DailyMail.com that an Omicron-fueled surge in cases could be right around the corner. ‘As best any of us can model, we will have an explosion of cases after the holidays in the in the early-to-mid-January timeframe,’ he said. ‘This variant is hyper transmissible, it spreads exponentially in an environment of cold weather, massive holiday get togethers, no masking and insufficient immunization.’

He believes it will become the dominant strain in the UK – which recorded a record 78,610 cases on Wednesday – in the coming days, and that the U.S. will follow around two weeks later. Cornell University in upstate New York is suspected to be home to the first US Omicron cluster, after 930 students were diagnosed with the virus in recent days. The college says every one of the positive tests it has sequenced so far has been the Omicron variant. A Cornell spokesman hasn’t said exactly how many Omicron cases have been identified, but added that they expect most, if not all, the 930 cases to be caused by the new variant.

There is absolutely nothing to justify a warning like this.

• Fauci Foresees Potential Record Death Rate From Omicron (NW)

Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, said on Sunday that record-breaking death rates could occur as the COVID Omicron variant spreads across the U.S. Fauci made an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, where host Jake Tapper pressed the leading infectious disease expert on where he believes the pandemic is headed. Tapper asked, “Do you expect new record high numbers for cases? And what about hospitalizations and deaths?” “Yes, well, unfortunately, Jake, I think that that is going to happen,” Fauci replied. “We are going to see a significant stress in some regions of the country on the hospital system, particularly in those areas where you have a low level of vaccination, which is one of the reasons why we continue to stress the importance of getting those unvaccinated people vaccinated.”

The Omicron variant was first reported by researchers in South Africa last month, after being detected in several southern African nations. It was detected in the U.S. earlier this month and has now been reported in most states. Experts predict that it will overtake Delta as the dominant variant in the U.S. in a few weeks. Fauci predicted that the country is in for a difficult time as the Omicron variant continues to spread and take over. “It is going to be tough,” Fauci said. “We can’t walk away from that, Jake. We can’t, because, with Omicron that we’re dealing with, it is going to be a tough few weeks to months as we get deeper into the winter.” Fauci also refuted the notion, expressed this week by Vice President Kamala Harris, that officials did not see COVID-19 variants coming. He reiterated that what is surprising about Omicron is not that it happened at all, but rather the number of mutations it seems to possess.

“We definitely saw variants coming,” he explained. “What was not anticipated was the extent of the mutations and the amino acid substitutions in Omicron, which is really unprecedented. It kind of came out of nowhere, where you have a virus that has 50 mutations, 30 of which are in the spike protein, and 10 or 12 of which are in the receptor binding domain. I mean, to me, that’s really quite unprecedented.”

“You’ll be told that your loved one cannot stay off the oxygen support long enough to get nutrition, and then you’ll be told they are not tolerating the feeding tube.”

• COVID-19 Protocolists are Killing People. By-Demand NOW (Lyons-Weiler)

Once your loved one is admitted for COVID-19 to a hospital full of protocolists, monoclonal antibodies are no longer an option. No reason is given, it’s just protocol. Once your loved one is admitted to a hospital full of protocolists for COVID-19, you cannot get the doctors to vary from the protocol with options other than those they are told they can use. Those options? -O2 support -Lovenox -Remdesivir -Vitamin D&C -Nasal cannula feeding tube -Intubation (ventilator) -Palliative care -Comfort care -Cremation, or relocation for embalming. If your loved one does not want Acetaminophen (e.g., Tylenol, or Ibuprofen (e.g., Motrin), but instead wants aspirin, it’s a no-go. Aspirin, by the way, helps break up microclots in the lungs. You’ll only get push-back on the risk of bleeding with long-term use.

COVID-19 is an acute condition. But hey, they have their protocols. Forget about Ivermectin. Forget about Hydroxychloroquine; the faked studies and Fauci tanked that option with bullshit logic. Forget about N-Acetyl-Cysteine, which helps the body increase O2 saturation levels. Forget about The COVID-19 Frontline Doctors protocols, I-MASK+, MATH+, and forget about Dr. Peter McCullough’s amazing dynamic and multi-faceted approach to treating COVID-19. Forget about all of these unless you are in a conservative county and can get a conservative judge to back patient choice. If you have time. And you won’t. Your loved one will be on oxygen support, like a bipap, maybe for a day. And then some doctor will start talking about how important it is they get some nutrition.

You’ll be told that your loved one cannot stay off the oxygen support long enough to get nutrition, and then you’ll be told they are not tolerating the feeding tube. Then they will tell you they want to intubate your loved one because feeding them is easier that way. You’ll learn that no one comes off the ventilators. Protocolism is killing people. Protocolists are killing people.

“We have taken this step and proceed from the fact that it will no longer be possible to somehow brush it [the security proposals] off.”

• ‘The Moment Of Truth Has Come’ For Russia & NATO – Moscow (RT)

Moscow’s new proposals for security guarantees are aimed at averting a potential military conflict with NATO, Russia’s deputy FM has said, noting that the country’s relations with the US-led bloc have reached a tipping point. The comprehensive deal, proposed to the US and NATO this week, serves the best interests of all the parties involved, and is designed to avoid a potential military showdown through political dialogue, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said Saturday. “[By proposing the deal] we make it clear that we are ready to talk about how to transform a military or a military-technical scenario into a political process that will strengthen the military security of all states within The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Euro-Atlantic area and Eurasia,” Grushko told the Soloviev LIVE YouTube channel.

Should the West ignore Moscow’s attempt to rein in the tensions, Russia will resort to “creating counter-threats” of its own, the minister said, referring to potential deployment of new weapons systems within Russia’s borders. “It will [then] be too late then to ask us why we’ve made such decisions, why we’ve deployed such systems,” he said. Arguing that increasingly strained Russia-NATO relations have reached “the moment of truth,” which calls for a “fundamental decision,” the minister stressed that the ball is now in NATO’s court. “We have taken this step and proceed from the fact that it will no longer be possible to somehow brush it [the security proposals] off.”

The idea of a comprehensive, legally binding security agreement with the West was first floated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two separate draft documents, presented by Russia to Brussels and Washington on Wednesday, laid out the main principles of peaceful coexistence of Russia and the US-led military bloc in Europe, Moscow said. Unveiling the proposals, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov explained that Russia insists on written guarantees since the ties with the West currently suffer from “an almost total lack of mutual trust.” Ryabkov pointed out that many verbal promises, given by Western politicians to Russia back in 1990, including NATO’s pledge to not expand eastwards, have been subsequently broken.

“..property, will be seized and people’s ability to purchase enough food not to starve, will depend upon them holding an up-to-date vaccine passport..”

• Israeli-led Central Bank Simulation Preparation For Great Reset – Yeadon (DT.nz)

A banking crisis simulation conducted recently in Israel is preparation for the ‘Great Reset’, according to Mike Yeadon, former chief scientific officer for Pfizer and pandemic critic. The 10-day simulation concluded on 9 December in Jerusalem, and invovled central bank representatives from Israel, USA, UK, UAE, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Thailand, as well as representatives from the IMF, World Bank, and Bank of International Settlements. The simulation was based on a catastrophic cyber attack scenario, in which the entire world financial system was brought down, leading to a ‘run on banks’ requiring emergency liquidity in multiple currencies, paralysing the global financial system. Targets would included foreign exchange markets, bond markets, loss of data integrity and compromised transactions between exporters and importers.

The solution to such an event would require international cooperation and coordination of monetary policy. Measures would include a coordinated bank holiday, debt repayment grace periods, SWAP/REPO agreements and coordinated delinking from major currencies. Dr. Mike Yeadon believes the simulation is a front for a planned financial reset, which he expects to take place sometime after March 2022.= The financial reset itself is the actual manifestation of what the head of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Claus Schwab has called The Great Reset, where ‘You will own nothing and be happy’. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is a ‘graduate’ of the WEF. Yeadon believes electronic representation of individual currencies will end, and that it is entirely possible people will lose everything they think they own by way of financial assets.

Yeadon believes other real assets, mostly property, will be seized and people’s ability to purchase enough food not to starve, will depend upon them holding an up-to-date vaccine passport. According to Yeadon, that’s the ultimate tool of coercion: VaxPass or starvation. According to a post on Yeadon’s Telegram channel: • Banks will close for several days, and online banking will be offline. People won’t be able see their balances. • ‘Debt holidays’ will be implemented, including the cancellation of debts, noting that one person’s debt is another person’s savings. • ‘Coordinated delinking from major currencies’ will see the end of balances in USD, GBP and EUR. Individual currencies will presumably be rebased and ‘severely haircut’ into Central Bank Digital Currencies.

Yeah, yeah, demise of the dollar and all that. What gives this guy’s ignorance away is this quote: “China has invested trillions of *dollars* into its Belt and Road Initiative..”

• China & Russia Are Ready To End US Dominance Of Global Finance (Diesen)

De-dollarisation, the reduced reliance on the US dollar as a reserve and transaction currency, is immensely challenging as the dominant role of the US dollar has defined the international financial system for more than 75 years. The dollar has continued its strong position for three main reasons: the huge size of the US economy, the preservation of the dollar’s value by keeping inflation low, and the open and liquid financial market. As the US economy is in relative decline, inflation is out of control, and its financial markets are used as a weapon – the foundations for the enduring role of the dollar are quickly coming to an end.

A financial partnership between China and Russia, the world’s largest energy importer and the world’s largest energy exporter, is an indispensable instrument for dethroning the petrodollar. In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value.

[..] China and Russia have also developed their own rating agencies and replaced the dominant position of Visa and Mastercard in their respective countries. This new financial architecture is complemented with an energy partnership and a technological partnership as neither China nor Russia wants to be reliant on American high-tech industries as they move into the fourth industrial revolution. Furthermore, China and Russia seek to avoid US-dominated transportation corridors. China has invested trillions of dollars into its Belt and Road Initiative for new land- and sea corridors, while Russia has advanced a similar but more modest program that includes developing the Arctic as a maritime route in partnership with China.

Lord Sumpton

No one described lockdown madness with grander eloquence than former UK Supreme Ct Justice Lord Sumption: “We have moral reasons…for not wishing to be like China…now…what began as a public health crisis is…an educational crisis…and social crisis on top of that.” 168/ pic.twitter.com/Li6Mlb9BU7

— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) November 18, 2021

Scripted?!

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Debt Rattle September 22 2021

Sep 222021

September 22, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:11 am Finance Tagged with: Evergrande, Melbourne, myopericarditis, Nordstream 2, Russiagate, VanDen Bossche, Yeadon 84 Responses »

Salvador Dali Portrait of Picasso 1947

• There Are No Shortcuts To The Scientific Truth (Vanden Bossche)

• mRNA Covid-19 Vaccination And Development Of Myopericarditis (Mrxiv)

• Pfizer Assures That Vaccine Is Almost As Safe For Kids As COVID (BBee)

• Delta Variant Only “Half As Infectious As Assumed” – JPMorgan (ZH)

• Now It Is TRULY Coming Apart (Denninger)

• Anti-Vaccine Protesters Clash With Police In Melbourne For 2nd Day (NPR)

• Biden’s National Security Advisor Implicated In Alfa Bank Russiagate Scam (RT)

• With Clinton Lawyer Charged, The Russiagate Scam Is Now Under Indictment (Maté)

• IEA Calls On Russia To Send More Gas To Europe Before Winter (G.)

• Kyle Bass: Xi Wants Evergrande Blowup To Help Lower Housing Prices (ZH)

• Medical Schools Update Hippocratic Oath To Exclude The Unvaccinated (BBee)

Mike Yeadon says if you persist and don’t get vaccinated now, it’ll all be over in a few weeks.

pic.twitter.com/WHqvcVvrX7

— Bojomomma22 (@bojomomma22) September 21, 2021

McCullough

Deaths: 41,096
Injuries: 4,287,533

(Combined total for Europe, U.K. & U.S.
as of 21 Sep, 2021)

"This is far and away the most lethal, toxic, biologic agent ever injected into a human body in American History and it's going strong."

~ Dr. Peter A. McCullough

Please RT. pic.twitter.com/gQM6STTWfW

— Coronavirus Plushie (@CoronavirusPlu3) September 21, 2021

Flip the narrative around

Flabbergasting if true… pic.twitter.com/8a4gT9slaf

— Kukicat (@Kukicat7) September 21, 2021

Vanden Bossche reacts to “How the unvaccinated threaten the vaccinated for COVID-19: A Darwinian perspective” Author: Emanuel Goldman; PNAS September 28, 2021 118 (39) e2114279118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2114279118

• There Are No Shortcuts To The Scientific Truth (Vanden Bossche)

[..] when mass vaccination was initiated, the question that really mattered was to know which part of the population would give more infectious variants a competitive advantage. It seems logical that more infectious variants can only enjoy a competitive advantage on a background that exerts selective immune pressure on viral infectiousness, i.e. on spike protein (as the latter is responsible for viral infectiousness). When people get jabbed in large numbers with S(pike)-based vaccines, this undoubtedly leads to massive S-directed immune selection pressure in the vaccinated part of the population. In contrast, the unvaccinated do not provide such competitive advantage to more infectious variants as they eliminate Sars-CoV-2 lineages without exerting immune selection pressure on viral infectiousness (i.e., on spike protein).

This is because unvaccinated either get asymptomatically infected, i.e., they overcome the infection thanks to their innate immunity, which is known to be multi-specific ( i.e., NOT variant-specific) or they contract symptomatic infection, which equally results in multi-variant-specific acquired immunity. In none of these cases does an unvaccinated person exert any immune selection pressure on viral infectiousness, i.e., on spike protein. The unvaccinated part of the population is, therefore, anything but a reservoir for the virus! On the contrary, their capacity to eliminate the virus in a non-selective manner will lead to a diminished concentration of more infectious immune escape variants in the unvaccinated population, and even in the overall population provided the unvaccinated part of the population represents a significant part of the overall population! (which is now increasingly becoming problematic).

[..] natural selection of more infectious variants happens within the vaccinated population, but not in the non-vaccinated population. This already explains why there was a fall in cases when the lockdown measures in the UK were abandoned and society opened up again. Opening-up society resulted in absorption of more infectious variants (i.e., the Delta variant) by non-vaccinated people. In this population, the Delta variant had no longer a competitive advantage (as unvaccinated individuals can effectively deal with ALL Sars-CoV-2 lineages).

1 in 1,000 develop myo(peri)carditis, but males/females ratio is 29/2.

• mRNA Covid-19 Vaccination And Development Of Myopericarditis (Mrxiv)

Introduction Several case reports or small series have suggested a possible link between mRNA COVID vaccines and the subsequent development of myocarditis and pericarditis. This study is a prospective collection and review of all cases with a myocarditis/pericarditis diagnosis over a 2-month period at an academic medical center.

Methods Prospective case series from 1st June 2021 until 31st July 2021. Patients were identified by admission and discharge diagnoses which included myocarditis or pericarditis. Inclusion criteria: in receipt of mRNA vaccine within one month prior to presentation; The CMR protocol included cine imaging, native T1 and T2 mapping, late gadolinium enhancement and post contrast T1 mapping. All CMR studies were read in consensus by two experienced readers. Diagnosis was based on clinical presentation, ECG/echo findings and serial troponins and was confirmed in each case by CMR. Incidence was estimated from total doses of mRNA vaccine administered in the Ottawa region for the matching time-period. This data was obtained from the Public Health Agency of Ottawa.

Results 32 patients were identified over the period of interest. Eighteen patients were diagnosed with myocarditis; 12 with myopericarditis; and 2 with pericarditis alone. The median age was 33 years (18-65 years). The sex ratio was 2 females to 29 males. In 5 cases, symptoms developed after only a single dose of mRNA vaccine. In 27 patients, symptoms developed after their second dose of. Median time between vaccine dose and symptoms was 1.5 days (1-26 days). Chest pain was the commonest symptom, but many others were reported. Non-syncopal non-sustained ventricular tachycardia was seen in only a single case. Median LV ejection fraction (EF) was 57% (44-66%). Nine patients had an LVEF below the normal threshold of 55%. Incidence of myopericarditis overall was approximately 10 cases for every 10,000 inoculations.

Summary and Conclusions This is the largest series in the literature to clearly relate the temporal relationship between mRNA COVID vaccination, symptoms and CMR findings. In most patients, symptom onset began within the first few days after vaccination with corresponding abnormalities in biomarkers and on ECG. Cardiac MRI confirmed acute myocardial and pericardial changes with the presence of edema demonstrated with both tissue mapping and late gadolinium enhancement. Symptoms settled quickly with standard therapy and patients were discharged within a few days. No major adverse cardiac events and no significant arrythmias were noted during inpatient stay. Further follow up will be required to ascertain the longer-term outcomes of this patient group.

Almost not funny.

• Pfizer Assures That Vaccine Is Almost As Safe For Kids As COVID (BBee)

After conducting several trials, Pfizer has announced that their vaccine is now almost as safe for kids as getting COVID is. “We are very proud of this achievement,” said a Pfizer spokesperson. “We can now confidently say that there is only a very small chance your child will suffer life-altering complications or death from the vaccine. Chances are still a bit higher than the chances of your kid dying from COVID, but hey! Give us some credit here! Not bad, huh?”

Experts confirmed that even though there is a statistically 0% chance of kids dying from COVID, parents should still require kids to get the vaccine immediately, to make up for Pfizer’s financial loss from the FDA not approving booster shots right away. “Besides,” said one expert, “kids are puny and can’t even fight back with their skinny little arms and legs. Just get them vaccinated—to protect yourself—since your safety is the highest priority here.” Pfizer is hoping they can get kids fully vaccinated before their Q3 sales numbers come out.

Is this research for a bank, or whould perhaps the WHO do it?

• Delta Variant Only “Half As Infectious As Assumed” – JPMorgan (ZH)

[..] over two months ago in early July, JPMorgan wrote a note about EM vulnerabilities to the COVID-19 Delta variant in which it drew attention to seven countries – the Philippines, Peru, Columbia, South Africa, Ecuador, Thailand and Mexico – which at the time looked particularly vulnerable due to a combination of low prevalence of the Delta variant and low vaccination rates. Given the widely accepted assumption that the Delta variant is much more infectious than prior strains of SARS-CoV-2, and given the prevailing trends in vaccination rates, JPMorgan then estimated that the spread of the Delta variant would push up the effective reproduction numbers (Re) significantly in these countries.

JPMorgan’s concern was that these seven countries would see significant gains in COVID-19 infections which would prompt further restrictive measures on mobility and mixing in some countries (EM Asia) or lead to worsening in public health and confidence in others (Latin America): “we thought that Re in the Philippines would rise from 0.92 to 1.97 as the Delta variant became fully prevalent. At an Re of 0.92 new infections are falling, while at an Re of 1.97 new infections are doubling every six to seven days.” What happened next was unexpected: JPMorgan policy research analyst David Mackie found that “the Delta wave was much milder than expected: none of these countries saw the gains in Re that we anticipated.”

This brings us to the latest note from JPM titled “What happened to the COVID-19 Delta wave in vulnerable EM countries?” in which the bank tries to explain just why it was so wrong with its modeling and assumptions. The bank starts off by showing the evolution of the reproductive numbers (Re) over the past couple of months for these seven countries. While Re did initially rise over the summer as the Delta variant spread, which led to an increase in infections, it was not by as much as expected. While on average, Re was expected to rise by 0.58 from the end of June to the time when the Delta variant was fully prevalent (from 1.07 to 1.65), the average rise was only by 0.24 (from 1.07 to 1.31); in other words, around half of the expected gain in Re did not occur.

OSHA is a shaky basis.

• Now It Is TRULY Coming Apart (Denninger)

OSHA “rules” are not federal law; they’re regulations and if issued illegally are void. Law is made by Congress and confirmed (if signed) by the President, or if a veto is overruled. Until that happens it’s not law, it’s a bill and legally means nothing. Agencies can issue regulations but they must comport with the statutes — that is, the law that enables same. This is why the CDC’s mandate was tossed and, I remind you, the courts now have notice that under Biden’s administration being handed a “nice” defeat will be met with a middle finger so the odds of a second “nice” rebuke are now zero.

I predicted when this BS started that OSHA would fail in this regard for several reasons. Chief among them is that it is a major rule impacting millions. This is not an emergency situation at one company or even within a single industry; it is intended to blast the entire nation’s workforce at once with a mandate. This triggers a whole host of scrutiny requirements which are very unlikely to succeed and will be immediately challenged — along with filings asking for injunctions to bar enforcement until a ruling on the merits is made. Said ruling will require hearings, trials, and ultimately likely go before the US Supreme Court. It will take months if not years to go through that process. I remind you that an injunction requires:

1. You are likely to win. OSHA has not issued a rule of this sort of scope in a very long time, and certainly not on an emergency basis. The entire premise of an “emergency” 18 months into this pandemic is a joke; Congress has had a year and a half to consider legislation and has not. That standing alone like dooms the rule. But there’s much more — in order to argue that “the vaccinated” must be protected in the workplace from “the unvaccinated” you have to admit the vaccines don’t work! If you put that admission into writing then you just ate your own tail; the circular logic of that is obvious to anyone. If you don’t then only consenting persons, who choose not to be vaccinated, are at risk. Then there is the CDC Director’s direct testimony before Congress, under oath, in September 2020 in which he said masks were more effective than vaccines — and he meant surgical masks too as that’s what he held up. When liberty interests are implicated the least-intrusive means to accomplish the goal must be chosen; the government cannot take the most intrusive, and potential permanent harm is certainly as intrusive as it gets. Having admitted there is a better alternative OSHA will lose on that basis. There’s much more — but you just need to demonstrate probability of a win.

2. Irreparable injury that cannot be compensated for with money. Losing a job or worse, permanently damaging your health qualifies. No problem there.

3. The threatened injury if the order goes into effect exceeds that if not. The status quo is what that’s measured against; this one is somewhat of a tougher call, but likely wins.

4. The injunction is not adverse to the public interest. 100 million Americans are the public interest. This is not a majority rule question; impacting a huge number of people certainly reaches this threshold.

The courts are not stupid. Partisan although claimed to not be, yes. Biased although designed to resist that, yes. Typically deferential to the Executive (and especially Congress), yes, even though by the Constitution they’re all co-equal. But stupid? No.

Note the ivermectin in the demands.

And when you see how the protesters are accused of being nazi’s, note the uniforms of the riot police.

• Anti-Vaccine Protesters Clash With Police In Melbourne For 2nd Day (NPR)

It’s been a violent few days in Melbourne, Australia, where construction workers and other demonstrators are clashing with police as they protest the government’s COVID-19 vaccine requirements. Amid the surging delta variant, officials in Victoria state — where Melbourne is the largest city — recently announced a vaccination mandate for construction workers that requires each employee to show proof of at least one dose by Thursday. Some 13% of the state’s active COVID-19 cases are linked to construction sites, according to local media. Construction workers who are opposed to the new restrictions have made their positions known in protests that have escalated in recent days.

After the government closed down tearooms at work sites, some workers took their lunch breaks outside on Friday. They set up tables and plastic chairs in multiple intersections in central Melbourne, blocking roads and holding up traffic. On Monday, people gathered outside the headquarters of the prominent Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union to protest the mandate, chanting and yelling before attempting to storm the building. Angry protesters threw bottles and smashed loudspeakers, according to local media reports. Riot police deployed on the scene allegedly used rubber bullets and pepper spray to disperse crowds, the BBC reported, adding that the headquarters building was damaged and “several people” were arrested in the process.

The union later issued a statement condemning the violence “in the strongest possible terms,” noting that an unspecified number of people were injured by violent acts, including the throwing of bottles. But it also distanced itself from the protesters, attributing the actions to “extremists or people manipulated by extremists.” “This crowd was heavily infiltrated by neo-Nazis and other right wing extremist groups and it is clear that a minority of those who participated were actual union members,” the statement said. Others have alleged that neo-Nazis and anti-vaccination groups organized on encrypted social media platforms before arriving at the protest in “hi-vis” clothing to look like construction workers.

Bill Shorten — the former opposition leader and current member of Parliament who serves as shadow minister for the national disability insurance scheme and for government services — said in a TV interview that some protesters were construction workers while others were “fake tradies.” “There is a network of hard-right, man-baby Nazis,” he said, “people who just want to cause trouble. … They want to complain about the vaccination, and they deserve to get the full force of everything that’s coming their way.”

Melbourne
https://twitter.com/i/status/1440315693040222221

Oz officer

1/ A very illuminating conversation with an Australian police officer. He hates what he is doing, but he doesn’t know what else to do.

“I agree with you, I'm just doing my job…I'm just as over this lockdown as you are mate, but this is my job.”pic.twitter.com/iaOQ75OQIf

— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) September 21, 2021

Better kick him out, Joe. Or will he kick you out first?

• Biden’s National Security Advisor Implicated In Alfa Bank Russiagate Scam (RT)

In any event, dossiers outlining the incendiary allegations were passed anonymously to every major US news outlet over the course of the 2016 presidential election campaign, with many eagerly seizing upon them. However, not all journalists were convinced, and several organizations refused to publish anything on the material. The Intercept issued a withering report on the charges a week prior to the vote, documenting how DNS records provided by the anonymous source “can’t really prove anything at all, and certainly not ‘communication’ between Trump and Alfa,” and no one “can show that a single message was exchanged between Trump and Alfa.” That same day however, Clinton drew attention to the “covert server” on social media, sharing a statement on the subject by her senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan, acting as if the information her team had passed to the media was new to her.

“This could be the most direct link yet between Trump and Moscow…This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide,” he boldly asserted. “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia as part of their existing probe into Russia’s meddling in our elections.” The indictment makes clear that Sullivan was a key player in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to publicize the Alfa Bank disinformation. It records how Sussmann was “alerted” to the Alfa Bank allegations by his tech executive client in July 2016, and “over the ensuing weeks, as part of their lawyer-client relationship,” the pair engaged with a Clinton campaign lawyer and individuals acting on the candidate’s behalf to share the false charges “with the media and others.”

In mid-September, that lawyer exchanged emails with the “campaign’s manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor” concerning the false charges, and Sussmann’s success to date with cultivating media interest. This contact was so significant, the lawyer specifically billed the Clinton campaign for the correspondence, an accompanying entry – titled “re: Alfa Bank Article” – naming Sullivan, the campaign’s manager and its communications director.

I’m beginning to sense a pattern.

• With Clinton Lawyer Charged, The Russiagate Scam Is Now Under Indictment (Maté)

In accusing Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of lying to the FBI, Special Counsel John Durham offers new evidence of the fabrications behind the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory. The indictment of Hillary Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann offers new evidence that the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that engulfed Trump’s term in office was itself the product of fabrications involving Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Although Sussmann faces just one count on a false statement charge, the 27-page charging document offers an expansive window into how the Russiagate scam began, and how Democratic operatives, intelligence officials, and establishment media figures dishonestly fed it to the public. Sussmann, until recently an attorney with Clinton campaign law firm Perkins Coie, is the second person to be charged by John Durham, the Special Counsel scrutinizing the Russia investigation.

Sussmann is accused of lying to the FBI during a September 2016 meeting in which he tried to raise alarm about “secret communications” between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Sussmann gave then-FBI attorney Jim Baker documents and data purporting to show that computer servers associated with Trump and Alfa Bank were in regular contact. This was evidence, Sussmann argued, of a possible covert back channel. According to Durham, Sussmann told Baker that he was not working “for any client,” and was simply passing on information that had been provided to him by “multiple cyber experts” who had come across the suspicious web traffic. But according to the detailed indictment, Sussmann was in fact cooking up a politically motivated scam.

The theory of a purported covert Trump-Alfa channel had been concocted by an unnamed tech executive positioning himself for a top cybersecurity job in the anticipated Clinton administration. To spread the theory to the media and intelligence community, the executive and Sussmann “coordinated”, Durham says, with Mark Elias, a colleague of Sussmann’s at Perkins Coie and the top lawyer for Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Sussmann and Elias in turn coordinated with the private intelligence company Fusion GPS. Elias had already hired the firm – on Clinton’s behalf – to produce the Steele dossier, the collection of fabricated reports by ex-British spy Christopher Steele alleging a longstanding Trump-Russia conspiracy/blackmail relationship. According to Steele, it was Sussmann, in a July 2016 meeting, who first informed him about the Alfa Bank server story.

Elias kept Clinton campaign members informed as well, including the “campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor.” In February 2017, Sussmann also met with a CIA official to push the Alfa Bank narrative. Sussmann concealed this plot from the FBI, along with the fact that he was billing Clinton for his involvement. The meeting with the FBI’s Baker, for example, was charged to the Clinton campaign as “work and communications regarding confidential project.” In fact, according to Durham, “all or nearly all” of Sussmann’s work on the Alfa Bank story prior to meeting Baker was “billed to the Clinton campaign.”

All they have to do is approve Nordstream 2.

• IEA Calls On Russia To Send More Gas To Europe Before Winter (G.)

The world’s energy watchdog has called on Russia to send more gas to Europe as the energy supply crunch bleeds across the continent, in a rare public rebuke of the Kremlin. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises global governments on energy policy, called out the gas-rich country for refusing to increase exports even as fierce demand has driven market prices to successive record highs, appearing to support claims that Russia is withholding supplies. “The IEA believes that Russia could do more to increase gas availability to Europe and ensure storage is filled to adequate levels in preparation for the coming winter heating season,” the Paris-based agency said.

“This is also an opportunity for Russia to underscore its credentials as a reliable supplier to the European market,” it said. The IEA’s intervention has come amid growing unease in Europe over Russia’s decision not to increase gas exports to Europe next month, despite record gas market prices across the continent. It said Russia had been “fulfilling its long-term contracts with European counterparts – but its exports to Europe are down from their 2019 level”. EU politicians have accused the Kremlin of deliberately withholding gas supplies while it awaits regulatory approval for a controversial pipeline project, Nord Stream 2, which would double Russia’s capacity to export gas to Germany.

Russia is not using all of its available pipeline capacity to export gas to Europe but state officials and executives at the state-owned gas company Gazprom have reportedly said it may increase gas sales to Europe once the pipeline has been approved.

In his 10 years in charge, Xi profited greatly from letting real estate prices rise. Now he doesn’t want the blame.

• Kyle Bass: Xi Wants Evergrande Blowup To Help Lower Housing Prices (ZH)

Shortly before two Evergrande creditors confirmed to Bloomberg (under the guise of anonymity) that the Chinese developer-giant had missed bond payments due Monday, Hayman Capital founder Kyle Bass returned to CNBC for an interview Tuesday morning for a telephone discussion with CNBC’s Joe Kernen to discuss the toxic Chinese economy and its unsustainable debt pile. Bass, one of the most vocal China hawks on Wall Street, has said it’s important to understand what, exactly, President Xi is looking for. According to Bass, China is “experiencing similar problems that we are in the US” when it comes to housing prices. Xi has been managing a broad-based crackdown on the Chinese economy all summer. Now, it’s time to confront the issue

Now, China is entering this period of weakness with over $50 trillion worth of credit in their system, with their annual GDP at around $15 trillion. Compared with China, the US had GDP of $17 trillion with another $12 trillion off-balance-sheet when Lehman collapsed. China is at 3.6x ahead of its “Lehman moment”, while the US was only about 1.7x. What’s more, China is still a relative newcomer to the capital markets business, Bass said. China adopted a western-style financial system in 2001 after they joined the WTO. Around the same time, Beijing’s population-control policies started to really bite, as China saw its birth rate dwindle. There are now 1.3 births per woman in China and you need to be at 2.1 to actually just sustain your population, Bass said.

So for many working-age Chinese males, population dynamics are at a critical level and the reason being is the Chinese men can’t afford houses so they’re all living with their parents and the fact that Evergrande went on a credit binge and built all of the housing and Chinese property took off because their central bank continued to print so much money. Now, it’s trying to rein in property prices and he’s trying to do it as quickly as possible because China’s on an unsustainable path lower. “Right now,” Bass says, everyone who believes China’s going to grow at 6% a year ad infinitum “is just dead wrong,” but if we just divorce ourselves from any value judgments about China and think about the the future of the plan of the globe – if we always think about the Chinese consumer and we all at one point wanted to move forward in a symbiotic way where we sell things to China, and their consumers buy things from us.

2 BBees today.

• Medical Schools Update Hippocratic Oath To Exclude The Unvaccinated (BBee)

Members of The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) voted this week to make major changes to the Hippocratic Oath for the first time since the 1960’s. Specifically, the Oath for new doctors is being adjusted to exclude both the unborn and the unvaccinated. “The changes we’re making to the Oath are long overdue,” said Dr. Sarah Butcher, a member of the AAMC ruling council. “The concept that physicians should attempt to do no harm to the unborn or the unvaccinated has no place in modern society.” Butcher said the famous first line of the Oath will be updated to read, “I promise to do no harm unless it’s killing a little unborn baby who’s really not a person yet. Also, since anyone who refused the vaccine is basically asking to die of COVID, I will let them suffer and die a horrifying death to set an example for others.”

Several other changes are also being made to the Oath, including the following new sections: • A vow to wear a mask at all times, even while showering and sleeping, to prevent any possibility of spreading infection to others. • A promise to provide preferential treatment to BIPOC and LGBTQ populations whenever possible while ensuring that white male oppressors get sent to the back of the line. • Swearing to always follow the latest science, as defined by whatever new study CNN is reporting that day. In addition to the changes in the Oath, the AAMC also announced updates to the educational requirements required for new doctors. “The requirements for licensure have changed slightly,” Butcher said. “We now require licensed doctors to either have a traditional four-year medical school degree or at least 1,000 hours of experience surfing WebMd.”

$16 is the wrong price. That should have been $19.

Romania
https://twitter.com/i/status/1440128722711957511

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Debt Rattle August 14 2021

Aug 142021

August 14, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: autopsies, booster, Delta, extremists, Israel, ivermectin, McCullough, Obama, Pfizer, pregnant, Yeadon 125 Responses »

Pablo Picasso The old guitarist 1903-4

• Biden Admin Warns Of Threat From Anti-Lockdown ‘Extremists’ and More (RT)

• Ex-Pfizer VP Urges Pregnant, Childbearing Age Women Not To Get Vaccine (CP)

• Dr. Peter McCullough – Ends The Pandemic With 5 COVID Facts (LS)

• Pfizer CEO to Public: Just Trust Us on the Covid Booster (KHN)

• Renowned German Pathologist Urges More Autopsies of Vaccinated People (NA)

• Israel Predicts Thousands Of Seriously Ill Covid Patients Within Month (ToI)

• Japanese Doctors Recommend Ivermectin to Cure Corona (Tribun)

• Why Won’t Our Government Even Inform People About Vitamin D? (Horowitz)

• Head Of WHO Covid Origin Team Admits China Ordered Them What To Write (SN)

• Drug Firms Poised To Make Billions Of Dollars From Covid Booster Jabs (G.)

• Low-Cost Test Could Detect Delta Variant In Saliva (MNT)

• Brace for Impact (Kunstler)

• The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama (Taibbi)

The right thing
https://twitter.com/i/status/1422286221015982082

The storyline is being written right before your eyes:

Unvaccinated = Anti-Lockdown Extremist = Conspiracy Theorist = Domestic Terrorist = Jihadist = Al-Qaeda.

“..though there are currently no credible or imminent threats identified.”

• Biden Admin Warns Of Threat From Anti-Lockdown ‘Extremists’ and More (RT)

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a terror warning that appears to put Americans pushing back against Covid-19 restrictions on par with jihadists who might strike on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. A DHS bulletin published Friday said that “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists” may try to “exploit the emergence of Covid-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the US as a rationale to conduct attacks.” The Covid-19 pandemic has stoked “societal strains and tensions,” the DHS said, “driving several plots by domestic violent extremists, and they may contribute to more violence this year.”

The terrorism warning, which runs through November 11, cited a host of other potential threats, including violent bigots who may perpetrate mass-casualty attacks, “though there are currently no credible or imminent threats identified.” Other potential attackers include “domestic violent extremists” and other “ideologically-motivated” individuals who may be triggered by “conspiracy theories” on such issues as “perceived election fraud,” DHS said. “Law enforcement have expressed concerns that the broader sharing of false narratives and conspiracy theories will gain traction in mainstream environments, resulting in individuals or small groups embracing violent attacks to achieve their desired objectives,” the bulletin claimed.

President Joe Biden’s administration has elevated domestic “extremism” as a top security threat in the wake of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. Democrat politicians have hyped the riot as a racially motivated “insurrection,” and Biden in April called it “the worst attack on our Democracy since the Civil War.” Critics pushed back against the claim, noting such previous tragedies as the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, four presidential assassinations and – more recently – race riots that torched cities and left dozens of people dead last summer.

On Friday, however, the DHS again raised the specter of January 6. DHS intelligence chief John Cohen told CNN that online rhetoric is similar to the chatter seen before the Capitol riot. He cited such “extremist” comments as “the system is broken,” “take action into their own hands,” and “bring out the gallows.” DHS also noted that, with the 20-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaching, Al-Qaeda recently published the first issue of its English-language magazine in more than four years. That move “demonstrates that foreign terrorist organizations continue efforts to inspire US-based individuals susceptible to violent extremist influences,” the agency said.

It really has never been tested. Some things are still hard to believe.

“Our government is urging pregnant women, and women of childbearing age, to get vaccinated. And they’re telling them they’re safe. And that’s a lie because those studies have simply not been done.“

• Ex-Pfizer VP Urges Pregnant, Childbearing Age Women Not To Get Vaccine (CP)

A former Pfizer executive recently advised that women of childbearing age and those who are already pregnant should consider opting out of taking the COVID-19 vaccine. “We never, ever give experimental medicines to pregnant women,” said Michael Yeadon, Ph.D., in a presentation for Life Site News’ “Stop the Shot” conference held on Aug. 4 that featured physicians, scientists, attorneys and religious leaders. Yeadon, who holds degrees in biochemistry and toxicology, and a Ph.D. in respiratory pharmacology, served as vice president and chief scientist for allergy and respiratory at Pfizer until 2011, when he retired to launch his own biotech company after working in the pharmaceutical industry for 32 years.

The British pharmacologist, who has attracted media attention for questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, criticized those in power for not providing the public with adequate information about vaccine risks. “You’re being lied to,” he said to pregnant women who’ve been told that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe for them and their preborn babies. “That’s bad enough because what that tells me is that there’s recklessness. No one cares. The authorities do not care what happens,” Yeadon asserted. “You never ever give inadequately tested medicines, medicinal products, to a pregnant woman,” he continued. “And that is exactly what is happening. Our government is urging pregnant women, and women of childbearing age, to get vaccinated. And they’re telling them they’re safe. And that’s a lie because those studies have simply not been done.”

Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, advise that pregnant women can get the COVID-19 vaccine. Similarly, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have urged pregnant women to get vaccinated. The CDC states that pregnant women are at increased risk for severe illness with COVID-19 compared to non-pregnant women, adding that they’re also at increased risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes. CDC adds that experts believe the vaccines are “unlikely to pose a risk for people who are pregnant,” but “there are currently limited data on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnant people.”

During his presentation, Yeadon listed three concerns he has with COVID-19 vaccines that he said haven’t undergone adequate toxicology testing to assess their effects on the reproductive system. Thousands of birth malformations resulted from pregnant women taking thalidomide to treat morning sickness 60 years ago, he said, because studies at the time did not assess that thalidomide was toxic for babies in the womb. “So here we are. There’s been potentially hundreds of millions of women of child-bearing potential [injected] with products which are untested in terms of impacts on fertilization and development of the baby,” he continued. Yeadon added that a study out of Japan found high concentrations of the spike protein in the ovaries, organs and tissue when tested on rats.

“What we find is the vaccine [in rats] doesn’t just distribute around the body and then wash out again, which is what you’d hope,” he said. “It concentrates in ovaries of rats, and it concentrates at least 20-fold over the concentration in other background tissues like muscles.” “You don’t want this product in your ovaries. It’s simply not necessary to induce immunity to have a vaccine in your ovaries. And, as it’s concentrating in the ovaries, getting higher concentrations over time, they have not even defined what the maximum levels are or when that occurs,” he added.

And this man is being sued for $1 million.

• Dr. Peter McCullough – Ends The Pandemic With 5 COVID Facts (LS)

Dr. Peter McCullough – Ends The Pandemic With 5 COVID Facts

1. The virus does not spread asymptomatically.

2. We should never test asymptomatic people.

3. Natural immunity is robust, complete, and durable.

4. COVID-19 is easily treatable at home.

5. The current vaccines are obsolete, unsafe, and unfit for human use.

“Pfizer announced its global phase 3 trial on a third dose in mid-July. That trial’s completion date is in 2022.”

But they will give it to you in September. Already have in Israel. Trials are for pussies.

• Pfizer CEO to Public: Just Trust Us on the Covid Booster (KHN)

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was confident in June about the ability of his company’s vaccine to protect against the highly contagious delta variant, as it marched across the globe and filled U.S. hospitals with patients. “I feel quite comfortable that we cover it,” Bourla said. Just weeks later, Pfizer said it would seek authorization for a booster shot, after early trial results showed a third dose potentially increased protection. At the end of July, Pfizer and BioNTech announced findings that four to six months after a second dose, their vaccine’s efficacy dropped to about 84%. Bourla was quick to promote a third dose after the discouraging news, saying he was “very, very confident” that a booster would increase immunity levels in the vaccinated. There’s one hitch: Pfizer has not yet delivered conclusive proof to back up that confidence.

The company lacks late-stage clinical trial results to confirm a booster will work against covid variants including delta, which now accounts for 93% of new infections across the U.S. Pfizer announced its global phase 3 trial on a third dose in mid-July. That trial’s completion date is in 2022. Phase 3 results generally are required before regulatory approval. “We are confident in this vaccine and the third dose, but you have to remember the vaccine efficacy study is still going on, so we need all the evidence to back up that,” Jerica Pitts, Pfizer’s director of global media relations, said Monday. The financial stakes are enormous: Pfizer announced in July that it expects $33.5 billion in covid-19 vaccine revenue this year. Meanwhile, Pfizer recently said that if a third dose couldn’t combat the delta or other variants, the drugmaker is poised to come up with a “tailor-made” vaccine within 100 days.

All of this has sown a sense of confusion about what exactly will work, and when. The pharmaceutical industry’s rush to recommend boosters for the public is “a little frustrating,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an adviser to the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration. Even if a booster is found to be safe, he said, the U.S. effort should focus on “vaccinating people who are unvaccinated.” In any case, decisions about boosters do not rest with vaccine makers, he said. “Pharmaceutical companies aren’t public health agencies, it’s really not theirs to determine when or whether there should be booster dosing,” Offit said. “That is the purview of the CDC.”

“..if we had had a data and safety monitoring board, they would have shut down the vaccine in February of 2021..”

• Renowned German Pathologist Urges More Autopsies of Vaccinated People (NA)

A renowned German pathologist has sounded the alarm on the number of fatal consequences of COVID-19 vaccinations being drastically underestimated, according to his findings. Peter Schirmacher, the director of the Pathological Institute of the University of Heidelberg, who was admired by The Pathologist magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential professionals in the field, stated that 30 to 40 percent of people who died within two weeks after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine and whom he performed an autopsy on died from the vaccination, according to the local outlet Augsburger Allgemeine.

The pathologist argues that just like cadavers of people who died from COVID-19, corpses of people who die within the short period of time after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine should be examined more frequently and meticulously. He added that currently, pathologists do not study possible connections between inoculation and a development of deadly health implications such as cerebral vein thrombosis or autoimmune diseases. Since vaccinated people usually do not die under clinical observation, Schirmacher explains, “The doctor examining the corpse does not establish a context with the vaccination and certifies a natural death and the patient is buried. Or he certifies an unclear type of death, and the public prosecutor sees no third-party fault and releases the corpse for burial.”

Schirmacher said that in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, his autopsy group worked closely with public prosecutors, the police, and resident doctors to study the phenomenon, and that the vaccine-related morbidity rate that they established is a “politically explosive statement in times when the vaccination campaign is losing momentum, the delta variant is spreading rapidly and restrictions on non-vaccinated people are being discussed.” [..]The administration of German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected Schirmacher’s conclusions and seemingly declined his calls, stating that vaccines are safe. The Paul Ehrlich Institute, a German federal agency, medical regulatory body, and research institution for vaccines and biomedicines, announced that Schirmacher’s statements were “incomprehensible.”

Thomas Mertens, chairman of the Standing Committee on Vaccination (Stiko), dismissed the findings: “I don’t know of any data that would allow a justifiable statement to be made here and I am not assuming an unreported number.” Schirmacher defends his opinion and calls for further study into the issue. “My colleagues are definitely wrong because they cannot assess this specific question competently,” he responded. Schirmacher added that while he has no intention to spread panic or discourage vaccination, he believes that “individual protection consideration” had been overlooked in the attempt to mass-vaccinate the general public.

[..] The underreporting of vaccine-related deaths and adverse effects is becoming an issue in the United States as well. As reported by the New American, a lawsuit filed in federal court in Alabama is alleging that the federal government is hiding, as of the beginning of July, “at least 45,000” deaths related to COVID-19 vaccines. According to the testimony from whistleblower working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and who has access to government servers including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service, there is evidence that the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System (VAERS), which collects data on vaccine-related deaths, is under-reporting such deaths “by a conservative factor of at least five.” According to Dr. Peter McCullough, since typically only 10 percent of vaccine-injury cases make it to VAERS, the death toll from the vaccines may actually be 10-fold higher than the official number. Still, he said, a vaccine that leads to 150 deaths is usually withdrawn from use. “I think if we had had a data and safety monitoring board, they would have shut down the vaccine in February of 2021,” McCullough said.

Berenson: “Israel, with a nearly entirely vaccinated adult population, now expects this coronavirus wave to be the worst yet – up to 2,500 serious cases compared to 1,200 in January.

Note: the article doesn’t mention vaccines once. It’s like they never even happened.”

• Israel Predicts Thousands Of Seriously Ill Covid Patients Within Month (ToI)

Israeli hospitals have to prepare for an influx of nearly 5,000 coronavirus patients within weeks, half of whom will need acute care to deal with severe bouts of COVID-19, health officials have warned Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, according to reports Wednesday. The dire predictions came during a Tuesday meeting between Bennett and senior health experts amid a major influx of new cases, prompting the premier to back a plan to expand hospital capacity, a signal that the government will look to absorb the crush of severe cases head-on rather than attempt to swerve out of its way. Senior Health Ministry officials and other experts presented Bennett with data forecasting some 4,800 coronavirus patients requiring hospitalization by September 10.

The experts expect half of the patients to be seriously ill, putting a major strain on Israel’s health system, according to Hebrew-language media reports on the closed-door meeting. Israel has seen new case numbers skyrocket in recent weeks from a few dozen a day to over 6,000 on Monday. Another 5,755 were diagnosed on Tuesday, the Health Ministry said Wednesday morning, bringing the number of active cases to 38,942. Ministry numbers showed 694 patients hospitalized as of Wednesday morning, 400 of whom were listed in serious condition. Sixty-two people were being treated on ventilators. Bennett and Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz agreed to pump money into the health system to bring in 100 more doctors, 500 nurses and 200 paramedical and support staff every 10 days to keep up with growing demand, according to a summary of the meeting drafted by the Prime Minister’s Office and published by the Ynet news site.

More Israel. This one is a bit strange, a Google doc as a pic in Hebrew, no access. But the details, via Ran Israeli, are interesting:

• New Concerning Results, Israel 2021 (Prof. Retsef Levi)

MDA Emergency calls:

25% increase in Cardiac arrests & Heart attacks (16-29).

83.6% increase in Heart attacks (Women 20-29).

According to the study, this increase was correlated with Mass vaccination.

Google translate from Indonesia.

• Japanese Doctors Recommend Ivermectin to Cure Corona (Tribun)

Dr. Kazuhiro Nagao (63) Chairman of medical company Yuwakai, director (Head) of Nagao Amagasaki Clinic, Hyogo prefecture, and visiting professor at Kansai University of International Studies highly recommend Ivermectin as a drug that can cure early patients infected with the corona virus. “Medical situation we are currently in a state of almost critical and many patients can not be accommodated in the hospital. For patients who are exposed to the corona early is highly recommended to drink the drug Ivermectin . I’ve tried a lot to me and heal patients,” said Dr. Nagao this afternoon (12/8/2021) on NTV. Professor Nagao also sees this (the drug Ivermectin ) as one of the solutions among many efforts to suppress the increasing number of people infected with the corona and at risk of becoming severe.

“In the early stages it’s good to take the drug . I always give my patients the drug , of course it’s made in Japan and the next day it gets better. I ask them to report to me every day the effects of the drug and it turns out to be good, they get well immediately,” he continued again. . In addition, Dr. Nagao also appealed to the Minister of Health and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to immediately promote the drug Ivermectin to the public so that it would be widely used among those infected with the early corona virus. “So far, all of my patients are good, recovering without any problems with the drug . In addition, the drug is also guaranteed and included in insurance coverage in Japan . So I think it’s not a problem and light, not too burdensome for the Japanese people ,” he added.

Until now, the Japanese government, especially the ministry of health, is still monitoring the use of the drug Ivermectin in Japan , and there has been no decision to promote the drug in the midst of the current pandemic. Tokyo itself this Thursday (12/8/2021) drastically increased the number of infected nearly 5000 people per day. Last week a doctor predicted that around August 18 the number of patients infected with the corona virus in Tokyo could reach 10,000 people per day. Professor Yoshihito Niki, Deputy Director of the Respiratory Center, Kurashiki Daiichi Hospital, Professor of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Japan’s Showa University School of Medicine estimates the number of infections could reach 10,000 people in Tokyo around August 18, he explained last August 6.

Basics.

• Why Won’t Our Government Even Inform People About Vitamin D? (Horowitz)

Imagine if rather than running out to buy worthless Chinese face diapers or toilet paper last March, there had been a mad rush to stock up on vitamin D. What would our hospitalization rate have been after the initial wave, and after the early science was clear about the efficacy of vitamin D, had government mailed out free vitamin D to every American (especially in nursing homes)? For a fraction of the cost of a shutdown, waning vaccines, remdesivir, and endless welfare, government could have offered free blood tests of everyone’s vitamin D, C, and zinc levels and advised a plan to bulk up those levels?

Well, we have a new study that demonstrates a good number of hospitalizations could have been avoided. Government agencies that are censoring information on vitamin D can no longer say the same thing about the vaccines, given how Israel is now showing that the vaccine wears off and the country is preparing for the worst run on hospitals ever, despite nearly every adult having been vaccinated. And unlike the vaccines and everything else our government promoted and mandated, vitamin D comes with no risk, numerous other vital benefits, and empowers rather than controls people. There is a misnomer that those promoting vitamin D for COVID somehow believe that all people have to do after getting the virus is to take vitamin D and they will suddenly get better (although there is evidence it works in the active form).

That is obviously an easy straw man for those who oppose preventives and early treatment to knock down. In reality, while vitamin D is definitely important post-infection, it takes several months to bulk up one’s level if it is deficient. A new study recently published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice demonstrates that had Fauci and Co. simply told Americans, especially the vulnerable, to take high doses of Vitamin D (like he does), most of the hospitalizations could have been avoided. The meta-analysis of 23 published studies containing 11,901 participants found the following: One who is vitamin D deficient was 3.3 times more likely to get infected with SARS-CoV-2 than one who is not deficient.

The serum vitamin D concentration, on average, was 20.3 ng/mL among all COVID19 patients but was 16.0 ng/mL among those with severe cases. It’s recommended that one’s levels be at least over 40. “The chance of developing severe COVID-19 is about five times higher in patients with vitamin D deficiency.” A total of 84% of COVID patients in the study were either deficient or insufficient in vitamin D. In other words, whether your vitamin D level is 15, 30, or 50 will make all the difference in terms of getting a mild, moderate, or severe case of the virus, or perhaps getting it at all. How is it that, to this very day, there is no effort to inform people about such a painless, cheap, and effective fix?

Horse, door, barn.

• Head Of WHO Covid Origin Team Admits China Ordered Them What To Write (SN)

The head of the World Health Organization’s origin investigation into COVID-19 has admitted that China basically ordered his team on what to write in their report and allowed them to mention the lab leak theory, but only on the condition that they didn’t recommend following it up. Revealing what is clear evidence of a cover up, the Washington Post reports that Danish WHO chief Ben Embarek made the admission after also commenting that he believes patient zero was a worker at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where experiments on coronaviruses were being carried out. Embarek noted that “human error” could have ultimately led to the virus jumping to humans, but that “the Chinese political system does not allow authorities to acknowledge that.”

Embarek commented that “Somebody could also wish to hide something.” As we have previously noted, the Communist Chinese government, along with Dr. Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, steered the course of the pathetic WHO “investigation”, which had already dismissed the lab leak notion after only a three hour visit to the facility in February. In addition, China has refused to cooperate with the renewed WHO probe, declaring that any attempt to look into the lab leak theory goes “against science” and claiming, contrary to U.S. intelligence and the WHO’s own conclusions, that workers in the lab were hospitalised with COVID in the autumn of 2020.

The Guardian has two different articles on this. Must be important.

• Drug Firms Poised To Make Billions Of Dollars From Covid Booster Jabs (G.)

The drug companies Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are poised to make billions of dollars from Covid-19 booster jabs this autumn, with analysts estimating that sales could rival the $6bn-a-year market for seasonal flu vaccines. The UK government is expected to announce details of its booster programme in the coming days, based on formal advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, but the health secretary, Sajid Javid, has suggested the over-50s could be offered a dose along with their winter flu jabs. The UK is expected to join France and Germany in offering follow-up doses from September. The US authorities on Friday approved a third dose for those with compromised immune systems, and Israel and Chile have begun administering boosters to their elderly citizens.

However, health experts are warning that many more people around the world will die of Covid if western countries prioritise boosters for their own populations instead of sharing them with the rest of the world. Moderna, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, have already inked over $60bn in sales for this year and next, in deals for supplying follow up shots and also the initial two doses for those being inoculated for the first time in less wealthy countries. Analysts polled by data group Refinitiv have forecast revenue of more than $6.6bn for the Pfizer/BioNTech shot and $7.6bn for Moderna in 2023, mostly from booster sales. They expect the annual market to settle at about $5bn or higher eventually, with additional drugmakers competing for those sales.

CAN you test for Delta? Yes, but only through genome sequencing, and that doesn’t happen all the time. Instead, as an MD explains: “The CDC does intermittent sequencing of the virus to determine what strain/variant is predominant in a particular region at any given time. The PCR tests do not differentiate.”

In other words: “There is not a specific test for the delta variant. However, since the vast majority of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are the delta variant, it’s likely a positive test result indicates you could be infected with the delta variant, according to Human and Health Services of Texas.”

• Low-Cost Test Could Detect Delta Variant In Saliva (MNT)

Scientists from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), both in Cambridge, MA, and several Boston-area hospitals, recently created miSHERLOCK. miSHERLOCK is an inexpensive, CRISPR-based diagnostic test that allows users to self-test for variants of SARS-CoV-2 at home, using their saliva. “Simple things that used to be ubiquitous in the hospital, like nasopharyngeal swabs, were suddenly hard to get, so routine sample processing procedures were disrupted, which is a big problem in a pandemic setting,” said co-first author of the study, Dr. Rose Lee, who is a visiting fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at MIT. “Our team’s motivation for this project was to eliminate these bottlenecks and provide accurate diagnostics for COVID-19 with less reliance on global supply chains, and could also accurately detect the variants that were starting to emerge,” she notes.

“miSHERLOCK is a low-cost point-of-care [COVID-19] test that is capable of detecting and differentiating specific SARS-CoV-2 variants, which could be used to guide patient care as well as for infection control or epidemiological purposes,” lead author Helena de Puig Guixe, a postdoctoral researcher at the Collins lab at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, told Medical News Today. “Our device is low-cost, provides a simple visual answer in 1 hour, and only requires saliva from a patient with no additional equipment separate from the device itself (including its standard battery). […] Our full device, including all testing components, costs $15, down to $6 with reuse of the housing and electronics, but could be as low as $2–3 per test if produced at scale,” she added.

“General David Berger, Commandant of the US Marine Corps, briskly told the SecDef, in effect, to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. What do you make of that?”

• Brace for Impact (Kunstler)

My Pillow man Mike Lindell’s three-day Cyber Symposium demonstrated a couple of things about the current depraved state of our nation: You could prove pretty conclusively that the national election of 2020 was saturated with fraud; and that no one in the news business would either care or dare to report it. Otherwise, it’s a little early to tell whether the exercise will have any effect on the country’s mood, though it is apparently a fact that millions tuned into the event on the few Internet sites that evaded the efforts to hack it out of existence.

The presentations by physicist Douglas Frank, law professor (New Mexico State U) David Clements, and retired army intelligence analyst Seth Keshel made a multi-dimensional case that the Dominion vote tallying machines were both pre-programmed with insidious algorithms and were also run remotely by Internet connection through servers in Senegal tied to China the night of Nov. 3, 2020. Even so, the vote in favor of Donald Trump so overwhelmed the programming that oafish mopping-up operations with bogus write-in paper ballots had to be conducted on-the-fly to make sure the election came out in “Joe Biden’s” favor.

It was interesting to be reminded that four key states — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — all claimed to have stopped counting votes around 10:30 eastern time, and nobody reporting the tally on TV (a national ritual going back seventy years) seemed to consider anything irregular about it. But since when in US elections do officials not work through the whole of election night to reach a result? The answer, of course, is never before. It is, as they say, not a thing. Shouldn’t that have been a national WTF moment?

And so began the secret after-hours hijinks, such as in the Fulton County, GA, arena, where poll watchers were shooed out of the joint and then ballot-counters supplied by a Stacey Abrams-owned temp worker company got foolishly caught on a security camera running reams of paper ballots multiple times through their machines… and the arrival in Philadelphia of a truck from Long Island delivering tens of thousands of fresh paper ballots… and so on through the long night of supposedly no vote counting.

[..] The regime is trying to soften up the public for mandatory vaxes now, using its propaganda arms to turn up the volume on pandemic fear and new variants, using phony statistics and threats to turn the unvaxed into social pariahs, including schoolchildren. The regime is playing with nitroglycerine there. How desperate and crazy are they, really? Is something wicked coming their way? I think so, and I think they know it’s so, and I think they have just about run out of tricks for avoiding it. A crack in the edifice of tyrannical coercion materialized a few days ago when SecDef Lloyd Austin declared his intention to vax-up the whole military. General David Berger, Commandant of the US Marine Corps, briskly told the SecDef, in effect, to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. What do you make of that?

Barack and Hunter, the new elites.

• The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama (Taibbi)

“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic? A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball.

Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.

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If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.”
– Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

AUSTRALIA IS A PRISON ISLAND

Watch as Police in Melbourne gathers in HUGE numbers to quash dissent under the guise of health.

No one is spared.

Not even the homeless.

RT to show the world what’s happening down under.

Because it’s coming to you next. pic.twitter.com/A0eQW9iwXw

— Avi Yemini (@OzraeliAvi) August 12, 2021

@LilithAssyria
My Russian friends told me – it was a very strict compliance about vax passports in Moscow.

Nobody would be allowed to come into the restaurant without a vax.

That lasted about 3 weeks. Why? Because nobody went to the restaurants anymore.

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Institutionalization on Steroids

Jun 162021

June 16, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:54 pm Finance Tagged with: Fauci, institutionalization, ivermectin, Kory, mRNA, PCR, science, steroids, Yeadon 11 Responses »

Nikolay Dubovsky Became Silent 1890

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Debt Rattle June 4 2021

Jun 042021

June 4, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:04 am Finance Tagged with: Daszak, DRASTIC, Fauci, fungus, gold, ivermectin, lab leak, monoclonal, Nord Stream 2, Redfield, Wuhan, Yeadon 61 Responses »

Pieter Bruegel the Elder Dulle Griet, also known as Mad Meg 1563

• Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins (Vanity Fair)

• How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media (NW)

• Fauci Kept Funding Daszak’s Experiments after Trump Canceled Grant (NF)

• Fauci Defends China, Doubles Down On Animal Origins Of Covid (DM)

• Ex-CDC Director Threatened For Saying Covid-19 Likely Originated In A Lab (DM)

• Where’s The Tar and Feathers? (Denninger)

• Covid-19 Cases Hit Lowest Point In US Since Pandemic Began (Axios)

• EU Purchases Its First Monoclonal Antibodies Cocktail For Covid-19 (RT)

• The Netherlands Used Children As A Weapon In The Fight Against Corona (AD)

• Delhi Reports Over 1,000 Cases Of ‘Black Fungus’ Amid Shortage Of Drugs (RT)

• Nord Stream 2 To Cost Kiev $3 Billion In Transit Fees A Year – Zelensky (RT)

• Russia’s $186 Billion Sovereign Wealth Fund Dumps All Dollar Assets (ZH)

When both Vanity Fair and Newsweek come out with in-depth articles about the very same topic (in this case how the DRASTIC group reported the lab leak theory), at the very same moment, that makes me nervous.

What also makes me nervous is the one-dimensional attention for Fauci. Much as I dislike the man, it starts to feel as if others are hiding behind him.

“Ivermectin is an off-patent drug that is one of the most widely used drugs in the world, and we know it is able to reduce Covid-19 symptoms at any stage of the disease by about 90%, so there is no need for vaccines.”

– Michael Yeadon, former CSO of Pfizer

Scary if true… pic.twitter.com/YIxqCQuo0Z

— Wittgenstein (@wittgenstein78) June 3, 2021

Kory

Somber (about Ivermectin)… pic.twitter.com/1BBtDA0K2q

— Wittgenstein (@wittgenstein78) June 3, 2021

“The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users..”

• Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins (Vanity Fair)

The idea of a lab leak first came to NSC officials not from hawkish Trumpists but from Chinese social media users, who began sharing their suspicions as early as January 2020. Then, in February, a research paper coauthored by two Chinese scientists, based at separate Wuhan universities, appeared online as a preprint. It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak? The paper offered an answer: “We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus.”

The first was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sat just 280 meters from the Huanan market and had been known to collect hundreds of bat samples. The second, the researchers wrote, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The paper came to a staggeringly blunt conclusion about COVID-19: “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan…. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.” Almost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.

By then, Matthew Pottinger had approved a COVID-19 origins team, run by the NSC directorate that oversaw issues related to weapons of mass destruction. A longtime Asia expert and former journalist, Pottinger purposefully kept the team small, because there were so many people within the government “wholly discounting the possibility of a lab leak, who were predisposed that it was impossible,” said Pottinger. In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted” status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.”

The bat lady returns.

• How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media (NW)

If there is a moment when the DRASTIC team coalesced into something more than its disparate parts, it would be this thread. In real time, for all the world to see, they worked through the data, tested various hypotheses, corrected each other, and scored some direct hits. The key facts quickly came together. The genetic sequence for RaTG13 perfectly matched a small piece of genetic code posted as part of a paper written by Shi Zhengli years earlier, but never mentioned again. The code came from a virus the WIV had found in a Yunnan bat. Connecting key details in the two papers with old news stories, the DRASTIC team determined that RaTG13 had come from a mineshaft in Mojiang County, in Yunnan Province, where six men shoveling bat guano in 2012 had developed pneumonia. Three of them died.

DRASTIC wondered if that event marked the first cases of human beings being infected with a precursor of SARS-CoV-2—perhaps RaTG13 or something like it. In a profile in Scientific American, Shi Zhengli acknowledged working in a mineshaft in Mojiang County where miners had died. But she avoided connecting it to RaTG13 (an omission she had made in her scientific papers as well), claiming that a fungus in the cave had killed the miners.

[..] One of those scientists was Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who recognized the value of the information DRASTIC was producing and began to interpret it for scientists and nonscientists alike in crisp explainers on Twitter that made her a star science communicator. Chan acknowledged the group’s accomplishments in a long thread on Twitter. “Without the work done by the DRASTIC team, I don’t really know where we would be today with the origins of covid-19,” she wrote, adding, “The work of these outsiders…has had a measurable impact on the scientific discourse.” That scientific discourse jumped tracks on January 6, 2021, when the University of Washington virologist Jesse Bloom, one of the country’s most respected COVID-19 researchers, became the first major scientific figure to publicly legitimize DRASTIC’s contributions.

“Yes, I follow the work,” he tweeted, sending tremors through the scientific establishment. “I don’t agree [with] all of it, but some parts seem important & correct.” Bloom singled out Mona Rahalkar’s paper on the Mojiang mine, then added that in the early days of the pandemic, “I thought lab escape very unlikely. Based on subsequent work, I now say quite plausible.” Other scientists pressured Bloom to reconsider, but he held his ground, and the wall of silence began to crumble. In May, 17 scientists from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and other leading institutions, including Chan, joined Bloom in a letter in Science calling for a thorough investigation of the Wuhan lab. On nearly the same day, The Seeker struck again. Visiting a database hosted by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, he searched for all theses supervised by Shi Zhengli. Boom. Three hits. “I got it on my first try,” he says. “Not sure why no one else thought of this before, but I guess no one was looking.”

If there had been any remaining doubt about the WIV’s pattern of deception, these new theses put it to rest. They indicated that the WIV researchers had never believed a fungus had killed the Mojiang miners, contradicting Shi’s remarks in Scientific American and elsewhere. In fact, WIV researchers had been so concerned about a new SARS-like outbreak that they’d tested the blood of neighboring villagers for other cases. And they had known the genetic sequences for the eight other SARS-like viruses from the mine—which could have helped researchers to understand more about SARS-CoV-2 in the early days —long before the pandemic started, and had kept the information to themselves, until DRASTIC called them out.

THIS should be investigated. Fauci as a state within a state.

• Fauci Kept Funding Daszak’s Experiments after Trump Canceled Grant (NF)

Peter Daszak, who studied controversial “gain of function” experiments on coronavirus elements in Wuhan, received $7.5 million from Anthony Fauci after Trump cancelled his grant. Last April, reports emerged that the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization run by one Peter Daszak, was involved in funding and collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers were examining coronaviruses extremely similar to the one behind the COVID-19 outbreak, and allegedly engaging in “gain of function” research relating to them. In an April 17th press conference, President Trump confirmed that a grant worth around $3.7 million since 2015 given to Daszak’s group by the National Institute for Health would be ended “very quickly” following the reports.

Only one week later on April 24th, all future funding for the EHA was cut, and they were ordered to stop spending the $369,819 remaining from its 2020 grant. “At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities,” Michael Lauer, the agency’s deputy director for extramural research, wrote in a letter to EcoHealth Alliance officials. From within the treasure trove of 3,200 pages of emails obtained from Anthony Fauci, one email can be found from Daszak, who thanked Fauci for dismissing the lab leak theory as being simply conspiratorial the day after President Trump announced the funding would be cut.

[..] Only a few months later in August, Fauci, who along with being put in charge of America’s response to COVID-19, is the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH, helped confirm that Daszak’s organization would receive a new grant of $7.5 million to study coronaviruses as part of a new network. The CREID network, which contains 11 institutions including the EHA, “coincidentally” will continue to study the emergence of coronaviruses in Southeast Asia. Fauci said that the network will help “enable early warnings of emerging diseases wherever they occur, which will be critical to rapid responses,” while Daszak boasted that they will be working in rural hospitals, according to a statement, “in remote parts of Malaysia and Thailand to get to the front line of where the next pandemic is going to start.”

Video of Anthony Fauci announcing “NIH Lifts Funding Pause on Gain-Of-Function Research” at a NIAID Advisory Council meeting on January 29, 2018.

Video of Anthony Fauci announcing "NIH Lifts Funding Pause on Gain-Of-Function Research" at a NIAID Advisory Council meeting on January 29, 2018.
Source: https://t.co/WVwn6GRYqK pic.twitter.com/ZxbTPbi6ZU

— Wittgenstein (@wittgenstein78) June 3, 2021

That train has passed.

• Fauci Defends China, Doubles Down On Animal Origins Of Covid (DM)

Dr. Anthony Fauci doubled down on claims that the coronavirus likely originated from an animal then was transmitted to humans in a Thursday morning interview on CNN, despite increasing speculation that it leaked from a China lab. Fauci, who served under former President Trump and President Joe Biden, continues to fight the idea that he downplayed theories that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a trove of emails exchange at the beginning of the pandemic revealed he was warned about a potential lab leak. ‘I have always said and will say today to you … that I still believe the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human,’ Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday on CNN.

Although he said he’s keeping an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak, Fauci said it was ‘far-fetched’ to think the Chinese would kill their own people. ‘The idea, I think, is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves, as well as other people. I think that’s a bit far out.’ In a separate Thursday morning interview on MSNBC, Fauci said they want to definitively find the cause of the coronavirus pandemic – whatever that origin is – but pointing the finger at China isn’t going to help. ‘It’s in China’s interest to find out exactly what it is,’ Fauci said. ‘Obviously, you want openness and cooperation. One of the ways to get it is not to be accusatory. Try to get a forensic, scientific and investigational approach. I think the accusatory part about it is only going to make (China) pull back more.’

Fauci was asked during the MSNBC interview if he thought it was in China’s best interest to hide information if the origin was a lab leak or if it was designing a weapon. He sidestepped, saying no matter what he says, ‘it will be taken completely out of context,’ which he said has already happened after more than 3,200 of his emails from January to June 2020 were obtained and published by Buzzfeed on Tuesday. The emails showed leading virus experts warned him COVID-19 may have been created in a lab while he publicly played such claims down.

GoF

OMG. Dr Fauci told Congress he hadn’t funded Gain of Function research. ⁦@BrianOSheaSPI⁩ found what appears to be Dr Ralph Baric’s CV. Ten million from Dr Fauci. Gain of function research. Bat lady. Human infections. Bill Gates. ⁦@RandPaul⁩ ⁦@TuckerCarlson⁩ pic.twitter.com/MMzSvVb0Dr

— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) June 3, 2021

“The former director of the Centers for Disease Control received death threats from fellow scientists..”

• Ex-CDC Director Threatened For Saying Covid-19 Likely Originated In A Lab (DM)

The former director of the Centers for Disease Control received death threats from fellow scientists after he said during a TV interview that he believed COVID-19 originated in a lab, according to an interview released Thursday. Robert Redfield, who served as the CDC director under Donald Trump when the pandemic began, told CNN on March 26 that he thought the most likely ‘etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory – you know, escaped.’ He said he wasn’t insinuating that there was ill intent, but that was his opinion. After that 10-second sound bite, he told Vanity Fair he was ‘threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis.’ At the time, the Wuhan lab leak was widely considered a ‘fringe theory’ at best, in favor of transmission from an animal to a human.

The Vanity Fair article said ‘death threats flooded his inbox’ from strangers who said he was being racist to prominent scientists, even some he considered friends. One told him to ‘wither and die,’ Vanity Fair reported. ‘I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science,’ Redfield said. Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, wrote an opinion piece on Webpagetoday on April 5 shooting down Redfield’s assertions on CNN. ‘Questions are undoubtedly going to persist about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 until, and if, a definitive answer is uncovered (and perhaps beyond),’ Goldstein wrote. ‘Until then, it’s imperative that leaders in science, public health, and government continue to call for rigorous study and stick to the science of viral evolution and viral ecology in their public commentary. ‘One of the fundamental principles of a life in science is to admit what you don’t know, and never be afraid to look it up. That’s where Redfield falls short, unfortunately on a big stage.’

[..] The magazine outlined the first moments Redfield heard about a mysterious new pneumonia affecting people in a Wuhan market from Dr. George Fu Gao, head of the Chinese CDC, on January 3, 2020. Redfield told Vanity Fair that he thought it was odd that family clusters were getting sick, and Gao later told Redfield that many cases had nothing to do with the market. That’s when it became apparent the virus was jumping from person to person, and Redfield told Vanity Fair he immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He wanted to send researchers to the facility to rule it out, but the Chinese didn’t allow it, Vanity Fair reported. ‘A team could rule it out as a source of the outbreak in just a few weeks, by testing researchers there for antibodies,’ according to Vanity Fair.

“All you need is for an entire profession involved in some very dangerous research to realize that they ****ed up and believe that through their ****up one percent or more of the population in their nation is about to die..”

• Where’s The Tar and Feathers? (Denninger)

The so-called “MSM” isn’t even debating these parts of the email dump — they’re playing Ostrich instead, hoping they can bury it by “touting” all the “pressure” that was seen in the trove while ignoring that the archive damns not one man but entire professions including the vaccine/pharma connection. Yes, there is even evidence that the intentional refusal to look at and use existing drugs and the “decision” on how they were going to deal with this goes back that far, before the first American died. Bluntly put these people didn’t just ignore the evidence that accumulated by the summer months they literally ignored it all the way back to the start and thus it can be reasonably argued they are personally responsible for all of the deaths. If you want to know how you generate international hysteria you don’t need some cabal pulling a puppet string.

All you need is for an entire profession involved in some very dangerous research to realize that they ****ed up and believe that through their ****up one percent or more of the population in their nation is about to die with nothing they can do about it, and if it gets pinned on them as it should since they caused it every one of them deserves to be swinging from a rope. Oh, incidentally, Fauci also knew that masks in the general population were worthless. He pointed this out directly; that the virus was too small and would go right though it. His own words folks, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out but cannot say as “it’s against the consensus of experts”, according to Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, without being de-monetized, having videos pulled and risking being banhammered.

Now we know factually that Fauci stated this himself, so now the media and other “tech companies” are enforcing a position that the so-called “expert” generated with an intentional lie and they’ve maintained and forced that intentional lie for a year and are continuing to do so to this day. Now you know how the hysteria, cover-ups and outright lying happened. Now contaminate that with pharma money and you get what we’re doing now.

This reads like a vaccine ad. “..the virus really is under control, nationwide and in every state, thanks almost entirely to the vaccines.”

But remember this graph, and remember they refused to use HCQ and ivermectin.

• Covid-19 Cases Hit Lowest Point In US Since Pandemic Began (Axios)

The U.S. has brought new coronavirus infections down to the lowest level since March 2020, when the pandemic began. Nearly every week for the past 56 weeks, Axios has tracked the change — more often than not, the increase — in new COVID-19 infections. Those case counts are now so low, the virus is so well contained, that this will be our final weekly map. The U.S. averaged roughly 16,500 new cases per day over the past week, a 30% improvement over the week before. New cases declined in 43 states and held steady in the other seven. The official case counts haven’t been this low since Americans went into lockdown in March last year — when the pandemic was still new, no one knew how long this would go on, and inadequate testing meant that cases were undercounted.

Overall, roughly 33 million Americans — about 10% of the population — have tested positive for COVID-19. About 595,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S., making it deadlier for Americans than the past 80 years of wars and other armed military conflicts combined, including World War II. The U.S. largely failed to contain the virus until the vaccines arrived. Cities and businesses began shutting down last March. From there, the virus rolled into a second wave last summer, when cases climbed to over 65,000 per day, on average, and hospitals in many parts of the country said they were overwhelmed. That failure was then eclipsed in the winter, when hundreds of thousands of people per day were contracting the virus and deaths climbed over 3,000 per day for about a month.

But now, the virus really is under control, nationwide and in every state, thanks almost entirely to the vaccines. Just over half of American adults are now fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. Cases and deaths are still soaring around the world, especially in the developing world, and the Biden administration is facing consistently mounting pressure to export more vaccines, now that the U.S. has contained the virus. The U.S. was never able to control the virus without vaccines, and it still can’t. The risk is still about as high as it’s ever been for unvaccinated people, as the Washington Post recently reported. An average of about 500 Americans per day are still dying from COVID-19, almost all of them unvaccinated.

There will still be some localized outbreaks in the U.S., especially in areas where relatively few people are vaccinated. But they will likely be small, and vaccinated people will be protected. Over time, the immunity from vaccines will likely wane, which, together with new variants of the virus, will likely require booster shots to stay ahead of another outbreak. For now, though, the U.S. has finally gotten the virus down to a level that just about every expert agrees is safe. Fewer than 20,000 cases per day, spread across the U.S. population of 331.5 million people, is a relatively low number of cases, and that number continues to improve across the board.

Why not simply get ivermectin? Too cheap?

• EU Purchases Its First Monoclonal Antibodies Cocktail For Covid-19 (RT)

The European Union has announced the purchase of 55,000 doses of the Roche-Regeneron Covid-19 drug, marking its first foray into potential treatments involving a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies. The EU announced it secured the shipment of the doses on Wednesday, as the bloc seeks to expand its portfolio of drugs and explores potentially promising treatments that can help in the fight against the virus. The deal was agreed earlier this year but the details were only confirmed on Thursday by an EU spokesperson, who said 55,000 doses of the single-shot treatment had been purchased. Roche stated that the company’s contract will cover 37 countries in Europe, including the UK and other non-EU nations. The cost of the shipment has not been made public by the EU or the pharmaceutical companies.

While the deal agreed between the companies and the EU is for the drug’s infusion version, there is also a shot that has been tested and developed. The Roche-Regeneron treatment is still awaiting formal approval from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) before the shipment is dispatched, with formal authorization expected between August and October 2021. The EMA is currently in the process of conducting a rolling review of preliminary data. The Roche-Regeneron Covid-19 treatment has already been granted emergency US approval for patients with mild to moderate symptoms, with Washington ordering 1.5 million doses. The monoclonal antibodies treatment seeks to replicate or boost the body’s natural immune response, helping to support Covid-19 patients who are at high risk of developing severe disease.

Google translate. Holland closed schools not to protect children, but to make parents stay home. Think about how crazy that is.

• The Netherlands Used Children As A Weapon In The Fight Against Corona (AD)

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

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

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

“..it has a fatality rate of around 54%..”

• Delhi Reports Over 1,000 Cases Of ‘Black Fungus’ Amid Shortage Of Drugs (RT)

The number of cases of so-called black fungus, or mucormycosis, has almost doubled in Delhi over the past seven days, reaching 1,044 infections, the local health minister has said. The disease has particularly affected India’s Covid patients. A further 440 people have been diagnosed in the city since last week, when the number of afflicted patients stood at 600. Health minister Satyendra Jain said on Thursday that 89 people had succumbed to the disease in Delhi to date, while 92 others had recovered. The shortage of drugs to treat mucormycosis still remained a problem for the city of 29 million, the minister added. Cases of black fungus have been on the rise in India during the harsh second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

As of May 25, the country saw 11,700 infections, which prompted several states to declare mucormycosis an epidemic. It also soon became clear that the health authorities didn’t have sufficient quantities of the antifungal drug Amphotericin B for the number of patients. Capitalizing on the weakened immune system in Covid sufferers, the fungi most commonly enter the human body through the nose and mouth before spreading to the lungs, heart, or brain. Its symptoms include facial swelling and black lesions – hence its name – and it has a fatality rate of around 54%. The spike in black fungus incidences among Indian coronavirus patients has been largely linked to the steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs prescribed during their treatment for Covid-19.

The US did this to Ukraine.

• Nord Stream 2 To Cost Kiev $3 Billion In Transit Fees A Year – Zelensky (RT)

The completion of the controversial Nord Stream 2 project will deprive Ukraine of about $3 billion annually, with the country’s pipelines no longer necessary for the transportation of Russian gas to Western Europe. That’s according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who told a delegation from the US Congress that America should do what it can to prevent Nord Stream 2 from being completed. Once finished, the pipeline will connect Germany directly to Russia via the Baltic Sea. It aims to protect Berlin’s energy security and make the process less reliant on third countries transiting gas, thereby lowering the price. As things stand, according to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, around 100km remains to be completed, which should be achieved by the end of 2021.

“Only the United States and the administration of President Joe Biden can prevent the completion and commissioning of Nord Stream 2,” Zelensky explained. “Nord Stream 2 will disconnect Ukraine from gas supplies, which means ‘disconnecting’ us from at least $3 billion a year… We will have nothing to pay for the Ukrainian Army.” According to the Ukrainian leader, without this money, the country will no longer have a “powerful and well-supplied army” to continue “defending Europe and European values.” The construction of Nord Stream 2 has been significantly hindered by US sanctions, with Washington imposing numerous packages of measures against companies involved in the building, maintenance, insurance, and certification of the project. The American authorities have claimed that its completion would “undermine Europe’s overall energy security and stability.” However, some have accused the Americans of opposing the pipeline for economic reasons, as the country looks to increase its exports of liquefied natural gas to the continent.

They’ll move into gold.

• Russia’s $186 Billion Sovereign Wealth Fund Dumps All Dollar Assets (ZH)

Following a series of corporate cyberattacks that American intelligence agencies have blamed on Russian actors, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund (officially the National Wellbeing Fund) has decided to dump all of its dollars and dollar-denominated assets in favor of those denominated in euros, yuan – or simply buying precious metals like gold, which Russia’s central bank has increasingly favored for its own reserves. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov made the announcement Thursday morning at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “We can make this change rather quickly, within a month,” Siluanov told reporters Thursday.

He explained that the Kremlin is moving to reduce exposure to US assets as President Biden threatens more economic sanctions against Russia following the latest ransomware attacks. The transfer will affect $119 billion in liquid assets, Bloomberg reported, but the sales will largely be executed through the Russian Central bank and its massive reserves, limiting the market impact and reducing visibility on what exactly the sovereign wealth fund will be buying. “The central bank can make these changes to the Wellbeing Fund without resorting to market operations,” said Sofya Donets, economist at Renaissance Capital in Moscow. “This in some sense a technical thing.”

Jordan Rochester, currency strategist at Nomura International PLC, said, “This is a transfer of euros from the central bank to the wealth fund, we’ll then see the central bank the holder of the USDs and it’s up to them to manage it. No initial market impact.” The news isn’t a complete surprise: The Bank of Russia, Russia’s central bank, has steadily reduced its dollar holdings over the last few years amid increasing sanctions pressure from the US and Europe. That trend continued through President Trump’s term. Just a few days ago, we reported that the Russian parliament had just authorized the sovereign wealth fund to buy gold through the central bank. However, the central bank reports its holdings with a six-month lag, making it impossible to determine its current holdings.

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Brilliant Ali on how he wants to be remembered.

Muhammad Ali was asked by David Frost how he would like to be remembered. pic.twitter.com/PqcrfomtZw

— Prof. Frank McDonough (@FXMC1957) June 3, 2021

The red train, Landwasserviadukt, Switzerland. Drone photo by Sebastianmzh

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Debt Rattle May 23 2021

May 232021

May 23, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:17 am Finance Tagged with: China, Fauci, hypersonic, Llthuania, statistics, VanDen Bossche, variants, Yeadon 66 Responses »

Edvard Munch Separation 1894

• 160+ Experts Slam Covid Vaccines As ‘Unnecessary, Ineffective And Unsafe’ (LSN)

• Second And Last Reply To M. Yeadon (Van Den Bossche)

• The Danger Of Claimed ‘Statistics’ (Denninger)

• Daily US Covid Cases Lowest In A Year, Pandemic Worsens In Latin America (F.)

• No 10 ‘Tried To Block’ Data On Spread Of New Covid Variant In UK Schools (O.)

• Fauci Faces Drop In Confidence From 40% Of Americans Over Past Year (RT)

• The Disintegrated States Of America (Escobar)

• The New “Rush Hour” (ZH)

• Lithuania Pulls Out Of China’s 17+1 Bloc In Eastern Europe (Pol.eu)

Yeadon

Dr Mike Yeadon who was top scientific research at Pfizer beforeretiring. pic.twitter.com/rDWMlcn7Rh

— Fiona Pancheri KBF #IamYeadon (@fionapanc) May 19, 2021

Michael Yeadon’s group.

• 160+ Experts Slam Covid Vaccines As ‘Unnecessary, Ineffective And Unsafe’ (LSN)

In their letter earlier this month, Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics emphasized serious health implications of the vaccines for both the healthy and ill, saying that the shots “are not safe, either for recipients or for those who use them or authorize their use.” They pointed to risks of “lethal and non-lethal disruptions of blood clotting including bleeding disorders, thrombosis in the brain, stroke and heart attack,” “antibody-dependent enhancement of disease,” autoimmune reactions, and potential effects of “vaccine impurities due to rushed manufacturing and unregulated production standards.”

“Contrary to claims that blood disorders post-vaccination are ‘rare’, many common vaccine side effects (headaches, nausea, vomiting and hematoma-like ‘rashes’ over the body) may indicate thrombosis and other severe abnormalities,” the experts said. “Clotting events currently receiving media attention are likely just the ‘tip of a huge iceberg.’” “Due to immunological priming, risks of clotting, bleeding and other adverse events can be expected to increase with each re-vaccination and each intervening coronavirus exposure,” Doctors for COVID-19 Ethics added. “Over time, whether months or years, this renders both vaccination and coronaviruses dangerous to young and healthy age groups, for whom without vaccination COVID-19 poses no substantive risk,” they argued.

“Just as smoking could be and was predicted to cause lung cancer based on first principles, all gene-based vaccines can be expected to cause blood clotting and bleeding disorders, based on their molecular mechanisms of action,” they said. “Consistent with this, diseases of this kind have been observed across age groups, leading to temporary vaccine suspensions around the world.” “Since vaccine roll-out, COVID-19 incidence has risen in numerous areas with high vaccination rates. Furthermore, multiple series of COVID-19 fatalities have occurred shortly after the onset vaccinations in senior homes,” the doctors said. “These cases may have been due not only to antibody-dependent enhancement but also to a general immunosuppressive effect of the vaccines, which is suggested by the increased occurrence of Herpes zoster in certain patients.”

“Regardless of the exact mechanism responsible for these reported deaths, we must expect that the vaccines will increase rather than decrease lethality of COVID-19,” they continued. The group stressed that the jabs remain technically experimental – a fact that legally precludes mandatory vaccination in many cases: “The vaccines are experimental by definition. They will remain in Phase 3 trials until 2023. Recipients are human subjects entitled to free informed consent under Nuremberg and other protections, including the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s resolution 2361 and the FDA’s terms of emergency use authorization.”

Van Den Bossche has problems with Yeadon. I’m not going to pretend I understand his every word here. But I’d like to know what everybody thinks.

• Second And Last Reply To M. Yeadon (Van Den Bossche)

Michael Yeadon’s rhetoric that mass vaccination campaigns do not have the potential to promote circulation of more infectious immune escape variants and that more infectious variants are not problematic are not based on sound immunological grounds at all. This will be my second but last reply to his erroneous and misleading interpretations. I hate to do this since this may leave the public with the opinion that people like me have nothing else to do than to focus on their own ego, although nothing is less true. However, when the most compelling arguments for my warning about the potentially disastrous consequences of mass vaccination are wiped from the table with scientifically hollow and invalid arguments, one has no choice but to react.

Now, more than ever before, criticism is indispensable to build and consolidate a consensus on why mass vaccination campaigns (using the current vaccines in the heat of a pandemic caused by a highly mutable virus) are highly problematic. However, it doesn’t help when people bring to the table arguments that are scientifically incorrect. Yeadon is basically not understanding the difference between viral escape from protection-blocking immunity and viral escape from infection-/ transmission-blocking immunity. His rhetoric about conserved T cell epitopes and long-lived cross-reactive MHC cl I-restricted responses to those, relate to protection against clinical disease but not against infection!

Yeadon doesn’t seem to understand the mechanism of S-directed immune selection, let alone adaptation of variants to conditions of suboptimal, S-directed immune pressure, which become increasingly prevalent upon mass vaccination. I can barely believe that someone who claims to be a skilled expert in immunology doesn’t see the parallel to serial in vitro cell culture passage of a mutable virus in the presence of suboptimal antibody (Ab) concentrations. In case of CoV inoculated on permissive cells, one would incubate the inoculated cell culture in the presence of suboptimal S-specific Abs to place infectious pressure on viral infectiousness. Provided you harvest the viral progeny and use it to repeat this procedure a number of times, you’ll manage to progressively enrich the viral progeny with naturally occurring S variants that have been selected to overcome the immune pressure placed on the S protein and which are, therefore, more infectious in nature.

“If you’re offered some type of lottery-style prize to do a potentially dangerous thing — run.”

• The Danger Of Claimed ‘Statistics’ (Denninger)

Let’s say that a “bad thing” is likely to happen to 50 in 100,000 people, that is, 0.05%. This is quite rare. Let’s say you do something with 30,000 people. You’d expect to see 15 bad things to happen. Well, let’s say you see three bad events. How confident are you that you just reduced the risk by 80%? If your answer is “not very” you’re wise. If you go cheering in the streets you’re stupid. Now might you try that thing that appears to be 80% effective? Sure, provided the risk of it doing something else that’s bad (which you don’t want to have happen) is also vanishingly small. But it’s one thing to try, and other to rely or make public policy based on those numbers. Remember that for any individual you are a trial of one; you’re not a trial of 100,000 or 330,000,000.

That is the roulette-wheel statistical fallacy and every single casino on the planet uses it to entice you to place a bet that in fact has no better or worse odds than the next table down the row! Assuming that there is no cheating going on and the wheel and ball are in fact “fair” (that is, the ball is round and balanced, and all of the spaces on the wheel have the same characteristics) each roll of the ball has exactly the same odds of landing on a given number on the wheel as every other roll of the ball. The distribution of former outcomes on that board is pure random chance and so is the next throw of the ball. So if the odds are in fact 0.05% of the bad thing then whether 10, 100 or 10,000 people all didn’t have it happen — or some did have it happen — prior to you doing it makes no difference whatsoever.

That five blacks all came up in sequence does not make either black or red (or green for that matter) more or less likely on the next throw of the ball. Your throw is a trial of one and so if the true odds are 0.05% then they are irrespective of all the other trials before. In addition be very careful that risks you think are not related are truly unrelated. For example the risk of being killed in a car accident is approximately 1 in 8,000 per year for a person in the United States. But that’s across everyone; your personal risk, if you drive while intoxicated, is likely quite a bit higher. How much higher? Don’t know, but I bet it’s higher. At the same time if you never take your vehicle outside of city limits where the speed limit is 25mph I bet it’s quite a bit lower. Not your risk of smashing the car, mind you, but your risk of dying due to a car smash.

This becomes quite important when we start talking about actions that have inherent risk to try to reduce a related risk. For example let’s say you take a drug for a given condition. The condition is dangerous and could kill you. The drug could kill you too; all drugs have some risk of doing bad things. Be careful assuming the risk of the drug is the same in everyone because it probably isn’t, just as the risk of the condition is probably not the same in everyone too. If the condition is more-dangerous in certain people for some reason and you know it’s more dangerous in you then you need to be extremely careful to find out whether the risks from the drug scale and, if they do, is their scaling more, equal or less than the factors for the condition. The best situation of course is that whatever makes the condition more-dangerous makes the drug less-so, but this is rare. That the two correlate is common, and that the two are uncorrelated is less-common, but certainly possible.

By the same token the reasonable risk from the drug depends greatly on the hazard from not using it, and instead employing all other known and available countermeasures that may exist. This is why companies look for cancer drugs, incidentally — it’s not just the money to be made but also the degree of risk that is acceptable. If you are searching for a drug that treats ordinary headaches it has to be extremely safe because headaches don’t kill people. Therefore the risk of not using the drug is zero and as a result the risk of using the drug has to be extremely small. But if you’re attempting to find a drug that cures pancreatic cancer then a risk of 1 in 100 or even 1 in 50 of the drug killing you outright looks very reasonable since at present pancreatic cancer is almost-always fatal even with the best of existing treatment.

One final point: If you’re offered some type of lottery-style prize to do a potentially dangerous thing — run.

“In Russia, confirmed cases have fallen to 8,000 from almost 24,000 in early January. In Africa, daily confirmed cases have fallen to under 10,000 from 38,000 in early January.”

• Daily US Covid Cases Lowest In A Year, Pandemic Worsens In Latin America (F.)

The seven-day average of new Covid cases in the U.S. fell to 27,815 on Friday, the lowest level since last June, but the pandemic is gathering strength in Latin America, where the number of virus-related deaths has passed 1 million, with almost half of them in Brazil, while the virus is spreading to rural parts of India from urban centers. A report from the Biden Administration released Friday showed that the number of U.S. counties with “high” levels of Covid transmission has been cut in half since mid-April to 694 But the Covid pandemic is worsening in some of the most heavily populated countries in Latin America, which accounted for 31% of global Covid deaths in May, while representing only 8.4% of the global population.

The seven-day moving average of confirmed Covid cases has risen in Brazil to more than 78,000 from about 57,000 in early May, and in Argentina to almost 37,000 from 5,760 in early February, according to Johns Hopkins. In India, the seven-day moving average of confirmed cases has fallen to about 265,000 from 382,000 a week ago, but health officials warn the pandemic has spread to rural areas amid a second wave. The U.S. is currently averaging about 552 Covid-related deaths per day, according to Johns Hopkins data, the lowest level since last July. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington projects that the number of daily deaths will fall to under 120 by early September, down sharply from 5,500 in early January.

In South America, only 15% of people have received at least one vaccination dose, versus 28% in Europe, while Asia and Africa have even lower rates of 5% and 1%, respectively, according to the website Our World in Data through May 19. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world reported infection rates are generally declining. Daily new infections in Europe have dropped to about 86,000 from 116,000 in early April, according to the Reuters tracker, while newly reported deaths have plunged to under 2,000 from almost 7,000 in late January. In Russia, confirmed cases have fallen to 8,000 from almost 24,000 in early January. In Africa, daily confirmed cases have fallen to under 10,000 from 38,000 in early January. In East Asia, Japan’s daily confirmed cases have jumped to about 5,250 from 1,530 in mid-March, while in South Korea, confirmed new cases have dropped to about 650 from 840 in early January.

What a bunch of amateurs.

• No 10 ‘Tried To Block’ Data On Spread Of New Covid Variant In UK Schools (O.)

Downing Street leaned on Public Health England not to publish crucial data on the spread of the new Covid variant in schools, documents seen by the Observer have suggested. Scientists, union officials and teachers said that the lack of transparency was “deeply worrying”. The focus of their anger concerns the pre-print of a PHE report that included a page of data on the spread of the India Covid-19 variant in schools. But when the report was published on Thursday 13 May, the page had been removed. It was the only one that had been removed from the pre-print. Days later, the government went ahead with its decision to remove the mandate on face coverings in English schools. Evidence seen by the Observer suggests No 10 was directly involved in the decision not to publish it.

The prime minister’s office acknowledged it was in correspondence with PHE officials about presentation of the data but vigorously denied this constituted “interference” or “pressure”. Data on the spread of the new variant in schools has still not been published, despite calls from union officials and scientists who say teachers and families are being put at risk. In hotspots such as Bolton, cases involving the variant are rising fastest among school-age children. Information seen by the Observer reveals that 164 cases of the new variant were linked to schools up to 12 May, or 13% of a total of 2,111 cases. Since then, the number of total cases of the new variant has risen to 3,424 cases, a rise of 160%. The number of cases now linked to schools is unknown.

He’s just another politician.

• Fauci Faces Drop In Confidence From 40% Of Americans Over Past Year (RT)

A new poll has found that over 40% of Americans have lost confidence in White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci in the past year. When asked whether their confidence in Dr. Fauci has gone up or down over the past year, 42% of respondents said their confidence had either “decreased significantly” or just “decreased.” The past year thrust the infectious disease expert into the national spotlight as he became a leader in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. Fauci’s support of lockdown measures and seeming flip-flops on issues like the safety of masking have earned him plenty of critics, however, especially among conservatives, which shows in the poll from Trafalgar Group. Among Republicans, 66% said their confidence in Fauci has waned.

Only 20% of Democrats said they were less confident in the health expert, and 34% even said they now have more confidence in the man. A YouGov and Yahoo News poll released last week reflected similar party-line results, as nearly 80% of Democrat respondents said Fauci was doing an excellent or good job, while less than 20% of Republicans described his job performance as either good or excellent. Over half of Republican respondents (55%) believed Fauci was doing a poor job. In the same poll, over 60% of Republicans said Fauci had actually “hurt” the US during the pandemic. Overall, 46% of participants said the doctor has “helped.”

Changes. Greatly underappreciated in the West.

• The Disintegrated States Of America (Escobar)

Here, Martyanov, in meticulous detail, analyzes the imperial decline thematically – with chapters on Consumption, Geoeconomics, Energy, Losing the Arms Race, among others, composing a devastating indictment especially of toxic D.C. lobbies and the prevailing political mediocrity across the Beltway. What is laid bare for the reader is the complex interplay of forces that are driving the political, ideological, economic, cultural and military American chaos. Chapter 3, on Geoeconomics, is a joy ride. Martyanov shows how geoeconomics as a field separate from warfare and geopolitics is nothing but an obfuscation racket: good old conflict “wrapped in the thin shroud of political sciences’ shallow intellectualism” – the stuff Huntington, Fukuyama and Brzezinski’s dreams are made of.

That is fully developed on Chapter 6, on Western Elites – complete with a scathing debunking of the “myth of Henry Kissinger”: “just another American exceptionalist, mislabeled a ‘realist’”, part of a gang that “is not conditioned to think multi-dimensionally”. After all they’re still not capable of understanding the rationale and the implications of Putin’s 2007 Munich speech that declared the unipolar moment – a crude euphemism for Hegemony – dead and buried. One of Martyanov’s key assessments is that having lost the arms race and every single war it unleashed in the 21st century – as the record shows – geoeconomics is essentially a “euphemism for America’s non-stop sanctions and attempts to sabotage the economies of any nation capable of competing with the United States” (see, for instance, the ongoing Nord Stream 2 saga). This is “the only tool” the US is using trying to halt its decline.

On a chapter on Energy, Martyanov demonstrates how the US shale oil adventure is financially non-viable, and how a rise in oil exports was essentially due to the US “pickin up’ quotas freed chiefly as a result of Russia and Saudi Arabia’s earlier cuts within OPEC + in an attempt to balance the world’s oil market”. In Chapter 7, Losing the Arms Race, Martyanov expands on the key theme he’s the undisputed superstar: the United States cannot win wars. Inflicting Hybrid War is another matter entirely, as in creating “a lot of misery around the world, from effectively starving people to killing them outright”. A glaring example has been “maximum pressure” economic sanctions on Iran.

But the point is these tools – which also included the assassination of Gen Soleimani – that are part of the arsenal of “spreading democracy” have nothing to do with “geoeconomics”, but have “everything to do with the raw power plays designed to achieve the main Clausewitzian object of war – ‘to compel our enemy to do our will’”. And “for America, most of the world is the enemy”. Martyanov also feels compelled to update what he’s been excelling at for years: the fact that the arrival of hypersonic missiles “has changed warfare forever”. The Khinzal, deployed way back in 2017, has a range of 2,000 km and “is not interceptable by existing US anti-missile systems”. The 3M22 Zircon “changes the calculus of both naval and ground warfare completely”. The US lag behind Russia in air-defense systems is “massive, and both quantitative and qualitative”.

More changes.

• The New “Rush Hour” (ZH)

With everybody moving out of cities and into the suburbs to work from home during the pandemic, there’s officially a “new rush hour”. Gone are the days of waiting on the interstate to get in and out of your local metro area around the edges of the nine to five workday. Here now are the days of a different kind of rush hour: one where running errands in the afternoon, while working from home, has suburban streets filling up. Afternoon traffic has “come roaring back” while traditional rush hour times across the U.S. still show traffic below pre-pandemic levels. Marjorie Crosbie, profiled in a new Wall Street Journal article, experienced this change firsthand. The 10 mile trip to pick up her daughter at an after-school program recently took her 45 minutes instead of the usual 22-23 minutes.

Crosbie works as a senior finance manager for PwC and has been working from home full time since the pandemic. In her area, Tampa, afternoon vehicle trips are at 105% of levels they were at pre-pandemic. “In more than 40 of the 100 biggest U.S. metros, roads are more congested on weekday afternoons than they were pre-pandemic,” the report notes. Tim Rivers, Florida market director for commercial real-estate firm JLL, told the Journal: “People are working from home, so the suburbs have tremendous traffic. They’re going out for a morning coffee at Starbucks to take their Teams or Zoom call, or going for a workout midday.” Traffic in the afternoon has come back quicker in metro areas that have reopened earlier, the report notes. 7 of the top 10 trafficked areas have been in Florida, with notable upticks in areas like Fort Myers and Sarasota. In places like San Francisco, New York and Detroit, afternoon weekday trips are still below 80% of pre-pandemic levels, the report notes.

Why would China care about Lithuania? Eurovision?

• Lithuania Pulls Out Of China’s 17+1 Bloc In Eastern Europe (Pol.eu)

Lithuania has dropped out of China’s “17+1” group and urged other EU countries to follow suit, the Baltic state’s foreign minister told POLITICO. “There is no such thing as 17+1 anymore, as for practical purposes Lithuania is out,” Gabrielius Landsbergis said in an email, referring to Beijing’s decade-old initiative to engage Central and Eastern European countries, most of which are from the ex-Soviet bloc. The Lithuanian foreign minister called on other EU countries to also abandon the initiative. “From our perspective, it is high time for the EU to move from a dividing 16+1 format to a more uniting and therefore much more efficient 27+1,” Landsbergis said. “The EU is strongest when all 27 member states act together along with EU institutions.”

“Vaccination rollout, tackling pandemics are just [a] few recent examples of the EU27 united in solidarity and purpose. Unity of [the] 27 is key to success in EU’s relations with external partners. Relations with China should be no exception,” he added. A spokesman for the Chinese Mission to the EU said China was “not aware” of Lithuania’s move, adding: “China-CEEC [Central and Eastern European countries] cooperation mechanism is a cross-regional cooperation mechanism jointly initiated by China and Central and Eastern European countries. It meets the desire of all parties to seek development together. “Rather than being dominated by China, the mechanism involves all parties in cooperation based on voluntarism, extensive consultation, joint contribution, openness and inclusiveness.

“China-CEEC cooperation has been very fruitful in the past nine years since its inception. It has brought tangible benefits to the nations involved and added a new dimension to China-EU relations,” he said. Lithuania’s move is the latest indication of an increasingly shaky relationship between China and the European Union. On Thursday, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to freeze the legislative process for ratifying the EU’s investment pact with China, unless Beijing lifts sanctions against EU lawmakers that were imposed after the 27 EU countries slapped Xinjiang officials with sanctions over mass internment of the Uyghur minorities.

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