Omicron is spreading at a rate we have not seen with any previous variant. I need to be very clear: vaccines alone will not get any country out of this crisis. It’s not vaccines instead of masks, distancing, ventilation or hand hygiene. Do it all. Do it consistently. Do it well. pic.twitter.com/YAVfJXsviQ
3/ I've pondered this question a lot. I've been involved in discussions with @WHO, many IPC and public health researchers and practitioners, politicians in multiple countries etc.
This thread summarizes my understanding of the causes of this situation. I look forward to comments
4/ Early in pandemic, a major historical error in the understanding of the IPC field played a major role
"Droplet transmission" was an important concept in that field... and it is an error that dates from 1910!!
5/ The concept of "sprayborne droplet transmission" was used by Charles Chapin (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V…),
a prominent US Public Health researcher (later pres. of APHA), to
explain the EMPIRICAL OBSERVATION that transmission increases in close
proximity and decreases with distance
6/ As of the start of the pandemic, @WHO and @CDCgov were completely stuck on the concepts from Chapin (e.g. his seminal 1910 book: ), as exemplified by this @WHO video showing the sprayborne droplets as explanation why distance reduces transmission:
7/ The problem is that Chapin had
made an error. He was pushing "contact infection" that he had
conceptualized, and encountered a lot of resistance (his book: archive.org/details/source…).
8/ Chapin was very intelligent, and
was well aware that short-range airborne transmission could also explain
why distance reduced transmission: we breathe less exhaled air from
someone else as we increased distance
americanthinker | I just finished reading an article on the Big Think website
titled "When science mixes with politics, all we get is politics," by
Professor Marcelo Gleiser, theoretical physicist, Dartmouth College. I
mistakenly thought the commentary would decry the misuse of science by
politicians, but no. Instead, it decries the mistrust that we, the
unwashed masses, have developed for the science establishment in recent
years. Unwittingly, the eminent professor gives us yet more reasons to
regard science insiders with skepticism.
He does what so many of his colleagues
do, which is to equate science itself with the institutions that purport
to advance science. To question politicized scientists, then, is
supposedly unscientific.
Censorship of actual science has been heavy-handed, both by Democrats
and by their Big Tech acolytes. Epidemiologists, virologists, and
physicians who do not toe the party line regarding COVID have been
intimidated and silenced. Science that cannot be openly questioned is
not science, since the heart and soul of science are to scrutinize every
claim from every angle. If we are to be told we must follow the
science, then scientists must explain to us the inductive reasoning that
was applied to exclude members of Congress, and their staffs, from the
COVID restrictions they imposed on the rest of us. If scientists are to
decry those of us who doubt their word, then they must equally decry
the policy of distributing unvaccinated, untested illegal aliens to
every state, while denying entry to legal travelers.
To decry only
the skeptics, while ignoring the egregious anti-science of many
politicians, does nothing to engender trust in the institutions of
science. It does the opposite.
scienceblog | As polarization has escalated in the U.S., the question of if and
when that divide becomes insurmountable has become ever more pressing.
In a new study, researchers have identified a tipping point, beyond
which extreme polarization becomes irreversible.
The researchers employed a predictive model of a polarized group,
similar to the current U.S. Senate, to reveal what can happen when the
country faces an attack by a foreign adversary or a global pandemic.
“Instead of uniting against a common threat,” said lead author
Michael Macy, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology
and director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory in the College of Arts
and Sciences, “the threat itself becomes yet another polarizing issue.”
The model allows researchers to study the effects of party identity
and political intolerance on ideological extremism and partisan
division.
“We found that polarization increases incrementally only up to a
point,” Macy said. “Above this point, there is a sudden change in the
very fabric of the institution, like the change from water to steam when
the temperature exceeds the boiling point.”
The dynamics resemble what physicists call “hysteresis loops.”
“We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a
little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too
extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the
existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue,”
said co-author Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and
director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology
Center (NeST) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “If we reach that
point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change,
pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society.”
The work builds on an earlier general model Szymanski developed to
study the interactions of legislators in a two-party political system.
Although the model isn’t specifically tuned to distinctive practices,
customs, and rules of the U.S. Congress, it was trained using data, and
previous research comparing model outcomes to 30 years of Congressional
voting records demonstrated strong predictive power. In one finding from
that work, the model accurately predicted the shift in polarization in 28 of 30 U.S. Congresses.
The China conspiracy theory seems to be working – a survey by the Reagan Foundation found that 52% saw China as the “greatest threat” to the USA
(Russia well behind at 14% and North Korea just behind it at 12%).
Three years ago Russia was 30% to China’s 21%. More striking is that
China has gained twenty points since February. Can the
Putin-won-2016/Trump-won-2020 divide be bridged by a Chinadunnit
conspiracy theory?
But agreeing on a common enemy is one thing, the internal divisions
are something else. In this respect the Reagan Foundation survey cited
above is indicative. It finds that disbelief is spreading rapidly in the
American population: trust in all institutions is dropping; confidence
in the US military is dropping; support for active global leadership is
dropping. A survey just now shows a slight majority of American youth regarding their democracy as in trouble. Not the strongest foundation for more foreign adventures.
A deeply divided country: there is no common conversation in the
United States today – one person’s conspiracy theory is another’s truth.
ecosophia | There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for
that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in
advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people. Popular
though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather,
is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes of society,
bursting forth among outcasts, dreamers, saints, and fools. It then
sweeps inward from there, brushing aside the daydreams of those who
thought they could make the world do as they pleased.
Consider the Roman Empire in the days of its power. While its
politicians and bureaucrats laid their plans and built their careers on
the presupposition that their empire would endure for all imaginable
time, a prisoner on a Mediterranean island—exiled for his membership in a
despised religious cult—saw the empire racked with wars, famines, and
plagues, ravaged by horsemen galloping out of the east, and finally
conquered and fallen into ruin, to be followed by a thousand years of
triumph for his faith. We call him John of Patmos today, and his vision
forms the last book of the New Testament. He was a figure of the
uttermost fringe in his own era: isolated, powerless, and quite possibly
crazy. He was also right.
Thus it’s important to keep a close eye on the fringes of
contemporary culture, the places where the future is being born out of
the surging tides of unreason. One of the things I watch most closely
with this in mind is the burgeoning realm of contemporary conspiracy
theories. Those reveal far more than the conventionally minded imagine,
irrespective of their factual accuracy or lack of same. As Alain de
Botton commented of religions, whether conspiracy theories are true or
not is far and away the least interesting question about them.
To begin with, the popularity of conspiracy theories is a sensitive
measure of the degree to which people no longer trust the conventional
wisdom of their time. That’s an explosive issue just now, and for good
reason: the conventional wisdom of our time is fatally out of step with
the facts on the ground. Look across the whole range of acceptable
views presented by qualified pundits, and by and large you’ll find that a
randomly chosen fortune cookie will give you better guidance. The
debacle in Afghanistan is only one reminder of the extent that a popular
joke about economics—“What do you call an economist who makes a
prediction? Wrong.”—can be applied with equal force to most of the
experts whose notions guide industrial societies.
What makes the astounding incompetence of today’s expert opinions so
toxic is that nobody in the corporate media, and next to nobody in the
political sphere, is willing to talk about it. No matter how disastrous
the consequences turn out to be—no matter how often the economic
policies that were supposed to yield prosperity result in poverty and
misery, no matter how often programs meant to improve the schools make
them worse, no matter how many drugs released on the market as safe and
effective turn out to be neither, and so on at great length—one rule
remains sacrosanct: no one outside the managerial class is supposed to
question the validity of the next round of expert-approved policies, no
matter how obviously doomed to fail they are.
Gregory Bateson, in a fascinating series of articles collected in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
discussed the way that schizophrenia is created by this kind of
suppression of the obvious in a family setting. Insist to a child from
infancy onward that something is true that the child can see is
obviously not true, punish the child savagely every time it tries to
bring up the contradiction, and there’s a fair chance the child will
grow up to be schizophrenic. Conspiracy theories in society are the
collective equivalent of schizophrenia in the individual, and they have
the same cause: the systematic gaslighting of individuals who know that
they are being lied to.
Bateson’s analysis goes further than this. He noticed that, bizarre as
schizophrenic delusions can be, they always contain a solid core of
truth expressed in exaggerated and metaphoric language. Look into the
family situation, Bateson suggests, and you can decode the metaphors.
Here’s a patient who claims that he’s Jesus Christ. Observation of the
family reveals one of those wretched family dramas, as dysfunctional as
it is endlessly repeated, in which the patient was assigned an
ill-fitting role from birth. What the patient is saying, in his
exaggerated and metaphoric way, is quite accurate: “I’m not who they say
I am.”
CTH | Many people have asked: how is the best way to stop the insanity
behind the incessant vaccine narrative? The likely best approach is to
start demanding the pharmaceutical companies have their liability
waivers removed.
If the vaccine is safe and effective, why would the U.S. government still need to provide liability waivers from adverse vaccine outcomes?
Start pressuring legislators and elected officials to force the
elimination of the waivers. Alinsky them… Make them live up to their
own narrative; their own words, their own rules. If the vaccines are
safe/effective, why do we need the waivers? If you want to get more
people vaccinated, drop the waiver moving forward.
Eliminate those liability waivers and watch how fast every vaccine
mandate is dropped, while every voice demanding vaccination goes quiet.
Twitter is designed in a way to mislead and distort objective reality.
This headline based on one Bloomberg opinion piece was trending on Twitter for literally *weeks*, leading many people to believe that the vaccine mandates were perfectly constitutional.
taibbi | Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the
“insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has
risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you
hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who
immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the
record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of
profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in
revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson &
Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic
news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good,
during a time of severe cultural crisis.
Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic
fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured
in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood
producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere:
America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t
exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets
cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The
concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths
to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary
roles as workers and shoppers.
In the Trump era, all this has been turned upside down. There’s
actually more depraved, dishonest propaganda than before, but the new
legends are explicitly anti-unifying and anti-patriotic. The people who
run this country seem less invested than ever in maintaining anything
like social cohesion, maybe because they mostly live in wealth
archipelagoes that might as well be separate nations (if they even live
in America at all).
All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic
economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional
Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America
more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody
believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is
trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime
before Battlefield Earth breaks out.
It’s only in this context that these endless cycles of
hyper-divisive propaganda make sense. It’s time to start wondering if
maybe it’s not a coincidence that politicians and pundits alike are
pushing us closer and closer to actual civil war at exactly the moment
when corporate wealth extraction is reaching its highest-ever levels of
efficiency.
mises | Under the Great Reset governance model, states and favored
corporations form “public-private partnerships” in control of
governance. The configuration yields a corporate-state hybrid largely
unaccountable to the constituents of national governments.
The cozy relationship between multinational corporations and
governments has even aroused the scorn of a few left-leaning critics.
They note that the governance model of the WEF represents at least the
partial privatization of the UN’s Agenda 2030, with the WEF bringing
corporate partners, money, and supposed expertise on the 4-IR to the
table. And the WEF’s governance model extends well beyond the UN,
affecting the constitution and behavior of governments worldwide. This
usurpation has led political scientist Ivan Wecke to call the WEF’s
governmental redesign of the world system “a corporate takeover of
global governance.”8
This is true, but the obverse is also the case. The WEF model also represents thegovernmentalization of private industry.
Under Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism” and the multistakeholder
governance model, governance is not only increasingly privatized, but
also and more importantly, corporations are deputized as major additions
to governments and intergovernmental bodies. The state is thereby
extended, enhanced, and augmented by the addition of enormous corporate
assets. These include funding directed at “sustainable development” to
the exclusion of the noncompliant, as well as the use of Big Data,
artificial intelligence, and 5G to monitor and control citizens. In the
case of the covid vaccine regime, the state grants Big Pharma monopoly
protection and indemnity from liability in exchange for a vehicle by
which to expand its powers of coercion. As such, corporate stakeholders
become what I have called “governmentalities”—otherwise “private”
organizations wielded as state apparatuses, with no obligation to answer
to pesky constituents.9 Since
these corporations are multinational, the state essentially becomes
global, whether or not a “one-world government” is ever formalized.
In Google Archipelago,
I argued that leftist authoritarianism is the political ideology and
modus operandi of what I call Big Digital, and that Big Digital is the
leading edge of an emerging world system. Big Digital is the
communications, ideological, and technological arm of an emerging
corporate socialism. The Great Reset is the name that has since been
given to the project of establishing this world system.
Just as Klaus Schwab and the WEF hoped, the covid crisis has
accelerated the development of the Great Reset’s corporate-socialist
statism. Developments advancing the Great Reset agenda include the
Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money, the subsequent
inflation, the increasing taxation on everything imaginable, the
increased dependence on the state, the supply chain crisis, the
restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of
personal carbon allowances.10 Altogether,
these and other such policies constitute a coordinated attack on the
majority. Ironically, they also represent the “fairness” aspect of the
Great Reset—if we properly understand fairness to mean leveling the
economic status of the "average American" with those in less
“privileged” regions. And this is one of the functions of woke ideology11—to
make the majority in developed countries feel unworthy of their
“privileged” lifestyles and consumption patterns, which the elite are in
the process of resetting to a reduced and static new normal.
technofog | The CDC caused an uproar in early September 2021, after it changed
its definitions of “vaccination” and “vaccine.” For years, the CDC had
set definitions for vaccination/vaccine that discussed immunity. This
all changed on September 1, 2021.
The prior CDC Definitions of Vaccine and Vaccination (August 26, 2021):
Vaccine:
A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity
to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines
are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be
administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.
The CDC Definitions of Vaccine and Vaccination since September 1, 2021:
Vaccine:
A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response
against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle
injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the
nose.
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.
People
noticed. Representative Thomas Massie was among the first to discuss
the change, noting the definition went from “immunity” to “protection”.
To many observers, it appeared the CDC changed the definitions
because of the waning effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines. For
example, the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine falls over time, with
an Israeli study
reported in August 2021 as showing the vaccine being “only 16%
effective against symptomatic infection for those individuals who had
two doses of the shot back in January.” The CDC recognizes the waning
effectiveness, thus explaining their promotion of booster shots.
Of course, the usual suspects defended the CDC. The Washington Post, for example, cast doubt that the CDC changed the definition because of issues with the COVID-19 vaccines. The CDC tried to downplay the change, stating “slight changes in wording over time … haven’t impacted the overall definition.”
Internal CDC E-Mails
CDC emails we obtained
via the Freedom of Information Act reveal CDC worries with how the
performance of the COVID-19 vaccines didn’t match the CDC’s own
definition of “vaccine”/“vaccination”. The CDC’s Ministry of Truth went
hard at work in the face of legitimate public questions on this issue.
In one August 2021 e-mail, a CDC employee cited to complaints that “Right-wing covid-19 deniers are using your ‘vaccine’ definition to argue that mRNA vaccines are not vaccines…”
theatlantic | We know how this ends: The coronavirus becomes endemic, and we live with it forever.
But what we don’t know—and what the U.S. seems to have no coherent plan
for—is how we are supposed to get there. We’ve avoided the hard
questions whose answers will determine what life looks like in the next
weeks, months, and years: How do we manage the transition to endemicity?
When are restrictions lifted? And what long-term measures do we keep,
if any, when we reach endemicity?
The
answers were simpler when we thought we could vaccinate our way to herd
immunity. But vaccinations in the U.S. have plateaued. The Delta
variant and waning immunity against transmission mean herd immunity may well be impossible even if every single American gets a shot. So when COVID-related restrictions came back with the Delta wave, we no longer had an obvious off-ramp
to return to normal—are we still trying to get a certain percentage of
people vaccinated? Or are we waiting until all kids are eligible? Or for
hospitalizations to fall and stay steady? The path ahead is not just
unclear; it’s nonexistent. We are meandering around the woods because we
don’t know where to go.
What is clear, however, is that case numbers, the metric that has guided much of our pandemic thinking and still underlies CDC’s indoor-masking recommendation
for vaccinated people, are becoming less and less useful. Even when we
reach endemicity—when nearly everyone has baseline immunity from either
infection or vaccination—the U.S. could be facing tens of millions of infections from the coronavirus every year,
thanks to waning immunity and viral evolution. (For context, the flu,
which is also endemic, sickens roughly 10 to 40 million Americans a
year.) But with vaccines available, not every case of COVID-19 is
created equal. Breakthrough cases are largely mild; 10,000 of them will
cause only a fraction of the hospitalizations and deaths of 10,000 COVID
cases in the unvaccinated. The more highly vaccinated a community is,
the less tethered case numbers are to the reality of the virus’s impact.
On
the ground, the U.S. is now running an uncontrolled experiment with
every strategy all at once. COVID-19 policies differ wildly by state,
county, university, workplace, and school district. And because of
polarization, they have also settled into the most illogical pattern
possible: The least vaccinated communities have some of the laxest
restrictions, while highly vaccinated communities—which is to say those
most protected from COVID-19—tend to have some of the most aggressive
measures aimed at driving down cases. “We’re sleepwalking into policy
because we’re not setting goals,” says Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor
of public health. We will never get the risk of COVID-19 down to
absolute zero, and we need to define a level of risk we can live with.
The signals began ringing loudly in December 2020, when first covid
shots were administered, and quickly became deafening. They were that
loud, and the extraordinary magnitude of them has been and continues to
be ignored by our government at all levels in Washington DC, all levels!
Senators this week demonstrated that they could put the heat on,
witness AG Merrick Garland — when they want to take something seriously.
However, despite the Loudon rape fiascos, which senators used to slap
Garland around with, Garland the Magnificent remains in office. And his
order to FBI to treat parents complaining about public school
corruption remain “domestic terrorists” remains in place far as I know.
Save for Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, none of them have lifted a
finger, while thousands and tens of thousands dead, permanently
disabled, maimed, injured, blinded, cancers that were in remission came
back, ditto herpes, thousands of miscarriages and who knows how many
thousands of women now permanently sterilized? from these poisons sold
as preventive medicine. Among many, many other injuries. And hospitals
across the land fire skilled medical staff for saying anything about
this grotesque bestiality. These are not hospitals; they are charnel
houses!
What are these shots actually preventing, —- if 85% of those dead after covid shot got the disease anyways?
Below is data indicating how out of control the covid shot injuries
are, which also indicates the moral turpitude of Congress, Biden, and
his men [and Trump’s advocacy of “warp speed” vax], et al.
In the 11 months preceding covid shot rollout, Jan — Nov 2020,
34,701 adverse events reported to VAERS — for ALL vaccines combined.
In the 11 months since, Dec 2020 to Oct 2021,
622,743 adverse events for covid-only shots
Nearly 17 times more, or 1,685% more.
This is what vaccine failure looks like.
This is what government failure looks like.
Had the CDC and US Food and Drug Administration been serious about
adverse events and in particular, the percentage of those either having
covid or not, they would have done something to ensure that there would
be data on this, for each and every VAERS report submitted.
In particular, regarding VAERS reports in which death occurs after covid shots.
While 100% data on this may seem like pie in the sky, the least we
should expect is what Pfizer and Moderna claimed was 95% Vaccine
Effectiveness VE. Which as we now know was base, rank, propaganda and
deception, at best.
Irrespective of the fact that the actual VE of these poisons tends toward zero, one can at the very least expect that the percentage of VAERS reports
on who did and did not test positive for this disease should have at a minimum
been ~ 43%.
43% is the CDC estimated VE, from average of previous decade’s [through 2019/2020 flu season], of influenza shots.
Instead, only 16.42% is actually reported in VAERS data bank. That’s bad, that’s really unconscionably bad.
VAERS data shows that of all the after covid shot deaths,
2.54 % reported “SARS-COV-2 TEST NEGATIVE”
13.88% reported “SARS-COV-2 TEST POSITIVE”
Where are the other 83.58% ???
Thus, only 16.42% of this essential data is actually, as of Oct. 29 data, known via VAERS.
Assuming these proportions are at least in the ball park, this means
~85% of after covid shot deaths tested positive
~15% tested negative.
[13.88/16.42 = 84.531, or 85% rounding; 100-84.531 = ~15%]
8,086 deaths after covid shot reported to VAERS x 21X = ~165,000 actual deaths.
165,000 x 0.85 = ~144,211 died with positive test
165,000 x 0.15 = 21,631 died with negative test.
Total = ~ 165,842
Rose says that these deaths are caused by covid shots.
vanityfair | The disclosures of the last four months—since Vanity Fair was first to detail how conflicts of interest resulting from U.S. government funding of controversial virology research hampered America’s investigation into COVID-19’s origins—present an increasingly disturbing picture.
Early last month, The Intercept published
more than 900 pages of documents it obtained through a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit against the NIH, relating to EcoHealth
Alliance’s grant research. But there was one document missing, a fifth
and final progress report that EcoHealth Alliance had been required to
submit at the end of its grant period in 2019.
In its letter Wednesday, NIH included that missing progress report,
which was dated August 2021. That report described a “limited
experiment,” as the NIH letter phrased it, in which laboratory mice
infected with an altered virus became “sicker than those infected with” a
naturally occurring one.
The letter did not
mention the phrase “gain-of-function research” that has become so
central to the bitter clashes over COVID-19’s origins. That type of
controversial research—the manipulation of pathogens with the aim of
making them more infectious in order to gauge their risk to humans—has
divided the virology community. A review system established in 2017
requires federal agencies to particularly scrutinize any research
proposals that involve enhancing a pathogen’s infectiousness to humans.
Dr. Fauci’s spokesperson told Vanity Fair
that EcoHealth Alliance’s research did not fall under that framework,
since the experiments being funded “were not reasonably expected to
increase transmissibility or virulence in humans.”
However, Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and coauthor of the book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,
said the NIH was in a “very challenging position. They funded research
internationally to help study novel pathogens and prevent against them.
But they had no way to know what viruses had been collected, what
experiments had been conducted, and what accidents might have occurred.”
As
scientists remain in a stalemate over the pandemic’s origins, another
disclosure last month made clear that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership
with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was aiming to do the kind of
research that could accidentally have led to the pandemic. On September
20, a group of internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC (short for
Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19)
released a leaked $14 million grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance had
submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA).
It proposed partnering with the Wuhan
Institute of Virology and constructing SARS-related bat coronaviruses
into which they would insert “human-specific cleavage sites” as a way to
“evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens. Perhaps not surprisingly,
DARPA rejected the proposal, assessing that it failed to fully address
the risks of gain-of-function research.
The leaked
grant proposal struck a number of scientists and researchers as
significant for one reason. One distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s
genetic code is a furin cleavage site that makes the virus more
infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. That is just
the feature that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology
had proposed to engineer in the 2018 grant proposal. “If I applied for
funding to paint Central Park purple and was denied, but then a year
later we woke up to find Central Park painted purple, I’d be a prime
suspect,” said Jamie Metzl, a former executive vice president of the Asia Society, who sits on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing and has been calling for a transparent investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
americanthinker | Lately, it has been all about getting 100% of the population jabbed.
For what reason? I am not sure, and some of the more detailed and
investigated theories scare me. I shudder to think. But last year’s
heroes are being labeled selfish and villainous for not getting the
vaccine. Hospital systems have abandoned their community’s health and
ignored early successful outpatient treatment in favor of huge
government subsidies for inpatient and ICU treatment. The success of
these treatments was not great, but that is another article. Now we
have the same hospital systems turning their backs on their own
employees. Basically, health providers have a choice, get shot, or get
fired. How does that help? Both vaxxed and unvaxxed can spread the
virus, so it doesn’t help anyone. It only helps the hospital to get
more government money by meeting quotas.
I, for one, will
remember that when we faced a real crisis, the hospitals and many
physicians chose money and profit over their own community’s best
interest. Perhaps it is time for groups of physicians to get back to
running their own healthcare clinics and hospitals. We used to have a
code of ethics. We used to put patients first. Not anymore.
As
for physicians, those who are blindly following the government edicts
are culpable in a moral atrocity. Bullying and deriding patients who
chose to refrain from this still experimental therapy is an
abomination. (You will say it isn’t experimental anymore, to which I
would say that just because the government broke its own rules regarding
approval, doesn’t make it legal or right). Patients have sincere
beliefs for making their choice. Respect their thoughts. Do you yell
as much at smokers, drinkers, fornicators, drug abusers, etc? No, I
think not. I think you chose to fit in because it gives you a sense of
righteousness.
And going so far as to encourage vaccination in
children and pregnant women is crazy. There is blood on the hands of
any physician who does this. With children, there is no benefit to the
vaccine, only harm. They would serve themselves and society better with
natural immunity. The vaccine hasn’t been studied on women and their
babies. It is pregnancy category X (unknown) but being pushed wholesale
on these poor women without proper studies. Shame on you, doctors who
are doing this. I certainly have lots to answer for when I meet my
maker, but this is on another level.
I beg physicians to get back
to basics, remember all the epidemiology and immunology that bored us to
tears in school. Investigate the real literature and take a stand.
Society needs us to do this. Even if you have been vaccinated, help
those who are fighting for their lives. Stand up against this forced
vaccine tyranny. Support those who have legitimate reasons for
declining the jab. If you don’t stand up now, who will stand up for you
when you are faced with your choice of yet another booster or your job.
CTH | According to Dr Pierre Kory, MD, MPA, and verified by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance
(FLCCC), 100 to 200 congressional reps and/or staff and families who
contracted COVID-19 were treated with the Front Line Ivermectin
protocol.
Fun fact: Between 100-200 United States Congress Members (plus many of their staffers & family members) with COVID.. were treated by a colleague over the past 15 months with ivermectin & the I-MASK+ protocol at https://t.co/OvU8SLfLJq. None have gone to hospital. Just sayin'
This successful treatment is happening at the same time many
congressional representatives are playing politics in favor of the
vaccine; downplaying the effective anti-viral treatment and therapeutic approach with Ivermectin; and taking action to block regular American citizens from seeking similar treatment with Ivermectin.
Congress can seek treatment with a medication they simultaneously
deny to others? This is well beyond a “scandal”, and needs to be
investigated quickly.
Friends, we would not have tweeted something of this magnitude and importance without knowing for certain that it was true, and that the source was unassailable. https://t.co/V7XUZkqLOt
— Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care (@Covid19Critical) October 8, 2021
Additionally, as Merck has announced a new and similar anti-viral
drug called Molnupiravir, two trial studies in India have requested to
exit the trials. Apparently the issue surrounds the new drug providing
no benefit once a patient is moderately ill and hospitalized (READ MORE, Reuters Link).
NYTimes | Newer
variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious,
infecting far more people than the original virus. Two new studies
offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more
efficiently through air.
The realization that the coronavirus is airborne indoors
transformed efforts to contain the pandemic last year, igniting fiery
debates about masks, social distancing and ventilation in public spaces.
Most
researchers now agree that the coronavirus is mostly transmitted
through large droplets that quickly sink to the floor and through much
smaller ones, called aerosols, that can float over longer distances
indoors and settle directly into the lungs, where the virus is most
harmful.
The new studies don’t
fundamentally change that view. But the findings signal the need for
better masks in some situations, and indicate that the virus is changing
in ways that make it more formidable.
“This
is not an Armageddon scenario,” said Vincent Munster, a virologist at
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who led one
of the new studies. “It is like a modification of the virus to more
efficient transmission, which is something I think we all kind of
expected, and we now see it happening in real time.”
The
studies compared the Alpha variant with the original virus or other
older variants. But the results may also explain why the Delta variant
is so contagious — and why it displaced all other versions of the virus.
“It
really indicates that the virus is evolving to become more efficient at
transmitting through the air,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne
viruses at Virginia Tech who was not involved in either study. “I
wouldn’t be surprised if, with Delta, that factor were even higher.”
cnbc | EISEN: Dr. Fauci, you guys have been pushing the vaccine and I
obviously understand why. I’m vaccinated but I also have COVID and it
spread through my entire family in the past few weeks. That’s why I’m
doing the show from home today and I just wonder about the public
messaging around vaccinations. Three vaccinated people got COVID in my
house, two unvaccinated children got it. Are you too casual about the
limitations of the vaccine because it does feel to me that these
breakthroughs are happening, they’re happening regularly, and we haven’t
really seen the government pay that much attention to them or warn
about them too much. The bottom line is we were still able to get it and
transmit it. Thank god we’re not in the hospital, I get it, I’m
vaccinated, but you can get it and transmit it and the government hasn’t
been warning about that.
FAUCI: Oh yes I am, we have. And we’ve
said that and let me just give you the science and the facts. If you are
an unvaccinated person, you have five times the likelihood of getting
infected, 11 times the likelihood of being hospitalized and 11 times the
likelihood of dying, compared to someone who’s been vaccinated. So, the
data showing the benefit of vaccines is incontrovertible. If you look
at the people who have died from COVID-19, overwhelmingly 90 plus
percent of them are unvaccinated. Vaccination protects you against
severe disease and even when you get breakthrough infections because
remember no vaccine is 100%, protected, but what we do know is that if
you get vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection, you are much less
likely of getting a severe outcome. It is much more likely that you in
fact would either be without symptoms or be mildly symptomatic so you
should not confuse the very important data that we now have a drug that
can diminish hospitalization and death by 50%. You should not confuse
that with the overwhelming benefits of the protection of vaccines. Those
should not be confused.
"If you look at the people who have died from COVID-19, overwhelmingly 90% of them are unvaccinated," says Dr. Fauci. "If you get vaccinated and get a break through infection, you are much less likely of having a severe outcome and much more likely you would be without symptoms." pic.twitter.com/gEFsIjTNWj
EISEN: 100%. But it says on the CDC
website, Dr. Fauci, that infections happen in only a small proportion of
people who are fully vaccinated and when these infections occur among
the vaccinated, they tend to be mild, but the CDC doesn’t even track the
breakthrough infections. So how do we know that they’re happening to a
small proportion and how do we know that they are tending to be mild?
It’s not a question of whether hospitalizations and death, we know that
benefit, it’s just public messaging and being transparent about the risk
for vaccinated people.
FAUCI: Well, in the past, the CDC has not,
you’re quite correct, tracked all real and potential asymptomatic
infections. They are modifying that right now in the studies that are
being done that would give the kind of information that you’re talking
about. Also, it’s very important to know that with the booster rollout
that we’ve been talking about, we are anticipating that we will get an
extra added boost in the sense of clinical effect. The Israelis
themselves are now showing very, very clearly, that when you give a
person who’s received two doses of an mRNA in this case, Pfizer, when
you give that person a boost, you dramatically diminish the infection,
you dramatically diminish the likelihood of getting a severe outcome,
and importantly, there are early data that are now showing that you
actually begin to show a diminution in the transmission itself. So, in
answer to your very appropriate question about if you get vaccinated and
you get infected, is there less of a chance that you will be
transmitting it to someone who is unvaccinated or someone who is
vulnerable, the chances of doing that are diminished by being vaccinated
and even further diminished, according to preliminary data we’ll wait
to see the real fundamental core of the data, but it looks like that
extra added of protection from a boost will be very valuable. Again,
we’re talking about data that’s being rolled out in real time and that’s
why when I’m using terminology that we’re having strong suggestions, we
want to wait until we get a lot of data to be able to say that with a
degree of confidence.
youtube | Crafting policy around medical misinformation comes charged with
inherent challenges and tradeoffs. Scientific understanding evolves as
new research emerges, and firsthand, personal experience regularly plays
a powerful role in online discourse. Vaccines in particular have been a
source of fierce debate over the years, despite consistent guidance
from health authorities about their effectiveness. Today, we're
expanding our medical misinformation policies on YouTube with new guidelines
on currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to
be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO.
Our Community Guidelines already prohibit certain types of medical
misinformation. We've long removed content that promotes harmful
remedies, such as saying drinking turpentine can cure diseases. At the
onset of COVID-19, we built on these policies when the pandemic hit, and
worked with experts to develop 10 new policies around COVID-19 and medical misinformation. Since last year, we’ve removed over 130,000 videos for violating our COVID-19 vaccine policies.
Throughout
this work, we learned important lessons about how to design and enforce
nuanced medical misinformation policies at scale. Working closely with
health authorities, we looked to balance our commitment to an open
platform with the need to remove egregious harmful content. We’ve
steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over
into misinformation about vaccines in general, and we're now at a point
where it's more important than ever to expand the work we started with
COVID-19 to other vaccines.
Specifically, content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are
dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not
reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains
misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines will be removed.
This would include content that falsely says that approved vaccines
cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that substances in vaccines can
track those who receive them. Our policies not only cover specific
routine immunizations like for measles or Hepatitis B, but also apply to
general statements about vaccines.
As with our COVID
guidelines, we consulted with local and international health
organizations and experts in developing these policies. For example, our
new guidance on vaccine side effects maps to public vaccine resources
provided by health authorities and backed by medical consensus. These
policy changes will go into effect today, and as with any significant
update, it will take time for our systems to fully ramp up enforcement.
ipsos | Americans’ trust in President Joe Biden to provide them with accurate
information on COVID-19 is on the decline, according to the latest
Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index. Fewer than half now say they trust the
president, a 13-percentage point decline from his high water mark right
after his inauguration in January. This week’s poll also shows Americans
generally perceive less risk in going out – on a plane, to restaurants,
or to see friends, in particular – than they did two weeks ago.
Finally, after last week’s announcement that the Pfizer vaccine works
for children aged 5-11, parents of children in this age group are split
on whether they will get their kids vaccinated once eligible.
Detailed findings:
1. Trust in various people and institutions – namely President Biden,
the federal government, and the news media – to provide accurate
information about COVID-19 drops slightly.
Fewer than half (45%) now trust President Biden to provide
accurate information about coronavirus, down significantly from when he
took office in January (58%).
Compared to the January high point, Biden has lost trust relatively
evenly across the board from Democrats (an 11-percentage point decline
to 81% trust a great deal or fair amount) and Republicans (a 10-point
decline to 11%). He has experienced a slightly larger decline among
independents (a 17-point decline to 42%).
The number who trust in the federal government to relay accurate
information has also declined to just under half (49%), compared to 54%
two weeks ago.
2. Compared to the past month, fewer Americans see going out as
presenting a large risk to their health. However, this change in their
risk calculation has not translated to significant behavioral change.
Just over one in ten believe attending in-person gatherings with
friends and family (13%) or dining in at a restaurant (12%) poses a
large risk to their health, a decrease of five percentage points from
two weeks ago when 18% and 17%, respectively, saw these activities as
very risky.
Currently, a quarter (27%) think traveling on an airplane or mass
transit is a large risk to their health, compared to 35% two weeks ago.
With Halloween on the horizon, fewer Americans now think allowing
trick-or-treating in their community poses a large risk to their health
(13% this year, 25% last year).
In terms of actual behaviors over the past few weeks, though
slightly more report going out to eat this week, all other reported
behaviors (seeing friends, social distancing, visiting retail stores,
etc.) remain steady.
3. Just after the announcement of the Pfizer vaccine’s efficacy
for children 5-11, parents of children in that age group are split over
whether to get their kids vaccinated once eligible.
Parents with children aged 5-11 are split on whether they will
vaccinate their kids when eligible. 44% say they are likely to do so,
while 42% are unlikely. This poll was conducted in the immediate days
following the announcement that the vaccine works for children in this
age group.
Overall, about three in five (57%) parents of children under 18 say
they are likely to vaccinate or have vaccinated their children.
Looking at the impact of COVID on schools, compared to last summer,
parents now perceive a smaller risk in sending their kids to school.
Only 19% of parents think sending their kids to school poses a large
risk, down from 32% last August.
Around one in eight Americans (13%) say their local school district
has closed schools in the past week due to a COVID-19 outbreak.
Two more guerilla libraries in Hoboken, NJ
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This is a follow-up to my Saturday post on guerilla libraries.
Here’s the Little Free Library located at 935 Bloomfield Ave. At that part
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A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
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New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...