theatlantic | For both yes-vaxxers like me and the no-vaxxers I spoke with,
feelings about the vaccine are intertwined with feelings about the
pandemic.
Although I think I’m right about the vaccines, the truth
is that my thinking on this issue is motivated. I canceled vacations,
canceled my wedding, avoided indoor dining, and mostly stayed home for
15 months. All that sucked. I am rooting for the vaccines to work.
But
the no-vaxxers I spoke with just don’t care. They’ve traveled, eaten in
restaurants, gathered with friends inside, gotten COVID-19 or not
gotten COVID-19, survived, and decided it was no big deal. What’s more,
they’ve survived while flouting the advice of the CDC, the WHO, Anthony
Fauci, Democratic lawmakers, and liberals, whom they don’t trust to give
them straight answers on anything virus-related.
The
no-vaxxers’ reasoning is motivated too. Specifically, they’re motivated
to distrust public-health authorities who they’ve decided are a bunch
of phony neurotics, and they’re motivated to see the vaccines as a risky
pharmaceutical experiment, rather than as a clear breakthrough that
might restore normal life (which, again, they barely stopped living).
This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites.
So what will change their minds?
I
cannot imagine that any amount of hectoring or shaming, or
proclamations from the public-health or Democratic communities, will
make much of a difference for this group. “I’ve lost all faith in the
media and public-health officials,”said Myles Pindus, a 24-year-old in
Brooklyn, who told me he is skeptical of the mRNA vaccines and is
interested in the Johnson & Johnson shot. “It might sound crazy, but
I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take
guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci,” Baca, the Colorado truck
driver, told me. Other no-vaxxers offered similar appraisals of various
Democrats and liberals, but they were typically less printable.
From
my conversations, I see three ways to persuade no-vaxxers: make it more
convenient to get a shot; make it less convenient to not get a shot; or
encourage them to think more socially.
theatlantic | Nonprofit organizations that provide these training
sessions argued that the order violated their free-speech rights and
hampered their ability to conduct their business. In December, a federal
judge agreed; President Joe Biden rescinded the order the day he took
office. But by then, critical race theory was already a part of the
conservative lexicon. Since Trump’s executive order, Rufo told me, he
has provided his analysis “to a half-dozen state legislatures, the
United States House of Representatives, and the United States Senate.”
One such state legislature was New Hampshire’s; on February 18, the
lower chamber held a hearing to discuss Keith Ammon’s bill. Rufo was
among those who testified in support of it.
Concerned that the
measure might fail on its own, Republicans have now included its
language in a must-pass budget bill. In March, Republican Governor Chris
Sununu signaled that he would object to “divisive concepts” legislation
because he believes it is unconstitutional, but he has since tempered
his stand. “The ideas of critical race theory and all of this stuff—I
personally don’t think there’s any place for that in schools,” he said
in early April. But, he added, “when you start turning down the path of
the government banning things, I think that’s a very slippery slope.”
Almost everyone I spoke with for this article assumed that Sununu would
sign the budget bill, and that the divisive-concepts ban would become
law.
Although free-speech advocates are confident that bills like Ammon’s
will not survive challenges in court, they believe the real point is to
scare off companies, schools, and government agencies from discussing
systemic racism. “What these bills are designed to do is prevent
conversations about how racism exists at a systemic level in that we all
have implicit biases that lead to decisions that, accumulated, lead to
significant racial disparities,” Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director
of the ACLU of New Hampshire, told me. “The proponents of this bill want
none of those discussions to happen. They want to suppress that type of
speech.”
Conservatives are not the only critics of diversity
training. For years, some progressives, including critical race
theorists, have questioned its value: Is it performative? Is it the
most effective way to move toward equity or is it simply an effective
way of restating the obvious and stalling meaningful action? But
that is not the fight that has materialized over the past nine months.
Instead, it is a confrontation with a cartoonish version of critical
race theory.
For
Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating
another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare
mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years. What’s
less clear is whether average voters care much about the debate. In a
recent Atlantic/Leger poll, 52 percent of respondents who
identified as Republicans said that states should pass laws banning
schools from teaching critical race theory, but just 30 percent of
self-identified independents were willing to say the same. Meanwhile, a
strong majority of Americans, 78 percent, either had not heard of
critical race theory or were unsure whether they had.
Last week,
after President Biden’s first joint address to Congress—and as Idaho was
preparing to pass its bill—Senator Tim Scott stood in front of United
States and South Carolina flags to deliver the Republican response.
“From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money
and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress,” Scott
said. “You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a
racist country.” Rufo immediately knew what he meant. “Senator Tim Scott
denounces critical race theory in his response to Biden’s speech
tonight,” he tweeted. “We have turned critical race theory into a
national issue and conservative political leaders are starting to
fight.”
newyorker | The invention of the sensitivity-training group is often traced to a
specific evening: Lewin was running a workshop for teachers and social
workers in Connecticut, where he had been hired by the state to help
address racial and religious prejudice. After the participants had left,
a few stragglers returned and asked to be permitted to sit in on the
debriefings, and Lewin agreed. Though it was initially awkward to have
the participants present, Lewin realized that the setup led to frank and
open conversations. He saw the transformative possibilities of
uninhibited feedback in the real time of the group session, and
established the idea of the corporate T-group—shorthand for sensitivity
“training group”—at the National Training Laboratory, in Bethel, Maine.
His inroads into social engineering could also be put to less
conciliatory purposes; Lewin was a consultant for the Office of
Strategic Services and developed programs to help recruit potential
spies.
The T-group, which was sometimes called “therapy for
normals”—rather insensitively by today’s standards but with the intent
of destigmatizing the practice—was a therapeutic workshop for strangers
which would take place in a neutral locale and promote candid emotional
exchange. A typical T-group session would begin with the facilitator
declining to assume any active leadership over the session, a move that
would surprise and disconcert the participants, who would collectively
have to work out the problem of how to deal with a lack of hierarchy or
directives.
It sounds simple enough, but the experience could be
deeply unsettling, even life-changing, for some. As one contemporary
witness of the Bethel N.T.L. workshops remarked, “I had never observed
such a buildup of emotional tension in such a short time. I feared it
was more than some leaders and members could bear.” The T-group promised
an antidote to the oppressions of Dale Carnegie-style insincerity that
dominated the business world, and, crucially, the sessions seemed to
provide a glimpse of a reality in which it was finally possible to know
how one was really perceived.
the prize for the “toughest encounter seminar that had been ever
convened at Esalen” went to one run collaboratively by George Leonard
and Price Cobbs. Leonard was a white psychologist from the South, whose
youthful encounter with the terrified eyes of a Black prisoner
surrounded by a white mob instilled in him a lifelong commitment to
fighting racism. He implored Cobbs, an African-American psychiatrist who
was co-authoring the book “Black Rage,”
to come to Esalen to collaborate. They organized a storied,
twenty-four-hour-marathon racial-sensitivity workshop between Black and
white participants that became rancorous: “the anger rolled on and on
without end” and “interracial friendships crumbled on the spot.”
Finally, Anderson relates how, as the sun was beginning to rise, an
African-American woman was moved to spontaneously comfort a crying white
woman, and this shifted the tenor of the entire session. Though the
episode could easily be read less sunnily, as another troubling instance
of the oppressor requiring comfort from the oppressed, the facilitators
purportedly deemed it a success. Cobbs spoke to Leonard and declared,
“George, we’ve got to take this to the world.”
Cobbs’s
career encapsulates the shift of sensitivity training from its literary
roots to corporate argot. He was sparked by early epiphanies about
Black anger and injustice, inspired by reading Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. He admired the plot of “Invisible Man,”
for instance, because “the unnamed main character’s sense of his own
invisibility fans his ultimate rage into flames of
self-expression. . . .” Cobbs credited Lewin’s research as a key
precedent when he went on to found Pacific Management Systems, a
training center for T-group leaders, and he played a role in the spinoff
of diversity training from sensitivity training. His years of advising
African-American businesspeople formed the basis of his guide, from
2000, “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.”
In her provocative history “Race Experts,”
from 2002, the scholar Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn examines Cobbs’s career as
part of the larger story of how “racial etiquette” and sensitivity
training “hijacked” and banalized civil-rights discourse. Quinn
persuasively maintains that “sensitivity itself is an inadequate and
cynical substitution for civility and democracy—both of which presuppose
some form of equal treatment and universal standard of conduct,” and
neither of which, of course, the U.S. has ever achieved.
archive |Abstract: COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers have been
exempted from legal liability for vaccine-induced harm. It is therefore
in the interests of all those authorising, enforcing and administering
COVID-19 vaccinations to understand the evidence regarding the risks and
benefits of these vaccines, since liability for harm will fall on them.
In short, the available evidence and science indicate that COVID-19 vaccines are unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe.
Necessity: Immunocompetent individuals are
protected against SARS-CoV-2 by cellular immunity. Vaccinating low-risk
groups is therefore unnecessary. For immunocompromised individuals who
do fall ill with COVID-19 there is a range of medical treatments that
have been proven safe and effective. Vaccinating the vulnerable is
therefore equally unnecessary. Both immunocompetent and vulnerable
groups are better protected against variants of SARS-CoV-2 by naturally
acquired immunity and by medication than by vaccination.
Efficacy: Covid-19 vaccines lack a viable mechanism
of action against SARS-CoV-2 infection of the airways. Induction of
antibodies cannot prevent infection by an agent such as SARS-CoV-2 that
invades through the respiratory tract. Moreover, none of the vaccine
trials have provided any evidence that vaccination prevents transmission
of the infection by vaccinated individuals; urging vaccination to
“protect others” therefore has no basis in fact.
Safety: The vaccines are dangerous to both healthy
individuals and those with pre-existing chronic disease, for reasons
such as the following: risk of lethal and non-lethal disruptions of
blood clotting including bleeding disorders, thrombosis in the brain,
stroke and heart attack; autoimmune and allergic reactions;
antibody-dependent enhancement of disease; and vaccine impurities due to
rushed manufacturing and unregulated production standards.
The risk-benefit calculus is therefore clear: the experimental
vaccines are needless, ineffective and dangerous. Actors authorising,
coercing or administering experimental COVID-19 vaccination are exposing
populations and patients to serious, unnecessary, and unjustified
medical risks.
currentaffairs | Bill Gates has long been one of the most powerful people in the
world. For many years, he was the world’s richest man, though he has
lately rotated in the slot with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Since retiring from his position as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, Gates has
become a celebrated figure in world philanthropy, with the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) spending astronomical sums on health and
education initiatives. The BMGF is the largest private charitable
foundation in the world, and spends more
on global health each year than the World Health Organization (WHO) and
many whole countries. (The BMGF is run jointly by the Gateses, though
the effects of the couple’s recently-announced divorce are unclear.)
Gates’ new book on climate change has brought him applause from the mainstream press (Fortune even
let him take over as editor for a day, the first time it has ever
extended that privilege), although Gates himself has one of the biggest
carbon footprints of any human being in the world. He lives in a 66,000
square foot mansion with 24 bathrooms that is worth $145 million, which
he calls (seriously) “Xanadu 2.0.” It was built using half a million
wood logs from 500-year-old trees. According to an academic study, just his prolific private jet time emitted 1,629 tons of carbon dioxide in 2017 alone.
This is why it is worth examining Gates’ career and philanthropic
work closely. His career shows the way ruthlessness and the pursuit of
self-interest are far more important than “innovation” in making a
person rich, but it also shows the problems of relying on Good Billionaires to address serious social problems. Since the time of steel baron Andrew Carnegie,
tycoons have had a philosophy: you can make your money as ruthlessly as
possible, as long as you do Philanthropy afterward. Gates is a
latter-day Carnegie. He is one of the most “benevolent” among the
uber-rich, having pledged to give most of his fortune away
(nevertheless, it continues to grow)
and devoting himself to health and climate change. And yet even he, the
best of the bunch, embodies the fundamentally dysfunctional nature of
wealth accumulation and philanthropy. The outsized influence of Gates on
education policy has shown the problems that come with allowing
billionaires to meddle in the democratic process. Gates’ fortune came at
the expense of the rest of us, and while his philanthropy has many
positive effects, it ultimately reflects an undemocratic and
unaccountable way of delivering benefits, and Gates himself can only be
in the position he’s in because we live in a deeply unjust world.
thebulletin | Why would anyone want to create a novel virus capable of causing a
pandemic? Ever since virologists gained the tools for manipulating a
virus’s genes, they have argued they could get ahead of a potential
pandemic by exploring how close a given animal virus might be to making
the jump to humans. And that justified lab experiments in enhancing the
ability of dangerous animal viruses to infect people, virologists
asserted.
With this rationale, they have recreated the 1918 flu virus, shown
how the almost extinct polio virus can be synthesized from its published
DNA sequence, and introduced a smallpox gene into a related virus.
These enhancements of viral capabilities are known blandly as
gain-of-function experiments. With coronaviruses, there was particular
interest in the spike proteins, which jut out all around the spherical
surface of the virus and pretty much determine which species of animal
it will target. In 2000 Dutch researchers, for instance, earned the
gratitude of rodents everywhere by genetically engineering the spike protein of a mouse coronavirus so that it would attack only cats.
Virologists started studying bat coronaviruses in earnest after these
turned out to be the source of both the SARS1 and MERS epidemics. In
particular, researchers wanted to understand what changes needed to
occur in a bat virus’s spike proteins before it could infect people.
Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led by China’s
leading expert on bat viruses, Shi Zheng-li or “Bat Lady,” mounted
frequent expeditions to the bat-infested caves of Yunnan in southern
China and collected around a hundred different bat coronaviruses.
Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work
focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as
to “examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect
humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses].” In pursuit of this
aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone
of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat
virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect
the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab
culture of such cells.
The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome
contains genetic material from two strains of virus. If the SARS2 virus
were to have been cooked up in Shi’s lab, then its direct prototype
would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera, the potential danger of
which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion.
“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
Baric and Shi referred to the obvious risks in their paper but argued
they should be weighed against the benefit of foreshadowing future
spillovers. Scientific review panels, they wrote, “may deem similar
studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky
to pursue.” Given various restrictions being placed on gain-of function
(GOF) research, matters had arrived in their view at “a crossroads of
GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future
outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous
pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to
consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether
these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation
versus the inherent risks involved.”
That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can
say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2
epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus
was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.
americanthinker |In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931),
who was then living in California, wrote to Orwell. Huxley had briefly
taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton.
Huxley
generally praises Orwell's novel, which to many seemed very similar to
Brave New World in its dystopian view of a possible future. Huxley
politely voices his opinion that his own version of what might come to
pass would be truer than Orwell's. Huxley observed that the philosophy
of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is sadism,
whereas his own version is more likely, that controlling an ignorant and
unsuspecting public would be less arduous, less wasteful by other
means. Huxley's masses are seduced by a mind-numbing drug, Orwell's
with sadism and fear.
The most powerful quote In Huxley's letter to Orwell is this:
Within
the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover
that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as
instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for
power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into
loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Could
Huxley have more prescient? What do we see around us? Masses of
people dependent upon drugs, legal and illegal. The majority of
advertisements that air on television seem to be for prescription drugs,
some of them miraculous but most of them unnecessary. Then comes
COVID, a quite possibly weaponized virus from the
Fauci-funded-with-taxpayer-dollars lab in Wuhan, China. The powers that
be tragically deferred to the malevolent Fauci who had long been hoping
for just such an opportunity. Suddenly, there was an opportunity to
test the mRNA vaccines that had been in the works for nearly twenty
years. They could be authorized as an emergency measure but were still
highly experimental. These jabs are not really vaccines at all, but a
form of gene therapy. There are potential disastrous consequences down the road. Government experiments on the public are nothing new.
LewRockwell | History teaches us that humanity evolves significantly only when it is really afraid: it then first sets up defense mechanisms; sometimes intolerable (scapegoats and totalitarianisms); sometimes futile (distraction); sometimes effective (therapeutics, setting aside if necessary all the previous moral principles). Then, once the crisis is over, it transforms these mechanisms to make them compatible with individual freedom, and to include them in a democratic health policy.
The beginning of the pandemic could trigger one of these structuring fears.
If it is not more serious than the two previous fears linked to a risk of pandemic (the mad cow crisis of 2001 in Great Britain and that of avian flu of 2003 in China), it will first have consequences. significant economic (fall in air transport , fall in tourism and the price of oil ); it will cost about $ 2 million per infected person and will lower the stock markets by about 15%; its impact will be very brief ( China's growth rate only declined during the second quarter of 2003, to explode higher in the third); it will also have consequences in terms of organization (In 2003, very rigorous police measures were taken throughout Asia; the World Health Organization has set up global alert procedures; and certain countries, in particular France and Japan, have built up considerable reserves of drugs and masks).
If it is a little more serious, which is possible, since it is transmissible by humans, it will have truly global consequences: economic (the models suggest to think that this could lead to a loss of 3 trillion dollars, a 5% drop in global GDP) and political ( because of the risk of contagion, the countries of the North will have an interest in ensuring that those in the South are not sick and they will have to ensure that the poorest have access to medicines today 'hui stored for only the richest); a major pandemic will then arise, better than any humanitarian or ecological discourse, the awareness of the need for altruism, at least self-interested.
And, even if, as we can obviously hope, this crisis is not very serious, we must not forget, as with the economic crisis, to learn the lessons, so that before the next inevitable one, we must not forget. set up prevention and control mechanisms and logistical processes for the equitable distribution of drugs and vaccines. For that, we will have to set up a global police force, a global storage and therefore a global tax system. We will then come, much faster than the sole economic reason would have allowed , to set up the bases of a real world government. It is also by the hospital that began in France in the 17th century the establishment of a real state.
In the meantime, we could at least hope for the implementation of a real European policy on the subject. But here again, as on so many other subjects, Brussels is silent. Fist tap BeeDee
unherd |The extraordinary spread in recent
months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as
“the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis
attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with
its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent
rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives,
still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?
What does this all do to speed along
policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe
global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests
in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind
of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and
fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the
richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of
the liberal state?
Composed with a feverish,
hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner
in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order,
observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without
at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological
State Apparatuses”.
What are these ISAs? Contrasted with
the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the
ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through
ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system
along with the family, and the legal and political system and the
culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the
governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis
that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political
struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary
victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the
possibility of political change through its wielding of the most
powerful weapon, ideology.
It is through ideology, Althusser
asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology
of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of
God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he
states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is
realised and realises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”
In virology, gain-of-function research is employed to better understand current and future pandemics.[1]
In vaccine development, gain-of-function research is conducted to gain a
head start on a virus and to develop a vaccine or therapeutic before it
emerges.[1]
In February 2000, a group at the Utrecht University led by Peter Rottier published a paper on their gain-of-function studies titled "Retargeting of Coronavirus
by Substitution of the Spike Glycoprotein Ectodomain: Crossing the Host
Cell Species Barrier" detailing how they constructed a mutant of the
coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus, replacing the ectodomain of the spike glycoprotein (S) with the highly divergent ectodomain of the S protein of feline infectious peritonitis virus. According to the paper, "the resulting chimeric virus, designated fMHV, acquired the ability to infect feline cells and simultaneously lost the ability to infect murine cells in tissue culture".[2]
The World Health Organization in 2010 developed a "guidance document" for Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) in the life sciences because "research that is intended [to] benefit, but which might easily be misapplied to do harm".[3]
In May 2013, Hualan Chen, who was then director of the China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, and colleagues successfully created a new strain of influenza virus through a gain-of-function experiment at the BSL3 approvedHarbin Veterinary Research Institute.[6] The Chinese scientists "deliberately mixed the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which is highly lethal [to birds] but not easily transmitted between [humans], with a 2009 strain of H1N1 flu virus, which is very infectious to humans."[7] This event caused consternation in European biotech circles, as Professor Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute
the Chinese scientists "haven’t been thinking clearly about what they
are doing. It’s very worrying... The virological basis of this work is
not strong. It is of no use for vaccine development and the benefit in
terms of surveillance for new flu viruses is oversold," while Lord May of Oxford
said: "The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring.
They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission
of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible."[7]
In May 2014, the Bundestag was presented a report written by the National Ethics Council on proposed guidance for governance of GoFR.[8] At the time, some in Germany were concerned over "GoFR pathogenic pandemic microbes raging out of control".[8] Epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch
used "data of past biosafety breaches to calculate that" they occur
with a probability "of 0.01 to 0.1 percent per lab per year."[8]
In December 2014, Veronique Kiermer (at the time on the editorial board of Nature)
discussed the considerations at her place of employment, that go into
the publication of DURC. She came to the conclusion that "the journal's
editorial and review boards should not (and could not) be the only
gatekeepers who decide which research results should be published,
either fully or redacted, 'because it is way too late in the process of
GoFR.'"[8]
By March 2016 the second symposium launched by the Obama
administration reported that funding for gain-of-function research was
provided by government agencies, pharmaceutical research companies,
venture capital funds, colleges and universities, non-profit research
institutions, foundations, and charities.[15]
In May 2016,[16] the NSABB published "Recommendations for the Evaluation and Oversight of Proposed Gain-of-Function Research".[17]
On 9 January 2017, the HHS published the "Recommended Policy
Guidance for Departmental Development of Review Mechanisms for Potential
Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight" (P3CO).[16]
On 19 December 2017 under the Trump administration, the NIH
lifted the Obama moratorium into GoFR because it was deemed to be
"important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies
and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that
pose a threat to public health,"[18] because on the same day the HHS P3CO Framework restored it.[19][18]
theatlantic |Lurking among the jubilant Americans
venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a
different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic
restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an
expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the
disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what
public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more
worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe
themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after
the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were
“very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared
with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study
conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc
Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that
getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life,
compared with a third of liberals and moderates.
Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health
officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme
care was warranted. People all over the country made enormous
sacrifices—rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling
graduations, avoiding the family members they love—to protect others.
Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of
skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up
their freedoms. But this is a different story, about progressives who
stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.
For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration
with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he
said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in
our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of
medicine at UC San Francisco, told me. Gandhi describes herself as “left
of left,” but has alienated some of her ideological peers because she
has advocated for policies such as reopening schools and establishing a
clear timeline for the end of mask mandates. “We went the other way, in
an extreme way, against Trump’s politicization,” Gandhi said. Geography
and personality may have also contributed to progressives’ caution: Some
of the most liberal parts of the country are places where the pandemic
hit especially hard, and Hetherington found that the very liberal participants in his survey tended to be the most neurotic.
The
spring of 2021 is different from the spring of 2020, though. Scientists
know a lot more about how COVID-19 spreads—and how it doesn’t.
Public-health advice is shifting. But some progressives have not updated
their behavior based on the new information. And in their eagerness to
protect themselves and others, they may be underestimating other costs.
Being extra careful about COVID-19 is (mostly) harmless when it’s
limited to wiping down your groceries with Lysol wipes and wearing a
mask in places where you’re unlikely to spread the coronavirus, such as
on a hiking trail. But vigilance can have unintended consequences when
it imposes on other people’s lives. Even as scientific knowledge of
COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace
policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.
salk | Scientists have known for a while that SARS-CoV-2’s distinctive
“spike” proteins help the virus infect its host by latching on to
healthy cells. Now, a major new study shows that they also play a key
role in the disease itself.
The paper, published on April 30, 2021, in Circulation Research,
also shows conclusively that COVID-19 is a vascular disease,
demonstrating exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the
vascular system on a cellular level. The findings help explain
COVID-19’s wide variety of seemingly unconnected complications, and
could open the door for new research into more effective therapies.
“A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor,
who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some
people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of
the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular
underpinnings.”
Salk researchers collaborated with scientists at
the University of California San Diego on the paper, including co-first
author Jiao Zhang and co-senior author John Shyy, among others.
While
the findings themselves aren’t entirely a surprise, the paper provides
clear confirmation and a detailed explanation of the mechanism through
which the protein damages vascular cells for the first time. There’s
been a growing consensus that SARS-CoV-2 affects the vascular system,
but exactly how it did so was not understood. Similarly, scientists
studying other coronaviruses have long suspected that the spike protein
contributed to damaging vascular endothelial cells, but this is the
first time the process has been documented.
In the new study, the
researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2
classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus.
Exposure to this pseudovirus resulted in damage to the lungs and
arteries of an animal model—proving that the spike protein alone was
enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in
endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls.
The team then
replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells
(which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike
protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. This binding disrupted ACE2’s
molecular signaling to mitochondria (organelles that generate energy
for cells), causing the mitochondria to become damaged and fragmented.
Previous
studies have shown a similar effect when cells were exposed to the
SARS-CoV-2 virus, but this is the first study to show that the damage
occurs when cells are exposed to the spike protein on its own.
The
evidence for aerosol transmission is now so solid that you have to
wonder why just about everyone in authority refuses to sign on. For my part, I start by excluding the possibility that they’re uninformed or misinformed. Something else must be at work.
My
conclusions:
1) The administration, governors, and others - are responding to their
real constituencies who care little about public health and are
clamoring to get the economy back on track without any consequential additional costs;
2) These political authorities know very well that doing so requires A)
ignoring or slighting the fact of aerosol transmission and B) focusing
instead on low-cost distractions such as masks, disinfectants and plexiglass barriers;
3) They also know that this means Covid will continue to be a public emergency, and here's the key;
4) They have gamed a way to avoid any culpability for the resulting wave of additional deaths, lung
transplants and prolonged and perhaps permanent disabilities due to
impairment of long-Covid sufferers’ major organs;
5) The authorities calculate they personally will be fine by the
time they leave office for quiet but plush and safe Covid-free obscurity
(like Newsom at the French Laundry, or in bunkers or off to New Zealand).
6) They want to prevent and delay aerosol mitigation long
enough to turn the rona into a permanent endemic disease, on
purpose and with malice of forethought.
Why?
6A) Investors need a new "big win". The synthetic biology complex wants to sell high-priced high-margin boosters every year for the next
several years. That requires a steady reservoir of
permarona in the population to keep breeding up new
variants that will be used to scare up new supplicants for additional mRNA boosters.
6B) The fact that mRNA therapeutics are themselves dangerous and will worsen the potency of variants may work
to profitably kill off a few billion surplus laborers whose services are no longer needed - all the while making it look like an accident.
khn | Last summer, Global Plasma Solutions wanted to test whether the
company’s air-purifying devices could kill covid-19 virus particles but
could find only a lab using a chamber the size of a shoebox for its
trials. In the company-funded study, the virus was blasted with 27,000 ions per cubic centimeter.
In September, the company’s founder incidentally mentioned that the devices being offered for sale actually deliver a lot less ion power — 13 times less — into a full-sized room.
The company nonetheless used the shoebox results
— over 99% viral reduction — in marketing its device heavily to schools
as something that could combat covid in classrooms far, far larger than
a shoebox.
School officials desperate to calm worried parents bought these
devices and others with a flood of federal funds, installing them in
more than 2,000 schools across 44 states, a KHN investigation found.
They use the same technology — ionization, plasma and dry hydrogen
peroxide — that the Lancet COVID-19 Commission recently deemed “often unproven” and potential sources of pollution themselves.
In the frenzy, schools are buying technology that academic
air-quality experts warn can lull them into a false sense of security or
even potentially harm kids. And schools often overlook the fact that
their trusted contractors — typically engineering, HVAC or consulting
firms — stand to earn big money from the deals, KHN found.
Academic experts are encouraging schools to pump in more fresh air
and use tried-and-true filters, like HEPA, to capture the virus. Yet
every ion- or hydroxyl-blasting air purifier sale strengthens a firm’s
next pitch: The device is doing a great job in the neighboring town.
“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people buy these technologies, the more they get legitimacy,” said Jeffrey Siegel, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto. “It’s really the complete wild west out there.”
Marwa Zaatari, a member of the American Society of Heating,
Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ (ASHRAE) Epidemic Task
Force, first compiled a list of schools and districts using such
devices.
Schools have been “bombarded with persistent salespersons peddling
the latest air and cleaning technologies, including those with minimal
evidence to-date supporting safety and efficacy” according to a report released Thursday by the Center for Green Schools and ASHRAE.
Zaatari said she was particularly concerned that officials in New Jersey are buying thousands of devices made by another company that says they emit ozone, which can exacerbate asthma and harm developing lungs, according to decades of research.
“We’re going to live in a world where the air quality in schools is
worse after the pandemic, after all of this money,” Zaatari said. “It’s
really sickening.”
The sales race is fueled by roughly $193 billion in federal funds
allocated to schools for teacher pay and safety upgrades — a giant fund
that can be used to buy air cleaners. And Democrats are pushing for $100
billion more that could also be spent on air cleaners.
In April, Global Plasma Solutions said further tests show its devices inactivate covid in the air and on surfaces in larger chambers. The company studies still use about twice the level of ions than its leaders have publicly said the devices can deliver, KHN found.
There is virtually no federal oversight or enforcement of safe
air-cleaning technology. Only California bans air cleaners that emit a
certain amount of ozone.
U.S. Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), chair of the education and
labor committee, said the federal government typically is not involved
in local decisions of what products to buy, although he hopes for more
federal guidance.
In the meantime, “these school systems are dealing with contractors
providing all kinds of services,” he said, “so you just have to trust
them to get the best expert advice on what to do.”
CNN | President Joe Biden hasn't committed to K-12 schools reopening full-time and in-person in the fall, one of his senior advisers said Sunday, because the coronavirus remains unpredictable.
"He
said 'probably.' He did not say 'absolutely,' " Senior Adviser to the
President Anita Dunn told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union."
"Because we've all seen this since unfortunately January of 2020. It's
an unpredictable virus. And it is a virus that has -- you know it
mutates. So we can't look in a crystal ball and say what September looks
like."
Dunn's
comments come after Biden said Friday that K-12 schools "should
probably all be open" in the fall for in-person learning after more than
a year of challenges with remote learning and as more Americans get
vaccinated.
"Based
on the science and the (US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention),
they should probably all be open. There's not overwhelming evidence
that there's much of a transmission among these people, young people,"
the President had said during an interview with NBC's "TODAY."
The CDC in February released highly anticipated guidelines
for reopening schools that focus on mask wearing, physical distancing,
washing hands, cleaning facilities and improving ventilation, and
contact tracing, isolation and quarantine. Last month, the agency also made another recommendation
that experts said would allow more schools to open. The CDC relaxed its
physical distancing guidelines for children in schools to recommend
most students maintain at least three feet of distance, down from six
feet.
Dunn
told Tapper if Americans get vaccinated against Covid-19 and if schools
follow CDC guidelines then "we probably should be able to have them
open," encouraging people to seek medical advice before getting a
vaccine.
"If
they have doubts about it they should ask their doctor. They should ask
people who have already gotten it. They should certainly do their own
research," she said.
pjmedia | In the Biden administration, “follow the science” takes second place to “follow the campaign donations from teachers unions.”
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was heavily lobbied by the
nation’s second-largest teachers union on when to reopen America’s
schools, emails obtained by the New York Post
show. There was extensive communication between the American Federation
of Teachers, the CDC, and the White House in the lead up to the release
of school reopening guidelines in February.
The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act
request by the group Americans for Public Trust and provided to The Post.
Anyone in the United States, any group, has a perfect right to lobby
any federal agency they wish. But don’t you think it would have been
nice to know that the CDC was being influenced by teachers in coming to
the conclusion that schools should remain closed to in-person learning?
The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC
Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials —
with Biden brass being looped in at the White House — in the days before
the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening
guidelines.
“Thank you again for Friday’s rich discussion about forthcoming CDC
guidance and for your openness to the suggestions made by our president,
Randi Weingarten, and the AFT,” wrote AFT senior director for health
issues Kelly Trautner in a Feb 1 email — which described the union as
the CDC’s “thought partner.”
You can’t really say the teachers union was driving the discussion on when to open schools. Or can you?
“We were able to review a copy of the draft guidance document over
the weekend and were able to provide some initial feedback to several
staff this morning about possible ways to strengthen the document,”
Trautner continued. “… We believe our experiences on the ground can
inform and enrich thinking around what is practicable and prudent in
future guidance documents.”
WaPo | Police officers were among the first front-line workers to gain priority access to coronavirus vaccines.
But their vaccination rates are lower than or about the same as those
of the general public, according to data made available by some of the
nation’s largest law enforcement agencies.
The reluctance of police to get the shotsthreatens
not just their own health, but also the safety of people they’re
responsible for guarding, monitoring and patrolling, experts say.
At the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, just 39 percent of employees havegotten
at least one dose, officials said, compared to more than 50 percent of
eligible adults nationwide. In Atlanta, 36 percent of sworn officers
have been vaccinated. And a mere 28 percent of those employed by the
Columbus Division of Police — Ohio’s largest police department — report
having received a shot.
“I think it’s unacceptable,” Joe Lombardo, the head of Las Vegas police and sheriff of Clark County, said of themeager demand for the shots within his force.
The numbers paint a troubling picture of policing and public health. Because officershave high rates of diabetes, heart disease and other conditions, their hesitancyputs them at greater risk of serious illness from the coronavirus
while also undermining force readiness, experts said. Police officers
were more likely to die of covid-19 last year than of all other causes
combined, according to data compiled by the National Law Enforcement
Officers Memorial Fund.
Police
hesitancy also means officers may be vectors of spread to vulnerable
people with whom they interact during traffic stops, calls for service
and other high-contact encounters. That could thwart efforts to restore
community trust in a moment of heightened scrutiny after last month’s conviction of ex-officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd.
“Police
touch people,” said Sharona Hoffman, a professor of law and bioethics
at Case Western Reserve University. “Imagine having a child in the car
who’s not vaccinated. People would want to know if a police officer
coming to their window is protected.”
Police ambivalence about immunization finds a parallel among other front-line workers. Just 52 percent of health-care workers surveyed by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation between Feb. 11 and March 7 said they had received at least one dose.
One solution is for departments to make vaccination compulsory, according to experts in bioethics and public health, just as somehealth-care settings and institutions of higher education have begun doing.
fox26houston | Fuentes says a supervisor encouraged her to file for a religious exemption.
"And
I said, 'Well, I don't have a religious exemption. I'm not doing this
for religious reasons,' and she said, 'I know, but we'll help you fill
it out, and at least this will save your job,'" Fuentes claims. "So,
because I don't have a religious reason and it's a personal reason, my
beliefs and my feelings aren't as worthy as someone who has a religious
reason?"
Fuentes says when she did not agree to stay quiet about
the reason for her departure, she was not allowed to complete her final
two weeks and escorted out of the hospital.
In response, Houston
Methodist stated they do not advise those who decline the vaccine for
personal reasons to file for a religious exemption. Adding:
"We
have a process in place for the employees who want to request a
religious/medical exemption--- like we have had for the flu shot for
more than a decade. Not all exemptions are granted."
In the
meantime, Fuentes says she was prepared to wear masks at work and show
lab results of COVID-19 antibodies since she'd recovered from the
disease.
She adds, she regularly worked in a surgical unit, but volunteered to work in the COVID-19 unit.
"I
want to be known that I was a safe nurse when I worked at the height of
the pandemic and volunteered to work and did work in the COVID unit.
So, I was a safe nurse then, not vaccinated, and I was able to turn back
around and work in my unit without being tested and without being
vaccinated," Fuentes said.
Houston Methodist adds:
"Our
employees have the choice to stay or leave—we are not forcing anyone to
get a vaccine. But over everything, we must put patients first. It is
our obligation as health care workers to do no harm to our patients, who
are among the most vulnerable in our community."
Generally,
employers are able to require employees to get vaccinated. Clayton
Craighead, an employment attorney in Houston, says there are the two
exemption that both deal with accomodations.
"One of them is an
accomodation under the American with Disabilities Act and the second
exception is an accomodation on a religious basis. In order to establish
an entitlement under the ADA, the employee would have to provide some
sort of documentation from a doctor explaining why he or she, could not
or should not receive the vaccination due to some medical condition or
disability," Craighead explained.
Celebrating 113 years of Mama Rosa McCauley Parks
-
*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
*Some notes: The life of the courageous activist Mama Rosa McCauley Parks*
Mama Rosa's grandfather Sylvester Ed...
Monsters are people too
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus,
and ...
Remembering the Spanish Civil War
-
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
War, an epoch-defining event for the international working class, whose
close study...
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
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
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 ...
-
(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
