Diversity/Sensitivity Training Is A CIA Invention..., (REDUX Originally 10/20/20)

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.

You Are The Carbon They Want To Reduce

This paper was originally hosted on the Doctors for Covid Ethics Medium account, but the platform censored the expert group and removed the paper, claiming the post was “under investigation”

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.

The Disrespect...., "Humanity Does Not Need Bill Gates"

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.

The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists DESTROYS Any Further Doubt About Covid's Origin

 Remember Where You Read It First!!! 

This is School For You!!!

Accept No MuthaPhukkin Substitutes...,

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.

Prescient Huxley-ian Projections About A Contentedly Enslaved Karenwaffen...,

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.

BeeDee Drops Some Prescient Globalist French Banker Pandemic Bon Mots...,

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

Only A Special Pinhead Could Consider IdPol Ideology Net Of Panicdemic State Ideology

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?

If we are to understand the successor ideology as an ideology, it may be useful here, counterintuitively, to return to the great but increasingly overlooked 1970 essay on the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Once influential on the Western left, Althusser’s reputation has suffered somewhat since he killed his wife in a fit of madness 40 years ago. Of Alsatian Catholic origin, and a lifelong sufferer from mental illness, Althusser wrote his seminal essay in a manic period following the évènements of 1968, for whose duration he was committed to hospital. 

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.”

I Wish I'd Never Gotten A SARS-COV2 Gain of Function mRNA Jab...,

wikipedia |  Gain of function research (GoFR) is a field of medical research focused on the serial passaging of microorganisms in vitro and in vivo. This places positive selective pressure on the microorganisms to effect mutations that would increase their pathogenicity, transmissibility, and antigenicity. These studies can also expand the host tropism of a pathogen to new host species or organ tissue. This research reveals targets to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics.

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 2012, a Japanese group of scientists operating out of the University of Wisconsin with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ERATO, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and support gifts from the National Institutes of Health and the Vietnamese National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology published a paper in the journal Nature about airborne transmission of the H5N1 bird flu introduced via respiratory droplet transmission from one ferret to another. The group "had altered the virus’s amino acid profile, allowing it to reproduce in mammal lungs, which are a bit colder than bird lungs. That small change allowed the virus to be transmitted via coughing and sneezing, and it solved the riddle of how H5N1 could become airborne in humans... (Some) members of Congress, among other critics around the world, responded to the publication of the research with alarm and condemnation." A New York Times editorial described the event as "An Engineered Doomsday."^[4][5]

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 approved Harbin 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 October 2014, The White House under the Obama administration instituted a moratorium on gain-of-function research into influenza, MERS, and SARS, launched inquiries from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB); and the symposia by National Research Council (NRC),^[9] and paused funding for all projects for three years.^{[10][11][12][13]} At least 18 GoFR projects were affected, "including work that had been continued ... in the labs of Fouchier and Kawaoka."^[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]

In December 2014, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine organized a two-day symposium to discuss the potential risks and benefits of Gain-of-Function Research. The event was attended by scientists from around the world, including George Gao, Gabriel Leung and Michael Selgelid, Baruch Fischhoff, Alta Charo, Harvey Fineberg, Jonathan Moreno, Ralph Cicerone, Margaret Hamburg, Jo Handelsman, Samuel Stanley, Kenneth Berns, Ralph Baric, Robert Lamb, Silja Vöneky, Keiji Fukuda, David Relman, and Marc Lipsitch.^[14] One day later, the US government granted exceptions to the GoFR moratorium to seven out of 18 research projects that had been affected.^[8]

In 2016, synthetic virology scientists and bioethics experts again raised concerns with the dual-use of gain-of-function research.^[1][13]

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]

Data Show The Hysterical Karenwaffen Greatly Amplified Covid Gain Of Function

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.

 

If The Spike Protein Alone Causes Extensive Vascular Damage - Why The mRNA Jabs Code For Spike-ulation?

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.

 

Sum'n Not Right With The Continuing Emphasis On Hygiene Theater....,

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.

Wolves Out'Chere Shearing Sheeple...,

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.”

 

 

Plexiglas And Poor Ventilation Show Why Biden Won't Force School Reopening In The Fall..,

Even With Nothing To Lose Cornpop Dares Not Piss Off These Teachers Unions..,

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.

 

"Trust The Science" But Obey The Teachers Unions On School Reopenings

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.”

 

PoPo Say No No To The Mark Of The Beast

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 shots threatens 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 have gotten 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 the meager demand for the shots within his force.

The numbers paint a troubling picture of policing and public health. Because officers have high rates of diabetes, heart disease and other conditions, their hesitancy puts 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 some health-care settings and institutions of higher education have begun doing.

It Would Wear On Any Ordinary Woman To Be Thought Of As The Devil's Wife...,

Nurse Fuentes Should've Claimed The Religious Exemption And Kept It Moving...,

 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.

No One Is Safe Until Everyone Is Safe...,

commondreams |  The U.S. is facing sustained calls to end its opposition of a proposal to temporarily lift intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines and related technology as soaring coronavirus cases ravage India and new reporting spotlights a debate within the Biden administration over whether to support the patent suspension effort to help tackle the global pandemic or prioritize Big Pharma's interests.

At issue, as the Washington Post reported Friday, is a proposal India and South Africa submitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) last October to suspend Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) rules on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments to boost manufacturing capacity. It's now cosponsored by 60 nations and backed by over 100 countries as well as hundreds of U.S. and international civil society organizations, former world world leaders and Nobel laureates, and some U.S. lawmakers.

In addition to the U.S., other wealthy nations including the U.K. and Canada are blocking the proposal—which needs consensus to pass.

The WTO's TRIPS panel met Friday to discuss the proposal, and it's now being revised by its cosponsors. 

Asked Friday whether the U.S. would continue its opposition, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration has not yet confirmed its stance and said the White House's "overall objective is to provide as much supply to the global community and do that in a cost-effective manner."

A Novel IS Being Written - What's India's Role In The Unfolding Narrative?

consortiumnews  |   The unfolding pandemic horror in India has many causes. These include the complacency, inaction and irresponsibility of government leaders, even when it was evident for several months that a fresh wave of infections of new mutant variants threatened the population. Continued massive election rallies, many addressed by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, brought large numbers to congested gatherings and lulled many into underplaying the threat of infection.

The incomprehensible decision to allow a major Hindu religious festival — the Mahakumbh Mela, held every 12 years — to be brought forward by a full year, on the advice of some astrologers, brought millions from across India to one small area along the Ganges River and contributed to ‘super-spreading’ the disease.  

The exponential explosion of Covid-19 cases — and it is likely much worse than officially reported, because of inadequate testing and undercounting of cases and deaths — has revealed not just official hubris and incompetence but lack of planning and major deficiencies in the public health system. The shortage of medical oxygen, for instance, has effectively become a proximate cause of death for many patients.

Failing Vaccination Program

But one significant — and entirely avoidable — reason for the catastrophe is the failing vaccination programme. Even given the global constraints posed by rich-country vaccine-grabbing and the limits on domestic production set by the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement, this is unnecessary and unexpected.

India is home to the largest vaccine producer in the world and has several other companies capable of producing vaccines. Before the pandemic, 60 per cent of the vaccines used in the developing world for child immunisation were manufactured in India.

The country has a long tradition of successful vaccination campaigns, against polio and tuberculosis for infants and a range of other diseases. The available infrastructure for inoculation, urban and rural, could have been quickly mobilised.

In January, the government approved two candidates for domestic use: the Covishield (Oxford-AstraZeneca) vaccine, produced in India by the Serum Institute of India, and Covaxin, produced by Bharat Biotech under a manufacturing licence from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) — other producers could have been similarly licenced to enhance supply.

The vaccination program officially started on Jan. 16 , with the initial target of covering 30 million healthcare and frontline workers by the end of March and 250 million people by July. By April 17 , however, only 37 percent of frontline workers had received both doses (of either vaccine); an additional 30 percent had received only the first.

Low uptake even among this vulnerable group could have resulted from concerns about the rapid regulatory approval granted to Covaxin, which had not completed Phase III trials. The Indian government also encouraged exports, partly to fulfil commitments by the Serum Institute of India to AstraZeneca and the global COVAX facility — partly to enhance its own standing among developing countries.