FT | When Silvia, a 33-year-old Italian nurse, received a bonus worth less than €500 after months battling one of Europe’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, she wondered if it “was a joke”.
She had worked on a busy Covid-19 ward of a hospital in the city of Genoa throughout the crisis, putting her health on the line and missing out on time with her young daughter “from a sense of duty and love for the job”.
The one-off bonus from the Italian health ministry announced late last year was “almost insulting for those of us who had spent months on the frontline risking our lives”, said Silvia, who declined to give her full name.
Silvia’s disillusionment points to the scale of the challenge for pandemic-hit governments around the world as they grapple with the question of how, and whether, to reward staff who endured the most searing experience of their professional lives.
In many cases, the discussions have forced governments to acknowledge longstanding grievances from healthcare workers about their pay and conditions. The ability to retain and recruit staff will also play a vital role in determining how strongly not just health systems, but national economies, emerge from the crisis.
Chris James, senior OECD health economist, said the focus had already shifted from worries over the availability of hospital beds and ventilators in the early phase of the pandemic to anxieties over staffing levels.
“Moving forward, one of the big discussion points among OECD countries is how do we make sure health systems can be stronger in future waves of Covid and meet any other emerging threat,” he said. “The health workforce is at the centre of that.”
Demand for healthcare workers exceeded supply long before the pandemic struck, said Anita Charlesworth, chief economist for the Health Foundation, a UK-based charity. This was fuelled by a global commitment to achieve universal health coverage and the rapid spread of diseases such as cancer and diabetes as nations industrialise and prosper.
Charlesworth pointed to a World Health Organization estimate that Europe would have a shortfall of 1.5m nurses by the end of the decade. The global estimate would be 13.5m. “If we’re going to be more resistant to the shocks of emerging infectious diseases we’re going to need a bigger buffer,” she said.
wsws | The wealth and privilege of the leading proponents of racialism
demonstrate the reactionary character of identity politics. It is
entirely divorced from the real concerns and experiences of the working
class. Fearful of a unified workers’ movement, the ruling class seeks to
sow artificial racial divisions among workers through the promotion of
identity politics. Additionally, middle class layers seeking a bigger
slice of the pie see identity as a means of advancing their own wealth
and social position.
The American ruling class is terrified of the
growth of a working-class movement. The fight against police violence,
racism, and poverty can only be waged through the building of a
socialist movement, independent of the capitalist parties, that unifies
workers on their common class interests.
New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of the Times’s
“1619 Project,” was paid $25,000 for an online Zoom lecture given to
the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.
Through
a Freedom of Information request, the right-wing news outlet Campus
Reform obtained documentation detailing Hannah-Jones’s terms of
compensation for the February 19 lecture. Additionally, the documents
revealed that Hannah-Jones was partnered with the Lavin Agency, a talent
agency that is “the world’s largest intellectual talent agency,
representing leading thinkers for speaking engagements personal
appearances, consulting, and endorsements,” according to its website.
Hannah-Jones’s relationship with the agency suggests she regularly
schedules events and is paid for them.
Part of the agreement between Hannah-Jones and the University of
Oregon dictated that the lecture, titled “1619 and the Legacy That Built
a Nation,” could not be recorded and redistributed. However, a
promotional flyer advertised a discussion on “the lasting legacy of
Black enslavement on the nation—specifically, how Black Americans pushed
for the democracy we have today.”
News of the lecture came days
after Hulu announced that it partnered with production studio Lionsgate
and billionaire Oprah Winfrey to create a docuseries based on the 1619
Project. In a statement, Hulu said the project was a “landmark
undertaking…of the brutal racism that endures in so many aspects of
American life today.”
jonathanturley | We recently discussed
the move by Twitter to block the tweet of sports journalist Jason
Whitlock criticizing the BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors for
purchasing a $1.4 million home in a secluded area of Los Angeles. A
self-professed Marxist, Cullors has reportedly purchased four homes worth more than $3 million and has looked at real estate investments in places like the Bahamas. As with the censoring of a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop story,
Twitter was criticized for the censoring of the story and later said it
was a mistake. Now, Facebook has reportedly blocked the underlying New York Post
report about the controversy. In the meantime, BLM itself insists that
the controversy is little more than terrorism from white supremacists.
Various conservative sites reported this week that Facebook users could not share the link to a story that shed light on Cullors’ multi-million-dollar splurge on homes. Fox News reported
that “an error message appears whenever users try sharing the article
on their personal Facebook page or through the Messenger app.”
Cullors has not denied the purchase or the real estate investments,
including in her statement below to the controversy. The story was
widely circulated because Cullors has long insisted that she and her BLM
co-founder “are trained Marxists. We are super versed on, sort of,
ideological theories.” She has denounced capitalism as worse than
Covid-19.
Critics like Nick Arama of RedState pointed out: “[I]t’s interesting to note that the demographics of the area are only about 1.4% black people there. So not exactly living up to her creed there.”
Moreover, the head of New York City’s Black Lives Matter chapter called for an independent investigation into the organization’s finances in the wake of the controversy.
The New York Post and other publications reported that Cullors is eyeing expensive properties
in other locations, including the Bahamas. However, I noted earlier
that there is no evidence that this money came from BLM, which has
reportedly raised almost $100 million in donations from corporations and
other sources. Indeed, Cullors seems to have ample sources of funds.
She published a best selling memoir of her life and then a follow up
book. She also signed a lucrative deal with Warner Bros to develop and
produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast,
cable and streaming. She has also been featured in various magazines
like her recent collaboration with Jane Fonda.
TCH | The people behind the JoeBama administration do not need to step on
the hot-button issue of ‘vaccine passports’ because they already have
ideological allies working on the issue. Remember that phone call with
100 multinational corporations a few days ago? Why would a Marxist
government need to engage in an issue highly charged with politics, when
they can just farm-out the same outcome to their Marxist corporate
allies?
Hopefully people can see what is happening here.
There are trillions at stake. Those trillions need to engage in
control mechanisms to retain their position. The multinational
corporations know how financially lucrative COVID compliance is. Those
same multinationals are setting up the parameters for control in the
exact same manner the U.S. government would. The ideological
multinationals and the ideological JoeBama administration are working in
concert.
Multinationals do not like capitalism because within the process of
capitalism they do not have control over the financial outcomes.
Capitalism breeds competition; multinationals abhor competition, they
are totalitarian in ideology and want the entire pie under their
control. Multinational corporations do not like capitalism; underline it, emphasize it, do not forget it.
Capitalism is based on the principles of a free market.
Multinationals do not want a free market, they want a controlled
market. Their efforts toward a vaccine passport are an example of yet
another control they can manipulate for maximum financial benefit. It
really is that simple…..
…. Meanwhile the crew of totalitarians behind JoeBama know they can
benefit from their corporate allies. The multinationals will pay the
politicians for control and the politicians will construct defensive
legislative outcomes that protect the multinationals. That is what is
happening in exponentially increasing sunlight.
Unfortunately the multinationals are also the funding mechanism for
the UniParty. Democrats and Republicans both benefit from the financial
process of payments by the multinationals for control of legislative
outcomes. This is the entire purpose of K-Street. In third-world
countries we call bribery of elected officials “corruption”; however, in
the United States we call bribery of elected officials “lobbying”, the
process is exactly the same.
In a slightly nuanced outline of the same type of Government and
Multinational merging, Glenn Greenwald has a solid article explaining
why and how the corporate world is using “false wokeness” as a tool for
expanded financial benefit.
TNR | In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage
the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator
expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture,
and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded
institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private
partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in
contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment
to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit
arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring
equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried
the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic
leader.
How he’s developed and wielded this influence
over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers
of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum
vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.
Gates’s marquee Covid-19 initiative started
relatively small. Two days before the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation announced something called the Therapeutics
Accelerator, a joint initiative with Mastercard and the charity group the Wellcome
Trust to identify and develop potential treatments for the novel coronavirus.
Doubling as a social branding exercise for a giant of global finance, the
Accelerator reflected Gates’s familiar formula of corporate philanthropy, which
he has applied to everything from malaria to malnutrition. In retrospect, it
was a strong indicator that Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine would
survive the pandemic, even before he and his foundation’s officers began to say
so publicly.
This was confirmed when a bigger version of the Accelerator was unveiled the following month at the WHO. The Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator, or ACT-Accelerator, was Gates’s bid to organize the development and distribution of everything from therapeutics to testing. The biggest and most consequential arm, COVAX, proposed to subsidize vaccine deals with poor countries through donations by, and sales to, richer ones. The goal was always limited: It aimed to provide vaccines for up to 20 percent of the population in low-to-middle-income countries. After that, governments would largely have to compete on the global market like everyone else. It was a partial demand-side solution to what the movement coalescing around a call for a “people’s vaccine” warned would be a dual crisis of supply and access, with intellectual property at the center of both.
Gates not only dismissed these warnings but actively sought to undermine all challenges to his authority and the Accelerator’s intellectual property–based charity agenda.
Few have observed Bill Gates’s devotion to monopoly
medicine more closely than James Love, founder and director of Knowledge Ecology
International, a Washington, D.C.–based group that studies
the broad nexus of federal policy, the pharmaceutical industry, and intellectual
property. Love
entered the world of global public health policy around the same time Gates did,
and for two decades has watched him scale its heights while reinforcing the
system responsible for the very problems he claims to be trying to solve. The
through-line for Gates has been his unwavering commitment to drug companies’
right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its
products.
andrewsullivan | If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our
politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It
profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand
scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war
purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners,
who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the
question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the
attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists,
who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the rights of women as
a grotesque enforcement of patriarchy.
Worse, it has now excited
the Christianist right, who see the recognition of trans rights as an
effort to destroy the sexual binary that is at the core of almost all
orthodox faith. And it has become a Twitter phenomenon, where all
reasonable arguments go to die. If you are an opinion writer, you really
do have to be a masochist to even want to dabble in the debate. And the mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love. (A recent exception to this, though tilted clearly from the start in one direction, is this explainer from the NYT last night.)
Big global stories — for example, a high court case in Britain that found that minors under 16 are not developmentally capable of making the decision to take puberty blockers — are routinely ignored. Check out this video
from the Washington Post. It doesn’t even gesture at fairness: no
presentation of counter-argument; instant attribution of bigotry for
anyone deemed in disagreement.
And the issue has recently become, even more emotively, about children
— how they are treated, how the medical world deals with them, amid
complicated arguments about specific treatments, their long-term
effects, and genuine scientific disputes. And all of this is taking
place with far too few reliable, controlled studies on transgender
individuals, as children and adults, or on medical interventions. A lot
of the time, we’re flying blind.
I’ve been trying to think these things through for the past few years. I used to think trans rights were a no-brainer. Of course
I supported them. And I still do. I believe trans people when they tell
the stories of their lives; I empathize because I’m human, and the pain
and struggle of so many trans people is so real; and perhaps also
because being gay helps you see how a subjective feeling can be so deep
as to be an integral part (but never the whole) of your identity.
Equally, however, I have some reservations. I trust biology on the core binary sexual reproductive strategy of our species, without which we would not exist, and which does not cease to exist
because of a few variations on the theme (I’m one of those variations
myself). I do not believe that a trans woman or a trans man is in every way
indistinguishable from a woman or a man. If there were no differences,
trans women and trans men would not exist as a separate category. I do
not buy the idea that biological sex is socially constructed, or a
function of “white supremacist” thought, for Pete’s sake. I further
believe that no-one should be excluded from this or any debate; and that
“lived experience” cannot replace “objective reality”, although it can
often help complicate and explain it.
In our current culture,
this somewhat complicated stance is anathema. For some trans activists,
especially the younger more thoroughly woke ones, I am simply evil,
beset by phobias, and determined to persecute and kill trans
people, or seek their genocide. I wish this were a caricature of their
views, but it isn’t. For some radical feminists, my empathy for trans
women, and concern for their welfare, is regarded as a function of my
misogyny and hatred of women, often wrapped up in some anti-gay,
misandrist bile. I wish I were exaggerating here as well. The proportion
of people in this debate who seem psychologically unstable, emotionally
volatile and personally vicious seems larger than usual.
But we can no longer avoid the subject. There is now a flood of bills
in state legislatures designed to ban medical procedures for minors who
appear to be trans, and to ensure fairness between trans girls and
girls in school sports, and a few that are even more extreme. Lines have
been drawn. The woke establishment — all major corporations, the
federal government, the universities, all cultural institutions, the
mainstream media and now the medical authorities — are unequivocally on
the side of anything the trans activists want. Amazon won’t even sell
some books presenting one side of the case, while they still sell Mein Kampf.
K thru 12 education now routinely tells children that biological sex is
a spectrum (it isn’t) and they can choose where to fit.
NYTimes | Danny Lavery had just agreed to a
two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I
met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to
do with the money.
“I think the thing
that I’m the most looking forward to about this is to start a retirement
account,” said Mr. Lavery, who founded the feminist humor blog The
Toast and will be giving up an advice column in Slate.
Mr. Lavery already has about 1,800 paying subscribers to his Substack newsletter, The Shatner Chatner, whose most popular piece is written from the perspective of a goose. Annual subscriptions cost $50.
The
contract is structured a bit like a book advance: Substack’s bet is
that it will make back its money by taking most of Mr. Lavery’s
subscription income for those two years. The deal now means Mr. Lavery’s
household has two Substack incomes. His wife, Grace Lavery,
an associate English professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, who edits the Transgender Studies Quarterly, had already
signed on for a $125,000 advance.
Along with the revenue the Laverys will bring in, the move is good media
politics for the company. Substack has been facing a mutiny from a
group of writers who objected
to sharing the platform with people who they said were
anti-transgender, including a writer who made fun of people’s
appearances on a dating app. Signing up two high-profile transgender
writers was a signal that Substack was trying to remain a platform for
people who sometimes hate one another, and who sometimes, like Dr.
Lavery, heatedly criticize the company.
Feuds among and about Substack writers
were a major category of media drama during the pandemic winter — a lot
of drama for a company that mostly just makes it easy to email large
groups for free. For those who want to charge subscribers on their email
list, Substack takes a 10 percent fee. “The mindshare Substack has in
media right now is insane,” said Casey Newton, who left The Verge to
start a newsletter on Substack called Platformer. Substack, he said, has
become a target for “a lot of people to project their anxieties.”
Substack
has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces
and contradictions. For one, the new media economy promises both to make
some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation
equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to
labor unions to level out pay scales.
This
new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the
boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel
culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew
Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once
were. (Only Twitter retains that power.) Big media cancellation is often
an offramp to a bigger income. Though Substack paid advances to a few
dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes
most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from
more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.
This new ability
of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t
just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult
performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on
Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s
marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for
big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon
Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big
media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural
shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.
The
facts tell a much more nuanced story than Thapar’s simplistic tale of
academic freedom versus totalitarianism. The case centers on professor
Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University
in Ohio. In 2018, Meriwether misgendered a trans student, known in
litigation as Jane Doe, in class; she asked that use her correct
pronouns and honorifics in the future, but he refused. The university
found Meriwether in violation of its nondiscrimination policy, which
requires professors to use students’ preferred pronouns. Meriwether
refused to comply with the policy, and following an investigation, the
university placed a “written warning” in his file noting his
noncompliance. The professor, backed by the viciously anti-trans law firm
Alliance Defending Freedom, then sued—dragging Jane Doe into the center
of a years-long legal dispute that she desperately wished to avoid.
I
recently corresponded with Doe over email about the case, including its
effect on her own freedom of expression and academic experience. We
spoke on the condition that I use the pseudonym Jane Doe to preserve her
privacy. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mark Joseph Stern: How did you feel when professor Meriwether first misgendered you?
Jane Doe: At
first, I thought it was a mistake, either mix-up of words or a miscue
based on my clothes or appearance. When it is the latter, it is
particularly painful; it makes you feel ugly or that your body is
broken. But, at the time, there was no way for professor Meriwether to
know that I am transgender. All my documents and school records reflect
my correct name and female gender marker.
The 6th
Circuit wrote the following about your reaction to professor
Meriwether’s refusal to acknowledge your gender identity because of his
religious beliefs: “Doe became hostile—circling around Meriwether at
first, and then approaching him in a threatening manner: ‘I guess this
means I can call you a cunt.’ Doe promised that Meriwether would be
fired if he did not give in to Doe’s demands.” Is this account accurate?
This account is only partially accurate. I approached professor
Meriwether after the first class session to let him know that he
mistakenly referred to me as male and ask that he refer to me as female
in the future. He refused. I showed him my driver’s license to further
prove that I am female. He refused again. It was degrading to have to
debate with my professor whether I am female and entitled to the same
treatment as my peers simply because professor Meriwether believed that I
was transgender (it was not until I filed an internal complaint with
Shawnee that I disclosed that I am transgender). Professor Meriwether’s
persistent refusal to treat me with the same respect he afforded other
students was upsetting. Although I made the remark quoted in the
opinion, I was not threatening or hostile.
thehill | House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says in a new interview that she would have put up a fight had she encountered rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
"Well, I'm pretty tough. I'm a street fighter," Pelosi told USA Today while acknowledging that some rioters intended to harm her. "They would have had a battle on their hands."
Pelosi joked that she had a weapon on her in the form of her stilettos.
"I would have had these," she said while lifting up her foot, according to USA Today.
Pelosi, along with former Vice President Mike Pence,
was one of the main targets of rioters who stormed the Capitol building
on Jan. 6 as Congress met to certify the election results.
During the incident, rioters broke into the Speaker's office, destroying and stealing various items in the process.
Pelosi
told USA Today that rioters were "setting out" to hurt her if security
had not quickly evacuated her from the House chamber.
A Missouri man pictured holding a broken piece of her nameplate is among those who have been charged over their roles in the breach.
greenwald |The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive,
extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly
world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too
scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts.
There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.
But they want you to know that they absolutely adore
gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much
that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia,
Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style
headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014,
they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters,
but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”
Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble
gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ
really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men,
lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little
overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their
surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and
they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and
truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people
working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their
flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.
Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this
tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the
costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves.
As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their
involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the
side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism
and militarism have so effectively co-opted.
Corporations have
always sought to control the legislative process and executive branch,
usually with much success. They purchase politicians and their power
aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they leave
government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then
proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to
ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced)
to benefit the corporations’ profit interests. These large corporations
achieve the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians
from both parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows
large corporations to control American democracy at the expense of
those who cannot afford to buy this influence.
But they are now
going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the government for
their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly powerful
participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the wake of
the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory
for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.
The Research
and Technology Protection Program wants everyone to know that aliens ARE
real. The UFO’s on FLIR are totally NOT a subsurface maritime-launched
UAV. The US DOESN'T have those, but if they did, the Navy might want to
introduce them without
breaking the law on special access programs. Hypothetically, such limited hangouts could force adversaries to
re-think their combat doctrine, potentially delaying future offensives in the South
China Sea. There is nothing like spending a ton on wunderwaffen to
plant a kernel of doubt in your adversaries, and convince yourself that conflict is anything but a crapshoot.
The central dogma of molecular biology is “DNA makes RNA makes proteins" but a quick read
of this paper says different, and, the data are probably good. Moreover, Richard Young and Rudolf Jaenisch have been
pioneers in the later phase of modern molecular biology. Bottomline, you'd have to be a total fooking fool to get injected with any of that mRNA therapeutic goop. Strongly recommend downloading the pdf as the technical Karenwaffen is shitting its anti-vax implication panties about now and agitating for censorship of the paper.
biorxiv | Prolonged
SARS-CoV-2 RNA shedding and recurrence of PCR-positive tests have been
widely reported in patients after recovery, yet these patients most
commonly are non-infectious1–14.
Here we investigated the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs can be
reverse-transcribed and integrated into the human genome and that
transcription of the integrated sequences might account for PCR-positive
tests. In support of this hypothesis, we found chimeric transcripts
consisting of viral fused to cellular sequences in published data sets
of SARS-CoV-2 infected cultured cells and primary cells of patients,
consistent with the transcription of viral sequences integrated into the
genome. To experimentally corroborate the possibility of viral
retro-integration, we describe evidence that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs can be
reverse transcribed in human cells by reverse transcriptase (RT) from
LINE-1 elements or by HIV-1 RT, and that these DNA sequences can be
integrated into the cell genome and subsequently be transcribed. Human
endogenous LINE-1 expression was induced upon SARS-CoV-2 infection or by
cytokine exposure in cultured cells, suggesting a molecular mechanism
for SARS-CoV-2 retro-integration in patients. This novel feature of
SARS-CoV-2 infection may explain why patients can continue to produce
viral RNA after recovery and suggests a new aspect of RNA virus
replication.
Introduction
Continuous
or recurrent positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR tests have been reported in
patients weeks or months after recovery from an initial infection1–14. Although bona fide re-infection of SARS-CoV-2 after recovery has been reported lately15,
cohort-based studies with strict quarantine on subjects recovered from
COVID-19 suggested “re-positive” cases were not caused by re-infection16,17. Furthermore, no replication-competent virus was isolated or spread from these PCR-positive patients1–3,5,6,12.
The cause for such prolonged and recurrent viral RNA production is
unknown. As positive-stranded RNA viruses, SARS-CoV-2 and other
beta-coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS employ an RNA-dependent
RNA polymerase to replicate their genomic RNA and transcribe their
sub-genomic RNAs18–20.
One possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs could be reverse-transcribed
and integrated into the human genome, and transcription of the
integrated DNA copies could be responsible for positive PCR tests.
Endogenous
reverse transcriptase (RT) activity has been observed in human cells,
and the products of reverse transcription have been shown to become
integrated into the genome21,22. For example, APP
transcripts have been shown to be reverse-transcribed by endogenous RT,
with resultant APP fragments integrated into the genome of neurons and
transcribed22.
Human LINE-1 elements (~17% of the human genome), a type of autonomous
retrotransposons, are a potential source of endogenous RT, able to
retro-transpose themselves and other non-autonomous elements such as Alu21,23.
Results
Expression
of viral-cellular chimeric transcripts in infected cultured and in
patient-derived cells is consistent with genomic integration of viral
sequences
To investigate the possibility of viral
integration into virus infected cells we analyzed published RNA-Seq data
from SARS-CoV-2-infected cells for evidence of chimeric transcripts,
which would be indicative of viral integration into the genome and
expression. Examination of these data sets 24–30 (Fig. S1a-b) revealed a substantial number of host-viral chimeric reads (Fig. 1a-c, S1c).
These occurred in multiple sample types, including cells and organoids
from lung/heart/brain/stomach tissues, as well as BALF cells directly
isolated from COVID-19 patients (Fig. 1c). Chimeric read abundance was positively correlated with viral RNA level across the sample types (Fig. 1c).
Chimeric reads generally accounted for 0.004% - 0.14% of total
SARS-CoV-2 reads across the samples, with a 69.24% maximal number of
reads in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid cells derived from severe COVID19
patients and near no chimeric reads from patient blood buffy coat cells
(corresponding to almost no total SARS-CoV-2 reads). A majority of
chimeric junctions mapped to SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) sequence (Fig. 1d-e). This is consistent with the finding that nucleocapsid (N) RNA is the most abundant SARS-CoV-2 sub-genomic RNA31,
and thus is most likely to be a target for reverse transcription and
integration. These analyses support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 RNA
may retro-integrate into the genome of infected cells resulting in the
production of chimeric viral-cellular transcripts.
nakedcapitalism |As the use of vaccine passports snowballs around the world, concerns about their potential reach and implications are growing.
Vaccine passports (or passes or certificates) are being rushed
through around the world, including in places where most people have not
even been able to get a vaccine yet. They are being touted as a way of
jump-starting the global economy by providing a means for people to
prove their vaccinated status, allowing them to travel, shop, go to the
gym, attend sporting and cultural events and conduct other indoor
activities. Countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore have
already introduced vaccine passports in the last couple of months.
Of course, the use of the word “passport” is deceptive. “Passport”
implies a document endorsed by a state that establishes citizenship and
guarantees diplomatic protection. A traditional passport does not
require the bearer to participate in a vaccine program, although
immunity certificates have existed for diseases such as Yellow Fever.
Another difference is that a vaccine passport is likely to come in the
form of a digital document. The potential scope of its application is
also far broader than that of a normal passport. It could be required
not only to establish identity and vaccine status at national borders
but also to travel, access public buildings and basic services within
one’s own country of residence.
In countries that already have an established national health
service, such as the UK and Israel, the vaccine passport has been
mandated at state level. In the US tech and health-care companies are
firmly in the driving seat. At least 17 alternative programs are
currently under development. As for the EU, it has proposed
issuing “digital green certificates” that would allow EU residents to
travel freely across the 27-nation bloc by the summer as long as they
have been vaccinated, tested negative for COVID-19 or recovered from the
disease. It’s worth noting that the EU has been studying the feasibility of creating a common EU vaccination card since early 2019.
International Initiatives
There are also initiatives taking place internationally such as the
Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group, whose partners include WHO,
UNICEF, ITU and the European Commission. The group “is focused on
establishing key specifications, standards and a trust framework for a
digital vaccination certificate to facilitate implementation of
effective and interoperable digital solutions that support COVID-19
vaccine delivery and monitoring, with intended applicability to other
vaccines.”
Another initiative is the CommonPass digital health app being
developed by the Commons Project Foundation (CPJ), which was founded by
the Rockefeller Foundation and is supported by the World Economic Forum.
The CommonPass is both a framework and an app that “will allow
individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and
consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status
without revealing any other underlying personal health information.”
Then there’s ID2020, a nongovernmental organization that advocates
for digital IDs for the billion undocumented people worldwide and
under-served groups like refugees. In 2019, ID2020 launched a new
digital identity program in collaboration with the government of Bangladesh and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). It is now involved in the Good Health Pass Collaborative,
“an open, inclusive, cross-sector initiative, bringing together leading
companies and organizations from the technology, health, and travel
sectors”.
Pause for Thought
Some of these initiatives are already being piloted by companies,
including airlines, and local or regional authorities. All Nippons
Airways has started a
test of the CommonPass on its flights from Tokyo Haneda to New York.
Last week New York unveiled its Excelsior pass, which is based on
technology from IBM. Other states are likely to follow suit. France has
also just completed a month-long trial of a health passport app for Air France passengers travelling to Martninique and Guadeloupe.
The speed at which these initiatives are being rushed out should give
pause for thought. Just as with contact tracing apps, the rollout is
haphazard and rife with conflicts of interest. The technology is
unproven and the privacy issues are glaring. Below are seven reasons why
I believe vaccine passports should worry us. Perhaps you can think of
more.
dailymail | Black reporter LOCKED OUT of Twitter for criticizing BLM founder's
$1.4 million home purchase blasts big tech for making movement a 'sacred
cow despite its financial grift'
Patrisse Cullors, 37, has bought an expansive property in Topanga Canyon
The district in which the BLM founder will now live is 88% white and 1.8% black
Critics accused her of abandoning her social justice and activist roots
Sports journalist Jason Whitlock was among those remarking on her purchase
Twitter on Friday locked him out of his account in response to his tweet
Whitlock told DailyMail.com he remains blocked by the social media network
Twitter is demanding he delete his tweet linking to a celebrity real estate blog
Whitlock says he remains 'in Twitter jail, because I won't post bail'
The action is the latest draconian step in censorship by the Silicon Valley firm
vanityfair | No wonder we’ve entered a new era in Silicon Valley, with the tech elite
having their own period of sex, drugs, and rock and roll—often without
the rock, the roll, or even the sex. Last year, a number of rich
founders began experimenting with microdosing drugs to make it through
the day, as two people with knowledge of these habits have told me, by
taking tiny amounts of MDMA and LSD, and a long list of psilocybin
mushrooms to help take the edge off, but not so much that you’re seeing
tie-dyed dolphins or 3D cartoon characters chasing you down Market
Street. For Musk, the pressures of being at the top led the board of
Tesla to worry about the founder’s use of Ambien to get to sleep each
night after the “excruciating” toll running Tesla had taken on him.
Some have even begun building their own microdosing
labs, hiring chemists and pharmaceutical scientists to make bespoke
batches of hallucinogens to pop like Skittles when reality gets a little
too real. During the pandemic, I’ve heard of founders going to far-off
places to experiment with ayahuasca, peyote, and the new drug of choice,
dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a synthetic drug that one person told me was
“like doing 10 years of psychotherapy in five minutes.”
Then there’s the body hacking, which first made its way into the mainstream in 1984 by way of the sci-fi subculture novel Neuromancer
but has since leapt off the page and into Palo Alto, where everyone
seems to want to outdo their cohorts by pushing their bodies to
extremes. You’ve got the Dorseys of the world bragging about how little
they eat each day, the Zuckerbergs boasting of killing their own food,
and an army of nerds now wearing every tracking device imaginable—from
rings that follow your sleep to real-time sugar monitoring devices you
inject into your arm—and then experimenting with all forms of starvation
and sleep habits to show how in control they are of their bodies.
There’s intermittent fasting, working under infrared heat lamps,
calculating ketones, and working with “DIY surgeons” to implant magnets
and microchips.
“I think this is
all a result of a complete detachment from authenticity by these tech
founders. They present a version of themselves that isn’t real, and
then, when they look in the mirror, they see how inauthentic they really
are, and the only way they can handle the illusion they’ve created is
through drugs,” said one Silicon Valley insider who often spends time
with the biohacking-obsessed ultrarich. “It’s all synthetic and it’s all
an illusion.” The pandemic only heightened this, with people slipping
into more extreme activities in their quest for control.
One
Silicon Valley founder who sold his company to Google years ago told me
that the year that followed the sale—when he had gone from an average
American worrying about paying rent each month to seeing seven zeros at
the end of his bank account—was one of the most miserable times of his
life. “You think it’s going to solve all these problems,” the founder
told me, “but it just creates so many more issues, both psychologically
and existentially. You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore.” For
Hsieh, the only thing he could do was run away from his demons and the
reality in which he found himself imprisoned.
buzzfeed | For more than a year, India’s government first cut off and then throttled internet access to Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir after unilaterally withdrawing the disputed region’s autonomy. Facebook executives reportedly shielded
members of India’s ruling party from the platform’s hate speech rules
to protect the company’s business interests. Right-wing trolls have used
social media platforms to harass women who they say offended their religious sensibility. Hindu nationalists have repeatedly taken offense to original shows that Netflix and Amazon have produced, claiming that the platforms were offending Hindu gods and promoting “love jihad,” a conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of converting Hindu women. In 2020, rioters used Facebook Live to incite violence in Delhi. Last month, India’s government threatened to jail Twitter executives
for not complying with an order to block hundreds of accounts, many of
which were critical of the government, and Delhi police briefly threw a young climate activist in jail after charging her with sedition for editing a Google Doc.
I
love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist
government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a
nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to.
Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row
seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like
watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss
in November.
In the physical world, it seemed like things were spiraling
out of control. At the end of 2019, protests about the controversial new
citizenship law roiled the nation. In January 2020, masked goons unleashed violence at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, whose students and staff are frequently branded by the ruling party as “anti-national.” Soon after, communal riots rocked New Delhi, the city I live in. More than 50 people died. But still, millions of Indians could freely voice their opinions online, at least when the government didn’t shut down their internet.
This February, it felt like the walls finally closed in. In the final week of that month, India’s government imposed draconian rules
that gave it the last word over what social media platforms will leave
up, what streaming services will show, and what news websites will
publish. It might also require messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal
to break their encryption so that it can track who texted whom.
Social media companies are now required
to take down anything the government deems problematic within three
days, and anything that law enforcement is unhappy with within 36 hours.
Platforms must also hand over people’s information to law enforcement
agencies if they ask for it. If the platforms fail to comply, their
local staff can be prosecuted, and companies could lose their protection
from being held liable for content that people post.
If
anyone in India takes offense to any scene in any show or any movie on
any streaming service, they can file a complaint. If a service doesn’t
respond or give a satisfactory explanation, the person who complained
can appeal to the federal government, which can then compel services to
censor, edit, or take down the content.
robbreport | It might be an exaggeration to say BioViva
CEO Liz Parrish believes death is optional, but for her, Asprey’s goal
of living to 180 shows a distinct lack of ambition. “If you can reach
homeostasis in the body,” Parrish says, “where it’s regenerating itself
just a little bit faster than it’s degrading, then what do you die of?
An accident or natural disaster, probably. There’s no expiration date at
90 or 100 years old.”
Tall, blond and fit, Parrish cuts a strikingly youthful figure at
49—one that might convince you to order whatever she’s having. But, like
Asprey, she has received criticism from the longevity research
community for becoming “patient zero” in her own experimental drug
trial, aimed at halting aging at the cellular level. In 2015, Parrish
underwent telomerase and follistatin gene therapies in Bogotá,
Colombia. The procedures involved receiving around a hundred injections
of a cocktail of genes and a virus modified to deliver those new genes
into her body’s cells. The objective was to prevent age-related muscle
loss and lengthen her telomeres: the “caps” at the end of our
chromosomes. Scientists have identified their unraveling as not only a
marker of aging but also a potential cause of age-related decline.
Parrish told the media about her clandestine experiment and has
published periodic updates on her condition in the five years since, and
she reports that she has indeed increased her muscle mass and
lengthened her telomeres. Parrish’s punk-rock approach stems from her
conviction that the medical-research community—both the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and researchers who aren’t business-minded—is
moving too slowly, with too much red tape, when it comes to advancing
aging therapeutics. But gene therapy is a relatively new area of
medicine that brings with it a host of new risks, including cancer,
severe immune reactions and infections caused by the viral vector used
to deliver the drug.
Parrish downplays such worries. “There may be risks,” she tells Robb Report.
“But the known risk is that you’re 100 percent likely to die. So you
have to decide for yourself if the potential benefit outweighs that.”
Humans have always aspired to find the fountain of youth, so people
might be skeptical about the fact that anti-aging technologies are
working now,” says British investor and businessman Jim Mellon. “But the
fact is that this is finally happening, and we need to seize the
moment.” Mellon cofounded Juvenescence,
a three-year-old pharmaceutical company that’s investing in multiple
technologies simultaneously to increase the odds of bringing winning
products to market.
Mellon, 63, has made his fortune betting on well-timed investment
opportunities, and he predicts that a new “stock-market mania” for life
extension is just around the corner. “This is like the internet dial-up
phase of longevity biotech,” he enthuses. “If you’d invested in the
internet in the very early days, you’d be one of the richest people on
the planet. We’re at that stage now, so the opportunity for investors is
huge.” According to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, he’s not
wrong: The market for technologies to increase human life span is
projected to grow sixfold to $610 billion in just the next five years.
oftwominds | Those who lived through The Cultural Revolution are reticent about revealing their experiences.
Even in the privacy of their homes in the U.S., their voices become hushed and their
reluctance to give voice to their experiences is evident.
The unifying thread in my view is the accused belonged to some "counter-revolutionary" elite
--or they were living vestiges of a pre-revolutionary elite (children of the landlord class,
professors, etc.)--and it was now open season on all elites, presumed or real.
What generates such spontaneous, self-organizing violence on a national scale?
My conclusion is that cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate
political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.
Cultural revolutions are an expression of disappointment and frustration with corruption and
the lack of progress in improving everyday life, frustrations that have no outlet in a
regime of self-serving elites who view dissent as treason and/or blasphemy.
By 1966, China's progress since 1949 had been at best uneven, and at worst catastrophic:
the Great Leap Forward caused the deaths of millions due to malnutrition and starvation,
and other centrally planned programs were equally disastrous for the masses.
Given the quick demise of the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom movement of open expression,
young people realized there was no avenue for dissent within the Party, and no way to express
their frustration with the Party's failure to fulfil its idealistic goals and promises.
When there is no relief valve in the pressure cooker, it's eventually released in a
Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites which are
deemed politically vulnerable. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they're
threatening to the status quo.
All these repressed emotions will find some release and expression, and whatever avenues are
blocked by authorities will channel the frustrations into whatever is still open.
A Cultural Revolution takes the diversity of individuals and identities and reduces them into
an abstraction which gives the masses permission to criticize the abstract class that "deserves"
whatever rough justice is being delivered by the Cultural Revolution.
As the book review excerpt noted, the definition of who deserves long overdue justice shifts
with the emergent winds, and so those at the head of the Revolution might find themselves
identified as an illegitimate elite that must be unseated.
I submit that these conditions exist in the U.S.: the systemic failure of the status quo to
deliver on idealized promises and the repression of dissent outside "approved" (i.e.
unthreatening to the status quo) boundaries.
What elite can be criticized without drawing the full repressive powers of the central state?
What elite will it be politically acceptable to criticize? I submit that "the wealthy" are
just such an abstract elite.
To protect itself, a repressive status quo implicitly signals that the masses can release their
ire on an abstract elite with indistinct boundaries--a process that will divert the public anger,
leaving the Powers That Be still in charge.
But just as in China's Cultural Revolution, central authorities will quickly lose control
of conditions on the ground. They will maintain the illusion of control even as events spiral
ever farther from their control. The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.
CTH | The Big Tech ministry of COVID compliance has again removed
scientific discussion that runs counter to the approved narrative
presented by the ideological community. In this article we explain
why….
…”COVID Compliance is Infrastructure“
Governor Ron DeSantis held a roundtable discussion with panel experts
from world-renowned doctors and epidemiologists from Oxford, Stanford
and Harvard. However, the panel debated the efficacy of masks on
children and that apparently was considered too contrarian for the Big
Tech control agents.
(Via NBC)
– […] The video of DeSantis’ roundtable discussion last month at the
state Capitol in Tallahassee was removed on Wednesday because it
violated the social media platform’s standards, YouTube spokesperson
Elena Hernandez said.
[…] “YouTube has clear policies around Covid-19 medical misinformation
to support the health and safety of our users,” Hernandez said in a
statement. “We removed AIER’s video because it included content that
contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities
regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19.”
[…] DeSantis’s press secretary Cody
McCloud called YouTube’s move “another blatant example of Big Tech
attempting to silence those who disagree with their woke corporate
agenda.”
“YouTube claimed they
removed the video because ‘it contradicts the consensus of local and
global health authorities,’ yet this roundtable was led by
world-renowned doctors and epidemiologists from Oxford, Stanford, and
Harvard, all of whom are eminently qualified to speak on the global
health crisis,” McCloud said. “Good public health policy should include a
variety of scientific and technical expertise, and YouTube’s decision
to remove this video suppresses productive dialogue of these complex
issues.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of
Stanford University, one of the scientists on the panel, said this “was a
policy forum, in which it is appropriate to consider both the benefits
and costs of a policy (child masking) when making judgments and
recommendations.” (read more)
CTH warned since last summer of the ramifications if a leftist group
used COVID-19 to expand federal power over peoples lives and
livelihoods. In January JoeBama’s team unleashed a series of TEN EXECUTIVE ORDERS fully weaponizing the opportunity. Their need to control the public behavior requires them to control public information.
(2) Executive order on COVID school safety,
weaponized the Dept of Education. Leverages federal funds, grants.
Supports the education labor union effort. Exactly as expected.
(4) Executive order using National Health Crisis
as a security threat. Weaponizing the Secretary of State, the
Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the
Secretary of Homeland Security.
(5) Executive order taking over National Guard.
The domestic terrorists need a category within the health emergency.
The isolation and detainment camps need security. “Support of Operations
or Missions to Prevent and Respond to the Spread of COVID-19. (a) The
Secretary of Defense shall, to the maximum extent feasible and
consistent with mission requirements (including geographic proximity),
request pursuant to 32 U.S.C. 502(f) that all State and territorial
governors order National Guard forces to perform duty to fulfill mission
assignments.”
(6) Executive order taking control of travel.
“The Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Health and Human Services
(HHS), the Secretary of Transportation (including through the
Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)), the
Secretary of Homeland Security (including through the Administrator of
the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Commandant of
the United States Coast Guard).
Social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation, are the entry
point for the goals and aspirations of the political left on a national
and global scale. COVID-19 is a virus, but also a very important
political weapon, and we are about to discover exactly what the purpose of the hype
is all about. What follows will help understand; and when you encounter
the fear it will help to reconcile what people cannot figure out.
I. Glenn Cohen: A digital health pass, sometimes
referred to as a vaccine passport, is essentially a way of digitally
recording that someone has had a vaccination, and then details about the
date of vaccination, and potentially the kind of vaccine they were
given, to the extent relevant. It might be something created by a
governmental authority, or might be something created in the private
sector.
CR: How can these digital health passes help us get to a new normal?
Jana Shaw: Vaccine passports, or digital health
passes, let others know that you are safe and that you are keeping
others safe by getting vaccinated. Places that require digital health
passes are making sure everyone there is safe.
Lawrence O. Gostin: Essentially, the goal is to try to return to as normal as possible, as safely as we can, and as soon as we can.
And so the idea of a digital health pass is to make sure that
everyone in a given space is protected, and also has a diminished
potential for spreading the infection to others.
CR: Can you describe some of the scientific challenges associated with implementing digital health passes?
JS: There are numerous challenges to creating digital health passes.
Length of protection is one of them. However, that can be easily
addressed by including the date of vaccination. As we get more
information on length of protection from vaccination, vaccine passports
can be then used accordingly.
Another limitation is that the efficacy of various COVID-19 vaccines
differs. However, we recognize that the efficacy differs against
developing symptomatic disease, and all authorized vaccines are very effective against serious illness.
In addition, as we monitor the emergence of variants of concern,
there have been reports of decreased vaccine efficacy among certain
vaccines. However, that currently is being addressed by vaccine
manufacturers. They are developing vaccines that target the emergent
variants to ensure that their vaccines will continue to be effective as
variants evade vaccine-induced immunity.
We could not really talk about challenges and not talk about access
to vaccination. Universal access to vaccines has to be ensured before
digital health passes are rolled out, to mitigate the risk of
transmission and the risk of creating an equity divide for those who are
not vaccinated.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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He ...
