RT | As experts extol the life-preserving qualities of Covid jabs, a
news story has claimed that the condition of a man who perished from the
virus could have been worse had he not been vaxxed, kindling
philosophical debate on Twitter.
The metaphysical social
media chatter was triggered by national media coverage of the recent
death of Texas native Patricio Elizondo, a diabetic who suffered from
heart problems. After Elizondo fell ill in early August, his daughter
suspected that he may be suffering from a resurgence of congestive heart
failure. The 76-year-old was soon hospitalized after he began having
difficulty breathing – a common symptom of heart failure, which can lead
to fluid building up in the lungs causing shortness of breath.
But
doctors said that a chest X-ray revealed that Elizondo had actually
caught Covid. He passed away on August 3 due to lung damage caused by
the virus, a cardiologist who treated Elizondo said.
The Texan’s
age and medical history placed him at high risk for contracting a severe
case of coronavirus – but the fact that he was fully vaccinated caught
the attention of local, then national media.
Aside from being fully inoculated against Covid, Elizondo “rarely left the house, was always masked up, and even wore gloves,” Yvonne Rodriguez, the daughter of the deceased, told
San Antonio news station KSAT. Although she said she couldn’t
understand how her father caught the virus, Rodriguez stressed that she
felt the vaccine had still been helpful.
“I saw my dad, how sick as he was,” she said. “I can’t imagine how much more he would have suffered if he had not gotten the vaccine.”
KSAT spoke with a local doctor and infectious disease specialist who suggested that Rodriguez was “right” to think that the vaccine had aided her father.
FT | A rise in vaccinated people becoming infected with coronavirus has cast doubt over the lasting efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, according to new studies, including one that found protection gained from the BioNTech/Pfizer shot declined more rapidly than that from the AstraZeneca jab.
An Oxford university study published on Thursday found that the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine against symptomatic infection almost halved after four months, and that vaccinated people infected with the more infectious Delta variant had as high viral loads as the unvaccinated.
Two research papers from the US and Qatar have also fuelled debate over the need for top-up booster shots as they found higher numbers of “breakthrough infections” than anticipated, even though protection against serious cases of the virus appears to hold.
Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at Emory University, said the spread of the Delta variant had made it “a lot harder” to stop transmission.
“The situation has changed with respect to how far we think vaccines can take us,” she said. “We’ve been brought back to a more modest — but still critical — goal: to prevent severe disease, hospitalisations and deaths.”
The Oxford scientists showed vaccine efficacy falling since the Delta strain became dominant in the UK in May. While the Pfizer shot was more effective at first, by four to five months after the second dose its efficacy was roughly the same as AstraZeneca’s jab, as the protection offered by the latter has barely budged.
The paper’s authors were not involved in the creation of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which originated at Oxford university.
Tomas Hanke, professor of vaccine immunology at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, speculated that the AstraZeneca shot generates longer-lasting immunity because its spike protein sticks around for more time, promoting a bigger immune response.
“When you deliver RNA, like the Pfizer vaccine, you deliver a finite number of mRNA molecules which are eventually cleared from the system,” he said. “But when you deliver the adenovirus, as AstraZeneca does, you deliver a template which then keeps producing these mRNAs that then produce the spike protein, so there’s no ceiling.”
A preprint based on evidence collected at the Mayo Clinic hospital chain in the US state of Minnesota showed protection against infection fell from 91 per cent to 76 per cent between February and July for the vaccine made by Moderna, and from 89 per cent to 42 per cent for the Pfizer jab.
thegrayzone | Amid rising reports of vaccine-related menstrual disruptions, the
CDC and FDA are dismissing women’s concerns and denying them information
while corporate media pathologizes them in sexist fashion.
Just 23% of pregnant women in the US have received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Only something like 11.1% have been fully vaccinated.
The CDC is seeking to drive these
numbers up, but it is not doing the one thing that would, perhaps more
than anything else, assuage the “hesitations” of these so-called
“anti-vaxxers”: investigate and explain widespread reports of menstrual
disruption post-Covid 19 vaccine – and, if necessary, add a warning
about it.
Why?
I have five female friends who, after
receiving Covid-19 vaccines, experienced disruption to their menstrual
cycles. Their symptoms have included hemorrhagic bleeding lasting more
than a month; heavy intermittent bleeding for four months; passing
golf-ball size clots of blood; and extreme cramping, serious enough to
land one friend in the ER.
Most of these women are in their 20s
and 30s, and at least one of them thinks she might want to have
children. She now worries that her symptoms might be the harbinger of
long-term fertility problems. At least two of my friends have symptoms
that have not resolved. All are feminists and have throughout the years
been consistent Democratic Party voters.
Other women of childbearing age havereported becoming temporarily “postmenopausal” after their second mRNA shot; conversely, women in menopause are reporting suddenly beginning to bleed again; trans men on hormone therapy have also reported
sudden bleeding. Apparently, the number of vaccinated women around the
world reporting alarmingly disrupted menstruation is, to be
conservative, in the tens of thousands.
The US Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), however, does not warn women who get the shots that they may
experience a disrupted menstrual cycle.
Why is this? In part because even
though menstruation is sometimes called the sixth vital sign and
directly implicates fertility, and the fact that women on average suffer
higher rates of adverse reaction to vaccines of all sorts and
medication in general, the effects of Covid vaccines on women’s health
specifically, including the menstrual cycle, were not studied as part of
theEmergency Use Authorization process.
thesaker | The first Taliban press conference
after this weekend’s Saigon moment geopolitical earthquake, conducted
by spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, was in itself a game-changer.
The contrast could not be starker with those rambling pressers at the
Taliban embassy in Islamabad after 9/11 and before the start of the
American bombing – proving this is an entirely new political animal.
Yet some things never change. English translations remain atrocious.
Here is a good summary of the key Taliban statements, and
– No problem for women to get education all the way to college, and
to continue to work. They just need to wear the hijab (like in Qatar or
Iran). No need to wear a burqa. The Taliban insists, “all women’s rights
will be guaranteed within the limits of Islamic law.”
– The Islamic Emirate “does not threaten anyone” and will not treat
anyone as enemies. Crucially, revenge – an essential plank of the
Pashtunwali code – will be abandoned, and that’s unprecedented. There
will be a general amnesty – including people who worked for the former
NATO-aligned system. Translators, for instance, won’t be harassed, and
don’t need to leave the country.
– Security of foreign embassies and international organizations “is a
priority.” Taliban special security forces will protect both those
leaving Afghanistan and those who remain.
– A strong inclusive Islamic government will be formed. “Inclusive” is code for the participation of women and Shi’ites.
– Foreign media will continue to work undisturbed. The Taliban
government will allow public criticism and debate. But “freedom of
speech in Afghanistan must be in line with Islamic values.”
– The Islamic Emirate of Taliban wants recognition from the
“international community” – code for NATO. The overwhelming majority of
Eurasia and the Global South will recognize it anyway. It’s essential to
note, for example, the closer integration of the expanding SCO – Iran
is about to become a full member, Afghanistan is an observer – with
ASEAN: the absolute majority of Asia will not shun the Taliban.
For the record, they also stated that the Taliban took all of
Afghanistan in only 11 days: that’s pretty accurate. They stressed “very
good relations with Pakistan, Russia and China.” Yet the Taliban don’t
have formal allies and are not part of any military-political bloc. They
definitely “won’t allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for
international terrorists”. That’s code for ISIS/Daesh.
On the key issue of opium/heroin: the Taliban will ban their production. So, for all practical purposes, the CIA heroin rat line is dead.
As eyebrow raising as these statements may be, the Taliban did not
even get into detail on economic/infrastructure development deals – as
they will need a lot of new industries, new jobs and improved
Eurasian-wide trade relations. That will be announced later.
The go-to Russian guy
Sharp US observers are remarking, half in jest, that the Taliban in
only one sitting answered more real questions from US media than POTUS
since January.
What this first press conference reveals is how the Taliban are fast
absorbing essential P.R. and media lessons from Moscow and Beijing,
emphasizing ethnic harmony, the role of women, the role of diplomacy,
and deftly defusing in a single move all the hysteria raging across
NATOstan.
The next bombshell step in the P.R. wars will be to cut off the
lethal, evidence-free Taliban-9/11 connection; afterwards the “terrorist
organization” label will disappear, and the Taliban as a political
movement will be fully legitimized.
Moscow and Beijing are meticulously stage-managing the Taliban
reinsertion in regional and global geopolitics. This means that
ultimately the SCO is stage-managing the whole process, applying a
consensus reached after a series of ministerial and leaders meetings,
leading to a very important summit next month in Dushanbe.
As
an index of the Afghan state’s failure to make its society ‘legible’
(in another phrase of Scott’s), it may be noted that in the whole of
modern Afghan history there has never been a census that could be
regarded as remotely reliable. As for Max Weber’s classic definition of a
state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of
the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’,3
that has never been true of Afghanistan. Even when the Afghan state was
at its strongest, local communities insisted, usually successfully, on
keeping rifles, on conducting limited armed disputes with other kinship
groups, and on executing their own members who violated traditional
community norms.
Only in the late 1940s, as a result of the import
of modern tanks and aircraft, did the Afghan state army become strong
enough to defeat a general tribal uprising – and that superiority lasted
a bare 30 years. It collapsed with the anti-communist revolts and army
mutinies of the late 1970s, and since then, no Afghan state – not even
the Taliban, which came closest – has successfully possessed a monopoly
of organised armed force across the whole of Afghanistan.4
This
basic truth obscures an important nuance, however. The Pashtun tribes
have not been categorically hostile to state authority as such; after
all, Pashtun tribes created the kingdom of Afghanistan in the first
place, and most rural Pashtuns accepted Taliban rule in the 1990s
willingly enough. Rather, they have been hostile to three kinds of
government: those lacking traditional or religious legitimacy; those
which force them to pay too many taxes; and those which try rapidly to
change their lives, their society and their traditions. In the
traditional Pashtun tribal view, the legitimate role of the state,
though essential, is also highly limited. Apart from leading the people
against invaders, it is to judge tribal disputes, and thereby prevent
these disputes from creating a state of permanent warfare.5
Given the traditional omnipresence of weapons in Pashtun society, and
the cultural obsession with honour and prestige, journalist Anand Gopal
has observed that ‘the role of dispute resolution in Pashtun society
cannot be emphasised enough … In post-2001 Kandahar, the Taliban’s
judicial services became one of the key advantages that the movement had
over the state.’6
The
Pashtun tragedy lies in the fact that in practice, this rejection of
state interference has usually amounted to a rejection of the
modernising state as such, since modernising states need to raise taxes
to pay for development, find it very hard to base themselves on
tradition, and by definition have to set out to change society.
Scott,
as an anarchist, sympathises unconditionally with the hill peoples of
Southeast Asia in their flight from and resistance to local states. The
melancholy history of Afghanistan, by contrast, would suggest that the
only thing worse than having a state is not having a state; and indeed,
this tragic dilemma is summed up in a very old Pashtun proverb: ‘feuding
ate up the mountains, and taxes ate up the plains’.7
The
great value of Scott’s approach is that it reminds us of something that
Western societies have long forgotten, and that the vast majority of
the Western ‘experts’ who tried (or pretended) to develop Afghanistan
after 2001 simply could not comprehend (as was probably true also of
their Soviet equivalents 20 years earlier): the intense nastiness of
most states in history, especially in their formative stages. As a
famous nineteenth-century British-Indian policeman wrote of the history
of South Asia in general:
There has seldom been
any idea of reciprocity, of duties and rights, between the governor and
the governed … For in India, the difference between the army of a
prince and the gang of a robber was, in the general estimation of the
people, only in degree – they were both driving an ‘imperial trade’, a padshahi kam.8
In
other words, if Pashtuns have often revolted against the Afghan state
(whether foreign-backed or purely indigenous), they have often had good
reasons to.
There is, however, a reciprocal relationship between
state nastiness and tribal resistance. It takes a great deal of
nastiness (or at least the threat of it) to persuade tribes to pay
taxes, but without taxes, what is the state? Either an impotent shadow,
or a dependency of some foreign state and its subsidies. Both of these
fates have befallen Afghanistan repeatedly over the past 200 years.
Key
to the West’s failure successfully to build a new order in Afghanistan
after 2001 was not just an inability to understand the historic
alienation of ordinary Afghans in general, and Pashtuns in particular,
from ‘their’ state, but also a refusal to recognise that, given the
miserable history and eventual collapse of Afghan states, the Taliban
may have been the best state-building option left, at least as far as
rural Pashtuns were concerned. Not by any means a good option – just
better than all the others.
asiatimes | Geopolitically, what matters now is how the Taliban have written a
whole new script, showing the lands of Islam, as well as the Global
South, how to defeat the self-referential, seemingly invincible US/NATO
empire.
The Taliban did it with Islamic faith, infinite patience and force of
will fueling roughly 78,000 fighters – 60,000 of them active – many
with minimal military training, no backing of any state – unlike
Vietnam, which had China and the USSR – no hundreds of billions of
dollars from NATO, no trained army, no air force and no state-of-the-art
technology.
They relied only on Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and
Toyota pick-ups – before they captured American hardware these past few
days, including drones and helicopters.
Taliban leader Mullah Baradar has been extremely cautious. On Monday
he said: “It is too early to say how we will take over governance.”
First of all, the Taliban wants “to see foreign forces leave before
restructuring begins.”
Abdul Ghani Baradar is a very interesting character. He was born and
raised in Kandahar. That’s where the Taliban started in 1994, seizing
the city almost without a fight and then, equipped with tanks, heavy
weapons and a lot of cash to bribe local commanders, capturing Kabul
nearly 25 years ago, on September 27, 1996.
Earlier, Mullah Baradar fought in the 1980s jihad against the USSR,
and maybe – not confirmed – side-by-side with Mullah Omar, with whom he
co-founded the Taliban.
After the American bombing and occupation post-9/11, Mullah Baradar
and a small group of Taliban sent a proposal to then-President Hamid
Karzai on a potential deal that would allow the Taliban to recognize the
new regime. Karzai, under Washington pressure, rejected it.
Baradar was actually arrested in Pakistan in 2010 – and kept in
custody. Believe it or not, American intervention led to his freedom in
2018. He then relocated to Qatar. And that’s where he was appointed head
of the Taliban’s political office and oversaw the signing last year of
the American withdrawal deal.
Baradar will be the new ruler in Kabul – but it’s important to note
he’s under the authority of the Taliban Supreme Leader since 2016,
Haibatullah Akhundzada. It’s the Supreme Leader – actually a spiritual
guide – who will be lording over the new incarnation of the Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan.
The collapse of the Afghan National Army (ANA) was inevitable. They
were “educated” the American military way: massive technology, massive
airpower, next to zero local ground intel.
The Taliban is all about deals with tribal elders and extended family
connections – and a peasant guerrilla approach, parallel to the
communists in Vietnam. They were biding their time for years, just
building connections – and those sleeper cells.
Afghan troops who had not received a salary for months were paid not
to fight them. And the fact they did not attack American troops since
February 2020 earned them a lot of extra respect: a matter of honor,
essential in the Pashtunwali code.
It’s impossible to understand the Taliban – and most of all, the
Pashtun universe – without understanding Pashtunwali. As well as the
concepts of honor, hospitality and inevitable revenge for any
wrongdoing, the concept of freedom implies no Pashtun is inclined to be
ordered by a central state authority – in this case, Kabul. And no way
will they ever surrender their guns.
In a nutshell, that’s the “secret” of the lightning-fast blitzkrieg
with minimal loss of blood, inbuilt in the overarching geopolitical
earthquake. After Vietnam, this is the second Global South protagonist
showing the whole world how an empire can be defeated by a peasant
guerrilla army.
And all that accomplished with a budget that may not exceed $1.5
billion a year – coming from local taxes, profits from opium exports (no
internal distribution allowed) and real estate speculation. In vast
swaths of Afghanistan, the Taliban were already, de facto, running local
security, local courts and even food distribution.
Taliban 2021 is an entirely different animal compared with Taliban
2001. Not only are they battle-hardened, they had plenty of time to
perfect their diplomatic skills, which were recently more than visible
in Doha and in high-level visits to Tehran, Moscow and Tianjin.
They know very well that any connection with al-Qaeda remnants,
ISIS/Daesh, ISIS-Khorasan and ETIM is counter-productive – as their
Shanghai Cooperation Organization interlocutors made very clear.
michael-hudson | After Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama funded Al Qaeda
(largely with the gold looted from destroying Libya) to fight for U.S.
geopolitical aims and oil in Iraq and Syria. The Taliban for its part
fought against Al Quaeda. The real U.S. fear therefore is not that they
may back America’s Wahabi foreign legion, but that they will make a deal
with Russia, China and Syria to serve as a trade link from Iran
westward.
Biden’s second myth was to blame the victim by claiming that the
Afghan army would not fight for “their country,” despite his assurances
by the proxies whom the U.S. installed – that they would use U.S. money
to build the economy. He also said that the army did not fight, which
became obvious over the weekend.
The police force also did not fight. Nobody fought the Taliban to
“defend their country,” because the U.S. occupation regime was not
“their country.” Again and again, Biden repeated that the United States
could not save a country that would not “defend itself.” But the
“itself” was the corrupt regime that was simply pocketing U.S. “aid”
money.
The situation was much like what was expressed in the old joke about
the Lone Ranger and Tonto finding themselves surrounded by Indians.
“What are we going to do, Tonto,” asked the Lone Ranger.
“What do you mean, ‘We,’ white man?” Tonto replied. That was the
reply of the Afghan army to U.S. demands that they fight for the corrupt
occupation force that they had installed. Their aim is to survive in a
new country, while in Doha the Taliban leadership negotiates with China,
Russia and even the United States to achieve a modus vivendi.
So all that Biden’s message meant to most Americans was that we would
not waste any more lives and money fighting wars for an ungrateful
population that wanted the U.S. to do all the fighting for it.
President Biden could have come out and washed away the blame by
saying: “Just before the weekend, I was told by my army generals and
national security advisors that it would take months for the Taliban to
conquer Afghanistan, and certainly to take control of Kabul, which
supposedly would be a bloody fight.” He could have announced that he is
removing the incompetent leadership engrained for many years, and
creating a more reality-based group.
But of course, he could not do that, because the group is the
unreality-based neocon Deep State. He was not about to explain how “It’s
obvious that I and Congress have been misinformed, and that the
intelligence agencies had no clue about the country that they were
reporting on for the last two decades.”
e could have acknowledged that the Afghans welcomed the Taliban into
Kabul without a fight. The army stood aside, and the police stood
aside. There seemed to be a party celebrating the American withdrawal.
Restaurants and markets were open, and Kabul seemed to be enjoying
normal life – except for the turmoil at the airport.
Suppose that Biden had said the following: “Given this acquiescence
in support for the Taliban, I was obviously correct in withdrawing the
American occupation forces. Contrary to what Congress and the Executive
Branch was told, there was no support by the Afghans for the Americans. I
now realize that to the Afghan population, the government officials
that America installed simply took the money we gave them and put it
into their own bank accounts instead of paying the army, police and
other parts of civic society.”
Instead, President Biden spoke about having made four trips to
Afghanistan and how much he knew and trusted the proxies that U.S.
agencies had installed. That made him seem gullible. Even Donald Trump
said publicly that he didn’t trust the briefings that he was given, and
wanted to spend money at home, into the hands of his own campaign
contributors instead of abroad.
Biden could have picked up on this point by saying, “At least there’s
a silver lining: We won’t be spending any more than the $3 trillion
that we’ve already sunk over there. We can now afford to use the money
to build up domestic U.S. infrastructure instead.”
But instead President Biden doubled down on what his neocon advisors
had told him, and what they were repeating on the TV news channels all
day: The Afghan army had refused to fight “for their country,” meaning
the U.S.-supported occupation force, as if this was really Afghan
self-government.
The media are showing pictures of the Afghan palace and one of the
warlord’s office. I did a double-take, because the plush,
wretched-excess furnishings looked just like Obama’s $12 million
McMansion furnishings in Martha’s Vineyard.
Greenwald | Last month, the independent journalist Michael Tracey, writing at Substack,
interviewed a U.S. veteran of the war in Afghanistan. The former
soldier, whose job was to work in training programs for the Afghan
police and also participated in training briefings for the Afghan
military, described in detail
why the program to train Afghan security forces was such an obvious
failure and even a farce. “I don’t think I could overstate that this was
a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or
losing equipment,” he said. In sum, “as far as the US military presence
there — I just viewed it as a big money funneling operation”: an endless
money pit for U.S. security contractors and Afghan warlords, all of
whom knew that no real progress was being made, just sucking up as much
U.S. taxpayer money as they could before the inevitable withdraw and
takeover by the Taliban.
So what was
supposed to happen back in October 2001, when the US forces invaded?
I’ve been going through the papers of record, the NYT and WaPo, to see
what the official line was, year by year. The first years of an
occupation are the most important, so I’ve focused on the first five
full years of US occupation, 2002-2007. You can find a good timeline of
these years here, but it’s much harder to find any trace of a plan.
The US invaded both Afghanistan (October 2001) and Iraq (March 2003), but not all invasions are equal. For the DC elite, Iraq was a war of choice, while Afghanistan was just a grim preliminary chore. They had to invade Afghanistan quickly
after the WTC attacks, because it was all over the news that Al Qaeda
had its HQ there and the voters were angry. Public support for invading Afghanistanwas higher than for invading Iraq.
But those in the know, in the three-letter agencies and the DC elite, knew Afghanistan was hopeless. They knew this because the Taliban, officially the enemy in Afghanistan,
was sponsored and protected by the Pakistani armed forces. And Pakistan
was never going to hand over Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, leader of
the Taliban, to the Americans. The Pakistani intel elite, one of the
scariest, murkiest groups in the world, cherished its
pet jihadis as its one reliable weapon against the hated Indians. It
was never going to help destroy them, or even cooperate in any serious
pruning operation.
A decade after the US invaded with
the supposed help of Pakistan, Osama was found in a big compound inside
Pakistan, a few hundred meters from a Pakistani military. At that point
even us rubes knew that the Pakistani government had never intended to
betray its Taliban allies. (Note: “Taliban” here means the “Afghan
Taliban,” as opposed to the later “Pakistani Taliban,” which the Pakistani gov’t, or at least some elements of that gov’t, really does dislike. Like I said, it’s murky.)
Nobody
at the CIA or the 16 other US intel agencies really thought the
Pakistani gov’t would give up their friends. And nobody in DC really
thought that Afghans, as they imagined Afghans, would welcome American
troops. So from the start, this was the poor stepchild invasion, while
Iraq was coddled.
They had high hopes for Iraq. Iraqis,
in the neocon dream, were really proto-Americans, just waiting for a
Shock and Awe Apocalypse to free their inner Republican. Afghans, OTOH,
were scary and alien. Brave, yes; remember all those Reagan-era movies
on the glorious Afghan resistance?
The DC blob had no real hopes or plans for Afghanistan —
and the stories from NYT and WaPo reflect that. These stories use
several different models, which I’ll try to characterize here. They
overlap, over the years 2002-2007, but they’re not in any strict
chronological order. It’s more that those whose unlucky job it was to
explain the invasion used whichever model retained a figleaf of
plausibility at the time.
The CDC, and the entire federal public health apparatus in the United States, has been an absolute disaster for the entire duration of this pandemic. It's embarrassing how incompetent they are. A pandemic is an emergency and requires proactive action. The CDC has been anything but proactive. As stated in the article, it seems as if they're reacting to every event that occurs with a month-long delay.
Data Collection--It's an absolute disgrace that there is no federal central repository of COVID-19 breakthrough infection data. We are navigating this mess completely blindfolded. Instead, we have to rely on individual state reporting, and sometimes data is only available on a county-level.
Wide-scale Home Testing--It took the FDA an entire year and a half to approve a lateral assay antigen test. Yet, they're on retail for $20 at CVS. That's far too expensive for a simple piece of nitrocellulose paper with immunofluorescent antibodies. If we were serious about curtailing the spread of Delta, we would invest funds in a federal effort to mass-produce these tests at a $1 price point, and distribute them to all households for daily testing.
Mutations--It seems as if everyone forgot the concept of a "derivative" from entry-level calculus. Everyone is focused on Delta without exerting the slightest effort in thinking about the future. We need to get proactive, folks. Immune evasion to Delta may be low, but what about future variants? We need to model the rate of mutations in the spike protein based on the magnitude of transmissions. This is possible if effort is put into it. Doing such, we can forecast antibody evasion in future variants based on current cases.
Booster Doses--I truly hope that the boosters that are being planned are not simply a third dose of the same Spike encodement. The spike region has mutated since the Alpha iteration of the virus. Current vaccines encode for that old version of the Spike protein. The boosters should have the mRNA encoding of the Delta spike. Giving senior citizens a booster of the old Spike sequence would be extremely short-sighted.
Treatments--Why is the United States investing so little in COVID-19 infection treatment? Why are we hedging all our bets on prophylaxis? We must invest far more into Coronavirus inhibitors.
In short, I have lost all faith in our federal public health apparatus. The CDC is nowhere near as agile as it needs to be to deal with a pandemic.
NYTimes | When asked if he had gotten a Covid-19 vaccine, Lamar Jackson, a quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, declined to answer. “I feel it’s a personal decision,” he said. “I’m just going to keep my feelings to my family and myself.”
Jackson
echoed another N.F.L. quarterback, Cam Newton of the New England
Patriots, who said much the same a few days earlier. “It’s too personal
to discuss,” Newton replied, when asked if he was vaccinated. “I’ll just keep it at that.”
Jackson and Newton are not the only prominent people to say hey, it’s personal
when asked about the vaccine. It is a common dodge for public-facing
vaccine skeptics or those using vaccine skepticism for their own ends.
“I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or
not,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, told CNN last month. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wrote similarly
(albeit less abrasively) in May that vaccination was a “personal and
private decision” and that “no one should be shamed, coerced or mandated
to take Covid-19 vaccines that are being allowed under an emergency use
authorization.”
Johnson and all the others are wrong. Wearing a helmet while bike
riding, strapping on your seatbelt in a car — these are personal
decisions, at least as far as your own injuries are concerned.
Vaccination is different. In the context of a deadly and often
debilitating contagion, in which the unchecked spread of infection has
consequences for the entire society, vaccination is not a personal
decision. And inasmuch as the United States has struggled to achieve
herd immunity against Covid-19 through vaccination, it is because we
refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve
through collective action.
In addition to not being paid, fed, or resupplied by leadership that fled the country with cars full of embezzled $$$ - the Afghan National Army folded quick, fast, and in a hurry for the following reason(s):
1. The Taliban has had 20 years to build lists.
2. So, the Taliban knows who the ANA Kandak commanders are. Everyone's got a cousin in the Taliban and a cousin in the ANA/ANP/ABP/CTPT whatever. The ANA Kandak commanders get a phone call from the Taliban commanders: we've got your family in X province under our protection now.
3. When the American ETT's lost operational control over their advisors, the ANA officers and NCOs had no one to put a check on the tendency to abuse new Askars, and also the tendency to steal the new Askars' money (Here's $100, we'll take $90 back now for your food and uniform).
4. Morale within the units is shit, and the trust and mutual respect needed for effective small-unit combat actions to actually work doesn't really exist. Corruption runs wild, drug abuse is a big problem, and again, everyone's got a cousin on the other side, so fuck it, right?
5. Plus, the US concentrated on developing combat forces in their own image, supplying the ANA with surplus Flag of United States arms, vehicles, uniforms & commo gear. The US spent thousands upon thousands of dollars training and equipping each ANA Askar, but forgot something: they didn't issue eyeglasses.
6. I have shit uncorrected eyesight, like, I really need glasses to do just about anything, certainly to shoot an M4 or an M203 accurately enough to kill the person I'm aiming at. Don't you reckon there might be myopic askars? None of the Askars had eyeglasses.
7. Afghanistan was a complete, total, and epic fuckup by the Administration, the Intelligence Community, the American Deep State. Sheer and utter incompetence played out over 20 years to the nth degree. For any of us looking, all I got is that we should now understand our Vietnam veterans better. And, man, every administration since Jimmy Carter (or hell, you can go back to Eisenhower and Morrison-Knudsen's dam building efforts) fucked up afghanistan.
p.s. the Talibs also have cousins who are Askars in the army. The difference is that the Talibs believe they're right and the Askars don't. That's the biggest difference. Weapons and big spending can't buy that.
This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President. pic.twitter.com/j4kKwyPDVm
One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen
Obama like this,” There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of
politician, when either because their careers are over, or because
they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that
they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid
bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.
He extended middle
fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of
America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of
hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite
A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry,
Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh
imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim
Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the
shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also
such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of
the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.
Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the
birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the
script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the
Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The
history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this,
but they shouldn’t.
Obama was set up to be the greatest of
American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great
political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his
remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said
in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives
are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding,
for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly
rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper
class status they crave: us.
alicefromqueens | Harris opposed legalization as recently as 2014, in her re-election
campaign for attorney general of California, even as her Republican
opponent supported it. Incidentally, the answer Harris gave a local
reporter on the subject that year was the first time her laugh got her in real trouble. Hold onto that for bar trivia-night.
TO BE CLEAR: I HAVE NO PROBLEM
with Kamala’s personality type as such. But before she dropped out of
the primaries, it amazed me that no one else found her
fish-out-of-waterness worth remarking on. Surely it’s not problematic to
discuss frankly whether any politician as feminine as Kamala can win a
presidential election.
The nearest thing to a high-profile criticism of Harris’s personality was delivered unwittingly in The Washington Post. In an Opinion piece titled, “Vogue got too familiar, too fast,” the paper’s former fashion critic, Robin Givhan, blamed Vogue for making Harris look relatable:
“The cover did not give Kamala D. Harris due respect. It was overly
familiar. It was a cover image that, in effect, called Harris by her
first name without invitation.”
Givhan goes on to suggest that the cover reflected solely the preferences of Vogue’s
editor and Hollywood-villain Anna Wintour, and that Wintour’s
cluelessness exemplified Vogue’s ongoing problems with race.
Astonishingly, this all came after Givhan acknowledged, “Harris styled
herself. She chose her ensembles.”
No one inflicts relatability on Kamala, and no one needs an invite to
call her by one name. There’s an invitation in every smile and word from
her mouth. Whether Americans want such an invitation from their
president is a different question, one we’ll be returning to in this
series
independent | The response from the office of Kamala Harris to reports that her office was a mess of dysfunction and distrust is to say the anonymous critics are "cowards".
An incendiary story in Politico based on leaks from within and around the vice president’s
orbit describes her office as chaotic, tense, dour, abusive, and an
unhealthy work environment where "people feel treated like s***".
The
report quotes 22 current and former vice presidential aides,
administration officials and associates of both Ms Harris and Joe Biden
to paint a picture of a toxic and incompetent operation from the
top-down, with particular ire aimed at the VP’s chief of staff Tina
Flournoy.
“People
are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and
it’s an abusive environment,” said a person with direct knowledge of how
Ms Harris runs her office.
The report claims Ms Flournoy created
an insular environment where ideas are ignored and she refuses to take
responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for negative
results that follow, like the bungled trip to the Mexico border that
blindsided members of the vice president’s own office.
In response to Politico, Ms Harris’ chief spokeswoman said people criticizing Ms Flournoy "are cowards to do this this way".
“We
are not making rainbows and bunnies all day. What I hear is that people
have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club,’” Ms Sanders said.
“We
have created a culture where people, if there is anything anyone would
like to raise, there are avenues for them to do so. Whoever has
something they would like to raise, they should raise it directly.”
DHS– The Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the current heightened threat environment across the United States. […] These threats include those posed by domestic terrorists, individuals and groups engaged in grievance-based violence. […] Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances over public health safety measures andperceivedgovernment restrictions.
Indystar |The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention has recommended that K-12 schools adopt universal masking for
all students, teachers and staff members, regardless of vaccination
status. The Indiana State Department of Health has recommended that
schools follow the CDC guidance.
But the
decision has been left to local school boards, the very people that
Stock is telling not to listen to the CDC or the state health officials.
State
health officials have pushed back on Stock’s video, while maintaining
the position that Indiana is a "home rule state" and decisions around
masking and more are up to local officials.
“Throughout
this pandemic, we have relied on data and science to make
recommendations, and we will continue to do so,” said Megan Wade-Taxter,
a spokesperson for the Indiana State Department of Health. “The
COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at preventing hospitalizations
and deaths, as evidenced by the fact that more than 98% of Hoosiers who
have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since mid-January are
unvaccinated."
That’s true even as the delta
variant drives a surge of new cases. More than 97% of Hoosiers who have
been hospitalized with COVID-19 since June 1 have not been vaccinated,
she said.
"Decisions about school protocols
rest with school boards and local leaders," she said, "including local
health departments and elected officials."
The Hancock County Health Department has also
advised all schools in the county, including Mt. Vernon, to follow the
CDC and state health recommendations.
"You’ve
got so many things coming at you," said Kellie Freeman, a member of the
Mt. Vernon Community Schools board that heard from Stock last week.
"It’s difficult to know."
At that meeting of
the Mt. Vernon board, members were considering parameters that would
require individual school buildings to increase cleaning and move toward
a mask mandate, based on the percentage of students out due to illness
or quarantine. Currently, the district is mask-optional.
Ultimately, the board decided to table the discussion after hearing Stock's comments.
"I think we have an obligation to… find the facts that were shared today," said board member Shannon Walls.
geertvandenbossche | The WHO’s mass vaccination program has been installed in response to a public health emergency of international concern. As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccines and threatening the unvaccinated.
This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity. As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vacinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the non-vacinated. This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs.
Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives. Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treatments of Covid-19 disease.
ritholtz | “In every well-ordered society charged with the duty of
conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in
respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great
dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable
regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”
I noted back in February that America’s CEOs were “Having a Good Year.”
Not just in their response to a deadly pandemic, or to the logistical
challenges of remote work or feeding a nation stuck at home, but even
their response to the January 6th attempted coup (Let’s stop pussyfooting around with equivocal words like “insurrection”).
The Vaccine hesitancy that has been stoked by bad actors – an
unseemly mix of malicious, opportunistic, and plain old stupid – has
presented another chance for the corporate sector to demonstrate
leadership. The track record is at best mixed.
If for no other reason than self-interest, it’s time for Corporate America to step up its Vax game – and fast. More than their new hires,
companies need to get their customers, aka the public, vaccinated.
Otherwise, we are going to be living through an echo of 2020, with Covid
as an ongoing and perhaps even long-term drag on the economy. This will
affect revenue and earnings at all companies.
Even better, as an exercise, let’s name names. Consider these 10
companies as well-situated to effect real social change relative to
Vaccines. But really, any company can show leadership.
epochtimes | Dr. Kulldorff: First of all, we expected that we would have good natural immunity from a virus like this. So it’s not a surprise that we do have it. There have been studies showing that we have good immunity from having COVID before. People can be reinfected and test positive, but there’s very few cases where somebody had it and then they get the serious disease afterwards. There are millions of people who have had COVID.
So if this was a common thing, it would have shown up all over the place, but it hasn’t. So it’s very rare. Once you’ve had it, you have good protection from your immune system for a serious disease or for mortality. There has been some direct comparison.
There was some data from Israel that came out recently showing that if you have had a vaccine, you’re 6.7 times more likely to be reinfected than if you have had the COVID disease itself. So we would expect that you get better immunity from the disease than you do from the vaccine. And of course, there’s only that one study.
We don’t know exactly, but we can confidently say that having had the disease at least gives you as good and probably better immunity than the vaccine. Empirically, we know that if you have a disease, you have at least one-and-a-half years of good immunity, because the virus has been with us for that amount of time. So we know that there’s long lasting immunity from having had COVID disease.
From the vaccine, we have less information because it only came in December. So it’s a bit over half-a-year. So we know that there’s good immunity for six months. Hopefully it’s longer, but we don’t have the same amount of data, the same evidence as we do for a natural immunity from actually having the disease naturally.
But for public health scientists, it’s very surprising that this is not recognized. We are forcing people who had the disease, who have good immunity to take a vaccine, even though they have an immunity that’s better than, or at least as good as those who have only had the vaccine.
At the same time, there are a lot of people who need these vaccines who are not getting them. People in India, Nigeria and Brazil, where a lot of older and especially poor people do not get the vaccine because they don’t have enough doses.
So those are the ones we should emphasize being vaccinated. Then we should view this as a global effort to vaccinate the old everywhere in the world, instead of vaccinating people that already have very good immunity against the disease.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that people are being forced to take a vaccine. I don’t know of anyone in the U.S. actually being forced to take it directly. Tell me what you mean when you say that.
Dr. Kulldorff: There’s a push both for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. If people want to have a job and stay at the job, they are required to take the vaccine or they’ll be fired. If they want to study at the university, many universities are requiring vaccines for all the students.
So there are these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. In New York City, for example, now they’re requiring restaurants to require vaccinations for people who go to the restaurants.
That is a very coercive way to get people to vaccinate. And that’s very bad for public health. One question is, “Why do you coerce people who are immune or people who are young, who have very small risk, when the vaccines are much more needed in for older people in other places?” So that’s an ethical aspect of it. I think it is very unethical to do so.
The other aspect is that if you force something on people, if you coerce somebody to do something, that can backfire. Public health has to be based on trust. If public health officials want the public to trust them, public health officials also have to trust the public. I’ve been working on vaccines for almost two decades now. One thing that we’ve always tried to do is to maintain good confidence in the vaccines.
For example, measles vaccines are very important, as well as polio vaccines. There is a small group of people who are very vocal, who don’t like vaccines, but they haven’t really been able to put any dent in the confidence in vaccines. It’s very high in the U.S. So we’ve been very successful in maintaining that confidence.
But right now with these vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports, this coercive thing is turning a lot of people away from vaccines, and not trusting them for very understandable reasons. “Why do you have to force somebody to take the vaccine, if it’s so beneficial to you?” That’s one rationale.
Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades. I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.
Even if they manage to coerce somebody to get the COVID vaccines, because of people saying, “Okay, I have to take it because I need to go to a university or I have to, because I want that job, or I want to go to restaurants,” even if they manage to get those people to take the COVID vaccine, it will turn them off from public health. It will make them distrust public health and turn them off from other vaccines that are not mandatory.
So it has ripple effects in other aspects of public health that are very unfortunate. I’m a native of Sweden. so I know a little bit about Sweden. Sweden has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and the highest confidence in vaccines in the world.
But there’s absolutely no mandate. It just doesn’t do it that way. It’s completely voluntary. If you want to have high confidence in vaccines, it has to be voluntary. There shouldn’t be any mandates.
First, let me
be absolutely clear. I believe the vaccines help prevent serious
illness, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. And I am not just
implying that a few people are protected. The data that I have reviewed
suggest that the vaccines are still around 90% effective in preventing bad things from happening even if people catch COVID.
That’s the very good news. Here’s the very bad news. I suspect that a lot
of vaccinated people are behaving as if they are fully protected
against the coronavirus. They have given up their masks and are shopping
in grocery stores, big box discount emporiums and hardware and garden
retailers, to name just a few locales. They are getting their hair cut,
going to banks and bars and trying to get back to a normal existence.
I
suspect that a great many of these folks are going to catch the Delta
COVID variant. They might not get very sick. They might not end up in
the hospital. They probably won’t die. But they will catch COVID. They will spread COVID. And they could end up with Long COVID!
Why Long COVID Matters:
You
have heard of “long haulers.” These are people who recover from
COVID-19. Some had mild symptoms. Others were asymptomatic. Some were
pretty darn sick. What they all have in common is continuing symptoms. And those symptoms can be life changing!
We now know that people who were fully vaccinated and caught COVID anyway can have persistent symptoms after they recover (New England Journal of Medicine, July 28, 2021). No one yet knows how many vaccinated people who catch COVID-19 will go on to develop long COVID (aka post COVID syndrome [PCS], Post-acute sequelae of SARS-COV-2 [PASC], chronic COVID, etc.). It could be a small number or it could go as high as 30% to 40%. That is the estimate of how many people develop this condition if they catch the virus without being vaccinated.
How Bad Is Long COVID?
Bad!
Symptoms can include unrelenting fatigue, breathing difficulties and/or
shortness of breath, cough, chest pain, muscle aches and joint pain,
brain fog, insomnia, head pain, loss of taste or smell, dizziness upon
standing, rapid heart rate, etc. You can read more about other symptoms
and the prognosis at this link.
If you want to learn what it’s like to have this condition, here is a link to our podcast with two health professionals who themselves have experienced Long COVID.
The Bottom Line:
If
you have been vaccinated, you are not guaranteed protection against the
Delta COVID variant! You probably won’t get terribly ill and you
probably won’t die if you get sick, but if you develop long COVID you
will be sorry. That is why you need to be careful. I do not like wearing
a tight-fitting N95 mask when I am out and about, but I do!
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