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!
NYMag | “The
message that breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare and that you don’t
have to worry about them if you’re vaccinated — that this is only an
epidemic of the unvaccinated — that message is falling flat,” Harvard
epidemiologist Michael Mina told me in the long interview that follows
below. “If this was still Alpha, sure. But with Delta, plenty of people
are getting sick. Plenty of transmission is going on. And my personal
opinion is that the whole notion of herd immunity from two vaccine shots
is flying out the window very quickly with this new variant.”
“We’re
seeing a lot more spread in vaccinated people,” agreed Scripps’s Eric
Topol, who estimated that the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic
transmission, which he estimated to be 90 percent or above for the
wild-type strain and all previous variants, had fallen to about 60
percent for Delta. “That’s a big drop.” Later, he suggested it might have fallen to 50 percent, and that new data about to be published in the U.S. would suggest an even lower rate. On Wednesday, a large pre-print study published by the Mayo clinic suggested the efficacy against infection had fallen as far as 42 percent.
“The
breakthrough problem is much more concerning than what our public
officials have transmitted,” Topol continued. “We have no good tracking.
But every indicator I have suggests that there’s a lot more under the
radar than is being told to the public so far, which is unfortunate.”
The result, he said, was a widening gap between the messaging from
public-health authorities and the meaning of the data emerging in real
time. “I think the problem we have is people — whether it’s the CDC or
the people that are doing the briefings — their big concern is, they
just want to get vaccinations up. And they don’t want to punch any holes
in the story about vaccines. But we can handle the truth. And that’s
what we should be getting.”
The central distortion reflected in the Kaiser report — and echoed by communicators elsewhere, including in the Times
— is the result of a basic error of comparison, one that should have
been obvious to anyone familiar with the shape of the pandemic. Almost
all of these calculations about the share of breakthrough cases have
been made using year-to-date 2021 data, which include several months
before mass vaccination (when by definition vanishingly few breakthrough
cases could have occurred) during which time the vast majority of the
year’s total cases and deaths took place (during the winter surge).This
is a corollary to the reassuring principle you might’ve heard, over the
last few weeks, that as vaccination levels grow we would expect the
percentage of vaccinated cases will, too — the implication being that we
shouldn’t worry too much over panicked headlines about the relative
share of vaccinated cases in a state or ICU but instead focus on the
absolute number of those cases in making a judgment about vaccine
protection across a population. This is true. But it also means that
when vaccination levels were very low, there were inevitably very few
breakthrough cases, too.
That means that to calculate a prevalence ratio for cases
or deaths using the full year’s data requires you to effectively divide
a numerator of four months of data by a denominator of seven months of
data. And because those first few brutal months of the year were
exceptional ones that do not reflect anything like the present state of
vaccination or the disease, they throw off the ratios even further.
Two-thirds of 2021 cases and 80 percent of deaths came before April 1,
when only 15 percent of the country was fully vaccinated, which means
calculating year-to-date ratios means possibly underestimating the
prevalence of breakthrough cases by a factor of three and breakthrough
deaths by a factor of five. And if the ratios are calculated using data
sets that end before the Delta surge, as many have been, that adds an
additional distortion, since both breakthrough cases and severe illness
among the vaccinated appear to be significantly more common with this
variant than with previous ones.
unherd |There has been much debate over how to get the unvaccinated to get their jabs — shame them, bribe them persuade them, or treat them as victims of mis- and disinformation campaigns — but who, exactly, are these people?
Most of the coverage would have you believe that the surge in cases is primarily down to less educated, ‘brainwashed’
Trump supporters who don’t want to take the vaccine. This may be
partially true: the areas in which the delta variant is surging coincide
with the sections of red America in which vaccination rates are lowest.
But according to a new paper by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh,
this does not paint the full picture. The researchers analysed more
than 5 million survey responses by a range of different demographic
details, and classed those people who would “probably” or “definitely” not choose to get vaccinated as “vaccine hesitant.”
In some respects the findings are as
predicted — for example the paper finds that there is a strong
correlation between counties with higher Trump support in the 2020
presidential election and higher hesitancy in the period January 2021 —
May 2021.
But more surprising is the breakdown
in vaccine hesitancy by level of education. It finds that the
association between hesitancy and education level follows a U-shaped
curve with the highest hesitancy among those least and most educated.
People with a master’s degree had the least hesitancy, and the highest
hesitancy was among those holding a Ph.D.
What’s more, the paper found that in
the first five months of 2021, the largest decrease in hesitancy was
among the least educated — those with a high school education or less.
Meanwhile, hesitancy held constant in the most educated group; by May,
those with Ph.Ds were the most hesitant group.
So not only are the most educated
people most sceptical of taking the Covid vaccine, they are also the
least likely the change their minds about it…
In
2020 people were told that business closures, stay-at-home orders,
lockdowns, and mask mandates were necessary to slow the spread of
SARS-CoV-2.
Some people expected that places where these measures
were absent or implemented half-heartedly would have drastically worse
results.
With more than a year of these measures behind us, it's time to evaluate the results.
Preliminary
academic studies have already been published, and they deserve our
attention. This quiz is intended for the layman, because if these
radical measures were truly justified the results should be clear and
unambiguous in the data.
covidstates | Researchers from the COVID States Project developed an interactive dashboard
to explore public behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, support for
restrictive measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus, and
approval for state governors’ and the president’s handling of the
pandemic.
The dashboard presents data from a series of large-scale monthly surveys with approximately 20,000-25,000 participants each.
Users can engage with state and national data in the following ways:
Health Behaviors:
This tab presents public health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It has three separate panels. The first shows core activities such as
going to work, church, or the gym. The second shows whether respondents
were in close proximity with people living outside their household.
Finally, the third panel presents data on public adherence to health
recommendations aimed at curtailing the spread of the pandemic. These
recommendations include mask wearing, hand washing, avoiding contact
with other people, and staying away from crowds and public spaces. Users
can select their state of interest and the three panels will
automatically update to reflect the selected state.
Restrictive Measures:
Restrictive Measures: The second tab presents data on public support
for federal, state and local governments to implement restrictive
measures meant to curtail the spread of the virus, such as limiting
restaurants to carry-out service only or requiring businesses to close.
Executive Approval:
This tab tracks public approval of state governors and the president. A
vertical line indicates the transition from the Trump Administration to
the Biden Administration on January 20, 2021. Prior to that point,
presidential approval numbers refer to Donald Trump, while subsequent
data points refer to Joe Biden. Users can select the state and the
official (Governor/President) they would like to view.
Maps:
This tab generates state-level choropleth maps for the data presented
in the dashboard. The tab contains two subpanels: one for health
behavior and another for restrictive measure support. Within each
panel, users should also specify the month that they are interested in
viewing. Below these maps, users will find bar charts comparing the data
from each state and ranking states in the context of the behavior or
measure of interest.
All
graphics in this app can be downloaded in a PDF or PNG format using the
“Download” buttons in the respective tab. Users who are interested in
downloading the underlying data can find it in a CSV format at the
bottom of the Overview tab.
consentfactory | People can tell themselves that they didn’t see where things have
been heading for the last 17 months, but they did. They saw all the
signs along the way. The signs were all written in big, bold letters,
some of them in scary-looking Germanic script. They read …
“THIS IS THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM.”
I’m not going to show you all those signs out again. People like me
have been pointing them out, and reading them out loud, for 17 months
now. Anyone who knows anything about the history of totalitarianism, how
it incrementally transforms society into a monstrous mirror image of
itself, has known since the beginning what the “New Normal” is, and we
have been shouting from the rooftops about it.
We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into
paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to
show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly
display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy
their groceries.
We have watched as the New Normal transformed the majority of the
masses into hate-drunk, hysterical mobs that are openly persecuting “the
Unvaccinated,” the official “Untermenschen” of the New Normal ideology.
We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every
totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the
numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to
reiterate all that again.
I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how
we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later
that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why
we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and
collaborators, or worse.
Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of
opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a
new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule.
They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring
power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into
unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or
its people.
That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.
The time for people to “wake up” is over. At this point, you either
join the fight to preserve what is left of those rights, and that
sovereignty, or you surrender to the “New Normal,” to global-capitalist
totalitarianism. I couldn’t care less what you believe about the virus,
or its mutant variants, or the experimental “vaccines.” This isn’t an
abstract argument over “the science.” It is a fight … a political,
ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is
totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it.
Anyway, here’s where we are at the moment, and how we got here, just the broad strokes.
libertytree | Google said it removed the content because “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines."
Paul said in response, which is no longer on YouTube, “YouTube said the video violated their policy because of my comments on masks, and that they don’t allow videos that contradict government’s guidance on COVID."
Sen. Paul expressed concern that Big Tech companies are behaving like the government during a press call on Tuesday.
“I’m not sure when YouTube became an arm of the government, and I’m not really sure it’s good for journalism to also be an arm of the government without any repercussions or push back, Paul said.
Paul said that private companies have the right to host content or not as they please, Big Tech's lack of interest in free speech is concerning.
“As a libertarian-leaning Senator, I think private companies have the right to ban me if they want to, but I think it is really anti-free speech, anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth,” Paul said.
He continued, “We realize this in our court systems that both sides present facts on either side of a question and complete an adversarial process to reach the truth in each case.”
The senator said such decisions being made by Big Tech companies could also affect the quality of journalism.
“Journalism isn’t far from that and in some ways, the adversarial part of the courtroom is ideally what you would find in journalism, where both sides would present facts, there is a period of argumentation and people figure out the truth for themselves,” Paul explained.
Paul added, “YouTube and Google though, have become an entity so huge that they think they are the arbitrator of truth.”
theguardian |The Delta variant was
first identified in the United States in April and by May it was well
onto its exponential growth curve, doubling every 10-12 days, as the
basis for Covid infections, now reaching over 96% prevalence. Ironically,
on 1 May, the CDC announced it would stop monitoring post-vaccination
breakthrough infections unless they led to hospitalizations or deaths.
This decision can be seen as exceptionally ill-advised and has led to a
country flying blind in its attempt to confront its fourth wave of
infections – one that has rapidly led to well over 100,000 new cases per
day and more than 60,000 hospitalizations, both higher than the US
first and second pandemic waves. It is unfathomable that we do not know
how many of these are occurring in people who were vaccinated.
Without
tracking, we have no idea of the proportion of people fully vaccinated
who are getting ill, hospitalized, or dying. There is no question the
frequency of requiring hospitalization is increasing, as reflected by
data from some counties that are tracking breakthroughs on their own and
reporting that 10 to 20% of admissions are in vaccinated individuals.
But we have no denominator.
Why is this so
critically important? For one, the false sense of security transmitted
by CDC’s lack of data in the Delta wave likely fosters complacency and
lack of protective measures such as masks and distancing. The mission of
the CDC to prevent such illness, and the first step is to collect the
relevant data. It would be very simple to know the vaccination status of
every American with a breakthrough infection admitted to the hospital
with Covid-19, along with key demographics such as age, time from
vaccination, which vaccine, and co-existing medical conditions. The PCR
diagnostic test for each patient has an accompanying cycle threshold
(Ct) value, which is an indicator of viral load, and would be important
to track. Moreover, the sample of the virus could undergo genomic
sequencing to determine whether there has been further evolution of the
virus and blood samples for neutralizing antibody levels that could be
obtained in as many patients as possible. Contact tracing of these
individuals would help determine the true rate of transmission from
other vaccines, something that is pure conjecture. Such systematic
collection of data would be the foundation for understanding who is at
risk for breakthrough infections, determining the current level of
effectiveness of vaccines and whether, when, and in whom, booster shots
should be recommended. It is remarkable that none of this is getting
done for hospitalized patients, who represent an undetermined fraction
of the people who are getting quite ill, some requiring monoclonal
antibody infusions to pre-empt getting admitted.
This
is not by any means the first breakdown of the CDC in managing and
communicating about the pandemic. But with billions of dollars allocated
to CDC earlier this year for improved Covid-19 surveillance, this
represents a blatant failure that is putting millions of vaccinated
Americans at unnecessary risk for breakthrough infections and leaving us
without a navigational system for the US Delta wave.
HuffPost |As I write this now, I’m midway through my quarantine, still symptomatic and contagious. At first, I was worried that my condition would worsen, but it hasn’t been too bad so far, like a persistent summer cold.
The at-home kit recommended retesting after three days. I waited until Day 5 and tested positive again, which could be a detection of dead virus particles since, according to the CDC, COVID is rarely detectable via the test after six days.
Slowly, I’m feeling better, although the brain fog, the inability to latch onto a chain of thought long enough to get my day started or get some serious work done, has been the most worrisome.
So far, my other symptoms have included a general achiness and grogginess, head and chest congestion, headaches and, in the first few days, a lot of sneezing. And, just like when I was sick last summer, I haven’t lost my sense of smell or taste, which only reaffirms my belief that I previously had coronavirus.
Thanks to the vaccine, none of my symptoms have been severe, and they weren’t serious for any of my family members either. In fact, my brother, mother and cousin all seemed to make a full recovery within one to two weeks. But if the delta variant infected my whole family, it suggests that we still need to keep masking up in public, maintaining social distance and being cautious socially.
The federal government only keeps track of these breakthrough cases if they result in death or hospitalization. In fact, the CDC hasn’t been tracking mild breakthroughs since May. That means the number of breakthrough cases throughout the country, the truenumber of infected people, is likely much higher.
To think just three weeks ago I flew on an airplane, happily went out to restaurants and bars with my colleagues in Seattle, comfortable enough to sometimes unmask in public. But did I infect more people? Did I feed the deadly surge of this delta variant?
I feel guilty, but I also feel greatly misled. Our leaders told us vaccinated people could go out in public again without their masks. They told us we would be safe, that others would be safe. That turned out to be false.
None of this should be a surprise to me or to the experts. This is what viruses do: They spread, they evolve, they spread some more. And I’m not knocking the vaccines. Those who haven’t been vaccinated should do so immediately.
Even if you still catch COVID, as I did, it will likely mitigate the symptoms, and it may reduce the spread to others. I’m very grateful for the vaccine, grateful that it protected my family from the worst that COVID can bring.
Yet, if we’re looking at the current infection rates across the country ― which are as bad as they were during this year’s fatal winter surge or in some caseseven worse ― then we as a nation need to recognize that just saying “get vaccinated” isn’t going to make the current COVID spike go away tomorrow.
Tens of millions of inoculations will take weeks to administer and weeks more to take effect. The delta variant is here, and allowing it to spread nearly unabated could create new, potentially more virulent versions of the virus, which (lest we forget) is how this highly contagious variant came to be in the first place.
ecosophia |Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This
There
was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t
clear at first. Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that
Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden
products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to
be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and
monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the
biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have
been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing
a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that;
the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not
especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a
far from minor problem slipped past. In the spring of 2021 word thus
began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem
with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a
few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get
seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t.
Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a
self-inflicted disaster on their hands.
Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites
The
first response of the people in power, of course, was to find somebody
else to take the blame. That’s when politicians and the media turned on a
dime (again) and suddenly started admitting that the virus could have
come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s when Bill Gates
suddenly stopped being the poster child for the vaccine effort and got
dumped in a hurry by his wife and kids, and when Anthony Fauci suddenly
had to deal with a flurry of negative publicity and the unexplained
cancellation of his ghostwritten memoirs. The goal was to find
someone—Gates, Fauci, the Chinese, anyone—who could be made into the
fall guy and blamed for the impending mess. Apparently that first round
of bad news was followed by even worse news, however; I suspect that the
news was that the ADE caused by the vaccine had a noticeable fatality
rate, but that’s just a guess. One way or another, finding fall guys
wasn’t an adequate dodge any more, since at this stage it wasn’t just
careers that were at risk: it was potentially the viability of the
entire political-economic establishment.
Stage Nine: Things Get Serious
All
of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of
the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if
everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that
what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE,
since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t
getting it. All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim
that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared
in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories
surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were
getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept
getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that
it was because too many people were sick you could count on being
shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new
variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who
caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know
that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have
been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of
what the fatality rate will be.
This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect.
Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle
As
ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up
with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the
population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be.
Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will
spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing
increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to
impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big
corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to
counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without
success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge
no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on
them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but
a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will
believe them one more time.
Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame
When
ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in
significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the
predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns,
mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who
are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay
attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you
know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced
infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under
the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this
will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also
impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the
vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the
political and economic establishment this could provoke.
NYMag |But
holding all else equal, if vaccines were still doing a good job
preventing severe disease but a considerably worse job preventing
spread, wouldn’t that drive the gap wider between cases and
hospitalizations, or cases and deaths? Yeah. But —
It’s a lot to hold equal. What
I’m hearing — and I’ve been helping with a bunch of patients — is that
people who are breaking through are getting very sick. They’re getting
Regeneron antibodies.
There
may be something to this waning immunity story. It’s fuzzy, but the
people who are getting hit are more apt to be people who were vaccinated
very early. I had a patient in recent days, who’s in her 70s. She got
vaccinated in January. And, I mean, she almost died. I mean, it’s just
terrible. I think — I hope — the monoclonals are going to save her life.
But she was a healthy 70-year-old lady, andjust
following her case was illuminating — she thought she was protected, but
she also wore masks everywhere. She was on guard and still got infected
and desperately ill.
Most people aren’t being that careful. The
vaccinated — who are now a very slight majority — those people just
think the pandemic’s over. There’s still this sense that if you’re
vaccinated, you’re good to go. I mean, I’ve even seen on television, you
know, some of our leading health experts, tell people it’s perfectly
okay to have indoor gatherings among vaccinated people. Well, it’s not
true. So we’re getting bad advice.
This
booster thing is yet another issue, because we don’t even know if
they’re going to protect against a Delta. I mean, everybody’s assuming
it, but there’s no data. You know, there’s some neutralizing antibodies
from the Pfizer report in 23 people and there’s an Israeli pre-print, it
says there’s waning immunity without any neutralizing antibodies. So
we’ll see. But these are just classic spike-protein boosters. There’s
nothing special about them to handle Delta. So I don’t know. I mean, I
suspect they’re going to provide some protection, but I’m not sure I’m
so confident it’s going to be great.
What
about just the basic heterogeneity of the country? We’re so big, with
so many pockets of vulnerable people, even in states that are, from a
bird’s-eye view, well-protected. Could it be that what we’re seeing now
is just the disease burning through those populations very efficiently
and producing numbers that look large even in the national context? I
think that’s true. I think heterogeneity is definitely playing a role,
but I also think the behavior is playing a substantial role. I mean, why
did Florida succumb? As you know, it’s basically at the national
average for vaccination, one percentage point below. But it’s been a
disaster there, and they have promotion from the leadership of the state
to do everything wrong. I mean, you know, they’ve mandated no masking.
But that should provide some hope, in the sense that other states will take a different course, presumably. I don’t know.
Personally,
I put a lot of stock into the fact that, even in states where the
vaccination levels weren’t so high overall, that seniors seemed pretty
well-vaccinated — I think when we last spoke, a couple of weeks ago, in
the worst-vaccinated state, Mississippi, 76 percent of seniors had
gotten at least one shot. That’s not 99 percent but I would’ve thought
it would’ve shielded a lot. I think for Alpha it would have been beautiful. But for Delta it’s just not nearly enough.
I
mean, one of the worst signals that I’ve seen is San Francisco. San
Francisco is like Vermont, they’re even a little higher than Vermont for
fully vaccinated — it’s 70 percent of the population of San Francisco
county and it’s going through a very substantial hospitalization spike,
unlike Vermont.
And that’s a bad sign because San Francisco has been kind of a rock throughout the whole pandemic.
They’ve been incredible. Even when the rest of California was doing poorly. Yeah.
Exactly. So I look at San Francisco as a bad bellwether for what might
be coming. Why are they doing so poorly right now for hospitalization?
Why is it so different than Vermont? If there’s that many people getting
so sick, something’s just not right. But it’s hard to explain all these
things, right? I mean, why, why did the U.K. on Freedom Day —
VE has always been measured retrospectively — after the fact. Thus accurate or mostly accurate or at least somewhat accurate picture of a vaccine's effectiveness can be gleaned — based on historical data.
And NOT based on Estimates.
Some may notice that “fact checkers” that “debunk” the growing and obvious simple fact that moderna and pfizer may end up having VE = 0 — all rely on CDC “estimates” — even as what they are trying to smear and claim as “false” — was based on an MDs and/or scientists quoting from actual data — and checked by those actually skilled in the science of data.
The narrative fact checkers use estimates to smear actual scientific knowledge — results gleaned from actual, concrete research and data. So what happens, now that our zig zagging, hysterical CDC director Rochelle Walesnky has just confirmed that mRNA neovaccinoid effectiveness equals zero?
Walensky told CNN the covid shots, having failed to prevent the disease among those inoculated also cannot prevent transmission of the disease among those inoculated.
mRNA neovaccinoid effectiveness=zero...,
She prefaced this astonishing acknowledgment of the drugs’ failure with an even more astonishing fabrication: “Our vaccines are working exceptionally well!”
The CDC Director: “Our vaccines are working exceptionally well! They continue to work well for Delta with regard to severe illness and death, they prevent it. But what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
“They continue to work well for Delta with regard to severe illness and death” she said — but what does the data say?
Don’t expect CDC director to level with the American people on this essential matter.
Expect more tears and flapdoodle from her; it’s how she runs.
To date, I am able to locate CDC published information that says Delta is highly transmissible; and unable to locate CDC information demonstrating this variant causes “severe illness and death” — the CDC’s most recent information from an Aug. 6 published study is equivocal:
“Finally, differences in vaccination coverage in some of these populations might be an additional confounding factor when estimating crude VE at the county and state levels. VE studies with more rigorous methods and the power to estimate protection against severe outcomes are needed to better understand the potential impact of the Delta variant.”
Obvious question: how does “VE studies with more rigorous methods and the power to estimate protection against severe outcomes are needed to better understand the potential impact of the Delta variant”
Square with: the covid shots “continue to work well for Delta with regard to severe illness and death”.
Walensky made this claim on national TV — fully aware her own agency’s most recent information is actually claiming that “VE studies with more rigorous methods and the power to estimate protection against severe outcomes are needed to better understand the potential impact of the Delta variant.”
Another paper says the Delta “B.1.617.2 variant is highly transmissible in indoor sports settings and households, which might lead to increased attack rates.”
This paper, last updated July 16, also says, in conclusion: ” Finally, vaccine effectiveness could not be calculated because of an inability to interview all persons associated with the outbreak and incomplete state immunization registry data.”
To sum up. VE is supposed to be determined after the fact.
off-guardian | In New York City, California, Australia, etc., the people have
permitted government such control over our daily lives that we have to
ask it for permission to control our bodies, to move freely, to practice
religion, to educate our children ourselves, to protest, etc.
Soon Biden, Trudeau, and other world leaders are going to clamp down
on our ability to express ourselves and to associate with each other
online so that we can no longer question, object to, or organize against
government action. It is the destruction of democracy.
It astounds me that my Progressive friends — the same ones who claim
to support “social justice” — are welcoming a fascist society in which
government crushes any opposition and individuals cannot make choices
about their own lives.
I will not comply because I do not want to live in the society that
is being created by extraordinary submissiveness to government. I do not
want to be complicit in this era’s atrocities.
What is the point of living if one merely exists to obey the elite to
one’s own detriment? Is it even living if one lacks the agency to
direct one’s life? I’ve already submitted in contradiction of my values
to a shameful extent. One might say, “Well, what’s one more compromise,” but it won’t be just one more compromise. It will be just the next cut in a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Submitting only validates tyrannical displays of power and ensures that there will be more such displays in the future.
And what does one get for compromising? Merely your continued
membership in a society that will only have you if you immolate yourself
and become nothing more than a reflection of the desires of the ruling
class.
If you cannot be truly yourself in a society, is that society worth
clinging to? I think not. As much as leaving the stability of my comfort
zone terrifies me, staying in it means continuing to silence and shrink
myself for a disingenuous feeling of acceptance. In that way, it is
more of a discomfort zone.
Each time I expressed my fears about the future direction of society,
my friends said “it won’t happen.” Each time it did happen, they
shrugged their shoulders and reminded me that compliance was an option.
At this point, if the government were to cart me away to an internment camp (which is not a completely far-fetched notion and which has happened in the past)
for being a dangerous dissident I am certain that my friends and family
would watch it happen and say it was my fault for not complying.
They are no longer capable of recognizing the humanity of the opposition or of questioning government.
NYTimes | Many vaccinated Americans are tired, disgusted and eager to assign blame. Public health experts and government officials, including some Republicans,
have shifted from sensitive prodding to firm condemnation of those
forgoing vaccination. Private conversations among the inoculated take an
even less diplomatic turn: “We were so close, and these stupid,
unvaccinated jerks ruined it for the rest of us.”
Fatigue
and outrage are appropriate emotions, considering all that has been
lost to Covid-19: lives, jobs, experiences, money, physical and mental
health. But those feelings, if not properly channeled, can themselves
take a heavy toll. What do we do with our anger?
I am a progressive woman who resides in a conservative state. I am on record
in this fractured political era as a proponent of maintaining
connection across gulfs of understanding, with the caveat that this
civic burden falls to people whose social privileges allow them to
engage safely with “the other side.” But seeking to understand dangerous
behaviors and beliefs is quite different than permitting them. I
myself, by many accounts an amiable person, once yelled at a truck stop
full of unmasked people to read the sign on the goddamn door.
Fury
— collective, generational, political, cultural, individual — is
utterly familiar to me, more so than the happy serenity of my current
life. I was a child in poverty during the 1980s “farm crisis,”
when federal policies favoring big corporations devastated rural
communities. Everywhere I turned, something was dying: the local grocery
store, the family farm, the cancer victims whose water supply contained
agricultural runoff. There was joy in my family, but there was also
addiction, abuse and neglect that drew from a deep well of justifiable
rage and sorrow.
Anger is a contagious
energy that jumps quickly from one person to the next. It will seize
your mind and body as its host. If allowed to explode, it will hurt
others. If allowed to implode, it will hurt you. I had to learn early
how to transmute it for the sake of my own survival. I found that it can
be the source of a powerful alchemy. If we are up to the task, it could
help us create something good together.
Our national conversation has reached the
point where many Americans are done with any and all excuses offered by
the unvaccinated. Some of the inoculated are not just self-righteous
but downright venomous, arguing on social media that hospitals should
refuse to admit unvaccinated Covid-19 patients, calling them trash and
wishing them a painful death. Residents of blue America have pronounced
this a red-America problem. “Our state did a great job fighting the
pandemic,” one person tweeted. “Our reward? The mouth-breathing
knuckle-draggers in adjacent red states flooded their hospitals and
spilled over into ours.”
Old political
resentments have found a new outlet in the fraught vaccine debate.
“I’ve been pissed off since Reagan was elected,” another Twitter user
quipped in a thread parsing the emotions of the vaccinated. Exhausted,
despairing minds find comfort in turning complex realities into simple,
opposing categories. The noble, upstanding vaccinated American and the
selfish, stupid, unvaccinated one. The good liberal citizen and the
far-right anti-vaxxer.
technofog | While they say this is about health, it is clear that it is also political.
The press revels in condemning
conservatives for not getting the vaccine. Self-loathing conservatives
like David French say Evangelical vaccine hesitancy is a “spiritual problem.”
Conservative governors – those with low COVID death rates in their
states – are attacked for not doing enough to encourage vaccination.
Paul Krugman takes these arguments to the next level, arguing
that conservatives seeking personal autonomy are really trying to
preserve their white male Christian “privilege” while making minorities
pay the price.
The government – including officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Francis
Collins – must be happy with the blame-shifting. Just imagine their
delight, after having potentially contributed to the creation of COVID-19, that the unvaccinated are now the accused.
Never one to miss a media appearance, Dr. Fauci is out there
saying the unvaccinated are “propagating” the latest outbreak, that we
need to “do something to get them to be vaccinated.” This duty that Dr.
Fauci advances is the purported obligation to do something to protect
others. (One has to ask whether millions of lives would have been saved
had they followed this same duty with taxpayer dollars at Wuhan.)
We
believe this is just the start. If persuasion has reached its limit
(and there is evidence it has), then please, trust them at their word
when they advocate restricting your rights and inflicting punishment if you remain unvaccinated.
“The crowd tends toward persecution since the natural causes of what troubles it and transforms it into a turba cannot
interest it. The crowd by definition seeks action but cannot affect
natural causes. It therefore looks for an accessible cause that will
appease its appetite for violence. Those who make up the crowd
are always potential persecutors, for they dream of purging the
community of the impure elements that corrupt it, the traitors who
undermine it.”
larrysanger | It is an objective, indisputable fact: never in
the history of the world has there been a global push to administer an
experimental medicine to all of humanity, billions of us, at the same
time.
I want you to stop and reflect on that. Imagine the hubris it
required both to carry out this plan and to propagandize the world to
carry it out.
“Hubris?” you ask. “What do you mean?”
The Covid vaccines are experimental. The FDA has not approved them.
Most vaccines require years to test and approve, in no small part
because we want to make sure they don’t have dangerous long-term side
effects, which they can have; the CDC has published a list of problems with selected approved vaccines. Many experimental vaccines never make it out of the experimental phase. CNN made similar points
back when Trump was, wrongheadedly (I thought so at the time) pushing
for rapid approval of the Covid vaccines. Of course, the mercurial news
organization hastened to forget all that when the Biden administration
decided rapid vaccine deployment was a good idea. They shouldn’t have:
for all the good they certainly have done, physicians warn us that
vaccines can be dangerous for some, and experimental vaccines are, naturally, even more so.
Again, my point is simple and absolutely factual. Again:
You have to be willing to trust the welfare of billions of people
not just to the honesty of our leaders and scientists—because things
can go wrong for decent people. You must also trust their competence—and
not just that, because competent people can make surprising,
unforeseeable mistakes. You must also trust that we avoided the worst,
that we dodged a bullet, and that they actually succeeded in making a more or less safe vaccine.
In a
self-organizing economy, things can work together in a way that looks
like a conspiracy. When there are not enough resources to go around, the
world seems to turn into two warring factions. We are seeing this right
now. I think you are seeing a
tip of the true world situation. Looked at through one lens, the world
looks like we will have a happy ever after situation, forever. Looked at
through another lense, we look like we are on the edge of disaster. I
am afraid the “edge of disaster” folks are
correct. The “happily ever after” situation is the one favored by Main
Street Media. Anyone who spends a lot of time reading Main Street Media
will think that the opposite side is crazy conspiracy theorists.
I think we are running short of fossil fuels. Shut downs help the
economy get along with less fossil fuel, especially oil. A local leader,
when he or she makes a decision to shut down the economy, takes into
account all of the considerations. Do local
factories need to shut down, for lack of parts or for lack of orders? Is
it becoming impossible to import enough oil for all needs? Are local
people protesting about inadequate pensions and living conditions? A
shutdown could help all of these problems at once.
The problem is inadequate resources to go around. Inadequate
resources, though the laws of physics, lead to ever more wage and wealth
disparity. When this happens, epidemics more easily take hold. The poor
especially are vulnerable, because they tend
to not eat well. This time, a group of influential individuals and the
pharmaceutical industry decided to help the situation along in a way
that would benefit themselves at the same time it reduces population.
Some people might like this approach, but I find
it objectionable.
Obviously governments know what they are doing …. they are aware of what happens when leaky vaccines are used during a pandemic… So why?
COMPASSIONATE EXTINCTION PLAN (CEP)
1. Every country on the planet is on board with the Injections.
Even Sweden. When have all countries aligned on any issue? Never.
2. Not a single MSM outlet is interviewing any of the expert
dissenters – Yeadon, Bridle, Montagnier, Bossche etc… and the mainstream
social media platforms are blocking them.
THE PERFECT STORM : The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a
monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since
the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of
ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical
relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction
is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it
for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel https://ftalphaville-cdn.ft.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf
“The global economy was facing the worst collapse since the second
world war as coronavirus began to strike in March, well before the
height of the crisis, according to the latest Brookings-FT tracking
index. “The index comes as the IMF prepares to hold
virtual spring meetings this week, when it will release forecasts
showing the deepest contraction for the global economy since the 1930s
great depression. https://www.ft.com/content/9ac5eb8e-4167-4a54-9b39-dab48c29ac6c
Oil Gluts – do NOT indicate we have found more oil. We just pumped what’s left too fast.
Summary In 2019 a second Perfect Storm was approaching – the
central banks had been doing ‘whatever it takes’ for over a decade….
Essentially nothing was off the table — throw the kitchen sink at
pushing GFC2.0 into the future. In 2019 the guns were blazing
but the beast was no longer held at bay…
What do you do when you are burning far more oil than you discover —
and your efforts to offset the impact of expensive to produce oil push
you to the edge of the cliff? You can accept your fate and allow the
beast to shove you into the abyss…. Or you
can take the ‘nuclear option’ and shut down as much of the economy as
possible, preserve remaining oil and pump in trillions of dollars of
life support to keep the system feebly alive.
Punchline: The problem global leaders face is that if you unleash
the nuclear option without some sort of cover, the sheeple and the
markets would be thrown into a panic and you risk blowing things up
prematurely. So you need a reason for putting the global
economy on ice — one that does not spook the masses – one that is big
enough to justify such epic amounts of stimulus and extreme policies —
and one that allows you to explain ‘this is just temporary – once this
is gone — we will get back to normal’
A pandemic is the perfect cover.
End Game – Covid was foisted on us as cover for the response to
peak oil (if we don’t slow the burn oil prices go through the roof and
we collapse) but it is also being used to convince billions to be
Injected. The Injection is meant to cause extremely
deadly variants like this .. only worse because we are deploying into a
pandemic so everyone dies https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous.
The reason for this is that 8B people need cheap oil to live. They
would starve without it. And 8B people without food would result in epic
starvation, violence, rape and cannibalism. Industrial civilization
ends soon after peak oil. Unfortunately we also
have 4000 spent fuel ponds that will boil off and release toxic
substances for centuries. These facilities cannot be controlled with
computers and energy. So even the subsistence level humans die as they
consume these toxins in the food, air and water.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
