Vaccination requirements work. They drive up vaccination rates, which makes our communities and schools safer, along with strengthening our economic recovery. Vaccine requirements are widely supported, proven successful, and quickly becoming the standard across the country. pic.twitter.com/qo1swxjbYg
Barrons |Merck
‘s announcement that its antiviral molnupiravir had halved hospitalizations
in a trial of high-risk Covid-19 patients was met with enthusiasm on
Friday, inspiring a vision of a world in which treating a Covid-19
infection could be as trivial as swallowing a few pills.
Some
scientists who have studied the drug warn, however, that the method it
uses to kill the virus that causes Covid-19 carries potential dangers
that could limit the drug’s usefulness.
Molnupiravir works by incorporating itself into the genetic material
of the virus, and then causing a huge number of mutations as the virus
replicates, effectively killing it. In some lab tests, the drug has also
shown the ability to integrate into the genetic material of mammalian
cells, causing mutations as those cells replicate.
If that were
to happen in the cells of a patient being treated with molnupiravir, it
could theoretically lead to cancer or birth defects.
Merck
(ticker: MRK) says it has run extensive tests in animals that show that
this isn’t an issue. “The totality of the data from these studies
indicates that molnupiravir is not mutagenic or genotoxic in in-vivo
mammalian systems,” a Merck spokesperson said.
Scientists who have studied NHC, the compound that molnupiravir
creates in the body after it is ingested, however, say that Merck needs
to be careful.
“Proceed with caution and at your own peril,”
wrote Raymond Schinazi, a professor of pediatrics and the director of
the division of biochemical pharmacology at the Emory University School
of Medicine, who has studied NHC for decades, in an email to Barron’s.
Scientists
are split on how serious a risk this is, and in the absence of detailed
data on Merck’s animal tests, and long-term human safety data, it’s
difficult to know for sure.
The safety concerns suggest that the
stock market’s reaction to the positive molnupiravir data on Friday
might have been overblown. Shares of Merck jumped 8.4% Friday, while
shares of Covid-19 vaccine maker
Moderna
(MNRA) fell 11.4%, and shares of
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
(REGN), which developed one of the leading monoclonal antibodies for Covid-19, fell 5.7%.
Vir Biotechnology
(VIR), which developed another of the monoclonal antibodies in partnership with
GlaxoSmithKline
(GSK), was down 21.1%.
“It was sort of, in effect, wishful thinking,” says SVB Leerink analyst Dr. Geoffrey Porges of investors’ reactions on Friday.
CBS-4 | A Colorado woman with stage 5 renal failure was months away from
getting a new kidney. Now, she and her donor are looking for another
hospital after learning UCHealth’s new policy.
According to
UCHealth, the majority of transplant recipients and living donors are
now required to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Neither woman has
received their shots.
Leilani Lutali met her donor, Jaimee Fougner, in Bible study just 10 months ago.
“It’s your choice on what treatment you have. In Leilani’s case, the
choice has been taken from her. Her life has now been held hostage
because of this mandate,” said Fougner.
Fougner says she hasn’t
received the vaccine for religious reasons. Lutali hasn’t gotten the
shot because she says there are too many unknowns. Until last week,
neither woman thought they needed to be vaccinated for the transplant.
“At
the end of August, they confirmed that there was no COVID shot needed
at that time,” said Lutali. “Fast forward to Sept. 28. That’s when I
found out. Jamie learned they have this policy around the COVID shot for
both for the donor and the recipient.”
apnews | Scandinavian
authorities on Wednesday suspended or discouraged the use of Moderna’s
COVID-19 vaccine in young people because of an increased risk of heart
inflammation, a very rare side effect associated with the shot.
Sweden
suspended the use of Moderna for those recipients under 30, Denmark
said those under 18 won’t be offered the Swiss-made vaccine, and Norway
urged those under 30 to get the Pfizer vaccine instead.
The
countries have adequate supplies of both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines
and will be able to continue their vaccination campaigns.
In
neighboring Finland, authorities are expected to announce their
decision Thursday, according to Dr. Hanna Nohynek, chief physician at
the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, told local broadcaster
YLE.
reuters | Finland on Thursday paused the use of Moderna's (MRNA.O)
COVID-19 vaccine for younger males due to reports of a rare
cardiovascular side effect, joining Sweden and Denmark in limiting its
use.
Mika
Salminen, director of the Finnish health institute, said Finland would
instead give Pfizer's vaccine to men born in 1991 and later. Finland
offers shots to people aged 12 and over.
"A
Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that
men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly
higher risk than others of developing myocarditis," he said.
Swedish and Danish health officials had announced on Wednesday they would pause the use of the Moderna vaccine for all young adults and children, citing the same unpublished study.
Norwegian health officials reiterated on Wednesday that they recommended men under the age of 30 opt for Pfizer's vaccine.
The
Finnish institute said the Nordic study would be published within a
couple of weeks and preliminary data had been sent to the European
Medicines Agency (EMA) for further assessment.
npr | In the quest to get more Americans vaccinated, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Vaccine mandates work.
Nowhere is that more apparent than at United Airlines.
On Aug. 6, United became the first U.S. airline to tell its workers to
get vaccinated against COVID-19 if they wanted to keep their jobs.
The
company says 99.5% of United employees have been vaccinated, not
counting the roughly 2,000 who have applied for religious or medical
exemptions. Elsewhere, other employers also report success with
mandates. Tyson Foods, New York City schools, major hospital systems in
Maine and the NBA are among those with vaccination rates topping 90%.
Taking
the shot isn't an easy decision for many people. One of them was
Margaret Applegate, a San Francisco-based customer service agent with
United for 29 years. She was proud of how United had handled the
pandemic up until then — the lengths the airline had gone to for keeping
workers and customers safe, even partnering with Clorox on cleaning and
disinfecting.
Now she no longer felt so proud.
Applegate, who is 57, had
not gotten vaccinated. Like many people, she was scared. She'd heard
from friends in the U.S. and abroad about bad reactions to the shots,
and she worried that the vaccine could exacerbate her heart condition.
She was also uneasy about how quickly the COVID-19 vaccines had been developed and authorized for use.
"I thought that was a little bit too rushed. It just felt too rushed," she says.
Still,
she wrestled with what to do. She was troubled by the death of a
co-worker from COVID-19 and the diminished health of another co-worker
who had been hospitalized with the virus and survived. She recognized
the vaccine mandate as her company's final push to keep employees safe.
FT | Vaccine mandates are not incurring a vicious public
backlash, at least not yet. Almost a month has passed since President
Joe Biden announced that most US workers would have to be vaccinated or
frequently tested. Street protests are real
but containable. Resignations from work are at modest levels. The
governor of California even feels emboldened to require vaccines for
school children….
If it holds, the public’s grudging tolerance of
mandates will have eye-opening lessons. For one, people are hopeless
predictors of their own future behaviour. Surveys had suggested a rash
of job-quitting in the event of employer mandates
(just as they had implied that France, whose vaccination rate is
pulling ahead of Britain’s, would be a laggard). Public opinion data
does not just inform the election predictions of speculative columnists.
It is also an important basis of government policy.
If the science has a systemic blind spot for the future, for what
people think they would do in hypothetical scenarios, it has distorted
governance.
Another conclusion is that partisanship has its
uses… It is a sign of the most dire civic rot that people base even
their approach to personal health on their tribal fealties. But it also
means that Biden’s mandate is mostly alienating
those who were never going to vote for him anyway. The very bifurcation
of America can empower as well as curb a leader.
Of all the inferences to be drawn from the elusive
backlash, the last is the most far-reaching. In fact, after five years
of anti-elite politics, from Brazil to the Philippines, it feels
transgressive to express this thought: in the end,
people want to be led.
A truism, possibly? Or something more unpleasant? More:
The public has already supplied an example of what
we might call enlightened docility. Imagine being told in 2016 that, in
four years, there would be vast support for a lockdown with no peacetime
precedent, prescribed by an invisible expert
class. Next to coercion of that scale and nature, the mandates are
laissez-faire. I say all this with the jitters of a man carrying a vase
in a greased hand across a stone floor.
No, not concerning at all! In a way, the whole process resembles the neoliberal playbook:
(1) Degrade public health
by underfunding and corruption, (2) watch it fail in a very public
test, and (3) replace it with coercion. Best of all, in future you can
go directly to coercion!
ENR | New guidance from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health
Administration is causing contractors to change their COVID-19 vaccine
requirements, and many of them criticize the guidance as diametrically
opposed to the Biden administration's stated desire to increase
vaccinations.
On April 20, OSHA released the new guidance in thefrequently asked questions section of its website for COVID-19 safety compliance.
The
question asks whether an employer should record adverse reactions to
COVID-19 vaccination if the employer requires the vaccine. OSHA states
that if a vaccine is required, then any adverse reaction is considered
work-related and therefore it must be recorded. Under OSHA rules, most
employers with more than 10 employees are required to keep a record of
serious work-related injuries and illnesses. Recorded injuries and
illnesses become part of a contractors safety record.
This is the actual text of the new question and answer on the OSHA website:
"If
I require my employees to take the COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of
their employment, are adverse reactions to the vaccine recordable?
"If you require your employees to be vaccinated as a condition of
employment (i.e., for work-related reasons), then any adverse reaction
to the COVID-19 vaccine is work-related. The adverse reaction is
recordable if it is a new case under 29 CFR 1904.6 and meets one or more
of the general recording criteria in 29 CFR 1904.7."
In response,
several large contractors said they have changed or will change their
vaccination policy to only recommend—not require—a vaccine.
"We,
sadly, had to back off our (employee vaccination) mandate because OSHA
did something I don't understand at all," said Bob Clark, founder and
executive chairman of Clayco in a recent ENR Critical Path podcast.
"I side with OSHA frequently, we're in its VIP program, but on this
they're just wrong. It's a terrible decision they've made and I think
it'll be overturned."
Clark said Clayco, which participated in
crafting the initial Centers for Disease Control guidance on
construction site safety during the pandemic, would be communicating
with OSHA through members of congress to seek changes to the guidance. A
spokeswoman for OSHA did not immediately return messages asking for
clarification of the new guidance. Construction industry groups
universally panned the guidance and said it would hurt their efforts to
encourage employees to get vaccinated.
"What they put forward
could potentially discourage employers from supporting their workers
getting the vaccine," said Kevin Cannon, senior director of safety and
health services at the Associated General Contractors of America. "AGC
is not in support of any mandate, however we participated, April 19th
through 23rd, in vaccine awareness week. We had a lot of members who
were in chapters that supported the event. We even had some who hosted
vaccine clinics on an active job site or in their offices."
Cannon
said some member contractors may have changed their approach to those
events had they known, at the time, they could potentially "be on the
hook for recording these potential adverse reactions."
caitlinjohnstone | “Money has begun flowing into companies intending to monetize
psychedelic therapy as new research has increasingly shown that blowing
one’s mind can alter it for the better,” reads a new article
for the Los Angeles Times titled “Money is pouring into psychedelics.
Meet the mystical hedge fund investor bankrolling the boom.”
“This scientific and commercial excitement rests on research showing
that psychedelics can supercharge mental health treatment for PTSD,
depression, anxiety, addiction, and other chronic ailments of the mind,
enabling patients to dive deep, confront their traumas and — a rarity
for mental illnesses — return healed,” the article reads. “That goes for
synthetic chemicals such as MDMA and ketamine as well as plant-derived drugs such as psilocybin (the
active ingredient in magic mushrooms), the South American plant brew
ayahuasca, and the West African root-derived substance iboga.”
LA Times’ Sam Dean shares the personal journey of hedge fund investor Sa’ad Shah and his involvement in what has become a multibillion-dollar
psychedelics industry long before even the legal infrastructure
necessary for such companies to turn a profit is in place. We learn of
Shah’s experience with ayahuasca, his interest in mystical traditions
and personal growth, and his conviction in the shift that has for the
last few years been known as the psychedelic renaissance.
And then, about halfway down the article, we get to the actual meat of the matter:
“Shah
welcomes big pharma and big institutions to enter the fray in the
interest of spreading the chemical gospel far and wide. He sees the
financial and therapeutic potential for psychedelics not in the cannabis
model, which would make psychedelics broadly available for retail
purchase, but in the pharmaceutical mode — psychedelics as prescribed
drugs, with patent rights, administered in medical settings.”
That
“with patent rights” bit right there is behind the so-called
psychedelic renaissance we’ve been hearing so much about: “favoring the
FDA regulatory route over the Oregon route,” as a psychiatrist cited in
the article put it. It’s being driven not by the need to free human consciousness from the prohibition-induced coma
it’s been under since the sixties so that we can collectively navigate
through the many existential hurdles our species is fast approaching
with wisdom and insight, but by the agenda to make rich people even
richer by forcefully controlling psychedelic substances via the
pharmaceutical industry.
quora | I thought I was a man of the world when I joined the police. I was 31,
served ten years in the army, a couple of years on the news desks and a few more in drama production all over the world. A few weeks into my first beat I realised most of my assumptions of police work were Hollywood. I had a better idea of the ground situation in the Balkans than I did my own city.
This was my first beat in 2002. To the south were celeb and banker heavy clubs, bohemians and bright young things flaunting their success in the drinking squares. The remnants of the Curtain Theatre where Shakespeare learnt his trade sits squarely in the middle. It was a veneer factory when I attended it after a burglary and got to stand on the last 3ft of original stage.
When I first walked it the Prime Minister’s home address was just off the top left corner of this map in Islington. The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony video was still popular and was filmed on Hoxton Street along the eastern boundary.
The Provost estate sits in the top right corner of the beat. I entered my first crack den there: Two toms (prostitutes), a street artist (beggar) and a small business owner (distribution of car tyres) all cooking up while a half mummified dog was still chained to the radiator in the back room. The floor had been used as a toilet and newspaper put down to cover the mess, a four inch duvet of human waste.
You could see the back yard of the Police Station from the window.
At the end of my first year I had to turn in a file on my beat - an intelligence and ground picture of: prom nom sightings (prominent nominals - the bigger players in crime); PYOs (persistent young offenders - much the same but under 18); gang nominals; street dealers; drug prices; robbery hotspots; burglary trends; vehicle crime methods; drug dens and stairwells. The names of homeless and street drinkers; bouncers; shop keepers; prostitutes the lot.
It was a record of what you had been up to and what you’d taken notice of.
One important aspect was to build a map of your ground: active crack houses / drug dens were a big part of this picture, my bosses loved closing them down and getting pictures in the papers. Wherever they sprung up anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, robbery, theft from vehicles, snatches and begging would spread out like ink blots on a map.
So drugs are bad - whole estates reduced to stinking derelicts as the locust-zombies meander your patch devouring goodwill and community relations. So we closed them down on a regular basis. We’d push them onto the next beat and three months later they got pushed back to us and you started collecting the evidence again.
The most common venues for drugs dens were the homes of vulnerable adults. Long ago it was decided that people with severe learning disabilities or chronic mental health issues would get more from life if they got their care in the community. The officials running this policy swiftly became inundated and the locusts descended in lieu.
Nice little cash cows are folk on disability benefit. You can trash their house and the council will get them a new one. You can get a free car lease and insurance thru motability finance if you just claim to be the carer of the vulnerable disabled person you’re using as a cash cow and shell company for the low-level fraud you fund your habit with.
In my annual report I had found evidence of maybe thirty drug addled locusts in four squats. I may have missed some but they are not covert. Let’s say those addicts are using twice a day (the upper scale of use) thats 30 x £40 a day = £1,200 a day - £438,000 a year to be made supplying crack and heroin to the locusts in this small square of London.
alt-market | There are a lot of assumptions and misconceptions when it comes to
the notion of a second civil war within the US. What I see most often is
the argument that the political left has “already won” the war without
firing a shot and that a rebellion would be crushed under the heel of a
newly a-wokened military industrial complex and a leftist controlled
federal government. The problem is, this argument is extremely naive and
ignores the bigger picture.
I think there are a couple of reasons why certain people press the
leftist supremacy theory: First, they greatly fear the idea of a kinetic
war breaking out and find the idea of combat repellent. So, they act as
if a shooting war cannot ever be won. They hide their fear behind a
veil of “rationalism” and thin hopes of a completely passive resistance.
They figure that if they can’t fight and win, then no one else can
fight and win.
Second, the motives of some of these people are more nefarious than fearful. One of the primary functions of 4th
Generation (psychological) warfare is to convince a target population
that “resistance is futile.” If you can make them believe that winning
is impossible then they may not fight at all, and thus the prophecy is
self fulfilling.
Luckily this method of propaganda does not seem to be working on a
large number of Americans. That said, there are many layers to the
scenario of civil war. While the extreme cultism of leftists is
relegated to a small percentage of the population, they are supported by
almost every major institution in our nation. The federal government
supports and protects them. Some state and local governments support and
protect them. The mainstream media avidly sings their praises. Most
corporations and Big Tech platforms support them and spread social
justice doctrine along with them. And, all globalist foundations
support, organize and even fund them.
All the people that the political left used to consider evil are now
on their side. This gives their small cult unprecedented social power
and a number of political weapons to use when they desire to threaten or
harm people who disagree with them. For now, most of this power is
actually used to terrify other people on the left.
There are many moderate democrats that have a distaste for the lunacy
of social justice warriors, but they are so afraid of being labeled
heretics, racists, fascists, etc. that they keep their mouths shut or
support draconian policies because they think they have to in order to
defend their political team. Limp-wristed moderates and old school
democrats that go along to get along are almost as big a problem as
hardcore leftists because they don’t have the guts to stand up to the
bullies in their own political circles.
This is how we end up with around half the country
in support of vaccine passport mandates, a totalitarian agenda which
would give government complete control over the health decisions of
individual Americans, complete control over how businesses operate and
who they are allowed to hire, not to mention complete control over the
economic participation of the average citizen. Vaccine passports are the
ULTIMATE POWER in the hands of government to decide the life and death
of individuals and their families. And, not surprisingly, the political
left and democrats are by far the biggest group backing the government
and the globalists on this agenda.
This places our nation in a difficult position; the political left
desperately wants to control the lives of others while conservatives and
some moderates just want to be left alone. We are at an impasse. We
cannot share the same spaces, we cannot share the same government and we
may not even be able to share the same land mass.
Our ideals are mutually exclusive. We believe in freedom and individual responsibility and they simply do not.
Make no mistake, an outright conflict is coming in the US and the
people in alternative media circles that fear it need to come to terms
with that fear and accept the inevitability of war. The sooner they do
this the sooner they can take action to mitigate the damage to their
families and communities. There will come a day very soon when you will
have to defend your freedoms and the freedoms of future generations with
your life. Embrace the suck and move on.
theatlantic | “Let me start big. The mission
of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization,” says Ryan
Williams, the organization’s president, looking at the camera, in a
crisp navy suit. “We’ve always aimed high.” A trumpet blares. America’s
founding documents flash across the screen. Welcome to the intellectual
home of America’s Trumpist right.
As Donald Trump rose to power, the Claremont universe—which sponsors fellowships and publications, including the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind—rose with him, publishing essays that seemed to capture
why the president appealed to so many Americans and attempting to map a
political philosophy onto his presidency. Williams and his cohort are
on a mission to tear down and remake the right; they believe that
America has been riven into two fundamentally different countries, not
least because of the rise of secularism. “The Founders were pretty
unanimous, with Washington leading the way, that the Constitution is
really only fit for a Christian people,” Williams told me. It’s possible
that violence lies ahead. “I worry about such a conflict,” Williams
told me. “The Civil War was terrible. It should be the thing we try to
avoid almost at all costs.”
That almost
is worth noticing. “The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment
of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for
a generation or two,” Williams said. Trump has left office, at least
for now, but those he inspired are determined to recapture power in
American politics. My conversation with Williams has been condensed and
lightly edited for clarity.
Emma Green: What do you see as the threats to Western civilization?
RyanWilliams:
The one we have focused on at the Claremont Institute is the
progressive movement. [Progressives think that] limited government, in
the Founders’ sense—checks and balances, robust federalism, a fairly
fixed view of human nature and the rights attendant to it—all has to
give way to a notion that rights evolve with the times.
The biggest institutional part
of [the progressive movement] is this large bureaucracy or
administrative state, which is insulated from control by the executive
or even, increasingly, by Congress.
I
would say the leading edge of progressivism now is this kind of woke,
social-justice anti-racism. It’s a threat to limited government because
it seems to take its lead from scholars like Ibram Kendi, who has proposed
a Department of Anti-racism that would basically have carte blanche
control over local and state governments. His definition of racism is
any policy that results in disparate outcomes for different groups. And
we take issue with that. You always have different outcomes between
different groups. Human nature is varied. We all have different talents.
The pursuit of equal results is only going to be successful in a new
woke totalitarianism. I realize that sounds a little hyperbolic, but
that seems to be the road we’re on.
Green:
We’re going to unpack “woke totalitarianism” in a second, but I want to
make sure I’m understanding your starting point correctly. When you say
Western civilization, it sounds like you’re not necessarily
describing people situated in geography or time but rather a set of
ideas that you believe are falling out of fashion or are being actively
destroyed by various forces in society. Am I getting you right?
Williams:
You can never really divorce a set of ideas and principles from the
people in which it grew up. America is an idea, but it’s not just that.
It’s the people who settled it, founded it, and made it flourish.
Green: Just to ask the question directly, do you mean white people?
Williams:
No, not necessarily. I mean, Western civilization happens to be where a
lot of white people are, historically, but I don’t think there’s any
necessary connection between the two. The ability to believe in natural
rights and a regime of limited government the way the Founders did is
not reserved only to white people.
centerforpolitics | To achieve understanding that can empower
effective compromise, deeper insights into the political and
social-psychological motivations that animate each side of the political
spectrum are needed. Toward those ends, this Center for
Politics/Project Home Fire study aims to:
— Provide a deeper understanding of the
dangerous divide that threatens America’s pursuit of universally
representative democracy.
— Uncover the politically and psychologically
motivated “compromise receptive” subgroups that exist among Biden and
Trump voters.
— Identify compromise corridors (the policy
and issue areas both Biden and Trump voters care about) and compromise
clusters (those groups of compromise receptive Biden and Trump voters
who both care about a particular policy or issue area and express less
dissimilar opinions).
— Reveal the specific pathways to persuade
Americans on both sides of the divide to open their minds to mutually
beneficial compromise that accrues to the bigger goal of preserving,
protecting, and expanding America’s universally representative
democracy.
“Our hope is that, by employing the tools of
modern behavioral science, Project Home Fire can develop a deep,
data-driven understanding of the fears and concerns animating the
increasingly dangerous political and cultural divide in America. The
first step toward effectively solving a problem is to accurately
understand its causes and we believe Project Home Fire can provide such
understanding,” said Robert “Mick” McWilliams of Project Home Fire.
“The logical conclusion then, is that it is in
the long-term interest of the country to pursue a series of strategies
and tactics that encourage bridge-building and constructive dialogue and
re-affirm America’s reputation as the world’s leading representative
democracy. Simply put — we need a real plan to heal our fractured
democracy. In our research, we have uncovered some pathways to help do
that,” said Project Home Fire’s Larry Schack.
desertreview | Now is the right moment to notice the onslaught of United States
poison control articles attempting to smear Ivermectin, a drug proven
safe and effective in the Uttar Pradesh test-and-treat program
administered under the auspices of both the WHO and CDC.
It is
appropriate to remind the reader that the WHO and CDC possess direct and
recent knowledge of Ivermectin use for COVID-19 in India. Moreover,
they know better than anyone the colossal effectiveness and overwhelming
safety of Ivermectin used in those millions of Uttar Pradesh test and
treat kits.
Perhaps it is also time to ask why exactly Dr. Tess
Lawrie’s peer-reviewed meta-analysis was given an Altimetric score of
26,697, making it number eight out of some 18 million publications.
This
rank is far better than the top 1%, which would only need a ranking of
180,000 for it to rank in the top 1%. It would only need 18,000 for it
to rank in the top .1%. Ranking in the top .001% would mean #180.
Therefore, at number eight, it is 8/180 of the top .001% or roughly the
top 4.4% of the top .001%. This article ranks in the top 5% of the top
.001%!
In other words, only seven articles in the world out of those 18 million are ranked higher.
This
peer-reviewed paper is one of the most cited of medical references of
all time – period. That should alert any reader – immediately - to its
historical significance. Dr. Tess Lawrie is a 30-year veteran WHO
evidence synthesis expert. Her conclusion is every bit as meaningful as
the article's rank. Here are those words,
“Moderate-certainty
evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible
using Ivermectin. Using Ivermectin early in the clinical course may
reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and
low cost suggest that Ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact
on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”
Maybe
it is time to ask why Dr. Pierre Kory’s peer-reviewed narrative review
of Ivermectin ranks #38 out of the same 18 million publications.
He
concludes, “Finally, the many examples of Ivermectin distribution
campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and
mortality reduction indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases
of COVID-19 has been identified.”
If
Dr. Lawrie’s paper is ranked in the top 5% of the top .001% of all such
published medical articles of all time, then Dr. Kory’s is not far
behind. His is 38/180 of the top .001% or the top 21% of the top .001%
Thus, both articles would rank in the rarified atmosphere of nearly one in a million.
Therefore,
the reader must now ask why two magnificent independent reviews from
two different continents, coming to the same conclusion, are both
ignored by our world’s medical leaders?
Uttar
Pradesh is one such population that experienced a considerable drop in
COVID-19 morbidity and mortality months AFTER Dr. Kory’s article was
published on April 22, 2021. Therefore, one must ask that if Ivermectin
so predictably and safely eradicates COVID-19, then why is it not being
systematically deployed over all the world, as Dr. Kory and Dr. Lawrie
suggest?
Perhaps every reader needs to ask themselves this
question - Why is it that BOTH Dr. Lawrie’s and Dr. Kory’s
supremely-rated expert review articles, published in the medical
literature on PubMed, the National Library of Medicine, are BANNED from
Wikipedia?
Although
India’s Ivermectin victory over COVID may have been lost on
bent-on-vaccinating-everyone Big Pharma and Big Regulators, the message
seems to have gotten through to the man on the street. If Google Trends
is any indicator, interest in Ivermectin is exploding, and for good
reason. We are all being systematically deceived by influential
organizations in the name of profits.
Interest
in Ivermectin and India is only increasing and has now reached an
all-time high. India’s conquest of COVID-19 is concealed no longer. The
secret is out. And perhaps, at long last, that much-anticipated WHO
Final Report detailing the most successful Pandemic campaign of any
place on earth will be published.
NYTimes | Newer
variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious,
infecting far more people than the original virus. Two new studies
offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more
efficiently through air.
The realization that the coronavirus is airborne indoors
transformed efforts to contain the pandemic last year, igniting fiery
debates about masks, social distancing and ventilation in public spaces.
Most
researchers now agree that the coronavirus is mostly transmitted
through large droplets that quickly sink to the floor and through much
smaller ones, called aerosols, that can float over longer distances
indoors and settle directly into the lungs, where the virus is most
harmful.
The new studies don’t
fundamentally change that view. But the findings signal the need for
better masks in some situations, and indicate that the virus is changing
in ways that make it more formidable.
“This
is not an Armageddon scenario,” said Vincent Munster, a virologist at
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who led one
of the new studies. “It is like a modification of the virus to more
efficient transmission, which is something I think we all kind of
expected, and we now see it happening in real time.”
The
studies compared the Alpha variant with the original virus or other
older variants. But the results may also explain why the Delta variant
is so contagious — and why it displaced all other versions of the virus.
“It
really indicates that the virus is evolving to become more efficient at
transmitting through the air,” said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne
viruses at Virginia Tech who was not involved in either study. “I
wouldn’t be surprised if, with Delta, that factor were even higher.”
rutherford | It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.
This is what we know: the government has the means,
the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its
orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons,
detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer
dollars.
It’s just a matter of time.
It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine
mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage,
healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results,
etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.
The groundwork has already been laid.
Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and
imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the
courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.
So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.
After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore,
especially given that the government likes to use the words
“anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
For instance, the Department of Homeland Security broadly defines
extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are
mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or
local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”
Indeed, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the
Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely,
associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views,
criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being
questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially
anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
The government also has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and
law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and
other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result
in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential
danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police
but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up
for perceived wrongs.
It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.
Human sacrifice is back with a vengeance, and this time we’re not throwing virgins into a volcano to stop an eruption or cutting the hearts out of prisoners-of-war to feed the gods and maintain cosmic balance. Instead, we’re calculating how many humans, along with other living creatures, must be sacrificed to keep economic growth going.
Somewhere in the last year public health lost its soul.The goal of fostering individual and collective health and well-being became secondary to disputable economic growth indicators and radical utilitarianism regarding the value of human lives. The focus on equity that was central in all public health discourses fell as one of the first victims of the discipline turn toward political symbiosis and realpolitik. The ambition to be a science-driven evidence-based practice continues to be daily trampled in evidence-free statements (Daflos, 2021; Goldman, 2020).
The neoliberal nations of the world are as much in thrall to religion as medieval Europe, but YHWH and the rest of the Trinity have been replaced by the Invisible Hand and monotheistic theology by the myths of growth and money. Where human sacrifice was practiced on victims numbered in the dozens or less in times past, now millions, and before long perhaps billions, will be sacrificed - justified by ungrounded speculation and willful blindness to alternatives.
slatestarcodex |4. The Malthusian trap, at least at its extremely pure
theoretical limits. Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced
onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an
idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art
(you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH
You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them
have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island
has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s
not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each
new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten
thousand.
A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their
time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this
sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat
composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back
will go extinct within a few generations.
In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner,
and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If
one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two
per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out,
swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of
rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage
over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.
If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut
stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be
exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut
consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by
their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most
of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of
rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.
For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the
ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other
things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy
to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From
within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic
imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.
5. Capitalism. Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry.
He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at
minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give
them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise
the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper
rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who
would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of
ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting
their prices they can’t do it.
Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition
are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else
be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can
sell the same service at a lower price.
(I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of
analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those
that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and
inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one
wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)
From a god’s-eye-view, we can contrive a friendly industry where
every company pays its workers a living wage. From within the system,
there’s no way to enact it.
(Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose blood is running money!)
authorea | In most Western countries, and in the majority of Canadian provinces, the COVID response symbiotically produced by political actors and public health institutions caused multiple disconnects: between the scientific evidence on COVID transmission and the public health sanctioned advice; between public health and governmental discourses prioritizing the wellbeing of the population and containment strategies focused mostly on economic indicators; and between inclusive discourses putting forward collective sacrifices for a common good and deeply inequitable interventions.
At the time of writing this commentary, those disconnects have grown too deep to be hidden. More efforts seem to go in controlling the political spin and rationing the information made available than in trying to correct documented deficiencies (Daflos, 2021; Thomas & Gervais, 2021). This is not to say that there is no push back by some public health officials and it could be that fierce debates are taking place behind closed doors. But, in most jurisdictions there have been little to no place for open dissension (Deep Singh, 2021).
Somewhere in the last year public health lost its soul. The goal of fostering individual and collective health and well-being became secondary to disputable economic growth indicators and radical utilitarianism regarding the value of human lives. The focus on equity that was central in all public health discourses fell as one of the first victims of the discipline turn toward political symbiosis and realpolitik. The ambition to be a science-driven evidence-based practice continues to be daily trampled in evidence-free statements (Daflos, 2021; Goldman, 2020).
In the following months and years, we should expect the COVID pandemic to be used to support calls for increased budgets by public health state bureaucracies. And many valid arguments can be made in support of stronger public health. However, it would be a huge mistake to ignore what the discipline lost in the pandemic, and the causes explaining the disconnects discussed here. The pandemic caused public health to turn back to its medical roots instead of leveraging the interdisciplinarity it long preached (Greenhalgh et al., 2021). It pushed many public health state bureaucracies to become tools for governments instead of being carriers for evidence-based information. And more generally it caused the discipline to renege most of its principles.
axial | Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and was exiled
from his native home Austria after the nation was annexed by Nazi
Germany. He moved to Ireland after he was invited to set up the Dublin
Institute of Advanced Studies. This follows the past history of Ireland
acting as a storehouse of knowledge during the Dark Ages. After decades
of work, biology was becoming more formalized around the 1940s. Better
tools were emerging to perturb various organisms and samples and the
increasing number of discoveries was building out the framework of life.
With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics, scientists probably
most importantly Thomas Hunt Morgan and his work on fruit flies (Drosophila) set up the rules of heredity - genes located on chromosomes with each cell containing a set of chromosomes. In 1927, a seminal discovery
was made that irradiation by X-rays of fruits flies can induce
mutations. Just the medium was not known where Schrödinger was thinking
through his ideas on biology. At the same type, organic chemistry was
improving and various macromolecules in the cell such as enzymes were
being identified along with the various types of bonds made. For
Schrödinger, there were no tools to characterized these macromolecules
(i.e. proteins, nucleic acids) such as X-ray crystallography. Really the
only tool useful at the time was centrifugation. At the time, many
people expected proteins to be the store and transmitter of genetic
information. Luckily, Oswald Avery published an incredible paper in 1944 that found DNA as probably the store instead of proteins.
With this knowledge base Schrödinger took a beginner’s mind
to biology. In some ways his naivety was incredibly useful. Instead of
being anchored to some widely-accepted premise that proteins transmitted
genetic information (although he had a hunch some protein was
responsible), the book thought from first principles and identified a
few key concepts in biology that were not appreciated but became very
important. Thankfully Schrödinger was curious - he enjoyed writing
poetry and reading philosophy so jumped into biology somewhat
fearlessly. At the beginning of the book, he sets the main question as:
“How
can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial
boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and
chemistry?”
Information
In the first chapter,
Schrödinger argues that because organisms have orderly behavior they
must follow the laws of physics. Because physics relies on statistics,
life was follow the same rules. He then argues that because biological
properties have some level of permanence the material that stores this
information then must be stable. This material must have the ability to
change from one stable state to another (i.e. mutations). Classical
physics is not very useful here, but for Schrödinger his expertise in
quantum mechanics helped determine that these stable states must be held
together through covalent bonds (a quantum phenomena) within a
macromolecule. In the early chapters, the book argues that the gene must
be a stable macromolecule.
Through discussion around the
stability of the gene, the book makes its most important breakthrough -
an analogy between a gene and an aperiodic crystal (DNA is aperiodic but
Schrödinger amazingly didn’t know that at the time): “the germ of a
solid.” Simply, a periodic crystal can store a small amount of
information with an infinite number of atoms and an aperiodic crystal
has the ability to store a near infinite amount of information in a
small number of atoms. The latter was more in line with what the current
data suggested what a gene was. Max Delbrück had similar ideas along
with J.B.S. Haldane, but the book was the first to connect this idea to
heredity. But readers at the time and maybe even still overextended this
framework to believe that genetic code contains all of the information
to build an organism. This isn’t true, development requires an
environment with some level of randomness.
Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers
-
When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring,
whether they know it or not, to the neotraditionalist “young country” that
arose in...
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
-
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
-
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 ...