Blog Dissecting Leftism by John Ray -- backup

COVID Exposed the Medical-Pharmaceutical-Government Complex

In college, I took a Latin American Politics and Development class. When discussing Latin American medical care, Professor Eldon Kenworthy presented a deeply countercultural idea. Echoing a journal article by the scholar, Robert Ayres, Kenworthy maintained that building hospitals there costs lives. If, instead of erecting, equipping, and staffing gleaming medical centers, this same money and human effort were devoted to providing clean water, good food, and sanitation, the public health yield would be much greater.

United States medical history bears out Ayres’s paradox. The biggest increases in U.S. life expectancy occurred early in the Twentieth Century, when people had increasing access to calories and protein, better water and sanitation. Lives lengthened sharply decades before vaccines, antibiotics, or nearly any drugs were available, and a century before hospitals merged into corporate systems.

Incremental American life span increases during the past fifty years reflect far less smoking, safer cars and jobs, cleaner air and less lethal wars more than they reflect medical advances. Books like Ivan Illich’s “Medical Nemesis” and Daniel Callahan’s “Taming the Beloved Beast” echo Ayres’s critique. But PBS, CNN, B&N, the NYT, et al. censor such views.

The American medical landscape has changed radically in the forty years since I learned of Ayres’ observation. America spends three times as much, as a percentage of GDP, on medical treatments as it did in the 1960s.

By 2020, America devoted 18 percent of its GDP to medicine. (By comparison, about 5 percent goes to the military.) Adding the mega-costs of mass testing and vaccines etc., medical expenditures might now approach 20 percent. Although the United States spends more than twice per capita what any other nation spends on medical care, American ranks 46th in life expectancy. U.S. life expectancy has flatlined, despite growing medical spending and broadened medical access via the vaunted Affordable Care Act.

Though medicine’s high-cost and relatively low yield are right in front of anyone who thinks about their medical experiences and those of people they know, most never connect the dots; more medical treatments and spending are continually advocated and applauded. There’s a regressive “if it saves—or even slightly extends—one life” medical zeitgeist/ethic.

As most medical insurance is employer-based, most people don’t notice annual premium increases. Nor do they see the growing slice of tax revenues used to subsidize Med/Pharma. Thus, they continually demand more stuff, like IVF, extremely high-cost drugs, sex changes, or psychotherapy, as if these were their right, and free. To say nothing of these treatments’ limited effectiveness.

As all are required to medically insure and to pay taxes, one can’t simply opt out or buy only those medical services that one thinks justify their costs. With massive, guaranteed funding sources, aggregate medical revenues will continue to climb.

Thus, the Medical-Industrial-Government Complex has become a Black Hole for today’s wealth. With great money comes great power. The Med/Pharma juggernaut rules the airwaves. Nonexistent until the 1990s, hospital system and drug ads now dominate advertising. By being such big advertisers, Med/Pharma dictates news content. Analysts who point out that lavish medical expenditures don’t yield commensurate public health benefit have small audiences. Med/Pharma critics can’t afford ads.

Medicine has fed Coronamania. The TV news I’ve seen during the past 27 months painted a very skewed picture of reality. The virus has been misrepresented—by the media and government, and by M.D.s, like Fauci, often posing in white jackets—as a runaway train that’s indiscriminately decimating the American populace. Instead of putting into perspective the virus’s clear demographic risk profile and the very favorable survival odds—even without treatment, at all ages, or promoting various forms of contra-COVID self-care, including weight loss—the media and medical establishment incited universal panic, and promoted counterproductive mass isolation, mass masking, mass testing, and treatment with ventilators and expensive, often harmful anti-virals.

Later, mass injections were added to the “COVID-crushing” armamentarium. While the shots created many billionaires, and greatly enriched other Pfizer and Moderna stockholders, they failed, as Biden and many others had promised, to stop either infection or the spread. All of the many whom I know who have been infected in the past six months were vaxxed.

Many—whose voices are suppressed by mainstream media—observe that the shots have worsened outcomes, by driving the development of variants, weakening or confusing immune systems, and causing serious near-term injuries.

Further, people blindly, ardently believed in the shots simply because they were marketed as “vaccines” by bureaucrats wearing medical garb. Despite the shots’ failure and the failure of other “mitigation” measures like lockdowns, masking, and testing, many refuse to concede that Med/Pharma has had much—overwhelmingly negative—influence over the society and economy and public health during Coronamania. Nonetheless, many billions of dollars have been—and are still being—spent to advertise shots that most people don’t want.

The COVID overreaction has to some extent also piggy-backed on TV programs that have, for decades, glorified medicine in TV shows like Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby, M.D., Medical Center, MASH, Gray’s Anatomy, and House. Wearing white coats connotes virtue, just as did wearing white hats in Western movies.

Given the cumulative PR onslaught of the ads and shows, medicine is widely seen as more effective than it is in real life. A few years ago, I heard some woman-in-the-street say, during a TV news clip, “If they make me change my doctor, it will be like losing my right arm.”

Many hold such polar views. Medicine is the new American religion. Given such fervent belief in medicine’s importance and the sense of entitlement regarding expanding medical treatments, government and insurance money is relentlessly overallocated to medicine.

Do these expenditures improve human outcomes? During the first Scrubs episode, resident J.D. complains to his mentor that being a doctor was different than he had envisioned; most of his patients were “old and kind of checked out.” His mentor responds, “That’s Modern Medicine: advances that keep people alive who should have died a long time ago, back when they lost what made them human.”

This largely describes those said to have died with COVID. Most people have disregarded that nearly all who died during the pandemic were old and/or in poor health. Most deaths have always occurred among the old and ill. Occasionally, sitcoms keep it realer than real people do.

Aside from not helping much and misspending resources, and extending misery, medicine can be iatrogenic, i.e., it can cause illness or death. Hospital errors are said to cause from 250,000 to 400,000 American deaths annually. Perhaps medical personnel try to do a good job, but when the bodies of old, sick people are cut open or dosed with strong medicine, stuff happens. Even well-executed surgeries and many medications can worsen health.

Further, though few know it, a brew of excreted medications and diagnostic radionuclides daily pours down drains across the United States and world and ends up in streams and rivers. For example, the hormones in widely-prescribed birth control pills feminize and disrupt aquatic creatures’ reproduction. There are books about all of this, too, though such authors never appear on Good Morning America.

Faith in medical interventions also lessens individual and institutional efforts to maintain or improve health. If people didn’t abuse substances, ate better, and moved their bodies more, there would be much less demand for medical interventions. And if people spent less time working to pay for medical insurance, they could spend more time taking care of themselves and others. Overall, America could spend a fraction of what it spends on allopathic medicine and yet, be much healthier. There are also plenty of books about this.

Given its place at the center of American life for 27 months, and counting, COVID has been—and will be—used to further intensify the medicalization of individual lives, the economy, and society. By exploiting and building an irrational fear of death, the Medical Industrial Complex will promote the notion that we should double—or triple—down on medical and social interventions and investments that might marginally extend the lives of a small slice of the population. Or, in many instances, shorten lives.

But most people who live sensibly are intrinsically healthy for many years. Given enough nutritious food, clean water, and a decent place to sleep, most people will live a long time, with little or no medical treatment. While intensive medical interventions can marginally extend the lives of some old, sick people, medicine can’t reverse aging and it seldom restores vitality.

If the media were honest brokers, the COVID mania would never have taken hold. The media should have repeatedly pointed out that the virus only threatened a small, identifiable segment of a very large population. Instead, captive to its Med/Pharma sponsors, the media went full-frontal fearmonger and promoted intensive, society-wide intervention. Social, psychological, and economic catastrophe ensued.

Additionally, many doctors who could have spoken against the COVID craziness stayed silent so as not to jeopardize their licenses, hospital privileges, or favored status with Pharma, or just because they were schooled in allopathic orthodoxy and hold fast to that faith. Props to those courageous few who broke ranks.

The Med/Pharma/Gov establishment, including the NIH and CDC, hasn’t saved America during 2020–22. To the contrary, COVID interventions have worsened overall societal outcomes. These net harms should have inflicted—and, depending on longer-term vaxx effects, may yet inflict—a big black eye on the Medical Industrial Complex.

If so, Med/Pharma will spend tens of billions of PR money to distort what’s happened for the past 27 months, and to portray well-paid medical personnel, administrators, and bureaucrats as selfless heroes. Many gullible Americans will buy this slick revisionism, including its portrayals of healthy-looking people walking in slow motion on beaches or across meadows in golden light, accompanied by a contemplative solo piano soundtrack.

Source

************************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

<a href="https://edwatch.blogspot.com">http://edwatch.blogspot.com</a> (EDUCATION WATCH)

<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)

<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)

<a href="https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/">https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/</a> <b>(IMMIGRATION WATCH)</b>

<a href="https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/">https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/</a> (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

**************************************************

June 21, 2022

Covid encore performance for Justin Trudeau

Multi-jabbed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has Covid for the second time this year. Trudeau announced his latest helping of Covid on Tuesday, saying:

‘I’ve tested positive for COVID-19. I’ll be following public health guidelines and isolating. I feel okay, but that’s because I got my shots. So, if you haven’t, get vaccinated – and if you can, get boosted. Let’s protect our healthcare system, each other, and ourselves.’

How unlucky can a jabbed, re-jabbed, and double-boosted guy get? It was only five months ago that Trudeau announced:

‘This morning, I tested positive for COVID-19. I’m feeling fine – and I’ll continue to work remotely this week while following public health guidelines. Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted.’

Covid likes Trudeau like Canadian truckers like their freedom.

Trudeau, you may remember, is the West’s jabber-in-chief who slammed the unvaccinated as racist, misogynistic, science deniers who should be shunned. He told Quebec television back in December 2021:

‘We are going to end this pandemic by proceeding with the vaccination. ‘We all know people who are deciding whether or not they are willing to get vaccinated, and we will do our very best to try to convince them. However, there is still a part of the population (that) is fiercely against it.

‘They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist. It’s a very small group of people, but that doesn’t shy away from the fact that they take up some space.

‘This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?’

That was before Trudeau proved the efficacy of the vaccine by going and getting Covid. And then getting it again, just to underscore the point.

Someone needs to ask the Canadian Prime Minister how the pandemic is supposed to end when feministic, anti-racists who believe in science/progress keep getting infected? Do we tolerate these people?

Imagine getting four polio vaccines and still getting polio. Twice. In five months. You’d start to ask questions, wouldn’t you?

Not Prime Minister Trudeau. No sir. Sticking to the Covid script like a day-old face mask sticks to your chin, the PM insisted he felt okay ‘but that’s because I got my booster shots’.

Ah. Of course.

‘I have contracted the virus I was supposed to be vaccinated against, but I am glad I received the vaccination that didn’t work because imagine how bad I would be if I had not!’

I love how Justin Trudeau has a parallel universe with which to compare things. How does he know his symptoms would have been worse were it not for all the jibby-jabs?

Thanking the vaccine that didn’t stop you from getting sick under the belief you’d have been worse had you had not had the injection – once, twice, three, four times – is delusional.

And this was an encore performance!

I got Covid without ever having been on the end of a government-sponsored needle, and I felt fine.

I know, I know. Just imagine how much finer I would have felt if Pfizer’s mRNA technology had been coursing through my veins!

Trudeau doesn’t miss a chance to use the vaccine’s failure to prevent him from getting Covid to urge people to get the vaccine to prevent them from getting Covid. ‘Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted,’ he wrote after getting Covid on Tuesday.

He wrote the same thing after getting Covid on February 1. ‘Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted,’ he tweeted at the time.

In other words…

‘I got jabbed and still got Covid. Everyone, please get jabbed.’ And, ‘Hey guys, you know how I got jabbed and still got Covid? Well, I got even more jabbed and got even more Covid! Everyone, please get jabbed.’ (Probably.)

If you’re not laughing, you’re not thinking.

Except for the millions of Canadians whose lives have been impacted by draconian restrictions and mandated vaccinations, this is no laughing matter.

At the time of writing, it was still illegal for unvaccinated Canadians to board a train or a plane. They might catch or spread Covid, you see.

And yet here is the heavily vaccinated Mr Trudeau catching Covid spread by heavily vaccinated leaders at the Summit of the Americas in California last week.

Meanwhile, Canada’s other vaccinated Justin (Bieber) has been diagnosed with Ramsey Hunt Syndrome – a disease most common in men aged 60 or over. His video set social media into a fit with #vaccineinjuries trending for days while ‘Justin Bieber face’ is the top Google suggested search.

(Calm down Fact-Checkers. We’re not saying the vaccine caused it – the Twitter mob is. For those wondering why we put this warning in, the Fact Checkers have been so active on the Bieber vibe that they even added a warning to this obviously satirical article in the VancouverTimes.)

Don’t panic. If you want to avoid getting Covid, just do what Trudeau says. ‘Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted.’

It’ll definitely work. Maybe.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/covid-encore-performance-for-justin-trudeau/

*********************************************

Right masks boost virus protection: study

Healthcare departments across Australia need to more selectively procure respirator masks to encourage stronger compliance among frontline workers, researchers say.

The finding follows the federal government signing off on an extra $760 million to help states and territories in the ongoing fight against COVID-19.

Existing commonwealth-state funding arrangements were set to expire in September but were extended on Friday by three months.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the pandemic “clearly isn’t over yet and it would be very brave to suggest that you can make that projection”.

Study author Irene Ng, a consultant anaesthetist at Royal Melbourne Hospital, said healthcare workers often do not comply with recommendations for using respirators, particularly N95 respirators.

“Explanations for non-compliance include the lack of standardisation of donning and doffing techniques, and design features of respirators that reduce comfort and usability,” Dr Ng said.

Some 378 health workers completed a comfort and usability survey, which formed the basis for the study.

The overall fit test pass rates were 65 per cent for semi-rigid cup respirators, 32 per cent for the flat-fold models, 59 per cent for the duckbill respirators and 96 per cent for three-panel flat-fold designs.

The latter was therefore the obvious choice for administrators and state and federal health departments when considering how to maximise respiratory protection.

Australia’s coronavirus-related death toll continues to rise, with more than 100 fatalities announced over the weekend including 48 in Victoria.

Source

Monday, June 20, 2022

WHO chief 'believes Covid DID leak from Wuhan lab' after a 'catastrophic accident' in 2019 despite publicly maintaining 'all hypotheses remain on the table'

The head of the World Health Organisation privately believes the Covid pandemic started following a leak from a Chinese laboratory, a senior Government source claims.

While publicly the group maintains that ‘all hypotheses remain on the table’ about the origins of Covid, the source said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread during late 2019.

The Mail on Sunday first revealed concerns within Western intelligence services about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were manipulating coronaviruses sampled from bats in caves nearly 1,000 miles away – the same caves where Covid-19 is suspected to have originated – in April 2020. The worldwide death toll from the Covid pandemic is now estimated to have hit more than 18 million.

The WHO was initially criticised for its deferential approach to China over the pandemic, as well as a willingness to accept Beijing’s protestations that claims of a laboratory leak were just a ‘conspiracy theory’.

However, in the absence of any compelling evidence of ‘zoonotic’ spread – the process by which a virus leaps from animals to humans – it is now adopting a more neutral public stance.

Dr Tedros updated member states on the pandemic this month, admitting: ‘We do not yet have the answers as to where it came from or how it entered the human population.

‘Understanding the origins of the virus is very important scientifically to prevent future epidemics and pandemics.

‘But morally, we also owe it to all those who have suffered and died and their families. The longer it takes, the harder it becomes. We need to speed up and act with a sense of urgency.

‘All hypotheses must remain on the table until we have evidence that enables us to rule certain hypotheses in or out.

This makes it all the more urgent that this scientific work be kept separate from politics. The way to prevent politicisation is for countries to share data and samples with transparency and without interference from any government. The only way this scientific work can progress successfully is with full collaboration from all countries, including China, where the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 were reported.’

Last year, the WHO established the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (Sago) to outline which studies would be needed to identify the origins of SARS-CoV-2 – as Covid is scientifically known – and to ‘create a global framework for studying the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens’.

An original probe into the outbreak by the WHO was resisted fiercely by China, leading to a report that concluded the SARS-CoV-2 virus probably passed to humans from a bat via another unidentified species.

But after 14 nations including the UK, US and Australia criticised its findings as being heavily compromised, Dr Tedros admitted the report’s flaws and ordered the new process.

The Government has taken a cautious approach to apportioning blame for Covid – something that China-sceptics attribute to a fear of offending Beijing.

However, American intelligence has placed the secretive Wuhan laboratory at the centre of its analysis.

Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that workers at the institute had fallen ill with Covid-like symptoms in autumn 2019 – weeks before the alarm was raised, and said that as part of military projects its scientists were experimenting with a bat coronavirus very similar to the one that causes Covid.

A WHO spokesman said: ‘Dr Tedros has been consistently saying all hypotheses remain on the table as scientists pursue their work.’

Source

***************************************

FDA study understimates risk of heart problems from Covid

“Severely flawed” is a cardiologist’s verdict on a peer-reviewed study funded by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggesting possible risks of developing myocarditis and pericarditis after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

The recent FDA study published on June 11, 2022, used health insurance databases to identify myocarditis or pericarditis hospitalizations occurring in people aged 18 to 64 years, 1 to 7 days after a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

The authors found that though only 12 to 14 percent of the studied cohort were 18- to 25-year-olds, 33 to 42 percent of the myocarditis or pericarditis events occurred in people of this age group, suggesting that this age group may be linked with these vaccine adverse events.

“These results do not indicate a statistically significant risk difference between mRNA-1273 (the Moderna vaccine) and BNT162b2 (the Pfizer vaccine), but it should not be ruled out that a difference might exist,” the authors wrote in the study.

However, cardiologist Dr. Sanjay Verma told The Epoch Times that the study “using a 7-day limit for clinical endpoints” for myocarditis or pericarditis events after vaccination was “severely flawed.”

Verma, who practices in Coachella Valley, California, has been seeing many more heart problems since the vaccines rolled out.

“Continued increased risk [of myocarditis or pericarditis]” was found by the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC)’s Reports (MMWR) “even at 21 days after vaccination,” Verma wrote in an email.

Explaining that spike proteins have been found in blood circulation even four months after injection, “there is no medical justification for a 7- or 21-day cutoff,” he said.

Further, a British pre-print led by researchers from the University of Oxford found “continued increased risk of myocarditis after the booster,” which was not assessed by the FDA study.

Verma pointed out further issues in the study, stating that it does not include 12- to 17-year-olds, “who are the highest risk cohort.”

The same CDC MMWR report also found that the 12- to 17-year-old cohort has “2 to 3 times increased incidence compared to the 18- to 29-year-old cohort,” the doctor explained.

After the second dose, males aged 12 to 17 years had an incidence of 22.0 to 35.9 myocarditis or pericarditis cases out of 100,000 as compared to males aged 18 to 29 years who had an incidence of 6.5 to 15 cases out of 100,000, demonstrating that teens have a higher risk than adults.

Verma also added that “the study does not account for those who may have died before hospitalization,” who would not be “included in insurance claims database.”

Nonetheless, the cardiologist noted a “tremendous improvement” in the study for using health insurance databases as compared to prior FDA studies that exclusively relied on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which would most likely result in a lower incidence of cases.

“Overall, the findings of the study are interesting, but the above limitations likely yield significant underestimation of the true risk of myocarditis or pericarditis after COVID vaccination.”

“Public safety and ethical post market pharmacovigilance warrants more robust active longitudinal follow-up to ensure informed consent and appropriate risk stratification counseling,” Verma concluded.

Source

************************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

**************************************************

Sunday, June 19, 2022

Florida surgeon general at odds with FDA panel decision on COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo disagrees with the FDA's decision to administer the COVID-19 vaccine for kids under the age of 5. The FDA's advisory panel met on Wednesday for a second time to determine whether the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is safe for young children.

Over 400 children under 5 years old have died from coronavirus, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Medical professionals in Florida have mixed reactions to vaccinating young children. Ladapo is one medical professional who emphasizes his opposition based on the data.

"We expect to have good data that the benefits outweigh the risks of any therapies or treatments before we recommend those therapies or treatments to Floridians. That is not going to change. I don’t think that is particularly radical. I think it’s very sensible," said Ladapo. "From what I have seen, there is just insufficient data to inform benefits and risk in children. I think that’s very unequivocal."

Jill Roberts, an associate professor at USF Health who watched the FDA meetings, feels as if young Americans were behind the curve on vaccinations compared to adults during the pandemic.

"The next time we're facing a pandemic, we cannot have a kid’s vaccine lagging 18 months behind the adults," Roberts told WTVT. "So you cannot use data from an adult vaccine and then apply it to your kids. It just doesn't work. They're too small. Their dosage is totally different. So we can't do that. The next time we have a pandemic, we really have to start all these things up at once."

On the other hand, Florida researcher Matt Hitchings, who tells WTVT that he will be first in line with his young children, says that the data shows more of a positive than a negative conclusion.

"This vaccine needs to be available so that parents can make the choice they want to make to feel comfortable," said Hitchings.

Young children must take three shots for the Pfizer vaccine while the Moderna vaccine requires two doses because they use different concentrations. Doctors must consult their children's pediatricians.

https://www.foxnews.com/health/florida-surgeon-general-odds-fda-panel-covid-19-vaccine-children-5

*****************************************************

Fauci admits 'not enough data' to show recommended boosters for 5-year-olds work

Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted Thursday that even though the Biden administration recommends that everyone over the age of 5 gets a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, there is currently insufficient evidence to prove that the boosters actually lower rates of hospitalization or death in children.

During a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., asked Fauci if he was aware of any studies that showed a reduction in deaths or hospitalizations for children who had received boosters.

"Right now, there's not enough data that has been accumulated, Senator Paul, to indicate that that's the case," Fauci stated. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases began to explain that he thinks the basis for the recommendation had to do with looking at morbidity and mortality of children in different age groups, when the senator cut him off.

"So there are no studies. And Americans should all know this. There are no studies on children showing a reduction in hospitalization or death with taking a booster," Paul said.

Paul, who is also a doctor, noted that the only studies that had been done were antibody studies, which he argued were not enough to prove a vaccine's efficacy. He claimed that just because a vaccine produces antibodies, that does not mean it is necessary. To illustrate his point, he argued that a person could get 10 boosters and get antibodies from all of them, but that does not mean a person needs to get 10 booster shots.

Fauci, who testified virtually because he currently has COVID-19, called Paul's hypothetical "somewhat of an absurd exaggeration," but Paul claimed that this is basically what the government is doing.

"That's not science. That's conjecture. And we should not be making public policy on it," he said.

Paul recognized that "there is probably some indication" that boosters are beneficial for older people who have health risks if they get COVID-19, but that this is not the case for younger people. To the contrary, he said the vaccine could be risky for younger people. Paul pointed recent reports of an increased risk of myocarditis in males age 12 to 24 who get a second dose of a vaccine.

The Republican senator also accused the government of withholding data about pediatric COVID-19 cases. Paul was particularly interested in the number of children who had previously been infected with COVID-19 who later died or were hospitalized from it.

"The answer may be zero, but you're not even giving us the data," Paul said.

Fauci did not answer the question, but stated that the "optimal degree of protection" after infection is to then get vaccinated, referring to reinfection possibilities from the omicron variant.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fauci-data-recommended-boosters-five-year-olds-work

*******************************************

Russian economy overcoming sanctions, Putin says

Putin is obviously putting the best face on things but I am guessing that he is pretty right. Sanctions rarely achieve much and Russia is a huge country with all sorts of resources, including a very resourceful population

St Petersburg: President Vladimir Putin has declared that Russia’s economy will overcome “reckless and insane” sanctions, while condemning the US for acting like “God’s own messengers on planet Earth”, at the country’s showpiece investment conference.

On Friday (Russia time), Putin began his address to the St Petersburg International Economic Forum with a lengthy denunciation of countries that he contends want to weaken Russia, including the US.

He said the US “declared victory in the Cold War and later came to think of themselves as God’s own messengers on planet Earth.”

Russia came under a wide array of sanctions after sending troops into Ukraine in February. Hundreds of foreign companies also suspended operations in Russia or pulled out of the country entirely.

Putin said trying to damage the Russian economy “didn’t work”.

“Russian enterprises and government authorities worked in a composed and professional manner,” he said. “We’re normalising the economic situation. We stabilised the financial markets, the banking system, the trade system.”

Russia’s projected inflation rate has fallen marginally, but the current projected annual rate of 16.7 per cent is still too high, he said.

Putin also vehemently defended his country’s actions in Ukraine. Russia has contended its neighbour posed a threat because of its desire to join the NATO military alliance.

“In the current situation, against a backdrop of soaring risks and threats, Russia’s decision to conduct a special military operation was a forced one,” the Russian leader said.

“It was very hard to make it, but it was forced and necessary. It was a decision by a sovereign country that has an unconditional right, based on the UN Charter, to defend its security.”

Putin predicted Russia’s success in Ukraine after more than 16 weeks of fighting.

“All of the special military operation’s objectives will definitely be attained,” he said. “This is predetermined by the courage and heroism of our warriors, the consolidation of Russian society, whose support gives strength and confidence to Russia’s army and navy, the profound understanding of the rightness and historic justice of our cause.”

Russia also “will accept any of the choices” the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine make about their futures, Putin said.

There’s been consistent speculation that the separatist territories will hold votes on joining Russia, similar to when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Separatist leaders of the two areas have expressed the desire for such a referendum.

Russia recognised the two areas as independent states days before sending troops to Ukraine, a move none of its allies have so far repeated.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/europe/russian-economy-to-overcome-reckless-sanctions-putin-says-20220618-p5aup1.html

Friday, June 17, 2022

Australia: New 'sticky' Omicron variants taking over

Two new Omicron variants are set to become the most dominant in NSW as a result of their "growth advantage" over previous strains, according to a new report.

The new variants— BA.4 and BA.5 — are set to overtake the previously prevalent BA.2 variant in coming weeks, the NSW Health respiratory surveillance report said.

"It is anticipated that in coming weeks the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-lineages, first identified in early April, will become the dominant strains," a NSW Health spokesperson said.

"And will likely be associated with an increase in infections."

Virologist Stuart Turville from the University of NSW's Kirby Institute said BA. 5 was "stickier" than its predecessors because of differences in its spike glycoprotein, which influences how the virus engages with cells.

"BA.5 doesn't look to be a big seismic shift like we saw with BA.1 and BA.2 in comparison to Delta," Professor Turville said.

"[But] the thing we're keeping an eye on with BA.5 is that it's starting to like tissue that pre-Omicron variants like ... it likes proteins on the lung.

"What we want to know now is does it like it as much as Delta and pre-Omicron variants or is it just a bit of a shift from BA.2?"

Infectious disease experts say there is evidence the Omicron sub-variants are effective at reinfecting people with previous infections from BA.1 or other lineages.

There is also concern these sub-variants may infect people who have been vaccinated.

However, there hasn't been a link to an increase in disease severity just yet, although this is being closely monitored, according to the NSW Health report.

Hospital and lab surveillance noted an early start to influenza season this year as well as a rapid increase in reported cases, raising concerns for strains on essential services.

University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine and Health Professor Elizabeth Elliott said there was no doubt "chaos" would be caused by the emergence of new variants in the winter flu season.

"Hospitals are already struggling with the load. And kids are not exempt. We recommend flu and COVID vaccines for all eligible," she said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-17/new-covid-omicron-variants-become-dominant-in-nsw/101162684

**************************************************

Fed accelerates rate hikes, but still too little, too late to stop crushing inflation

If the administration returned to balanced budgeting there might be a hope of inflation being temporary but huge excess spending is locked in so whatever the Fed does inflation will continue -- JR

By Robert Romano

The Federal Reserve on June 15 once again hiked the Federal Funds Rate — the rate at which the central bank lends to financial institutions — up another 0.75 percent to 1.5 percent to 1.75 percent, following 0.25 percent and 0.5 percent rate hikes at its March and May meetings.

That came after the January meeting when the Fed left its rate at 0 to 0.25 percent, even though inflation was already running north of 7 percent.

The acceleration of the Fed’s rate hikes, after tepid expectations of just 0.25 percent increases at each meeting, now stand out as an admission that the central bank thinks it was wrong. That, in sum, the central bank waited far too long to begin the process of ending the emergency measures enacted to mitigate the economic impacts of the Covid pandemic lockdowns.

A quick gander at the Fed’s economic projections tells the tale. Just in Dec. 2020, the Fed was projecting just 1.7 percent Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index inflation for 2021. It came it at 3.87 percent. In Dec. 2021, it was projecting 2.7 percent for 2022. So far, it’s already up to 6.3 percent as of April 2022.

When compared to a separate measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, now at 8.6 percent, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, similarly, since inflation first rose above 5 percent in June 2021, the Federal Reserve has kept its policy rate far below that of the inflation rate.

Just in Nov. 2021, the central bank was confidently promising the inflation would be “transitory”: “Inflation is elevated, largely reflecting factors that are expected to be transitory… an easing of supply constraints are expected to support continued gains in economic activity and employment as well as a reduction in inflation.”

A month ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the Fed was not even considering a 0.75 percent rate hike, telling reporters on May 4, “Seventy-five basis points is not something the committee is actively considering.”

And yet, a month later, that is exactly what the Fed did.

Meaning, the Fed has not only been consistently wrong about the state of the economy, it is not even a reliable source of information about what its own policy posture actually is on a month-to-month basis. It doesn’t even know what it wants to do.

Of course, the American people have noticed the inflation, as their money doesn’t go as far as it used to. Real average hourly earnings are down 3 percent from May 2021 to May 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The inflation itself is little wonder. Congress spent and borrowed more than $6 trillion to fight Covid after Jan. 2020: the $2.2 trillion CARES Act and the $900 billion phase four legislation under former President Donald Trump, and the $1.9 trillion stimulus and $550 billion of new infrastructure spending under President Joe Biden.

As a result, the national debt has increased by $7.2 trillion to $30.4 trillion since Jan. 2020, of which the Fed monetized half, or $3.4 trillion, by increasing its share of U.S. treasuries to a record $5.7 trillion while the M2 money supply has increased by $6.3 trillion to $21.8 trillion, a 41 percent increase, since Jan. 2020.

To be fair, one exigent event is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which unquestionably disrupted global grain supplies, with Russia and Ukraine accounting for one-third of all wheat exports, and the world’s oil and gas supply, since Russia is a top producer.

And, the Fed knew about the war in March and May when it did its tepid 0.25 and 0.5 percent rate hikes.

Still, the supply crisis has not improved. Production slowed down in 2020 in response to the Covid lockdowns, demand picked up sooner than expected, but when it comes to agriculture or oil and natural gas production, both are still below pre-Covid levels. Whether rates are rising slowly or very fast, if we don’t boost production soon, it might not matter where the Fed sets the interest rate, inflation will still get worse. Stay tuned.

https://dailytorch.com/2022/06/fed-accelerates-rate-hikes-but-still-too-little-too-late-to-stop-crushing-inflation/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=0a651e7d-fa73-49e2-be87-2fc2fa2e0f5c

*********************************************

The Emergence of Neo-Fascism in Public Health

Fascism is the art of hiding the truth behind a facade of wholesome virtue. It is, presumably, as old as humanity. Mussolini just gave it a name—hiding his authoritarian ideas behind the drainage of swamps, village renewal, kids in school, and trains running on time. The 1930s picture of Nazism was not broken windows and old men being beaten in the street, but happy smiling youths working together in the outdoors to rebuild the country.

Putting such labels to the present time is dangerous, as they carry a lot of baggage, but it also helps to determine whether the current baggage we had thought was progressive is actually regressive. Those happy smiling youths of the 1930s were actually being trained in the arts of self-righteousness, denigration of wrong-think, and collective obedience. They knew they were right, and that the other side was the problem. Is that familiar?

The societal changes of the past two years have been defined by, and led by, ‘public health.’ So it is right to look for public health analogies in the past to help understand what is happening, what the drivers are, and where they might lead. We have witnessed our public health professions and the associations that represent them call for active discrimination and coercion over medical choice. They have advocated for policies that impoverish others, whilst maintaining their own salaries, controlling normal family life, and even dictating how they can mourn their dead.

Hospitals have refused transplants for those who made unrelated medical choices the hospital did not like. I have witnessed them refuse a family access to a dying loved one until they accept injections they do not want, then allow immediate access thereby confirming it was not immunity, but compliance, that was sought.

We have all seen prominent health professionals publicly vilify and denigrate colleagues who sought to restate principles on which we were all trained: absence of coercion, informed consent, and non-discrimination. Rather than put people first, a professional colleague informed me in a discussion on evidence and ethics that the role of public health physicians was to implement instructions from the government. Collective obedience.

This has been justified by ‘the greater good’—an undefined term as no government pushing this narrative has, in two years, released clear cost-benefit data demonstrating that the ‘good’ is greater than the harm. However, the actual tally, though important, is not the point. The ‘greater good’ has become a reason for the public health professions to annul the concept of the primacy of individual rights.

They have decided that discrimination, stigma, and suppression of minorities is acceptable to ‘protect’ a majority. This is what fascism was, and is, about. And those who have promoted slogans such as ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ or ‘no one is safe until all are safe’ know the intent, and the potential outcomes, of scapegoating minorities.

They also know, from history, that the fallacious nature of these statements does not impede their impact. Fascism is the enemy of truth, and never its servant.

The point of writing this is to suggest that we call a spade a ‘spade.’ That we state things as they are, we tell the truth. Vaccines are a pharmaceutical product with varying benefits and risks, just like trees are wooden things with leaves on. People have rights over their own bodies, not doctors or governments, in any society that considers all people of equal and intrinsic worth.

Stigmatization, discrimination, and exclusion on the basis of healthcare choices, whether for HIV, cancer, or COVID-19, is wrong. Excluding and vilifying colleagues for differing views on the use of safe medications is arrogant. Denouncing those who refuse to follow orders conflicting with ethics and morals is dangerous.

Blindly following government and corporate dictates simply to comply with the ‘group’ has nothing in common with ethical public health. These all have more in common with the fascist ideologies of the past century than with what was taught in the public health lectures I attended. If that is the society we now wish to develop, we should be up front and state this, not hide behind facades of false virtue such as ‘vaccine equity’ or ‘all in this together.’

Let us not get tied down with political niceties of ‘left’ and ‘right.’ The leaders of Europe’s two main fascist regimes of the 1930s emerged from the ‘left.’ They leaned heavily on public health concepts of ‘greater good’ to weed out the inferior thinkers and non-compliers.

Our current condition calls for introspection, not partisanship. As a profession, we have complied with directives to discriminate, stigmatize, and exclude, whilst blurring requirements for informed consent. We have helped remove basic human rights—to bodily autonomy, education, work, family life, movement, and travel. We have followed the corporate authoritarians, ignoring their conflicts of interest and enriching them whilst our public has become poorer. Public health has failed to put the people in charge, and has become a mouthpiece for a small, wealthy, and powerful minority.

We can continue down this path, and it will probably end up where it did last time, except perhaps without the armies of others to overthrow the monstrosity we supported.

Or we can find humility, remember public health should be a servant of the people and not the instrument of those who seek to control them, and remove the monster from our midst. If we do not support fascism, we can cease to be its instrument. We could achieve this simply by following the fundamental ethics and principles on which our professions are based.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-emergence-of-neo-fascism-in-public-health_4535485.html

Thursday, June 16, 2022

Fully Vaxxed and Boosted Dr. Fauci Catches COVID

Maybe this will convince people that vaccienations are useless against Omicron. His symptoms are mild but that is typical of Omicron

On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), tested positive for COVID-19 on a rapid antigen test, according to a statement from the National Institutes of Health.

Fauci is fully vaccinated and has been boosted twice. He is reportedly experiencing mild symptoms.

“Dr. Fauci will isolate and continue to work from his home,” the statement reads. “He has not recently been in close contact with President Biden or other senior government officials. Dr. Fauci will follow the COVID-19 guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical advice from his physician and return to the NIH when he tests negative.”

Dr. Fauci is the architect of the nation’s COVID-19 response and was once the most trusted figure when it came to the novel coronavirus. However, his repeated contradictions and deceptions have resulted in Americans losing confidence in our health institutions and prompted calls for his firing.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/06/15/breaking-fully-masked-vaxxed-and-boosted-dr-fauci-catches-covid-n1605758

******************************************

Imperial College London research finds Omicron not boosting protection against reinfection

New research has found people who caught Covid in the first wave of the pandemic get no boost to their immunity if they catch Omicron.

A study of triple vaccinated people looked at how infections from different Covid strains affected people’s immune response, to help inform future vaccine development.

While three doses of the Covid jab help to reduce the severity of the illness from Omicron, previous infections can affect how the body responds, researchers say.

Imperial College London Professor Rosemary Boyton, who is a co-author of the study, said “if you were infected during the first wave, then you can’t boost your immune response if you have an Omicron infection”.

The study also found that being infected with Omicron did not boost protection against that strain.

“When Omicron started flying around the country, people kept saying that’s OK, that will improve people’s immunity. What we’re saying is it’s not a good booster of immunity,” Prof Boyton told The Guardian.

The study followed 731 triple vaccinated healthcare workers in the UK from March 2020 to January 2022. Each person had a different Covid infection history.

Researchers found that regardless of previous infections, immunity against Omicron waned a few weeks after third Covid jab.

They also found those who caught Omicron did have increased protection from other variants but it only offered a limited boost of protection from another Omicron infection. But in those who had the original strain of the virus - the response was weaker.

The team said those who caught Covid in the first wave of the pandemic did not gain a boost to their immune response after catching Omicron.

This study has raised concerns about what the future holds, with these findings suggesting people are not building up their immunity against the virus.

“We’re not getting herd immunity, we’re not building up protective immunity to Omicron,” study co-author Professor Danny Altmann said, reported The Guardian.

“So we face not coming out the other end of infections and re-infections and breakthrough infections.”

Actor Hugh Jackman has tested positive for Covid for the third time, after performing at the Tony Awards in New York City.

Jackman’s positive Covid result came less than 24 hours after he and co-star Sutton Foster and the ensemble cast of The Music Man performed a set at Radio City Music Hall for the 75th Tony Awards.

The Wolverine star took to social media to share the news, explaining that Max Clayton will take over his role in The Music Man while he recovers.

He also thanked all those who are understudies for their work and helping the show go on.

The Aussie actor had previously missed performances of the musical due to Covid. Over the Christmas period when Jackman contracted the virus for the second time some shows had to be cancelled.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/world/the-rolling-stones-cancels-amsterdam-concert-after-mick-jagger-tests-positive-to-covid/news-story/8b7bc68bd4126655557897790313f512

***************************************************

The Subordinate Citizen

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

I recently led a group of about 100 citizens to tour Israel for nearly two weeks. Before returning to the United States, all participants had to indicate their vaccination status and take a COVID-19 test for reentry.

Anxieties swept the group as Israeli testers swabbed them.

Anyone testing positive would have to delay his return. That quarantine would entail spending thousands of dollars in finding scarce hotel accommodations, additional living expenses, and rebooked airline tickets—depending upon the length of the mandatory sequestration.

Contrast the tens of thousands of foreign nationals now mustering to cross illegally into the United States again this summer. They follow the already 2 million who have entered the country unlawfully since Joe Biden became president.

Does any foreign national worry about being tested for COVID-19, much less fear being turned away if he tests positive or for lack of proof of vaccination?

Or do we scrutinize far more carefully U.S. citizens entering legally their own country than we do noncitizens crossing our borders unlawfully?

For that matter, the government is still determined to fire thousands of federal workers and U.S. military personnel who refused the new mRNA vaccinations. Most citizens who were not vaccinated feared that the inoculations were either possibly dangerous to their health or ineffective in preventing COVID-19 infections or would not necessarily lead to herd immunity.

Are 2 million nonvaccinated foreigners arriving unaudited from impoverished countries less of a threat during the pandemic than fully audited American citizens employed by the federal government? Why would we fire unvaccinated Americans but welcome equally unvaccinated noncitizens?

The Biden Administration blasted the Trump southern border wall and canceled all further funding.

Yet it just appropriated $40 billion to Ukraine to ensure that it does not lose its border war against Russian aggression.

That is a tiny percentage of the federal budget. But the aid is full of symbolic irony, nonetheless. The multibillion-dollar appropriation would have more than covered the completion of the entire wall along our own southern border.

An outside observer might conclude that the U.S. government intends to uphold the universal idea of national sovereignty, internationally recognized borders, and the security of citizens inside their own country—as long as they are not American citizens.

There are currently over 550 “sanctuary” jurisdictions established by state and local governments. They aim to prevent federal immigration authorities from deporting illegal aliens, including tens of thousands detained by law enforcement for committing additional crimes.

The nation has not experienced such blatant nullifications of federal laws since the efforts of pre-Civil War Southern states—or the 1960s southern governors who defied federal efforts to enforce U.S. civil rights legislation.

So, can any citizens now simply vote to declare their hometown or local county immune from federal legislation?

That is, can a city or county nullify as it pleases the IRS tax code, endangered species laws, or federal gun registration legislation?

Or is nullification only permissible in the interest of non-citizens and lawbreakers?

These asymmetries also transcend noncitizens.

We have developed entire classes of American elite citizens who are not subject to the enforcement of the law—at least as it is applied to others either less influential or ideologically incorrect.

Federal prosecutors sought to jail Lt. General Michael Flynn for six months for not telling the truth to federal agents.

They put another Trump subordinate, George Papadopoulos, in jail for two weeks for lying to federal prosecutors.

Recently the FBI stormed into an airport to arrest former Trump advisor Peter Navarro for contempt of a congressional subpoena.

OK, defying federal law has consequences. Or does it?

Former Obama Administration Attorney General Eric Holder brazenly defied congressional subpoenas and was found in contempt—an historic first.

Did the FBI ever arrest Holder, much less as he boarded an airplane?

James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, confessed he flat-out lied under oath to a congressional committee.

So did former Central Intelligence Agency cheif John Brennan—twice!

Andrew McCabe repeatedly lied to federal investigators as acting director of the FBI.

Were any of them arrested or tried in the manner of Flynn, Papadopoulos, or Navarro?

If not, what then is left of the foundation of U.S. citizenship—universal equal treatment under the law?

There are lots of reasons why the looming November midterms will likely see historic levels of pushback against the Biden Administration, Democratic candidates, and the entire progressive agenda.

Take your pick of the many self-induced Biden disasters, among them hyperinflation, unaffordable gasoline, out-of-control crime, and foreign-policy humiliations.

But one reason why voters are furious is rarely expressed.

Americans feel that ordinary citizens like themselves who follow the rules are treated more harshly by their own government than are both non-citizens and our own progressive elites.

And they are right, and they are angry, and we will hear from them very soon.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14206

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

The Great California Exodus... to MEXICO: Thousands flock south of the border to escape the crippling cost of living under Biden and Governor Gavin Newsom

Thousands of Californians are fleeing to Mexico amid the soaring cost of living in the golden state. Americans taking advantage of work from home are reaping the benefits of US salaries, while living off Mexico's cheaper lifestyle.

Others are living in Mexico, while commuting to work in the US. But critics have argued that the influx of Americans in cities south of the border has begun to price out local Mexicans.

It comes amid a wider exodus of Californians to other states across the US, including Texas, Washington, and Arizona.

Many feel forced out by rocketing inflation in the golden state that has gas, grocery, and living costs soaring under Governor Gavin Newsom.

'I would say at least half are coming down from California,' Darrell Graham of Baja123 Real Estate Group told CNBC while speaking about the real estate trends he has seen.

'Suddenly the cost of taxes, the crime rates, the politics, all the things that people are unhappy with in California are are coming down to Mexico.

Travis Grossi, a content creator who moved to Mexico in 2020, paid $1,600 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood, while in Mexico his rent became $850 per-month for two bedrooms, three bathrooms, a shared pool, and 24-hours a day security.

'We were able to cut our budget in half, which allowed us to really focus on our careers and the things we wanted to do artistically without having to just hustle, and hustle, and hustle, every day, every week to just meet the bare minimum,' Travis Grossi, told CNBC.

Monthly rent in Mexico can average as little as $430 per month, while rents can average as high as $1,500 north of the border in San Diego.

The population of California continues to shrink, as residents flee the state's high cost of living and rising crime.

California's population declined again in 2021 for the second consecutive year, state officials said in May, the result of a slowdown in births and immigration coupled with an increase in deaths and people leaving the state.

Critics point to the steady stream of people leaving California as an indictment on the state's policies, which are set by Governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats in the state legislature.

About 280,000 more people left California for other states than moved here in 2021, continuing a decades-long trend.

With an estimated 39,185,605 residents at the end of the year, California is still the most populous US state, putting it far ahead of second-place Texas and its 29.5 million residents.

But after years of strong growth brought California tantalizingly close to the 40 million milestone, the state's population is now roughly back to where it was in 2016 after declining by 117,552 people this year.

Though the life is good for California ex-pats living in Mexico, the trend has begun a process of gentrification that is pricing out local Mexican citizens who aren't paid in US dollars.

'Certain neighborhoods are now becoming too expensive for Mexican citizens to live in because most of the time people that are actually buying the property developments are being able to do so because they either make money in US dollars, or because they are working remotely,' said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy institute.

Exactly how many Californians have relocated to Mexico have not been documented, but as of 2019 it was estimated that at least 1.2million Americans lived in the country.

The trend comes as average cost of a gallon of gasoline in the US has risen to $5.014 as grocery costs saw the highest surge in a year since 1979.

Gas prices are up $1.94 from this time last year, spiking 50 cents in the last month alone, according to the AAA Gas Price Index.

The national average passed the $5 mark for the first time in history over the weekend, and President Biden deflected blame for soaring prices to Russia once again.

Meanwhile the cost of groceries rose 11.9 per cent from this time last year, the sharpest increase the country has seen since Jimmy Carter was president.

The Labor Department's report on Friday showed the consumer price index jumped one percent in May from the prior month, for a 12-month increase of 8.6 percent - topping the recent peak seen in March.

The new figures released on Friday suggested the Federal Reserve could continue with its rapid interest rate hikes to combat what has been coined 'Bidenflation,' and markets reacted swiftly, with the Dow shedding around 600 points.

Markets continued to drop during early trading on Monday, as fears of a recession grow stronger.

The runaway inflation rates are hurting American wallets outside of the gas station, most notably at the grocery store.

Grocery costs have increased at staggering rates, and are expected to only keep climbing as the crisis continues.

The price of eggs has risen 32% and poultry is up 16.6% since the year began, following a bird flu outbreak in January that killed off roughly 6% of commercial chickens.

Embargoes against Russia have also led to increases in the prices of grain-based foods, while fats and oils are up 16.9%, and milk is up 15.9%.

As inflation-borne production costs climb, producers and retailers alike have indicated that they will be forced to continue hiking prices.

Overall, global oil prices are rising, compounded by sanctions against Russia, a leading oil producer, because of its war against Ukraine.

In addition, there are limits on refining capacity in the U.S. because some refineries shut down during the pandemic.

The combined result is seeing the cost of filling up surging, draining money from Americans who are facing the highest rate of inflation since 1981.

Surveys show that Americans see high inflation as the nation's top problem, and most disapprove of Biden's handling of the economy.

A top UK economist scolded the Federal Reserve Bank on Sunday, suggesting that the current inflation could have been avoided but for the naivete, or arrogance, of the central bankers who dismissed rising prices as temporary.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10912339/Thousands-flock-Mexico-escaping-crippling-cost-living-Biden-Governor-Gavin-Newsom.html

********************************************

The federal government is sitting on 22 million acres of farmable land during a global food crisis. Biden should tap it.

The federal government continues to pay farmers not to farm on some 22 million acres of farmlands that are a part of the voluntary Conservation Reserve Program, established in 1985 to address soil erosion and other environmental impacts caused by farming, even as the global supply crisis, the war in Ukraine and bad weather are all combining to reduce global agriculture production in 2022, threatening starvation in the third world.

In any given year, before the Covid supply crisis or the war in Ukraine, 9 million people were already starving to death each year, according to global health estimates by the United Nations and the World Food Programme.

Now, that crisis could get even worse, as global wheat production is taking a major hit, according to the latest data by the Department of Agriculture in May: “Global production is forecast at 774.8 million tons, 4.5 million lower than in 2021/22. Reduced production in Ukraine, Australia, and Morocco is only partly offset by increases in Canada, Russia, and the United States. Production in Ukraine is forecast at 21.5 million tons in 2022/23, 11.5 million lower than 2021/22 due to the ongoing war.”

Recently, wheat has been particularly hard hit, with U.S. wheat production down 15 percent since 2019, from 1.93 billion bushels in 2019 to 1.64 billion in 2021, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

According to a March Department of Agriculture release on prospective plantings, 2022 will be the fifth lowest area planted since 1919: “All wheat planted area for 2022 is estimated at 47.4 million acres, up 1 percent from 2021. If realized, this represents the fifth lowest all wheat planted area since records began in 1919.”

Just on June 7, Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told Reuters that the current global food crisis could kill just as many people as Covid. To date, almost 7 million people have died globally from Covid.

Sands warned: “Food shortages work in two ways. One is you have the tragedy of people actually starving to death. But second is you have the fact that often much larger numbers of people are poorly nourished, and that makes them more vulnerable to existing diseases… It’s not as well-defined as some brand new pathogen appearing with distinctive new symptoms. But it could well be just as deadly.”

Meaning, millions more could starve — more than usual — if global agriculture production does not soon catch up to demand.

So, what are we doing about it? On May 11, President Joe Biden told the nation that U.S. farmers were “expanding production and feeding the world in need” this year. But so far, Biden only pointed to a federal insurance program to incentivize farmers in the short term to engage in double cropping, whereby fields are planted twice in a season and harvested early.

That might help. But what about the 22 million acres that the federal government is sitting on as a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program? Why aren’t we tapping that as is already allowed under federal law?

Specifically, 16. U.S.C. section 3833(b)(1)(B)(i)(I)(cc) allows the Secretary of Agriculture to allow for farming on lands in the Conservation Reserve Program when there is a drought or another type of emergency: “The Secretary… shall permit certain activities or commercial uses of established cover on land that is subject to a contract under the conservation reserve program if… the Secretary… includes contract modifications … without any reduction in the rental rate for … emergency haying, emergency grazing, or other emergency use of the forage in response to a localized or regional drought, flooding, wildfire, or other emergency, on all practices, outside the primary nesting season, when… the Secretary … determines that the program can assist in the response to a natural disaster event without permanent damage to the established cover…”

We have all of the above. There’s a drought in the southwest United States presently. There’s too much rainfall in North Dakota. There’s also the overall global supply crisis and the war in Ukraine.

Overall U.S. agriculture production has been down, with planted acres recently peaking at 319.3 million acres in 2018, according to data compiled by USDA. In 2019, amid flooding, it was down to 303 million acres planted, 310 million acres planted in 2020 during Covid and 317 million acres planted in 2021.

And that is far below the level of farming that used to take place here. Acres planted actually peaked in 1932 at 375 million acres planted. That was right before the Dust Bowl of 1934, which drove planting down to 339 million acres planted before recovering to 361 million acres planted in 1935.

Then, with the advent of suburbs, agriculture production took further hits in the 1960s, when annual land planted was down to less than 300 million acres. It experienced a resurgence in the 1970s and then peaked again at 361 million acres planted in 1981.

Those numbers took a big hit, though, after the 1985 Conservation Reserve Program was established. In 1985, before the program took effect, 353 million acres were planted. In 1986, that number immediately dropped to 338 million acres planted. And in 1987, it was down to 315 million acres planted.

If there ever was a valid basis for President Biden and the USDA to take exception to the Conservation Reserve Program, this is it. These farmlands should be planted before it is too late. My worry is that we will look back on this situation in a year or so and ask, “Why didn’t we plant more?”

https://dailytorch.com/2022/06/the-federal-government-is-sitting-on-22-million-acres-of-farmable-land-during-a-global-food-crisis-biden-should-tap-it/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=1a6b7b6b-7d89-466c-9e4d-faad68f7d3ef

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

The Sovietization of American Life

One day historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its founding principles.

“Sovietization” is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology. It refers to the subordination of policy, expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates. Ultimately such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom.

The American Commissariat

Experts become sycophantic. They mortgage their experience and talent to ideology—to the point where society itself regresses.

The law is no longer blind and disinterested, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused. Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress and smiles; Peter Navarro is held in contempt of Congress and is hauled off in cuffs and leg-irons. James Clapper and John Brennan lied under oath to Congress—and were rewarded with television contracts; Roger Stone did the same and a SWAT team showed up at his home. Andrew McCabe made false statements to federal investigators and was exempt. A set-up George Papadopoulos went to prison for a similar charge. So goes the new American commissariat.

Examine California and ask a series of simple questions.

Why does the state that formerly served as a model to the nation regarding transportation now suffer inferior freeways while its multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project remains an utter boondoggle and failure?

Why was its safe and critically needed last-remaining nuclear power plant scheduled for shutdown (and only recently reversed) as the state faced summer brownouts?

Why did its forests go up in smoke predictably each summer, as its timber industry and the century-old science of forest management all but disappeared from the state?

Why do the state’s criminals so often evade indictment, and if convicted are often not incarcerated—or are quickly paroled?

Why are its schools’ test scores dismal, its gasoline the nation’s highest-priced, and the streets of its major cities fetid and dangerous—in a fashion not true 50 years ago or elsewhere today?

In a word, the one-party state is Sovietized. Public policy is no longer empirical but subservient to green, diversity, equity, and inclusion dogmas—and detached from the reality of daily middle-class existence. Decline is ensured once ideology governs problem-solving rather than time-tested and successful policymaking.

In a similar fashion, the common denominator in Joe Biden’s two years of colossal failures is Soviet-like edicts of equity, climate change, and neo-socialist redistribution that have ensured (for the non-elite, in any event) soaring inflation, unaffordable energy, rampant crime, and catastrophic illegal immigration. Playing the role of Pravda, Biden and his team simply denied things were bad, relabeled failure as success, and attacked his predecessor and critics as various sorts of counterrevolutionaries.

Biden rejected commonsense, bipartisan policies that in the past kept inflation low, energy affordable, crime controlled, and the border manageable. Instead, he superimposed leftist dogma on every decision, whose ideological purity, not real-life consequences for millions, was considered the measure of success.

The Caving of Expertise

Entire professions have now nearly been lost to radical progressive ideology.

Do we remember those stellar economists who swore at a time of Biden’s vast government borrowing, increases in the monetary supply, incentivizing labor non-participation, and supply chain interruptions that there was no threat of inflation? Were they adherents of ideological “modern monetary theory”? Did they ignore their own training and experience in fealty to progressive creeds?

What about the Stanford doctors who signed a groupthink letter attacking their former colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, because he questioned the orthodoxies of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the state bureaucracies—who we now know hid their own involvement with channeling funding to deadly gain-of-function research in Wuhan? Did they reject his views on empirical grounds and welcome a give-and-take shared inquiry—or simply wish to silence an ideological outlier and advisor to a despised counterrevolutionary?

Or how about the 50 retired intelligence “experts” who swore that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not genuine but likely Russian disinformation? Did they really rely on hundreds of years of collective expertise to adjudicate the laptop or did they simply wish to be rewarded with something comparable to a “Hero of Woke America” award?

Or what about the 1,000 medical “professionals” who claimed violating quarantine and protective protocols for Black Lives Matter demonstrations was vital for the mental health of the protestors? Or the Princeton creators of a video identifying Jonathan Katz as a sort of public enemy for the crime of stating that racial discrimination of any sort was toxic?

Career Advancement, Cowardice, and Membership in the Club

There can be no expertise under Sovietization; everything and everyone serves ideology. Our military—especially its four-star generals, current and retired—parroted perceived ideologically correct thought. Repeating party lines about diversity, white supremacy, and climate change are far more relevant for career advancement than proof of prior effective military leadership in battle.

The ultimate trajectory of a woke military was the fatal disgrace in Afghanistan. Ideologues in uniform kept claiming that the humiliating skedaddle was a logistical success and that misguided bombs that killed innocents were called a “righteous strike.” Afghanistan all summer of 2021 was to be Joe Biden’s successful model of a graduated withdrawal in time for a 20th-anniversary commemoration of 9/11—until it suddenly wasn’t.

Pentagon decision-making increasingly privileges race, gender, sexuality, and green goals over traditional military lethality—a fact known to all who are up for promotion, retention, or disciplinary action.

How predictable it was that the United States fled Kabul, abandoning not just billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to terrorists, but also with Pride flags flying, George Floyd murals on public walls, and gender studies initiatives being carried out in the military ranks. Ask yourself: if a general during the Afghanistan debacle had brilliantly organized a sustainable and defensible corridor around Bagram Airfield but was known to be skeptical of Pentagon efforts to address climate change and diversity would he be praised or reviled?

The elite universities in their single-minded pursuit of wokeness are ironically doing America a great favor. For a long time, their success was due to an American fetishization of brand names. But now, most privately accept that a BA from Princeton or Harvard is no longer an indication of acquired knowledge, mastery of empiricism, or predictive of inductive thinking over deductive dogmatism.

Instead, we now understand, various lettered certificates serve as stamps for career advancement—proof either of earlier high-school achievement that merely won the bearer admission to the select, or confirmation that the graduate possesses the proper wealth, contacts, athletic ability, race, gender, or sexuality to be invited to the club.

Universities’ abandonment of test scores and diminution of grades—replaced by “community service” and race, gender, and sexuality criteria—has simply clarified the bankruptcy of the entire higher education industry.

Our “diversity statements” required for hiring at many universities are becoming comparable to Soviet certifications of proper Marxist-Leninist fidelity. Like the children of Soviet Party apparatchiks, privileged university students now openly attack faculty whose reading requirements or lectures supposedly exude scents of “colonialism” or “imperialism” or “white supremacy.”

Faculty increasingly fear offering merit evaluation, in terror that diversity commissars might detect in their grading an absence of reparatory race or gender appraisals. The result is still more public cynicism about higher education because it is apparent that the goal is to graduate with a stamp from Yale or Stanford that ensures prestige, success, and ideological correctness—on the supposition that few will ever worry exactly what or how one did while enrolled.

We have our own Emmanuel Goldsteins who, we are told, deserve our three minutes of hate for counterrevolutionary thought and practice. Donald Trump earned the enmity of the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the IRS. Now Elon Musk and his companies are suddenly the targets of the progressive state, including repartees from the president himself. To vent, the popular Soviet directs its collective enmity at a Dave Chappelle or Bill Maher, progressives who exhibit the occasional counterrevolutionary heresy.

Cabinet secretaries ignore their duties—somewhat

understandable given their resumes never explained their appointments. What binds a Pete Buttigieg, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Jennifer Granholm is not expertise in transportation, border security, or energy independence but allegiance to an entire menu of woke policies that are often antithetical to their own job descriptions.

“Diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” started out as mandated proportional representation as defined by the state allotting spoils of coveted admissions, hiring, honors, and career advancement by race and gender percentages in the general population. The subtext was that federal and state governments imported and incorporated largely academic theories that alleged any disequilibrium was due to bias.

More specifically, racial and sexual prejudices were to be exposed and punished by morally superior castes—in politics, the bureaucracy, and the courts. There was never any interest in detailing how particular individuals were personally harmed by the system or by the “other,” which explains the Left’s abhorrence of racially blind, class-based criteria to establish justified need.

Reparations

In the last five years, American Sovietization has descended into reparatory representation. Due to prior collective culpability of whites, heterosexuals, and males, marginalized self-defined groups of victims must now be “overrepresented” in admissions, hiring, and visibility in popular culture

As the Soviets and Maoists discovered—and as was true of the Jacobins, National Socialists, and cultural Marxists—once radical ideology defines success, then life in general becomes anti-meritocratic. The public privately equates awards and recognition with political fealty, not actual achievement.

Were recent Netflix productions reflections of merit or ideological criteria governing race and gender? Do the Emmys, Tonys, or Oscars convey recognition of talent, or of adherence to progressive agendas of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Does a Pulitzer Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, or a MacArthur award denote talent and achievement or more often promote diversity, equity, and inclusion narratives?

Consequences of Failing Up

Where does woke Sovietization end once accountability vanishes and ideology masks incompetence and malfeasance?

We are starting to see the final denouement with missing baby formula, epidemics of shootings and hate crimes, train-robbings reminiscent of the Wild West in Los Angeles, Tombstonesque shoot-up Saturday nights in Chicago, spiking electricity rates and brownouts, $7 a gallon diesel fuel, unaffordable and scarce meat, and entire industries from air travel to home construction that simply no longer work.

Everyone knows that the status of our homeless population in Los Angeles or San Francisco is medieval, dangerous, and unhealthy. And everyone knows that any serious attempt to remedy the situation would cause one to be labeled an apostate, counterrevolutionary, and enemy of the people. So, like good Eastern Europeans of the Warsaw Pact in the 1960s, we mutter one thing under our breath, and nod another publicly.

Behind all our disasters there looms an ideology, a creed that ignores cause and effect in the real world—without a shred of concern for the damage done to those outside the nomenklatura.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14198

Monday, June 13, 2022

‘Outright lying’: Australian scientist hits out at TGA after ‘life-changing’ Covid vaccine injury

An Australian scientist, left unable to work for eight months after a debilitating neurological reaction he blames on the Covid shot, has likened the treatment of people suffering vaccine injuries to that of returning veterans with health issues after the Vietnam War.

Dr Rado Faletic has slammed the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) adverse event reporting process, saying the medicines regulator tasked with vaccine safety surveillance was “simply uninterested” in investigating his symptoms despite submitting multiple reports.

“I’m similar to thousands of Aussies. After the vaccine I had a huge constellation of symptoms from head to toe,” the 46-year-old said, describing it as similar to “mutant long Covid”.

“The worst has been an oppressive brain fog. I’ve had headaches, chest pains, abdominal pains, unbelievable muscle twitching, issues focusing my vision. Basically I’ve been unable to work for eight months. I’m only now just starting to feel a little bit normal. This is not a mild side effect – this has been life-changing.”

Dr Faletic said doctors and specialists were unable to find anything obviously wrong with him.

“You go to the hospital, they take your blood, do an echocardiogram or X-ray or MRI and don’t find anything,” he said. “They say, ‘Well you look fine, go home and rest.’”

He added, “I don’t necessarily blame the doctors. The problem is there hasn’t been a test to find out what’s wrong. I know some people are getting misdiagnosed with anxiety or functional neurological disorder – that’s not what’s going on. It’s a physical injury.”

Dr Faletic, who earned his PhD in hypersonic technology from the ANU and now runs an international research consulting firm based in Canberra, says his faith in the scientific and medical community has been badly shaken by his experience.

He received his first Pfizer dose on October 19 last year and his second on November 9. He had a bad reaction to both “within hours”, but says the second was “dramatically off the charts”.

“I waited a little while (to take the vaccine) – I work with technology and have a science background, so I understood that with a new product, new technology, there could be some things we don’t know about,” he said.

“I thought, enough time has passed, surely our government would have flagged any reactions of concern. I took it and all this stuff happened to me. It’s not a matter of it being a coincidence – it all happened within hours of the shots. Then I thought, surely the government would be interested in what’s happened to me? Nope.”

Dr Faletic says it soon became clear to him that the TGA wasn’t interested. “I’ve done 50 rounds with the TGA on this,” he said.

“They’ve said, ‘We can find no safety signals,’ which I think is disingenuous if not outright lying. In my small personal circle I know over a dozen people with different long vax problems, [ranging from] ongoing headaches, memory problems or brain fog to some people who were basically bedridden for months.”

When he went searching for answers, he found “hundreds of people” in online groups who had experienced similar symptoms and submitted reports themselves.

“The TGA still claims there is nothing to see,” he said.

“We are being treated with the same type of derision and condescension as Vietnam vets when they came back damaged. The government doesn’t want to acknowledge us, people in the community look down on us. There are a lot of parallels.”

In the 1970s, Australian troops who had returned from Vietnam began to experience high incidences of cancer and other illnesses, with the government initially denying exposure to Agent Orange and other chemicals sprayed by the US military was to blame.

While health regulators and drug manufacturers including Pfizer have previously denied any causal link between the vaccines and neurological symptoms, the tide appears to be slowly turning as a growing number of experts call for more investigation.

Earlier this year, Sydney woman Daniella Lenarczyk, 34, spoke out about her persistent symptoms that included migraines, tinnitus, neck pain and numbness in her arm.

In the US, the National Institutes of Health conducted a small observational study last year of patients who reported neurological problems within one month of Covid vaccination, including pins and needles in the face or limb, orthostasis – sudden decrease in blood pressure when standing or sitting – heat intolerance and palpitation.

That paper, currently in preprint, concluded that “a variety of neuropathic symptoms may manifest after SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations and in some patients might be an immune-mediated process”.

“There doesn’t seem to be a majority theory,” Dr Faletic said.

“Whilst we’ve all been damaged in the same way, our cluster of symptoms vary from person to person.”

In a statement, the TGA said it “monitors the safety of Covid-19 vaccines using information from a variety of sources, including analysis of adverse event reports submitted to the TGA, emerging published literature, worldwide safety data submitted by vaccine sponsors and information shared by international regulators”.

“If the TGA identifies a safety concern it will take regulatory action to address the safety issue and promptly provide information to the public,” a spokeswoman said.

“The recognised adverse effects of Covid-19 vaccines are included in the approved Product Information (PI). These are updated as new safety information is identified. To date, the TGA has undertaken 26 actions with the sponsors to include new safety information in the PIs for Covid-19 vaccines.”

Those have included the addition of hypoaesthesia (reduced sense of touch or numbness) and paraesthesia (an unusual feeling in the skin, such as a tingling or crawling sensation) to the PIs for Comirnaty (Pfizer) and Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca).

Meanwhile, new figures obtained by news.com.au reveal the federal government’s vaccine injury compensation scheme has approved just 16 payouts in six months of operation.

The Covid-19 vaccine claims scheme allows people to claim a one-off payment ranging from $1000 to $20,000 for lost wages or other expenses if they suffer a bad reaction, and in cases of death the family may be able to claim funeral costs.

But the scheme has been criticised by legal experts and victims as overly complex and narrowly targeted towards a very limited number of officially recognised adverse effects.

Services Australia confirmed it had received 2225 applications as of June 2. Of these just 16 have been approved, 49 have been withdrawn and 671 are “waiting further information from applicants”.

“The assessment process can be complex, and claims may also be reviewed independently by medical and other appropriately qualified experts,” a spokesman said.

“In many cases, Services Australia has had to seek additional information from applicants in order to further progress consideration of their application. In other cases, applications have also been withdrawn. If found eligible, applicants are given up to six months to accept an offer of compensation, therefore finalisation of claims may also take some time.”

Services Australia declined to provide any data on the amounts of payouts or types of claims, citing privacy concerns due to the small number involved.

According to the TGA’s most recent safety update, there have been 129,995 total adverse event reports from 59.4 million vaccine doses administered to June 5.

Eleven deaths have been ruled as likely linked to vaccination, all after AstraZeneca.

No deaths have been officially linked to Pfizer in Australia from around 41 million doses administered.

In New Zealand, three deaths have been ruled as likely due to vaccine-induced myocarditis after Pfizer, from around 11 million doses.

Last month, the family of one of the 11 Australians who died after receiving AstraZeneca spoke out for the first time.

Victorian woman Robyn, a “fit and healthy” 77-year-old, died in September last year from Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Speaking to ABC Radio, her children said while they still supported Covid vaccination, they felt let down by the lack of government support.

They said they believed they were entitled to a lump-sum payment of $70,680 plus funeral expenses, but were critical about the complexity of the application process.

Her son Ross said reading through the vaccine claims policy, it felt callous. “It’s a policy that’s designed to protect medical professionals from legal repercussions if something happens, like to my mother,” he said.

“My understanding is that it is to facilitate the actual vaccine rollout, so the doctors aren’t scared to administer vaccines. But for people who have suffered from the side effects, it feels like we’re just an afterthought to that.”

Dr Faletic said he had also looked over the scheme carefully and “it’s absolutely clear they’ve written it to not include people like me”.

“From a philosophical point of view we had these massive, broad, sweeping economic sanctions on all of us – lockdowns, travel shutdown – all done because someone may transmit Covid, the precautionary principle,” he said.

“But when it’s these vaccines it’s the exact opposite – you have to prove every single thing.”

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/outright-lying-australian-scientist-hits-out-at-tga-after-lifechanging-covid-vaccine-injury/news-story/c57a554e4f7b6750e8ae6ff2db6c9514

***************************************************

‘Significant’ Cases of Neurological Disorder Associated With the AstraZeneca Vaccine

A UK study by University College London has confirmed “small but significant” cases of the serious Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), a rare neurological disorder associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID-19.

The researchers speculate that “the majority or all” of the 121 UK cases of GBS (pdf) in March to April 2021 were associated with first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine administered in January.

“A similar pattern is not seen with the other vaccines or following a second dose of any vaccine,” said lead author Prof. Michael Lunn on May 30.

The team observed that from January to October 2021, 996 GBS cases were recorded in the national database but with an unusual spike from March to April with about 140 cases per month rather than 100.

To identify whether any or all of these cases were linked to vaccination, the team linked dates of GBS onset to vaccination receipt for every individual and found that 198 GBS cases (20 percent of 966) occurred within six weeks of their first dose of COVID-19 vaccination in England; of these, 176 people had an AstraZeneca vaccination, 21 for Pfizer, and 1 for Moderna.

The researchers found no excess GBS cases associated with mRNA vaccines, but observed 5.8 excess cases of GBS per million doses of vaccine for AstraZeneca, equating to a total excess between January to July 2021 of around 98–140 cases, confirming the association between the vaccine and GBS.

GBS is a rare and serious neurological disorder that occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks its own nerves, typically resulting in numbness, weakness, pain in the limbs, and sometimes even paralysis of breathing.

The disease is commonly associated with Campylobacter infections that prompt the body to attack its own nerves.

However, GBS cases were also observed in the 1976 following administration of the swine flu vaccine as well as modern influenza and yellow fever vaccines, though none of them had rates as high as AstraZeneca.

Whilst the majority of the vaccination-associated GBS patients had recovered from symptoms of weak limbs, weak deep tendon reflexes, and monophasic sleep, one patient in the study had recurring neuropathic symptoms well after the second dose.

The patient initially developed facial paralysis on both sides and a tingling sensation in their limbs after the first dose and improved with treatment. However, two weeks after receiving their second dose, they developed increasing weakness with pain, changes in their nerves, and only partial response to the treatment.

Researchers are currently still speculating the reasons behind rises in GBS cases following the vaccine.

“It may be that a non-specific immune activation in susceptible individuals occurs, but if that were the case similar risks might apply to all vaccine types,” said Lunn.

“It is therefore logical to suggest that the simian adenovirus vector, often used to develop vaccines, including AstraZeneca’s, may account for the increased risk.”

Studies in the United States have also confirmed increased cases of GBS after receiving adenovirus vector COVID-19 vaccines, with significant cases of the disease associated with the vaccine.

According to the CDC, 1 to 2 people out of 100,000 in the United States develops GBS, however, a 2022 U.S. study found the incidence in receivers of J&J’s adenovirus vaccines to be 32.4 per 100,000 people within 3 weeks following the vaccine; well above the background rate.

A spokeswoman for AstraZeneca told The Epoch Times that “vaccination of any kind is a known risk factor for GBS” and “the small number of GBS cases [following the AstraZeneca vaccine] appears similar to increases previously seen in other mass vaccination campaigns.”

She wrote that reports of GBS have been very rare following vaccination and that “current estimates show that globally the vaccine has helped prevent 50 million COVID-19 cases, five million hospitalizations, and to have saved more than one million lives.

“The Emergency Medical Associates and other international bodies including the WHO, have all stated that the benefits of vaccination continue to outweigh any potential risks.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/significant-cases-of-neurological-disorder-associated-with-the-astrazeneca-vaccine_4503326.html

Vaccines are worse than the disease

I recently received a communication from my GP’s surgery:

‘Influenza is spiking early. Our GPs report that those with 2022 flu have a rapid onset of illness with high fevers, dry cough, body aches, and headache. They are generally more unwell than those with a Covid infection. We recommend everyone receive a flu vaccine.’

This was followed by the same advice on a second Covid booster (that is, fourth vaccine). ‘They are generally more unwell than those with a Covid infection.’

When will the penny drop? Perhaps more pertinently, what – if anything – will make the penny drop?

Some of us have been arguing for some time that we must learn to live with the virus as we live with the flu, including (maybe) an annual vaccine, provided it has better efficacy and less concerning safety signals. Lo and behold, in an editorial on May 30, The Economist turned this around and suggested that maybe governments should begin to treat flu like Covid, with active monitoring, surveillance, home testing, working from home, and vaccines – of course.

Describing this as a ‘thought experiment’, the magazine noted:

‘Epidemiologists worry that two years of low exposure to flu may have caused immunity to wane to low levels. That may result in an extraordinary number of cases this winter, at a point when huge waiting lists will still clog up the National Health Service (NHS).’

An alternative twofold conclusion from this is that it proves the NHS is no longer fit for purpose, should be abandoned and a new system built from scratch; and that prolonged lockdowns that drastically reduce mass exposure to the perennially circulating pathogens to interfere with the build-up of natural immunity are perhaps not such a good idea? Yet in the US, Jeffrey Tucker warns, the CDC wants to make the Covid regime permanent.

Reduced immunity may be one explanation, along with the collateral harms from widely predicted warnings that lockdowns would lead to increased deaths down the line from preventable diseases that were no longer caught in time because of cancelled screenings, etc. Studies are now confirming a rise in all-cause excess mortality.

According to a study published this month from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, between April 2020 and December 2021, ‘Americans died from non-Covid causes at an average annual rate 97,000 in excess of previous trends’, including 32,000 from hypertension and heart disease, and 12,000-15,000 each from diabetes, obesity, drug abuse, and alcohol abuse.

Meanwhile, a Swedish study published in The Lancet on February 4 based on 1.69 million individuals, divided equally between vaccinated and unvaccinated ‘found progressively waning vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection of any severity across all subgroups’. This, of course, is the question I had raised in my last Flat White article on May 26.

In a little over five months in 2022 until June 7, with very high vaccination coverage, Australia has recorded more than almost three times the total number of deaths with and from Covid compared to the previous 22 months. The figure is more than twenty times higher for New Zealand. Thorsteinn Siglausson notes that deaths in Iceland jumped by 30 per cent in the first quarter of 2022, coinciding with the rollout of booster vaccines. And Alex Berenson highlights how all-cause death rates in Europe are soaring again three months after booster mRNA shots.

The one thing I had neglected to do is to put the Australian and New Zealand experience in global context. Figures 1 and 2 rectify that neglect. For the last two months, Australasian Covid cases per million people have been dramatically higher than African, Asian, European, North and South American, and world averages (Figure 1) at any time throughout the pandemic. While the last part is not true of Covid mortality rates, the current rates in Australasia are nonetheless higher than in any of these averaged death rates by continent (Figure 2).

I ask again: if this is vaccine success, what would vaccine failure look like?

This takes us back to the question: are vaccinations contributing to the upsurge in Covid cases and deaths, (i) by a combination of reduced efficacy over time, with the rate of reduction accelerating with each successive dose as cautioned by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and (ii) owing to harmful side-effects?

As a policy analyst, not a doctor, epidemiologist or virologist, I am in no position to answer that. But I was very interested to read a recent (June 5) letter to Virology Journal by Kenji Yamamoto, a cardiovascular surgeon at Okamura Memorial Hospital in Shizuoka, Japan. He suggests several possible pathways for the decrease in immunity following vaccination, understanding which is beyond my pay grade.

Two of his observations struck me with particular force. First, he remarks: ‘The media have so far concealed the adverse events of vaccine administration, such as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), owing to biased propaganda.’ His institute ‘encounters many cases in which this cause is recognised’.

Second, because, ‘Covid vaccination is a major risk factor for infections in critically ill patients,’ he recommends: ‘As a safety measure, further booster vaccinations should be discontinued.’

‘Besides the risk of infections owing to lowered immune functions, there is a possible risk of unknown organ damage caused by the vaccine that has remained hidden without apparent clinical presentations, mainly in the circulatory system.’

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/yet-more-vaccine-success/

************************************************

WHO Now Agrees "˜Lab Leak' Theory Needs Investigation

A team of scientists convened by the World Health Organization to better understand the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and possible future outbreaks has said a theory that the virus could have escaped from a laboratory needs "further investigations."

Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia's war in Ukraine.
However, in a report released Thursday, the WHO-backed team said it had not received any new data that would allow it to better evaluate that theory.

Members of the group from Brazil, China and Russia objected to the calls for further investigation into the "lab leak" theory.

The report also said that available data suggests SARS-CoV-2 had a zoonotic origin, which means it spread between animals in a natural setting, but that neither the animal that infected humans nor the place where this infection occurred could be identified.

"At this point, the strongest evidence is still around zoonotic transmission," Marietjie Venter, chair of the WHO team and a virologist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said in a Zoom call with reporters before the report was published. "However, the precursor viruses that have been identified in bats are definitely not close enough to be the virus that spilled over into humans."

The report was written by the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a body made up of experts from the United States, China and 25 other nations that first came together last year after widespread criticism of a joint WHO-China investigation into the coronavirus's origins.

WHO officials emphasized that the report contains only the preliminary findings of the group, which was created to advise the global health body's secretariat. SAGO did not undertake its own studies, but instead reviewed existing research.

The team is designed not only to help investigate the origins of the coronavirus but also to set up a framework for understanding the origins of future outbreaks. Its work is expected to last for years, WHO officials said.

"It is just the start," Maria Van Kerkhove, a World Health Organization epidemiologist, told reporters. "They've made some good progress. They've clearly outlined that there's more work to be done."

Even so, the report may breathe life into a debate that has never come to a firm conclusion: Where did the coronavirus pandemic come from? While many scientists have favored a theory of zoonotic spread, the lab-leak theory has gained prominent support from some experts, including some U.S. officials.

The Wuhan lab-leak theory is getting more attention. That's because key evidence is still missing.

Beijing has fiercely rejected the idea that the coronavirus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another research institute studying coronaviruses in the Chinese city where covid-19 was first recorded in late 2019.

In its place, Chinese officials promoted wild theories without scientific backing, including that the virus originated in the United States or was imported to China on frozen fish.

The SAGO report aimed to evaluate pandemic origins from a scientific stance, Van Kerkhove said. "We are under no illusions that we can keep all of the politics out, but we will do our damnedest to keep focused on what needs to be done here."

The preliminary SAGO report was released more than a year after the joint WHO-China team traveled to Wuhan and released its own report that ruled out the lab-leak theory as "extremely unlikely," while suggesting that the idea the virus was carried by frozen food needed further investigation.

The WHO-China report concluded that zoonotic spread was the likeliest scenario for the origin of the virus, but failed to find evidence for how it was spread to humans.

That report was widely criticized after being released in March 2021, with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus suggesting that the report did not conduct an "extensive enough" assessment of the lab-leak theory and voicing frustration with the low level of access given to the mission by Chinese officials.

How Chinese pressure on coronavirus origins probe shocked the WHO "” and led its director to push back

One of the researchers on the joint team, Danish food scientist Peter Ben Embarek, later told interviewers that Chinese researchers on the team had pushed back against including the lab-leak theory in the report at all.

While SAGO was convened to address some of the criticism of the WHO-China report, it also was able to evaluate some new evidence, including data on blood samples from 40,000 Chinese donors in Wuhan between September and December 2019.

According to the report, more than 200 of these samples initially tested positive for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, but these were later found to be false positives. SAGO requested further information on the data and methods used to analyze the samples.

The new report suffers from some of the same limitations as the joint WHO-China report, including that Chinese officials cannot be compelled to cooperate with any investigation.

According to the SAGO report, Tedros sent letters to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Health Minister Ma Xiaowei on Feb. 14 and Feb. 21, respectively, requesting information on a variety of factors, including the "laboratory hypotheses."

It is not clear whether Tedros received a reply. Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesperson for the WHO, said the body doesn't share correspondence it has with member states.

Venter, the SAGO chair, said Chinese officials had cooperated with the team, sending experts to present and discuss new findings.

"We recognize that they've done a huge amount of work and they have addressed several of the questions" raised in the initial WHO-China report, Venter said.

However, SAGO found that much had not been addressed. Venter identified the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan as one location that needed more study. "We recognize that the market ... may have been an amplification event of the early outbreak, but it's not clear where all those animals came from. We need to follow up on that," she said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/09/who-sago-covid-origins/

Friday, June 10, 2022

Covid not going away

A rise in UK hospital admissions for patients with Covid-19 has prompted experts to warn that Britain could face a fresh wave of coronavirus infections.

Life has largely returned to normal since the final social restrictions were removed on 24 February, with masks, distancing and hand sanitiser largely forgotten by the majority as the national focus switched to Partygate, the war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis.

But new figures published on Tuesday show weekly admissions have increased by 4 per cent across England as of 5 June and were up by 33 per cent in the North East and Yorkshire.

Asked by The Independent if the UK was heading into another wave, John Roberts, one of the leading analysts at the Covid Actuaries group, answered: “Yes we could be but... how big that wave and how serious it will be in terms of admissions and deaths is very, very difficult to judge at this stage.”

His comments come after experts in Europe warned there will be a new wave driven by the growth of the BA.5 and BA.4 Covid variants.

The last major spike in cases came in December and January, driven by the Omicron variant, which spread rapidly around the world after being discovered in southern Africa in late November, once more threatening Christmas celebrations and sparking a run on booster vaccines.

Omicron proved to be less severe but more transmissible than its predecessor Alpha and Delta variants, with total daily case numbers in England rocketing to a pandemic high of 218,724 on 4 January, according to the UK Health Security Agency, before gradually falling away.

Since then, only the over-75s have been offered second booster jabs, meaning that immunity could be beginning to wane.

“If we are going to go into another wave, maybe that’s something that ought to be reconsidered,” Mr Roberts suggested.

What public health officials had to learn on the fly when Omicron arrived last winter was how the variant differed from the original Covid strain.

Whereas the World Health Organisation estimated that symptoms took anywhere between two days to two weeks to materialise in cases of people infected with the first coronavirus strain, Omicron proved to incubate much faster, closer to three to five days.

“Recent analysis from the UK Health Security Agency suggests that the window between infection and infectiousness may be shorter for the Omicron variant than the Delta variant,” UK health secretary Sajid Javid told the House of Commons on 6 December.

That explained why the strain was able to spread so swiftly and successfully, as the shortness of its incubation period gave sufferers a shorter window between suspecting they had contracted the virus and experiencing a flare-up, making it less likely a positive lateral flow test result would be recorded in time to warn others, enter isolation and prevent the contagion being passed on.

A shorter incubation period “makes a virus much, much, much harder to control”, Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, observed in The Atlantic that same month.

Another characteristic of Omicron that made it potentially harder to detect than earlier strains – and worth bearing in mind should any new variant make in-roads on these shores – is that its symptoms differed somewhat from the three primary indicators we had been conditioned to be on the lookout for in 2020: coughs, fever and the loss of one’s sense of taste or smell.

Early warning signs for the newer variant, by contrast, included a scratchy throat, lower back pain, a runny or blocked nose, a headache, muscle pains and fatigue, sneezing and night sweats.

Omicron cases analysed in Britain found that patients typically recovered within five days to a week on average, although some symptoms like coughing and fatigue were likely to linger for longer.

Shortness of breath, experienced by some sufferers, often proved to last for as long as 13 days after other symptoms had passed.

Covid patients are, typically, thought to be infectious to others from around two days before their first symptoms start to materialise and for around 10 days after.

https://au.yahoo.com/news/covid-incubation-period-long-infectious-105537180.html

******************************************************

CDC Raises Monkeypox Alert, Recommends Masks During Travel, Then Removes Advice

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday raised its alert level for monkeypox to level 2 and recommended that people wear masks when traveling, before appearing to make a U-turn on the advice.

In an update, the government agency raised the alert level to 2, encouraging people to practice enhanced precaution measures such as avoiding contact with visibly sick people, regularly washing hands, and wearing a face covering.

“Cases of monkeypox have been reported in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia,” the CDC wrote in its alert.

“Some cases were reported among men who have sex with men. Some cases were also reported in people who live in the same household as an infected person,” it added.

The health body on Monday cautioned travelers to avoid close contact with sick people, including those with skin or genital lesions, as well as with dead or live wild animals such as small rodents and monkeys.

Travelers were also urged to avoid eating prepared meat from wild game or using products such as creams and lotions derived from wild animals from Africa, where cases of monkeypox are mainly found.

“Avoid contact with contaminated materials used by sick people (such as clothing, bedding, or materials used in health care settings) or that came into contact with infected animals,” the health body said.

Finally, the CDC urged travelers to wear masks, noting that doing so “can help protect you from many diseases, including monkeypox.”

However, the advice regarding mask-wearing is no longer present on the CDC website as of June 7, while the rest of the advice for travelers remains in place.

A CDC spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Tuesday:

“Late yesterday CDC removed the mask recommendation from the monkeypox Travel Health Notice because it caused confusion.

Travel Health Notices inform travelers and clinicians about current health issues that impact travelers’ health, like disease outbreaks, special events or gatherings, and natural disasters, in destinations around the world. In countries where there is a current monkeypox outbreak, CDC continues to recommend masking in high-risk situations including for household contacts and healthcare workers, or for other people who may be in close contact with a person who has been confirmed with monkeypox.

CDC will continue to update recommendations as more is learned about this current outbreak.”

Monkeypox is a rare virus believed to be transmitted to humans from animals and is endemic to Central and West Africa, typically places in close proximity to tropical rainforests.

It spreads from one person to another through close contact with bodily fluids, lesions, respiratory droplets, and contaminated materials.

Scientists say the virus can cause an array of symptoms including fever, body aches, swelling of the lymph nodes, fatigue, headaches, and a bumpy rash that often occurs one to three days after the fever begins before spreading to other parts of the body. The rash can last up to a month.

As of June 6, there have been 1,019 confirmed cases of monkeypox in 29 countries around the world tied to the current outbreak, of which 30 are in the United States, according to the CDC.

The first suspected case was reported on May 7 in an individual who traveled from the United Kingdom to Nigeria and subsequently returned to the United Kingdom.

Health officials have noted that a number of cases have been found among homosexual men, although the virus itself is not a sexually transmitted infection and can be caught by anyone.

Monkeypox is fatal in as many as 1 to 11 percent of people who become infected, although previous vaccination against smallpox, which is related to the monkeypox virus, may provide protection.

In May, pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna announced it is testing potential vaccines against monkeypox in pre-clinical trials as part of its commitment to advancing programs by 2025 against pathogens that pose a threat to public health.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/cdc-raises-monkeypox-alert-recommends-masks-during-travel-then-removes-advice_4516949.html

******************************************************

The wheat crop: Biden was talking though his anus -- as usual

By Robert Romano

Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that U.S. winter wheat production will be down 8 percent in 2022, from 1.28 billion bushels in 2021 to 1.17 billion bushels expected this year amid drought in Kansas and other areas plus lower yields.

Adding to the misery, planting for spring wheat and durum is delayed the North Dakota Wheat Commission reported, via NDagconnection.com, on June 8: “this year producers continue to work on planting their wheat crops after a delayed start to planting and slow progress due to wet conditions, reports the North Dakota Wheat Commission… [S]ome fields are simply too wet to plant any crop and planting past June 10 or 15 is not an ideal option in an already short growing season.”

The lousy weather will almost certainly hurt yields, which are already down, according to the USDA’s May 12 press statement: “the U.S. yield is expected to average 47.9 bushels per acre, down 2.3 bushels from last year’s average of 50.2 bushels per acre.” That was the third consecutive year of declining yields, and they could not come at a worse time with the ongoing war in Ukraine, which combined with Russia was responsible for one-third of global wheat exports.

On May 11, President Joe Biden told the nation that U.S. farmers were “expanding production and feeding the world in need” this year, but it was all just happy talk. He vaguely offered crop insurance incentives to plant more. We didn’t.

In May, USDA had estimated that wheat planting nationwide would be up to 47 million acres planted this year, not a lot historically speaking. According to a March Department of Agriculture release on prospective plantings, 2022 will be the fifth lowest area planted since 1919: “All wheat planted area for 2022 is estimated at 47.4 million acres, up 1 percent from 2021. If realized, this represents the fifth lowest all wheat planted area since records began in 1919.”

The longer story here is that of globalization but also diversification of U.S. agriculture. The U.S. used to be the world’s breadbasket. Not so much, even with rising demand. The U.S. produces a little more than half of what it did in 1981, when it produced more than 75 million metric tons. That was down to 44.8 million in 2021.

More recently, U.S. wheat production is down 15 percent since 2019, from 1.93 billion bushels in 2019 to 1.64 billion in 2021, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The global shortfall is 4.5 million tons this year is real with global production already expected to drop by about 0.6 percent, according to the latest data by the Department of Agriculture: “Global production is forecast at 774.8 million tons, 4.5 million lower than in 2021/22. Reduced production in Ukraine, Australia, and Morocco is only partly offset by increases in Canada, Russia, and the United States. Production in Ukraine is forecast at 21.5 million tons in 2022/23, 11.5 million lower than 2021/22 due to the ongoing war.

And Russia won’t let the grain Ukraine produced out, with a naval blockade of Ukraine’s ports after taking over Mariupol in May, leaving 20 million tons of wheat apart from global supply chains.

On top of everything else, inflation isn’t helping. Producer prices for wheat by U.S. farmers are similarly adding to the drag, up 84 percent the last twelve months in April, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Biden knew the costs of escalating the war and what he called the “price of sanctions.” On March 24, President Biden warned of global food shortages at the NATO summit in Brussels Belgium, stating: “With regard to food shortage, yes, we did talk about food shortages. And — and it’s going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia, it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well. And — because both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat…”

This raises the question, what has the U.S. done to de-escalate the war? Because despite Biden’s rosy projections of “expanding production,” we have not. This year’s winter wheat was too dry, and the spring wheat might be too wet in some areas. And we’re just not planting enough. Is the rest of the world just going to have to make do?

https://dailytorch.com/2022/06/u-s-spring-wheat-planting-lags-after-winter-wheat-harvest-down-8-percent-in-2022-as-world-waits-for-ukraine/

Thursday, June 09, 2022

Moderna develops new vaccine against Omicron

Moderna is powering ahead with the production of a new Omicron version of its Covid jab it hopes to have approved for use in the US within months.

Study results released in the US overnight show the new vaccine cocktail produces 1.75 times as many antibodies against Omicron as its original shot.

The new vaccine was tested in the US against the original Omicron variant BA.1 that swept through Australia over the Christmas holidays.

There is no data on whether it will work against the latest Omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5 variants now sweeping the country.

A new clinical trial by Moderna gave 377 people who‘d had three previous vaccinations a fourth dose of the company’s original vaccine.

And it compared their outcomes to 437 people also given three previous jabs who were given a new combination shot aimed at the original form of the virus as well as Omicron.

The newer vaccine led to a nearly eight-fold rise in levels of antibodies capable of fighting Omicron.

And it produced an antibody jump 1.75 times better than giving a fourth dose of the original vaccine, Moderna said.

The company said it was submitting the trial data to US regulator the FDA and hoped to market it around the end of summer in the US.

“We anticipate more durable protection against variants of concern with mRNA-1273.214, making it our lead candidate for a Fall 2022 booster,” said St�phane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna.

“We are submitting our preliminary data and analysis to regulators with the hope that the Omicron-containing bivalent booster will be available in the late summer,” she said.

Moderna has entered a partnership with the Australian Government to build a manufacturing plant in Melbourne capable of producing 100 million mRNA vaccines a year.

It is possible the latest version of its Covid vaccine could be made here.

While the fast paced development of the Omicron version of the vaccine is unheard of, the virus is still managing to outpace science.

Even before the vaccine targeted at the original Omicron was fully tested the virus had mutated again to become even more infectious.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/coronavirus/moderna-develops-new-vaccine-against-omicron/news-story/b5651d82c19db4e6b3e2acf8c6de63ec

************************************************************

Lockdown disasters: We told you so

Comment from Australia:

Not for the first time – and certainly not for the last, we can assure you – The Spectator Australia has been shown to have been prescient and astute in its analysis when all around us were heading in the opposite direction. That the knowledge that we belled the cat early on and against the orthodoxy comes with a degree of satisfaction is self-evident, but it also comes tinged with genuine unease. Why on earth does what appears to be common sense to so many of our writers and readers fly in the face of the accepted media and political dogma of the day?

In this instance, and it is by no means a solitary example, we now learn from a variety of respected and reputable sources that the draconian lockdowns we repeatedly railed against in these pages may have done more harm than good – quelle surprise! – including untold medical damage out of all proportion to their claimed successes. Worse, lockdowns may even have led to the deaths of thousands of young people who were never at risk from the virus in the first place. Indeed, one US study reports 170,000 surplus deaths amongst people in the prime of their lives (18-44) who were of low risk from Covid.

This disgraceful news was conveyed to an astonished world via the Australian newspaper this week along with numerous other sources.

Yet twelve months ago Dr David Adler, in his column in these pages entitled ‘Lockdown needs a slapdown’, was predicting this very outcome.

For the first time I deeply fear for the future of my country. This fear arises not from existential threats and challenges but because Australia is being trashed by incompetent control freak leadership which has also succeeded in severely scaring much of our citizenship. Panic rules the day.

Melbourne with over six months cumulative lockdown already holds the world record for the most locked down city and we’ve seen other cities locked down for a handful of community cases. Our state premiers are the world’s most reactionary in imposing panic lockdowns. The PM has signalled this is to continue.

There has been a complete loss of proportionality with Australian lockdowns doing much more harm than good and based on international data and experience, we now have impossible policy settings to sustain if we want life to return to normality. Our situation could now be described in the Eagles classic hit ‘Hotel California’, ‘you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave’.

The damage being done by lockdowns in smashing small businesses, disruption of education for kids, mental health problems including rise in self-harm and suicides, deferred routine health services resulting in delayed diagnoses of cancer and other illnesses – far exceed the harm caused by the virus. Australia may experience a wave of additional morbidity and mortality in the next few years due to cancers not being detected in 2020 and 2021 at Stage 1, but once they have spread to Stage 3 or 4. This could well affect thousands of patients.

Pursuing the lockdown and zero-case policy will do untold economic, health and lifestyle damage to Australians.

That is just part of Dr Adler’s article from a year ago. Several other Speccie writers, but most notably Rebecca Weisser and Ramesh Thakur, have throughout the two years of the pandemic, often on a weekly basis, provided insights, analysis, facts and warnings regarded as heresy by the left wokerati. Indeed, both have must-read articles in this week’s magazine, including a terrific – and terrifying – piece on excess mortality and the vaccines by Ms Weisser.

As the editor of The Spectator Australia, my commitment to you is that we will never flinch in providing you with well-researched and informed opinion that quite often upsets those in positions of power and flies in the face of the politically correct dictates of the day. And yes, there is a word for that, too. It’s called journalism.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/das-spectatorfuhlung

***************************************************

Doctors Suing Food and Drug Administration Over Ivermectin

A Washington law firm has filed a federal lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for interfering with the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.

The lawsuit was filed by Boyden Gray & Associates on behalf of three doctors who were disciplined for prescribing human-grade ivermectin to patients.

The firm’s founder, attorney Boyden Gray, is a former legal adviser to the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Gray told The Epoch Times that the FDA had violated well-established law that allows doctors to prescribe an FDA-approved drug as an off-label treatment.

Ivermectin was no different, he said. It was approved by the FDA in 1966.

“Congress recognized the importance of letting doctors be doctors and expressly prohibited the FDA from interfering with the practice of medicine,” Gray said.

“That is exactly what the FDA has done time and time again throughout this pandemic, assuming authority it doesn’t have and trying to insert itself in the medical decisions of Americans everywhere.”

The three plaintiffs in the case are Dr. Paul Marik of Virginia, Dr. Mary Bowden of Texas, and Dr. Robert Apter of Arizona.

Marik is a founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care 21 Alliance (FLCCC), a national nonprofit that promotes alternative COVID-19 treatments to the government-touted vaccine.

“The FDA has made public statements on ivermectin that have been misleading and have raised unwarranted concern over a critical drug in preventing and treating COVID-19,” Marik told The Epoch Times. “To do this is to ignore both statutory limits on the FDA’s authority and the significant body of scientific evidence from peer-reviewed research.”

According to Marik, more than 80 medical trials conducted since the outbreak of COVID-19 show that ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for the virus.

Gray said the FDA has engaged in unlawful interference with the use of ivermectin and should be held accountable for that.

The lawsuit included several statements made by the FDA that Gray said show that the administration interfered with the use of ivermectin.

They include an Aug. 21, 2021, Twitter post by the agency: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

The post, with an image of a horse and a doctor, has a headline that reads, “Why you should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.”

Marik, Bowden, and Apter are among a number of U.S. doctors across the United States who have been disciplined for prescribing ivermectin.

Marik, a critical care specialist, was suspended by Sentara Norfolk General Hospital for prescribing ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. Bowden, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, was suspended from the Houston Medical Hospital. Apter was under investigation by both the Washington Medical Commission and Arizona Medical Board for prescribing ivermectin.

Marik was recently informed that he was under investigation by the medical licensing board in Virginia.

Gray filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Texas.

The doctors are seeking a permanent injunction that would prohibit the FDA from interfering with the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/doctors-suing-food-and-drug-administration-over-ivermectin_4515103.html

Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Inflation: Senile Joe Biden’s inflation diagnosis and cure will make the disease worse

Biden wrote at The WSJ that his plan has three parts:

“First, the Federal Reserve has a primary responsibility to control inflation. My predecessor demeaned the Fed, and past presidents have sought to influence its decisions inappropriately during periods of elevated inflation. I won’t do this. I have appointed highly qualified people from both parties to lead that institution. I agree with their assessment that fighting inflation is our top economic challenge right now.”

As with everything else, Joe is a little late to the party here. The Fed, through quantitative easing, has already ramped up the money supply so high that it will be very difficult to rein in inflation. You can’t un-ring a bell and dumping trillions of unsupported cash into the economy will show up. Americans see it whenever they go to the store or to the gas station.

Not “interfering” with the FED’s actions won’t earn Biden a pass here. He’s already done more than enough to set the inflation avalanche in motion. Staying out of the way now won’t alleviate the pain of those in its path. We’d best prepare our shovels to dig out from being buried by the flow.

Joe went on, “Second, we need to take every practical step to make things more affordable for families during this moment of economic uncertainty—and to boost the productive capacity of our economy over time. The price at the pump is elevated in large part because Russian oil, gas and refining capacity are off the market. We can’t let up on our global effort to punish Mr. Putin for what he’s done, and we must mitigate these effects for American consumers. That is why I led the largest release from global oil reserves in history. Congress could help right away by passing clean energy tax credits and investments that I have proposed. A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats...”

Huh? The CEO’s Joe referenced must be Democrats. Since the vast majority of American energy is still realized through burning fossil fuels, how is it possible to reduce bills by cutting supply of what, pardon the expression, drives the economy? Biden must feel boxed in a corner with this green energy nonsense, so politically speaking, he can’t and won’t let it go. But ask your regular consumer whether he or she would be satisfied with tax credits and/or federal subsidies for windmills and solar panels and ethanol instead of just pumping more oil out of the ground, and he'll tell you to go catch a slow boat to China.

Even if Biden were correct, which he’s not, utility bills wouldn’t be reduced now, next year, or anytime soon by mass emphasis on “green energy”. Benefits twenty years down the line won’t “help” consumers pay for stuff in 2022. Here, again, Biden doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.

In his piece, Joe also wrote that Democrats would fix the supply chain, build more housing and lower prescription drug prices by empowering Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. This was standard Democrat-speak for more government price controls and useless interference in the free market. He also shifted responsibility to Congress for inaction on his ideas (which basically singles out Senator Joe Manchin). Do we want Joe Biden’s “help” here? No thanks.

Biden lays out the third part of his plan: “Third, we need to keep reducing the federal deficit, which will help ease price pressures. Last week the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit will fall by $1.7 trillion this year—the largest reduction in history. That will leave the deficit as a share of the economy lower than prepandemic levels and lower than CBO projected for this year before the American Rescue Plan passed. This deficit progress wasn’t preordained. In addition to winding down emergency programs responsibly, about half the reduction is driven by an increase in revenue—as my economic policies powered a rapid recovery.”

Not so astonishingly, Biden claims credit for “reducing the deficit” from the previous years, which not-so-loosely translated means, the government is spending slightly less than it was during the wanton appropriations binge during the COVID pandemic. While it may be true that the feds aren’t engaging in the splurging orgy that they were two years ago -- and last year, thanks to the $1.9 trillion, party-line vote “relief” bill -- the budget is still not even close to balancing.

Predictably, one of the many things Biden neglected to mention is the effect that paying higher interest rates to finance the enormous national debt will have on the annual budget. Every percentage point higher in interest adds up quickly when you’re servicing $30+ trillion that you’ve borrowed from the FED, China, taxpayers, whomever. How much will it cost in interest to finance what was borrowed a decade ago?

Not to mention, what about the revenues lost from the senseless reductions in energy production? Democrats never credit the significant tax collections that are generated from oil, gas and coal development. While it may not be possible to drill our way out of government deficits, every bit counts. God gifted the United States with the capability to not only achieve energy independence, but also to export the fuels to a thirsty global market.

As I’ve argued many times, boosting energy prices makes everything more expensive. Farmers don’t have electric tractors and combines and there aren’t “green energy” semi-trucks to transport the harvest, either.

Further, we have not yet begun to see the full effects of the inflation to come. Reports are emerging that food prices will increase dramatically when farmers harvest their crops and send them to market. In other words, the more they’re paying for fertilizer now to grow the same amount of grain or feed their livestock as the year before, the more they’ll ask for when they bring the crops for sale.

And what about all the personal credit card debt Americans are accumulating in trying to deal with the skyrocketing prices? Interest rate hikes will be found here, too, which will compound the already serious problem.

It’s clear by his repeated excuses and denials of culpability that Joe Biden neither understands what’s causing inflation nor how to deal with it. Government “help” has already done enough damage and every extra tidbit of tinkering with the free market will exacerbate the problem. Democrats brought the political anger upon themselves by elevating a senile dunce to the presidency.

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/the-right-resistance-senile-joe-biden-s-inflation-diagnosis-and-cure-will-make-the-disease-worse

******************************************************

Hispanic breakthrough?

In another sign the November midterm elections will see widespread losses for Democrats, another poll finds Hispanic voters are more likely than white voters to disapprove of Joe Biden’s job performance and prefer Republicans control Congress.

The poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University and released May 18, found only 35 percent of all registered voters approved of Biden’s job performance, with 57 percent disapproving. Additionally, 47 percent of registered voters preferred Republicans win control of the U.S. House, with 43 percent preferring Democrats. (These numbers have actually declined even further, but we’ll stick with this particular poll for now.)

But what is surprising to many is Hispanics, generally considered a reliable Democrat voting bloc, are now more likely than white voters to disapprove of Biden and prefer Republicans.

When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling his job as president?,” only 32 percent of white registered voters expressed approval. Among Hispanics it was even lower, at only 26 percent approval.

The trend continued in party approval. When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job?” Hispanics were more likely than whites to express approval, 33 percent to 28 percent.

Only 24 percent of Hispanics approve(d) of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job,” compared to 27 percent of whites.

While support for Republicans isn’t optimal, the rock-bottom approval of Biden and Democrats appears to be fueling strong Hispanic support for GOP candidates.

When asked “If the election were today, would you want to see the Republican Party or the Democratic Party win control of the United States House of Representatives?,” 48 percent of Hispanic registered voters backed Republicans and 34 percent backed Democrats.

All About the Money

I have a feeling that Hispanics, like all other subsets of our population, are starting to look at the bottom dollar. And at this point, there isn’t one. Families are going under with mounting fuel costs, skyrocketing grocery bills, and no relief in site. Even the little bitty babies are suffering from a formula shortage that Biden refuses to address properly. But he doesn’t mind giving Ukraine $40 Billion. How many Hispanic families could that money help?

Clearly, inflation is rampant. The consumer price index jumped another 8.3% in April alone. This trend isn’t slowing down. Not only is Bidenflation a problem, but we’re headed into stagflation– a stagnant economy mixed with inflation that is so bad, the 1970s are back for an encore performance.

That’s not the worst of our problems. Biden is the worst of our problems. Whether we’re talking foreign relations, military leadership, inflation, supply chain, trade, lingering effects of the scamdemic, the issue is really not what matters. What truly matters is what approach our leaders are taking to solve these crises. And that’s where we see what a demented clown is sitting in the White House.

https://theblacksphere.net/2022/06/hispanics-are-abandoning-democrats-droves/

****************************************************

One Picture Of Trump’s Home Has Just Burst The Liberal Bubble!

The left loves to tout that President Trump and his supporters are white supremacists who hate women and want to steal your candy, but as we know that is hardly the truth. Trump is the one leader that we have had in a very long time that actually promotes unity to the American people, and wants to make American great for all that live in our nation.

However, that just doesn’t fly with liberals whose only desire is to destroy our country from the inside with division and hatred.

Now, to fly in the face of that ridiculous rhetoric from the left, a new picture is floating around Twitter that literally smacks these hateful leftists and their lies.

Caleb Hull posted a picture on the HUGE social media site showing Trump’s employees laughing, smiling, and trying to get a picture with him. Take a few seconds to focus on a different person each time you look at the picture. As Hull says, there is a LOT going on!

Did you notice what I noticed?

Yeah, there all sorts of diversity happening in that picture and they seem, do I dare say…happy?

There were lot of positive tweets about the picture but all have been deleted by Twitter

https://dailyallegiant.com/one-picture-of-trumps-home-has-just-burst-the-liberal-bubble-2/

Tuesday, June 07, 2022

The end of energy free trade

Russia’s attack on Ukraine is redrawing the world’s energy map, ushering in a new era in which the flow of fossil fuels is influenced by geopolitical rivalries as much as supply and demand.

Over the past half-century, oil and natural gas have moved with relative freedom to the markets where they commanded the highest prices around the world. That ended abruptly when Russian tanks rumbled across the Ukraine border on February 24, triggering a barrage of trade sanctions by the US and Europe targeting Russia that have plunged global commerce into disarray.

During the past week, the European Union agreed to its toughest sanctions yet on Russia, banning imports of its oil and blocking insurers from covering its cargoes of crude.

Whatever new order emerges won’t be fully clear for years to come. But traders, diplomats and other experts in energy geopolitics generally agree that it will be more Balkanized, and less free-flowing, than what the world has seen since the end of the Cold War.

Three likely axes of energy influence are emerging: the US and other Western nations, which have used their massive economic and purchasing power as a political weapon; China and large emerging nations such as India, Turkey and Vietnam, which have rebuffed Western pressure and continued doing business with Russia; and Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern oil-producing nations, which have sought to maintain neutrality, and may stand to gain market share in the years to come.

“We are in a real hinge of history,” said Chas Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Freeman, who is now a senior fellow at Brown University, said Europe can never again trust Russia to be its primary energy provider, and that even if sanctions are lifted, countries are proposing costly new infrastructure and endorsing long-term alternative supply contracts that will lock in the new energy map.

The new order promises to make the energy trade less efficient and more expensive, potentially putting commodities at the centre of the next global economic crisis, said Zoltan Pozsar, a former official at the Treasury Department who now heads short-term interest-rate strategy at Credit Suisse Group AG.

A German embargo of Russian crude would likely mean that instead of Russian oil reaching Hamburg in a week or two, it would take several months to travel to China, he noted. Conversely for Middle Eastern oil, the embargo would trigger a longer voyage to Europe for crude that would have ordinarily gone to Asia. Such inefficiencies will drive up the costs of shipping, insurance, and financing that underpin the energy trade, he said.

Many predict Russia’s energy industry, the backbone of its economy, will contract because the loss of its largest market cannot be completely replaced. Western financial and technological sanctions will undermine Russia’s ability to maintain current revenues and production levels, these people say.

“Russia’s days as an energy superpower are over,” said Daniel Yergin, the vice-chairman of S&P Global and a noted oil-industry historian.

But the new map isn’t without risks to American power and the country’s standing as the guarantor of global trade. Since the end of World War II, the US dollar has been the default currency for oil transactions, which has helped maintain its centrality to the global economy.

Leveraging the might of the US financial system to muster sanctions against Russia has called into question its reliability as a place to store wealth, Mr Freeman said.

Now Saudi Arabia, India and other developing countries are exploring conducting energy transactions in non-US dollar currencies. Russia has similarly begun seeking recompense in rubles for its fossil fuels.

“We may have had good reasons, but the US has politicised the trade of energy,” Mr Freeman said.

Geopolitics and energy have always been linked, and US. sanctions against Iran and Venezuela have disrupted global oil flows in recent years. But since the end of the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s, the relatively free trade of commodities, backed by US. military and financial might, has been a hallmark of the international system.

That is now changing. During a speech in April, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that in the wake of Russia’s invasion, it was time to redesign Bretton Woods, the system of trade rules adopted in 1944 that prioritised economic efficiency and international cooperation. Ms Yellen advocated for “friend-shoring” supply chains of critical raw materials by deepening trade ties with “a group of countries that have strong adherence to a set of norms and values.” Trade flows are already being redirected as Western energy companies pull out of Russia and shippers, lenders and insurers refuse to touch Russian exports.

The EU, in beginning to implement its embargo on Russian oil exports today, joins Australia, the US, UK and Canada. Following concerns Hungary raised about the economic impact, the embargo will exempt oil delivered from Russia via pipelines. Still, by the end of the year, the embargo would cover 90 per cent of previous Russian oil imports, EU officials said.

Russian oil exports to the EU, the U.S., the UK, Japan and South Korea have already fallen by 563,000 barrels per day, or 32 per cent from February to April. A full EU ban would mean some 2.8 million barrels per day of crude and 1.1 million barrels per day of products that normally flow into Europe will have to find a new market, according to investment bank Piper Sandler.

European leaders will find it more difficult to wean themselves off Russian natural gas, which typically accounts for more than 30% of the EU’s supply and mostly comes via pipeline. JPMorgan Chase estimates that by the end of the year Europe will still receive between 81 per cent and 94 per cent of the amount of Russian gas it took in 2021. The EU has said it would stop using Russian oil and gas by 2027, but ending its reliance on Russian energy could come at a heavy cost.

Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s coordinator for energy security, has worked with foreign officials and energy executives to bolster alternative supplies of oil and gas to Europe to blunt the pain.

But Europe and the US are operating under an additional constraint: Mr. Hochstein said the US won’t provide incentives for long-term fossil-fuel investments that run counter to its plan to encourage a transition to greener energy sources.

“We’re trying to help Europe, stabilise the market and protect U.S. consumers while making Putin pay the price and do that without cheating our overall goal of reduced fossil-fuel usage,” Mr Hochstein said.

EU leaders have said they would now accelerate ambitious plans to build out renewable energy projects as a result of the war, but concede Europe will need more fossil fuels in the interim.

Increased demand coupled with Western energy sanctions against Russia that will cut its output may lead to physical shortages of global oil, according to Joseph McMonigle, secretary-general of the Saudi Arabia-based International Energy Forum.

“If Russia is removed from the export market, there will be a global recession that kills demand,” Mr McMonigle said.

Saudi comeback Middle Eastern producers look poised to be winners in the emerging energy map. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states had been under pressure to diversify away from fossil fuels in recent years due to growing global concerns about climate change. But President Joe Biden called on the kingdom to drill more in the lead up to war, a stark turnaround from his presidential campaign, when he called the nation a pariah.

Retired Admiral Dennis Blair, who served as then president Barack Obama’s first director of National Intelligence, said despite efforts to pivot US foreign policy away from the region, the importance of the Middle East to US interests has been elevated again by the war.

“We need to have a very eyes-open, transactional relationship with Saudi, where we do have to go back to being their ultimate provider of defence until we can electrify our transportation and transition to more diverse energy sources,” Mr Blair said.

State-owned energy giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co, known as Saudi Aramco, which recently overtook Apple Inc. as the world’s most valuable company, is already receiving more requests for its crude from buyers in Europe. More broadly, Saudi officials say the war has shown that aggressive targets to reduce carbon emissions by rapidly cutting fossil fuel usage were unrealistic.

“The kingdom finds it laughable that last year, several countries, including the United States, have been pressuring them to stick to [plans to zero out carbon emissions by 2050] but now are asking them for more oil,” said a Saudi official.

After rejecting U.S. requests for more production for months, OPEC and its allies agreed Thursday to a bigger-than-expected output increase, allowing Saudi Arabia to potentially pump more crude and paving the way for a potential oil-for-security deal with the US and a visit from President Biden later this month.

“The Russian invasion has taught the world one thing loud and clear: We need more Saudi oil,” another Saudi official said.

Challenge for Russia Russia’s new imperative is deepening ties with Asia, and especially China, to offset the looming loss of its European market.

Such a pivot is particularly necessary for Russia’s natural-gas exports, which are less fungible than its oil, and will require a massive infrastructure build-out to find a new home. Russia previously exported as much as 200 billion cubic metres of gas a year to Europe, by far its biggest market. It sold about 33 bcm to Asia last year.

Russia has a handful of proposed pipelines and liquefied natural gas projects, which convert the gas to a liquid enabling seaborne trade, that would boost its ability to send gas to Asia, but many of the projects are technically challenging and expensive, and Western sanctions will hamper their progress, say analysts.

The most important planned project is a roughly 1600-mile (2570km) pipeline connecting Russia’s Yamal peninsula to China, called Power of Siberia 2. The first Power of Siberia project cost more than $US50 billion ($69bn) and took more than five years to build. It will send nearly 40 bcm to China at full capacity and the second could send as much as 50 bcm of gas to China.

When the two countries agreed to terms on the first pipeline in 2014, China extracted relatively cheap gas prices. “Our Chinese friends drive a hard bargain as negotiators,” Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked at the time.

China holds even more negotiating power this go-round, due to Russia’s desperation to offset European lost revenues, said Ed Chow, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Russia could, at most, sell as much as 120 bcm of gas to Asia by 2030, and at a lower price than it fetches in Europe, according to CSIS.

“Everyone will try to take advantage of the fact that Russia needs them more now,” Mr. Chow said.

Russian diplomats are rushing to counter U.S. efforts to deter Russian energy from finding a new home. Russian oil cargoes bound for India, Turkey, China and other “friendly” countries increased by more than 1.2 million barrels per day from February to April, a 146 per cent increase, according to JPMorgan Chase.

Russian state-run natural gas giant Gazprom redirected several LNG tankers from Japan to China and India, an official said in an interview, a pre-emptive move in case Tokyo joins the Western embargo.

But Asian buyers are unlikely to fully supplant Europe as a market for Russian oil and gas over the long term, say analysts and traders. Though India has rebuffed calls to embargo Russian oil, it is buying Russian barrels at a steep discount in the same way China has sought natural-gas discounts.

Losing its nearest and largest market will cost Russia billions of dollars in energy revenues every year. Coupled with biting technological sanctions, this will seriously degrade the country’s ability to sustain its current oil-and-gas production levels. The IEA estimates the amount of Russian production offline could triple to 3 million barrels per day by the end of 2022 amid the EU oil sanctions, suggesting a nearly 27 per cent decrease in pre-war production levels.

Some Russian energy officials privately concede Russia will be unable to dodge prolonged Western energy sanctions.

“Russia was shocked at how united the West was on sanctions,” the Gazprom official said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/the-end-of-energy-free-trade/news-story/4c1dca56a888fac10f6811134368b46d

Monday, June 06, 2022

New York Times Backtracks on COVID-19 Lockdown Harm

The New York Times (NYT), one of the leading media outlets to publish favorable articles on lockdowns and other extreme measures to battle the COVID-19 virus, has done an about-face on its position, at least on how such policies have impacted children and the lockdown harm they have caused.

On May 5, 2022, the media outlet ran an article titled, ‘Not Good for Learning,’ which details evidence that school shutdowns cost students dearly in terms of math and reading scores based on standardized Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) test results.

“Remote learning was a failure,” wrote the writer, David Leonhardt.

The impetus for the change on lockdown harm appears to come from a new study from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. The study, titled “Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” reviewed MAP test data for 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states, plus D.C.

The study revealed that, on average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window. However, students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse, losing an average of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

The article also referenced an October 2020 article by Emily Oster in The Atlantic titled, “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,” which detailed data she had collected from 47 states that indicated an average student infection rate of a scant 0.13 percent. Even higher-risk staff were infected at a rate of only 0.24 percent.

Low-Risk Group

A few months into the pandemic, there was a growing body of evidence that school-aged children were among the lowest risk groups for serious infection or transmission of the SARS-CoV2 virus.

“The experience of Sweden shows that the school shutdowns were never justified,” said Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder, and president of the Brownstone Institute. “Even based on demographic data from January 2020, we knew this already. The elites sacrificed a whole generation of school kids, and the public is demanding answers now. Rightly so.”

Other MSM publications also have been slow to admit that early fearmongering and the resultant shutdowns are increasingly being demonstrated to have been pointless. Few have linked draconian policies to the devastating consequences being seen today such as supply chain shortages, empty retail and grocery shelves, soaring energy costs, and inflation, following the trillions of dollars that were pumped into the U.S. economy in the name of COVID-19 emergency relief.

Media narratives on lockdown harm began to soften in 2022 when poll after poll demonstrated the weariness of the public from the restrictions and a mid-term election looming in November. A key study gave media outlets little room for defending masks and lockdowns.

A meta-data analysis conducted by three respected economists from Johns Hopkins University, Lund University in Sweden, and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies and published in January 2022, found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020, including shelter in place orders, masks mandates, and social distancing, only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2 percent.

Still, Newsweek published a February 7, 2022 hit piece on the study titled, “Did a Johns Hopkins Study ‘Prove’ Lockdowns Don’t Work? What We Know So Far.” The article criticized the study for not being peer-reviewed and that alleged “right-leaning outlets,” including The National Post, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal had reported on the study.
The article failed to mention that peer reviews are not always the gold standard. In 2020, the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine retracted peer-reviewed studies discrediting off-label drugs to treat and prevent COVID-19.

The Newsweek article concluded not with a factual rebuttal of the study, but rather with a dogmatic claim, not by a medical scientist or epidemiologist, but by an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, named Seth Flaxman.

“Smoking causes cancer, the Earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission,” Flaxman said. “None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.”

Can’t Deny Growing Evidence

Tucker says it is impossible for mainstream media outlets to ignore the growing evidence that the lockdowns were a costly mistake.

“Not even the New York Times can deny the crisis caused by the shutdowns, which affects the whole of society, especially the catastrophic educational losses,” said Tucker. “What’s outrageous is the lack of responsibility here. The NYT essentially began this era with its promotion of COVID lockdowns. The losses are incalculable. We need honesty not only about the effects but also about the cause. Their own venue was a major player.”

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2022/06/lockdown-harm/

**********************************************

During the Omicron Wave, Death Rates Soared for Older People

Despite strong levels of vaccination among older people, Covid killed them at vastly higher rates during this winter’s Omicron wave than it did last year, preying on long delays since their last shots and the variant’s ability to skirt immune defenses.

This winter’s wave of deaths in older people belied the Omicron variant’s relative mildness. Almost as many Americans 65 and older died in four months of the Omicron surge as did in six months of the Delta wave, even though the Delta variant, for any one person, tended to cause more severe illness.

While overall per capita Covid death rates have fallen, older people still account for an overwhelming share of them.

“This is not simply a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor in global health at Boston University who studies age patterns of Covid deaths. “There’s still exceptionally high risk among older adults, even those with primary vaccine series.”

The Omicron Wave Was Deadlier Than Delta for Older People in the U.S.

That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.

In much of the country, though, the booster campaign remains listless and disorganized, older people and their doctors said. Patients, many of whom struggle to drive or get online, have to maneuver through an often labyrinthine health care system to receive potentially lifesaving antivirals.

Nationwide Covid deaths in recent weeks have been near the lowest levels of the pandemic, below an average of 400 a day. But the mortality gap between older and younger people has grown: Middle-aged Americans, who suffered a large share of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are now benefiting from new stores of immune protection in the population as Covid deaths once again cluster around older people.

And the new wave of Omicron subvariants may create additional threats: While hospitalizations in younger age groups have remained relatively low, admission rates among people 70 and older in the Northeast have climbed to one-third of the winter Omicron wave’s towering peak.

“I think we are going to see the death rates rising,” said Dr. Sharon Inouye, a geriatrician and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It is going to become more and more risky for older adults as their immunity wanes.”

Deaths have fallen from the heights of the winter wave in part because of growing levels of immunity from past infections, experts said. For older people, there is also a grimmer reason: So many of the most fragile Americans were killed by Covid over the winter that the virus now has fewer targets in that age group.

But scientists warned that many older Americans remained susceptible. To protect them, geriatricians called on nursing homes to organize in-home vaccinations or mandate additional shots.

In the longer term, scientists said that policymakers needed to address the economic and medical ills that have affected especially nonwhite older Americans, lest Covid continue cutting so many of their lives short.

“I don’t think we should treat the premature death of older adults as a means of ending the pandemic,” Dr. Stokes said. “There are still plenty of susceptible older adults — living with comorbid conditions or living in multigenerational households — who are highly vulnerable.”

The pattern of Covid deaths this year has recreated the dynamics from 2020 — before vaccines were introduced, when the virus killed older Americans at markedly higher rates. Early in the pandemic, mortality rates steadily climbed with each extra year of age, Dr. Stokes and his collaborators found in a recent study.

That changed last summer and fall, during the Delta surge. Older people were getting vaccinated more quickly than other groups: By November, the vaccination rate in Americans 65 and older was roughly 20 percentage points higher than that of those in their 40s. And critically, those older Americans had received vaccines relatively recently, leaving them with strong levels of residual protection.

As a result, older people suffered from Covid at lower rates than they had been before vaccines became available. Among people 85 and older, the death rate last fall was roughly 75 percent lower than it had been in the winter of 2020, Dr. Stokes’s recent study found.

At the same time, the virus walloped younger and less vaccinated Americans, many of whom were also returning to in-person work. Death rates for white people in their late 30s more than tripled last fall compared to the previous winter. Death rates for Black people in the same age group more than doubled.

The rebalancing of Covid deaths was so pronounced that, among Americans 80 and older, overall deaths returned to prepandemic levels in 2021, according to a study posted online in February. The opposite was true for middle-aged Americans: Life expectancy in that group, which had already dropped more than it had among the same age range in Europe, fell even further in 2021.

“In 2021, you see the mortality impact of the pandemic shift younger,” said Ridhi Kashyap, a lead author of that study and a demographer at the University of Oxford.

By the time the highly contagious Omicron variant took over, researchers said, more older Americans had gone a long time since their last Covid vaccination, weakening their immune defenses.

As of mid-May, more than one-quarter of Americans 65 and older had not had their most recent vaccine dose within a year. And more than half of people in that age group had not been given a shot in the last six months.

The Omicron variant was better than previous versions of the virus at evading those already weakening immune defenses, reducing the effectiveness of vaccines against infection and more serious illness. That was especially true for older people, whose immune systems respond less aggressively to vaccines in the first place.

For some people, even three vaccine doses appear to become less protective over time against Omicron-related hospital admissions. A study published recently in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine found that trend held for people with weakened immune systems, a category that older Americans were likelier to fall into. Sara Tartof, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, said that roughly 9 percent of people 65 and older in the study were immunocompromised, compared with 2.5 percent of adults under 50.

During the Omicron wave, Covid death rates were once again dramatically higher for older Americans than younger ones, Dr. Stokes said. Older people also made up an overwhelming share of the excess deaths — the difference between the number of people who actually died and the number who would have been expected to die if the pandemic had never happened.

Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, found in a recent study that excess deaths were more heavily concentrated in people 65 and older during the Omicron wave than the Delta surge. Overall, the study found, there were more excess deaths in Massachusetts during the first eight weeks of Omicron than during the 23-week period when Delta dominated.

As older people began dying at higher rates, Covid deaths also came to include higher proportions of vaccinated people. In March, about 40 percent of the people who died from Covid were vaccinated, according to an analysis of figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fewer older Americans have also been infected during the pandemic than younger people, leading to lower levels of natural immunity. As of February, roughly one-third of people 65 and older showed evidence of prior infections, compared with about two-thirds of adults under 50.

A drop-off in Covid precautions this winter, combined with the high transmissibility of Omicron, left older people more exposed, scientists said. It is unclear how their own behavior may have changed. An earlier study, from scientists at Marquette University, suggested that while older people in Wisconsin had once been wearing masks at rates higher than those of younger people, that gap had effectively disappeared by mid-2021.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/health/omicron-deaths-age-65-elderly.html

Sunday, June 05, 2022

Explaining the Left/Right divide

In 2004 I wrote an article for a sociology journal under the above heading. It looked at the Left/Right divide over the last 1,000 years, with a particularly extensive focus on the Tudor period.

On looking back on the article, I was pleased to find that what it said was still applicable today. A lot has happened since 2004, however, so I have updated the article to include recent examples. You can find it here.

********************************************

'Long COVID' Is Not Grounds for More Mandates

Though the CDC claims people who choose not to get the COVID vaccine are more at risk of "long COVID," a new study reveals there is a negligible difference in risk for "long COVID" symptoms between those with and without the vaccine.

"Long COVID" refers to cases of COVID-19 in which affected individuals continue experiencing symptoms for weeks or months after initially contracting the virus. The CDC says, "people who did not get a COVID-19 vaccine may be more at risk for developing post-COVID conditions (or long COVID)."

According to the study from Nature Medicine, vaccines only decrease the risk of long COVID by about 15 percent.

One in five adults experience long COVID symptoms according to the CDC. But Dr. Greg Vanichkachorn, director of the COVID activity rehabilitation program at the Mayo Clinic, said "the majority of folks with long COVID have not had severe infections" (via NBC).

Booster vaccines do very little, if anything, to prevent long COVID according to Vanichkachorn (via NBC):

I do not think boosting will do much to prevent long COVID with the vaccine. We have many patients with breakthrough infections who are as vaccinated as possible. We also have not seen much of a difference between variants with long COVID symptoms.

Many are still encouraging masking to prevent COVID, even though the mandates in the past two years have not prevented transmission of the virus. Dr. Margaret Liu, chair of the board of the International Society for Vaccines, has highlighted such concerns (via Medical News Today):

A big reason that I and other physicians are still being so careful to still mask and to avoid as much as possible situations of exposure is that prevention of any COVID-19 infection is still the best strategy to avoid long-haul COVID.

The CDC has not provided any statistics relating to deaths caused specifically by long COVID and COVID deaths in general are going down. But as Townhall reported, lockdowns saw an increase in drug overdose deaths, domestic violence, and more harmful consequences.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/maddywelsh/2022/06/01/long-covid-is-not-grounds-for-more-mandates-n2608007

******************************************************

‘Significant’ Cases of Neurological Disorder Associated with the AstraZeneca Vaccine

A UK study by University College London has confirmed “small but significant” cases of the serious Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), a rare neurological disorder associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID-19.

The researchers speculate that “the majority or all” of the 121 UK cases of GBS (pdf) in March to April 2021 were associated with first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine administered in January.

“A similar pattern is not seen with the other vaccines or following a second dose of any vaccine,” said lead author Prof. Michael Lunn on May 30.

The team observed that from January to October 2021, 996 GBS cases were recorded in the national database but with an unusual spike from March to April with about 140 cases per month rather than 100.

To identify whether any or all of these cases were linked to vaccination, the team linked dates of GBS onset to vaccination receipt for every individual and found that 198 GBS cases (20 percent of 966) occurred within six weeks of their first dose of COVID-19 vaccination in England; of these, 176 people had an AstraZeneca vaccination, 21 for Pfizer, and 1 for Moderna.

The researchers found no excess GBS cases associated with mRNA vaccines, but observed 5.8 excess cases of GBS per million doses of vaccine for AstraZeneca, equating to a total excess between January to July 2021 of around 98–140 cases, confirming the association between the vaccine and GBS.

GBS is a rare and serious neurological disorder that occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks its own nerves, typically resulting in numbness, weakness, pain in the limbs, and sometimes even paralysis of breathing.

The disease is commonly associated with Campylobacter infections that prompt the body to attack its own nerves.

However, GBS cases were also observed in the 1976 following administration of the swine flu vaccine as well as modern influenza and yellow fever vaccines, though none of them had rates as high as AstraZeneca.

Whilst the majority of the vaccination-associated GBS patients had recovered from symptoms of weak limbs, weak deep tendon reflexes, and monophasic sleep, one patient in the study had recurring neuropathic symptoms well after the second dose.

The patient initially developed facial paralysis on both sides and a tingling sensation in their limbs after the first dose and improved with treatment. However, two weeks after receiving their second dose, they developed increasing weakness with pain, changes in their nerves, and only partial response to the treatment.

Researchers are currently still speculating the reasons behind rises in GBS cases following the vaccine.

“It may be that a non-specific immune activation in susceptible individuals occurs, but if that were the case similar risks might apply to all vaccine types,” said Lunn.

“It is therefore logical to suggest that the simian adenovirus vector, often used to develop vaccines, including AstraZeneca’s, may account for the increased risk.”

Studies in the United States have also confirmed increased cases of GBS after receiving adenovirus vector COVID-19 vaccines, with significant cases of the disease associated with the vaccine.

According to the CDC, 1 to 2 people out of 100,000 in the United States develops GBS, however, a 2022 U.S. study found the incidence in receivers of J&J’s adenovirus vaccines to be 32.4 per 100,000 people within 3 weeks following the vaccine; well above the background rate.

A spokeswoman for AstraZeneca told The Epoch Times that “vaccination of any kind is a known risk factor for GBS” and “the small number of GBS cases [following the AstraZeneca vaccine] appears similar to increases previously seen in other mass vaccination campaigns.”

She wrote that reports of GBS have been very rare following vaccination and that “current estimates show that globally the vaccine has helped prevent 50 million COVID-19 cases, five million hospitalizations, and to have saved more than one million lives.

“The Emergency Medical Associates and other international bodies including the WHO, have all stated that the benefits of vaccination continue to outweigh any potential risks.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/significant-cases-of-neurological-disorder-associated-with-the-astrazeneca-vaccine_4503326.html

****************************************************

The Colorado and Ohio Model Programs That Train Teachers to Defeat Active Shooters

For many years there has been debate about allowing teachers to be armed to protect students. This post describes an established training program for teachers who choose to do so in compliance with school rules. The program is FASTER—short for Faculty/Administrator Safety Training & Emergency Response. Introduced in Ohio, FASTER could be adopted by every state and school, at no cost to taxpayers, and at considerable saving of lives.

FASTER was created in Ohio in December 2012, following the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. FASTER Ohio's website, FASTER Saves Lives, is the best resource for information about the program. FASTER Colorado was founded by Laura Carno; it has been adopted as a supported program of the Independence Institute, the Denver think tank where I work. Pilot programs for FASTER have begun in Utah and Arizona.

In the last decade, FASTER has trained thousands of teachers and other school staff in emergency medicine and emergency armed defense.

FASTER training is voluntary. No teacher or staffer should be forced to carry a firearm. For teachers and staff who want training, FASTER offers 26 hours over three days.

Almost all FASTER participants already have been issued a concealed handgun carry permit. The permits authorize concealed carry almost everywhere in one's home state; they also authorize concealed handgun carry in many other states (because of interstate reciprocity, like with drivers' licenses).

FASTER teaches specific skills for school protection. Legally, schools are said to act in loco parentis—in place of parents. Parents defend their children. Therefore, teachers defend their students. That's what FASTER participants think, and FASTER prepares them to do so.

FASTER graduates learn the medical and defensive skills relevant to stopping a school shooter from taking lives. FASTER instructors are law enforcement trainers. They teach FASTER classes two of the skills they teach law enforcement officers: treating gunshot wounds and defeating active shooters.

Part of FASTER training is a very specific subset of emergency medicine: how to keep a gunshot wound victim alive while waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

The other major component of FASTER is close-quarters combat against active shooters. FASTER teaches the same skills and techniques that law enforcement officers are taught.

To graduate from FASTER, one must exceed the marksmanship criteria required in one's state for certified law enforcement officers—such as Colorado's Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST). The three days of FASTER training make graduates well-prepared against school shooters; the classes do not prepare graduates to perform unrelated medical or law enforcement functions, such as dealing with heart attacks or conducting traffic stops.

FASTER charges tuition to cover expenses, but scholarships are available for employees of any school district that cannot afford tuition.

A school shooting you probably haven't heard about, unless you live in Colorado, took place on May 7, 2019, at the STEM High School in Highlands Ranch. When two armed criminals invaded a classroom, student Kendrick Castillo rushed them. His heroism allowed all other students to escape, but Kendrick was fatally shot. Kendrick's parents, John and Maria Castillo, speak to FASTER classes and explain the necessity of armed staff. This May, they held a fundraiser for FASTER Colorado, in honor of Kendrick.

There has never been a problem of any FASTER teacher causing an accidental discharge, or having a gun taken by student. FASTER training rigorously teaches weapons safety and retention.

FASTER Colorado executive director Laura Carno explained FASTER on the Jesse Watters show last week. More information about FASTER is available in Lauro Carno's article for The Hill, and in a New York Daily News article she coauthored with me, Arming teachers can protect kids.

FASTER is not the only good idea about preventing or thwarting school shootings. Implementing FASTER does not prevent consideration of any other school safety idea.

According to a recent poll of likely general election voters by The Trafalgar Group, 57.5% believe that preventing trained teachers from carrying firearms in schools makes schools more dangerous; 30.8% disagreed. Democrats felt the same way as the general public, although by a smaller margin: 48.2% to 41.3%. People aged 18-24 were the most supportive of armed teachers, with 62% for and 21% against.

So far, FASTER has a perfect record of prevention and a zero record of negative side-effects. School officials, politicians, or anti-gun activists who prevent willing, well-trained staff from protecting students are refusing to prioritize student safety

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/01/faster-teaches-teachers-how-to-save-lives/

Friday, June 03, 2022

New Lancet Study Destroys the CDC's Justification for School Mask Mandates

The Lancet, a world-renowned medical journal, is out with a new study debunking a highly-cited CDC study that was used to support mask mandates in schools.

Specifically, the study not only replicates the CDC study, which found a “negative association” between masks and pediatric cases of Covid-19, it also extends the study to include more districts over a longer period of time. In the end, the new study had nearly “six times as much data as the original study.”

“Replicating the CDC study shows similar results; however, incorporating a larger sample and longer period showed no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates,” the study finds.

“These results persisted when using regression methods to control for differences across districts. Interpretation: School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways. We failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval.

Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables. Randomized studies can more reliably inform public health policy.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2022/06/01/lancet-study-on-masking-n2608053

*****************************************************

Following the Chinese Communist example was a mistake -- including the suppression of dissent

SARS-CoV-2 started in Wuhan in late 2019. After several waves swept through the world and left millions of people dead, the world is now entering the endemic phase. The scars that COVID-19 have left behind, however, are very fresh and very deep. Leaders in government, science, and medicine, along with the general public, must work together to heal, and to make sure that these scars do not turn into a cancer that eventually kills humanity.

The Dark Forces

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governs China by controlling every aspect of people’s lives. When SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, the CCP was in a celebratory mood. It planned to showcase its economic achievements and celebrate the Chinese New Year with huge banquets. No virus should have dared to come to spoil the party. Therefore, the CCP silenced those people sounding the alarm.

Then, when they found out that the virus was spreading and killing many, in order to show the world that they were powerful and capable of controlling viral spread, they implemented a draconian lockdown in Wuhan.

The CCP then intentionally allowed the spread of the virus to the rest of the world by continuing international flights out of Wuhan while cancelling domestic flights. In this way, the CCP protected itself while infecting other countries.

As a result, the rest of the world suffered huge losses while China enjoyed zero-COVID for most of 2020 and 2021. The CCP then took every opportunity to “educate” the world that their system is better than the inefficient western democracy and should be implemented across the whole world for the sake of “the shared destiny of humankind”. After all, it was in the CCP’s Constitution (as revised in October 2017) that it is CCP’s duty to advance “the shared destiny of humankind” with the CCP’s superior governing system.

Xi Jinping even suggested honoring the CCP with a gold medal in COVID control at the party celebrating the conclusion of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

Unfortunately, many in the West admired the CCP and followed the CCP’s playbook.

The Lancet, Nature, and many other scientific journals praised the Chinese response. For example, the Lancet published an article on April 18, 2020 claiming, “The quick containment of COVID-19 in China is impressive and sets an encouraging example for other countries.”

Government-imposed lockdowns, vaccine mandates, keeping people in fear, and silencing scientific debate have all garnered approval from the global scientific community.

But for those of us who noticed that the public health information being disseminated often contradicted itself, it seemed that Dark Forces had been in control.

Silence and Censorship Make Bad Science

Some of us have known all along that the public health agenda of advancing pharmaceutical talking points, disseminating fear, and insisting that only a for-profit, rushed to market vaccine would not stop COVID.

Others of us are just waking up to the inconvenient truth that the entire pandemic response may have been wrong and that our blind obedience and trust in authority were misguided.

No matter what your beliefs are about COVID, vaccines, lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and school closures, however, it’s important to understand that the only way out of the collective mess humanity is in right now is to be willing to disagree, talk honestly, and encourage the process of scientific inquiry.

Yet since the beginning of the COVID crisis, when honest scientists, professors, and medical doctors began to speak up, they were, and continue to be, silenced, canceled, de-platformed, and defamed.

Even now, “science” has become so politicized that doctors willing to speak truth to power have lost their jobs, their social standing, and their licenses to practice medicine.

Questioning COVID Protocols

Just a few months into the pandemic, scientists start to question the COVID measures being implemented.

Health care professionals noticed that when their patients were put on ventilators, instead of recovering, they were dying.

Others saw that COVID was treatable, and that they could use a combination of off-label drugs like ivermectin and anti-inflammatory steroids to calm the immune system’s cytokine storm that the virus seemed to provoke in order to help their patients recover.

These observations led to the Great Barrington Declaration, which was a project spearheaded by three visionaries: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford.

They described themselves as infectious disease specialists and public health scientists who have “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”

Published in October of 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration currently has more than 930,500 signatories.

“Current lockdown policies,” the Great Barrington Declaration insisted, “are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” These include, “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health—leading to excess mortality in the years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.”

The Declaration pointed out that school children and the underprivileged were “disproportionately harmed.”

As hopeful as the Declaration made many feel, it was relentlessly criticized and largely ignored. It seemed that throughout 2021, many people preferred to blindly put their trust in the government and in what a growing number call the government’s lies.

For whatever reasons (political, emotional, Dark Forces), people throughout the free world were willing, and even eager, to allow newly minted pharmaceutical billionaires to forward a narrative that lined their corporate pockets. It was as if the world were gripped by a dark force.

But 2022 has not turned out to be “2020 too.” Instead, starting in January of 2022, major scientific journals are rebelling against the one-sized-fits-all no-debate-allowed agenda. It was then that the British Medical Journal, one of the most prestigious health journals in the world, published an editorial insisting that the raw data that has been used to justify such an aggressive worldwide push to get the COVID vaccine be made fully and immediately available for public scrutiny.

Three months later, an editorial was published in the April edition of Surgical Neurology International: “COVID UPDATE: What is the truth?” by retired neurosurgeon Dr. Russell L. Blaylock. Blaylock was frank and direct in his condemnation of the public health policies implemented to contain COVID-19.

Indeed, he unapologetically calls the pandemic “one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies.”

Real Science Is Not Dogmatic

Fake science is dogma that cannot be debated, nuanced, challenged or changed. Real science is not dogmatic. It can be debated and considered. But scientific freedom can only be defended when each one of us stands up and defends it.

Now for the good news. There are indications that the pro-science pro-freedom movement is becoming more mainstream every day.

In March, Joe Wang attended a conference in Washington, D.C. to inaugurate the Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College. This new academy’s mission is to educate people about “the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”

Everyone who attended the conference was already aware, to some degree, of the American government’s war on science. But there we were, in America’s capital, able to hold a conference criticizing the rich and powerful, without having the police knocking at our door. Just ask yourself, what happened to Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan whistleblower in 2020, who purportedly died of the virus in a Chinese hospital? And what happened to the top COVID expert in Shanghai, Dr. Wenhong Zhang, who had to give up his belief of co-existing with the virus and “full-heartedly” endorse the Xi Jinping’s zero COVID policy?

We must use of what limited freedom we still have now in the United States to avoid the fates of Dr. Zhang and Dr. Li.

In April, Jennifer Margulis attended a medical freedom conference for doctors and other healthcare workers in Conroe, Texas. It was hosted by pediatrician Angelina Farella, a conventionally trained doctor who has testified against the COVID vaccines. Dr. Farella’s testimony has led biased media outlets, including The Independent, to give her the moniker of being an “anti-vaccine” doctor despite the fact that she gives vaccines in her office every day. Over eighty medical doctors attended the conference, sharing their clinical data and successful treatment protocols.

“People are sick and dying and doctors won’t treat patients,” Ben Marble, M.D., an emergency room doctor, said. “Is this a 2-year long Twilight Zone episode or what?”

He called the way patients were being treated in the emergency rooms an “epic failure” and explained that he quit his job as an emergency room doctor in order to be able to treat patients. Marble, who founded a website that treats people for free called MyFreeDoctor.com, said, “[We’ve] treated over 200,000 people for COVID and lost six.”

May the Force Be With Scientists and Doctors Who Fight Back
The fight for scientific freedom is important to our lives, and the lives of generations to come. To be honest, scientists and doctors are not particularly good at these kinds of fights, which involve not only science, which they are good at, but also interacting with politicians, the mainstream legacy media, and social media.

Luckily, the scientists and doctors are stepping up anyway and it’s time for us to join them. It’s time to say enough is enough, just as Blaylock has.

Silencing free speech and co-opting science can have deadly consequences. “The first thing that the Nazis did was fear, propaganda, and censorship,” says Vera Sharav, a child survivor of the Holocaust.

She said, “The free press was ended the minute Hitler took over. Information is freedom. People who are informed do not march in unison. It’s only those who are being fed lies that frighten them and that keep them in a state of total anxiety who will follow orders without a second thought. They’ve become conditioned not to trust their own instincts.”

As founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, Sharav has been speaking openly about the disturbing parallels between the German state’s control of information in the 1930s and today’s trend to silence dissent. For instance, the Germans justified eugenics, which was widely accepted among scientists even in the United States, by insisting that they were “following the science,” Sharav said.

We all need to rally behind the scientists, researchers, and doctors who are striking back. It is only with our support that the side of what is true will prevail and vibrant and long-lasting good health be realized.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/may-the-force-be-with-them-scientists-fight-back_4502259.html

CDC Director Issues Alert on Pfizer’s COVID-19 Pill: ‘You Might Get Symptoms Again’

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky warned that Pfizer’s COVID-19 pill Paxlovid can lead to a rebound in symptoms.

“If you take Paxlovid, you might get symptoms again,” Walensky told CBS News on Tuesday. “We haven’t yet seen anybody who has returned with symptoms needing to go to the hospital. So, generally, a milder course.”

Another researcher who is not affiliated with the CDC said that he has observed such a scenario.

“People who experience rebound are at risk of transmitting to other people, even though they’re outside what people accept as the usual window for being able to transmit,” Dr. Michael Charness of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Boston told CNN on Tuesday.

After a patient recovers from COVID-19, the aforementioned rebound has occurred between two and eight days later, according to the CDC. The agency, however, told CBS that the benefits of taking Paxlovid outweigh the risks of COVID-19, namely among those who are at a high risk of developing severe symptoms from the virus.

About a week ago, the agency issued an alert to health care providers about the rebound, saying that patients who took Paxlovid either test positive for the virus after having tested negative or will experience COVID-19 symptoms.

“A brief return of symptoms may be part of the natural history of SARS-CoV-2 infection in some persons, independent of treatment with Paxlovid and regardless of vaccination status,” the federal health agency said at the time. SARS-CoV-2 is another name for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.

“Limited information currently available from case reports suggests that persons treated with Paxlovid who experience COVID-19 rebound have had mild illness; there are no reports of severe disease. There is currently no evidence that additional treatment is needed with Paxlovid or other anti-SARS-CoV-2 therapies in cases where COVID-19 rebound is suspected,” the CDC added.

The Epoch Times has contacted Pfizer for comment. Pfizer told CBS that it is observing a rebound rate of approximately 2 percent and is continuing to monitor patients.

“We have not seen any [COVID-19] resistance emerge to date in patients treated with Paxlovid,” a spokesperson for the company told Reuters this week.

In recent weeks, doctors have increasingly prescribed Paxlovid, which has been authorized to treat at-risk people. But some health care workers told Reuters they are putting off prescribing the medication.

“I am shying away from giving it to people who are very low- risk, and are not terribly ill, particularly people who are vaccinated and boosted,” said Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology for Northwell Health, in an interview with the news agency. He will still prescribe the bill to people who have significant health conditions or are aged 75 and older.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/cdc-director-issues-alert-on-pfizers-covid-19-pill-you-might-get-symptoms-again_4503262.html

*************************************************

WHO European director Dr Hans Kluge says monkeypox requires 'urgent' action

People should reduce their number of sexual partners to help fight the spread of monkeypox, the World Health Organization has urged.

Dr Hans Kluge, the head of WHO's European division, has warned the current outbreak of the tropical disease 'may not be containable'.

He warned Europe had become the new epicentre of the virus, with the outbreak linked to sexual transmission at raves and festivals on the continent.

Dr Kluge insisted the virus 'will not require the same extensive population measures' as Covid but said 'significant and urgent' action was needed to prevent more cases.

The WHO stopped short of calling for contacts of known cases to be quarantined but called for 'critical' twice-daily temperature checks and 'close monitoring'.

Dr Kluge said that while cases have been concentrated in men who have sex with men, there was nothing stopping it from spreading to other groups.

The WHO earlier this week upgraded the global threat level to 'moderate', warning that community spread could lead to vulnerable patients or children catching the virus, which also spreads from touch, or interaction with contaminated surfaces or clothes.

In total, there have been 606 confirmed cases of monkepox across the globe, with 130 more suspected since the first infection was found at the start of May.

Around 70 per cent of the confirmed or suspected cases have been in Europe, with the UK count now at 190. Only Spain has seen more cases.

The LGB Alliance — a trans-exclusionary gay rights group — attracted criticism on Monday after calling for all commercial sex venues to be closed ahead of Pride month, which begins today.

UK monkeypox cases rise to 190 as 11 more Brits test positive
Another 11 monkeypox cases were recorded in Britain yesterday, health officials announced.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said the new patients were all in England, bringing the UK total to 190.

Officials said the 'risk to the general public from monkeypox is still low' but it is advising anyone with a new rash or scabs to self-isolate.

Until now, those with suspected or confirmed cases of the tropical disease were being urged to seek advice from NHS 111 or a sexual health service.

But officials said the move to introduce quarantine was to prevent further spread 'now that community transmission is occurring here in the UK and other countries'.

Experts have previously linked the outbreak to two festivals in Europe: The Gran Canarian pride festival, held between May 5 and 15, and a large-scale fetish festival in Antwerp, which ran from May 5 to May 8.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKSA) updated its own guidance on Monday night to tell people to wear condoms during sex for eight weeks after clearing the virus.

Anyone in Britain who develops a new rash or blister is being urged to quarantine and call 111 — and not to leave isolation 'until you've been told what to do'.

They are also been ordered to abstain from sex or close contact with others 'until their lesions have healed and the scabs have dried off'.

Dr Kluge said in a statement last night: '[Europe] remains at the epicentre of the largest and most geographically widespread monkeypox outbreak ever reported outside of endemic areas in western and central Africa.

'Based on the case reports to date, this outbreak is currently being transmitted through social networks connected largely through sexual activity, primarily involving men who have sex with men.

'Many — but not all cases — report fleeting and/or multiple sexual partners, sometimes associated with large events or parties.'

Dr Kluge said all young people, regardless of gender or sexuality, are at risk of the virus and should be aware of the symptoms.

He said gay and bisexual communities have shown 'rapid health-seeking behaviour', adding 'we should applaud them' for coming forward with symptoms early.

But he warned festivals and parties planned over the coming months could lead to further outbreaks of the virus.

He said: 'The potential for further transmission in Europe and elsewhere over the summer is high.

'Monkeypox has already spread against the backdrop of several mass gatherings in [Europe].

'Over the coming months, many of the dozens of festivals and large parties planned provide further contexts where amplification may occur.'

The WHO said event organisers should share 'accurate, practical and targeted information' with attendees over summer.

The LGB Alliance had a statement calling for gay saunas to be closed taken down by Twitter on Monday.

In the statement, the group said: 'Monkeypox is spreading and gay and bisexual men have been affected disproportionately.

'That’s why we are calling on all commercial sex venues, such as saunas, leather/fetish bars and clubs with dark rooms to be closed for a month.'

Critics accused the group of homophobia, arguing the move would lead to stigmatisation ahead of Pride month.

But LGBA insisted the move would have helped 'save Pride' by preventing huge outbreaks just before the main events scheduled over the next four weeks.

Malcolm Clark, head of research at LGBA, told the Daily Telegraph: 'We were really lucky this time that it wasn't another Aids, but what would have happened if it was?

'We would have been complaining about stigmatisation and still taking our time. It appears that 30 years after HIV, we haven't learnt anything.

'It's pure luck that this is a disease nobody dies from, but it could have easily been something else, it could have easily been worse. We should thank our lucky stars.'

Andy Seale, from the WHO's department for HIV, hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections, on Monday said Pride parades pose little risk of spreading monkeypox.

He said most transmission is linked to 'enclosed spaces' such as nightclubs and there is no 'enhanced risk' of transmission at the annual celebrations.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10874047/Monkeypox-Cut-number-sexual-partners-help-fight-virus-urges.html

************************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

**************************************************

Why Putin will never truly conquer Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has never been completely clear about his war aims. But he gives clues. He endlessly talks of the brotherhood of Russians and Ukrainians – and in this relationship he always puts Russia first. In Ukraine he wants Russian language schooling to be restored and he of course wishes to annex more Ukrainian territory. He would like Russian businesses to receive privileged access and for Ukraine to be barred from having an independent foreign and security policy. In other words, he wishes to pursue ‘Russification’.

Russification is an objective that has taken changing forms over the centuries. Under the Russian Empire, the tsars saw Ukraine as a problem as they feared the growth of nationalism. The Ukrainian language was restricted in the press. Ukraine made no appearance on official maps. The territories around Kyiv were called Malorossia (Little Russia) while those near the Black Sea were dubbed Novorossia (New Russia). These names expressed an insistence that the entire destiny of Ukrainian speakers lay with Great Russia.

Imperial Germany coveted Ukraine’s wheat fields and iron mines during the Great War. When Soviet Russia went down to defeat in 1918, the Germans established a Ukrainian puppet state which was obliged to supply them with the grain and labour they craved. Ukrainians nevertheless cherish those brief months as their first experience of statehood. When the communists took charge after the ensuing civil war, Vladimir Lenin saw that Ukraine would remain difficult to rule inside the USSR unless granted the status of a Soviet republic and permitted a degree of cultural and linguistic autonomy – as Putin sees it, this was a cardinal blunder of statecraft that prepared the way for a split between Moscow and Kyiv.

Joseph Stalin eyed Ukraine as crucial for his forcible imposition of collective farming from the late 1920s. Ukrainian agriculture had been central Europe’s breadbasket before 1914 and the intention was to fund Soviet industrialisation by means of massive cereal exports. Instead there was searing damage to peasant farms and millions of Ukrainians perished in the avoidable famine. Stalin also reintroduced restrictions on the Ukrainian language. More Russians than ever moved to Ukraine seeking work in the mines and steel plants. Moscow offered the Ukrainian people little except poverty and repression. This was one of the reasons why many initially welcomed the Nazi invaders in 1941 – another event that Putin has not forgotten.

Throughout the decades that followed, Soviet rulers met with trouble in Ukraine. Stalin’s occupation forces at the end of the second world war had to contend against partisans who fought to thwart the reimposition of Soviet rule. The communist order was restored by the 1950s. The Ukrainian Soviet republic acquired a seat at the United Nations – perhaps Putin thinks this a blunder on Stalin’s part. Ukraine never became the ‘model’ of Marxist-Leninist affluence that Lenin and Stalin had envisaged and the USSR failed to grow enough food for itself, far less to export grain to foreign parts.

When Mikhail Gorbach�v announced reforms of communism in the late 1980s, he tried to keep a lid on Ukrainian nationalism. But the collapse of the Soviet economy intensified Ukrainians’ resentment about their treatment by Moscow. Leonid Kravchuk, the communist leader in Kyiv, sniffed the nationalist wind in 1991 and aligned himself with Ukrainian opinion by demanding a referendum on independence. That December, after Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to secede, the USSR fell apart – an event described by Putin as the century’s ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe’.

Throughout the 1990s the Ukrainian economy was in a deep depression and was mocked by Russian rulers who themselves had little to boast about. Ukraine’s politics, however, were looser than Russia’s. In the present century they have given rise to presidential electoral contests won by candidates who wanted close ties with the European Union and an open democratic system under the rule of law. Under Volodymyr Zelensky this orientation was consolidated. Putin’s Crimean land grab in 2014 persuaded even the millions of pro-Russia Ukrainian citizens that Ukraine should prioritise cooperation and alliance with the West. Putin’s bullying of Russia’s ‘brother people’ turned that nation into hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism.

So how could Putin ever go about denationalising Ukraine and making it more Russia-friendly? The collapse of Ukrainian statehood now seems unlikely thanks to the bravery of its politicians and armed forces. Territorial annexation is another matter. Large parts of the Donbas, apart from Kharkiv, are occupied by Russian forces. The Black Sea coast has also been overrun. Currently what is left of Ukraine is blockaded by the Russian navy.

In order to keep hold of what he already has, Putin has imposed puppet administrations in the occupied territories. He has recognised the Donetsk and Luhansk so-called people’s republics, and he may well arrange plebiscites for their incorporation in the Russian Federation on similar terms to Crimea. He has already deported thousands of Ukrainian citizens deep into Russia. A further campaign of ethno-political cleansing is probable. The Russian language will be re-imposed. Russian business interests will be privileged. All this is possible but it would require a massive enduring presence of security forces to stamp out Ukrainian resistance.

A Russian military victory even in Donbass and along the Black Sea coast could never be without horrendous costs for Russia’s ruling group and big business. Russia would remain the world’s pariah state and economy. Resentment of Russia both in the conquered and still-free parts of Ukraine would be greater than anything known to Nicholas II, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Putin will surely at some point – let’s hope it is soon – be asked whether his ‘special military operation’ was worth it all. And it will be the Russians, including some of their ruling group, who will be putting the question.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/why-putin-will-never-truly-conquer-ukraine/

***************************************************

The feminization of Sweden

The Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede is known for his studies of national values. On two occasions he collected extensive data from IBM employees in 53 countries, first in 1968 and again in 1972. He received 116,000 responses to questions about attitudes and preferences. In the 1970s, he organised the material into five themes and summarised them in a “cultural dimension theory”. Hofstede then scored the countries and compared them with each other. His study has attracted a lot of attention, mainly because the conclusions are based on such a large body of material. Hofstede is one of the 100 most-cited social scientists in the world.

On the basis of his vast material, Hofstede established no fewer than 76 criteria for male and female. Japan came first among the masculine countries. Both the United States and Germany are also high on the ranking list. Among the most feminine countries, he placed Sweden in first place, with Norway second.

Note that the data is now a half-century old and that Sweden has since become even more feminised. In most universities and colleges, women are in the majority among teachers and researchers. Six out of eight parliamentary parties have female leaders. We have a female prime minister and there are twelve women and eleven men in the government.

In the media, the imbalance is probably even greater. I have not looked for studies that show this, because it is so obvious both to me and to others who follow Swedish news reporting. Women, women and more women both report and are interviewed on every conceivable subject. This female expertise covers everything from football and ice hockey to advanced and male-dominated high technology to gang crime, which is almost 100% a male activity. We find out how women think, what they find interesting and how they want to solve various social problems.

One of the traditionally most male-dominated professions, policing, is represented in the Police Federation by a woman. This is only right. In 2019, 33% of Sweden’s police officers were women. In total, 44% of all police employees are women. Among civilian employees, women are in the majority, a whopping 67%. When 43% of those admitted to the police training programme in Malm� were women last year, Caroline Mellgren, who oversees the unit for police work and police training at the university, was very happy and hoped that the trend of more and more female police officers would continue.

A couple of years ago, a young, beautiful female police officer explained that when she and other female officers took the metro home from late-night duty in Rinkeby’s new police station, they needed an escort. If there had been only male police officers there, would they have made that demand? Hardly; they would realise it was ridiculous. If they felt unsafe on their own, they would have to arrange to protect each other. But for a graceful and good-looking female police officer, the question of an escort was certainly relevant, and I don’t think she would then feel entirely comfortable being escorted by another young and attractive female officer.

Recruitment films for the Armed Forces are another example. In the American ones, it is crystal clear that the military is a male profession and also a very physically demanding one. In the Swedish ones, either the main characters are women or they are gender-neutral.

Now, war is not just any activity. It’s about killing your opponents, winning. A country that does not recruit optimally efficient soldiers, but deliberately reduces efficiency for ideological reasons, will be responsible in war for more soldiers dying, both men and women. The reason is that these mixed corps of soldiers are likely to fight against opponents who are all men. In that case, it is a question of not really wanting to win, which is the same as losing, and since it is a question of war, it can be said to be a form of social suicide. Nor should it be forgotten that in war people are injured. Women are less able than men to cope with injuries.

In the autumn of 2016, the Swedish Armed Forces released a new handbook for Swedish military personnel. It makes it quite clear that in Sweden the Armed Forces prefer political correctness to efficiency. There are several so-called gender advisors in Swedish units. The goal, according to Jan Th�rnqvist, who is responsible for the Swedish Armed Forces, is to be far ahead of other countries. As the book says: “Swedish units can also contribute to raising awareness within multilateral organisations of the importance of the gender perspective. This can be done by developing gender-inclusive reporting formats and proposing gender mainstreaming in meetings and plans.”

OK, we have female police officers in Sweden, we have female firefighters (gender-neutral language: firemen?) and we have female soldiers. Gender equality is a political goal that is close to the heart of left-liberals.

At the same time, the state has a reasonable responsibility to choose the optimum solution for important social services. I think that if the people had a choice, the distribution between male and female police officers would be more clearly skewed in favour of the men.

But if, for reasons I will not go into here, the people also choose women for these posts, then it is the duty of the state in a democracy to make not an ideological but an efficiency-optimal choice. Which means: women in higher positions are welcome, but if physical strength and other male “virtues” are required, then it should be men — and also women who meet the requirements for men. Ultimately, this is about competence. Police officers in Rinkeby should not have to ask for an external escort when they go home from work.

Is this a reactionary perspective? Yes; reactionary means reacting, and it is right to react to stupid decisions. I and many others react to the politicisation of society. At its core, it is totalitarian when politicians neither listen to what citizens want, nor look out for the best interests of citizens.

In a totalitarian state, ideology wins out over both democracy and optimal choices.

https://gatesofvienna.net/2022/05/the-estrogen-revolution/#more-53890

Why Putin will never truly conquer Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has never been completely clear about his war aims. But he gives clues. He endlessly talks of the brotherhood of Russians and Ukrainians – and in this relationship he always puts Russia first. In Ukraine he wants Russian language schooling to be restored and he of course wishes to annex more Ukrainian territory. He would like Russian businesses to receive privileged access and for Ukraine to be barred from having an independent foreign and security policy. In other words, he wishes to pursue ‘Russification’.

Russification is an objective that has taken changing forms over the centuries. Under the Russian Empire, the tsars saw Ukraine as a problem as they feared the growth of nationalism. The Ukrainian language was restricted in the press. Ukraine made no appearance on official maps. The territories around Kyiv were called Malorossia (Little Russia) while those near the Black Sea were dubbed Novorossia (New Russia). These names expressed an insistence that the entire destiny of Ukrainian speakers lay with Great Russia.

Imperial Germany coveted Ukraine’s wheat fields and iron mines during the Great War. When Soviet Russia went down to defeat in 1918, the Germans established a Ukrainian puppet state which was obliged to supply them with the grain and labour they craved. Ukrainians nevertheless cherish those brief months as their first experience of statehood. When the communists took charge after the ensuing civil war, Vladimir Lenin saw that Ukraine would remain difficult to rule inside the USSR unless granted the status of a Soviet republic and permitted a degree of cultural and linguistic autonomy – as Putin sees it, this was a cardinal blunder of statecraft that prepared the way for a split between Moscow and Kyiv.

Joseph Stalin eyed Ukraine as crucial for his forcible imposition of collective farming from the late 1920s. Ukrainian agriculture had been central Europe’s breadbasket before 1914 and the intention was to fund Soviet industrialisation by means of massive cereal exports. Instead there was searing damage to peasant farms and millions of Ukrainians perished in the avoidable famine. Stalin also reintroduced restrictions on the Ukrainian language. More Russians than ever moved to Ukraine seeking work in the mines and steel plants. Moscow offered the Ukrainian people little except poverty and repression. This was one of the reasons why many initially welcomed the Nazi invaders in 1941 – another event that Putin has not forgotten.

Throughout the decades that followed, Soviet rulers met with trouble in Ukraine. Stalin’s occupation forces at the end of the second world war had to contend against partisans who fought to thwart the reimposition of Soviet rule. The communist order was restored by the 1950s. The Ukrainian Soviet republic acquired a seat at the United Nations – perhaps Putin thinks this a blunder on Stalin’s part. Ukraine never became the ‘model’ of Marxist-Leninist affluence that Lenin and Stalin had envisaged and the USSR failed to grow enough food for itself, far less to export grain to foreign parts.

When Mikhail Gorbach�v announced reforms of communism in the late 1980s, he tried to keep a lid on Ukrainian nationalism. But the collapse of the Soviet economy intensified Ukrainians’ resentment about their treatment by Moscow. Leonid Kravchuk, the communist leader in Kyiv, sniffed the nationalist wind in 1991 and aligned himself with Ukrainian opinion by demanding a referendum on independence. That December, after Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to secede, the USSR fell apart – an event described by Putin as the century’s ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe’.

Throughout the 1990s the Ukrainian economy was in a deep depression and was mocked by Russian rulers who themselves had little to boast about. Ukraine’s politics, however, were looser than Russia’s. In the present century they have given rise to presidential electoral contests won by candidates who wanted close ties with the European Union and an open democratic system under the rule of law. Under Volodymyr Zelensky this orientation was consolidated. Putin’s Crimean land grab in 2014 persuaded even the millions of pro-Russia Ukrainian citizens that Ukraine should prioritise cooperation and alliance with the West. Putin’s bullying of Russia’s ‘brother people’ turned that nation into hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism.

So how could Putin ever go about denationalising Ukraine and making it more Russia-friendly? The collapse of Ukrainian statehood now seems unlikely thanks to the bravery of its politicians and armed forces. Territorial annexation is another matter. Large parts of the Donbas, apart from Kharkiv, are occupied by Russian forces. The Black Sea coast has also been overrun. Currently what is left of Ukraine is blockaded by the Russian navy.

In order to keep hold of what he already has, Putin has imposed puppet administrations in the occupied territories. He has recognised the Donetsk and Luhansk so-called people’s republics, and he may well arrange plebiscites for their incorporation in the Russian Federation on similar terms to Crimea. He has already deported thousands of Ukrainian citizens deep into Russia. A further campaign of ethno-political cleansing is probable. The Russian language will be re-imposed. Russian business interests will be privileged. All this is possible but it would require a massive enduring presence of security forces to stamp out Ukrainian resistance.

A Russian military victory even in Donbass and along the Black Sea coast could never be without horrendous costs for Russia’s ruling group and big business. Russia would remain the world’s pariah state and economy. Resentment of Russia both in the conquered and still-free parts of Ukraine would be greater than anything known to Nicholas II, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Putin will surely at some point – let’s hope it is soon – be asked whether his ‘special military operation’ was worth it all. And it will be the Russians, including some of their ruling group, who will be putting the question.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/why-putin-will-never-truly-conquer-ukraine/

https://gatesofvienna.net/2022/05/the-estrogen-revolution/#more-53890