I have given you the best available Covid information in my many postings to this website. Here is the latest roundup. As you can see, none of us has the slightest justification for placing any trust whatsoever in the American Medical Establishment.
Oxford University Clinical Research Group Discovers Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Are a Health Threat to Patients
Study: Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Carry 251 Times Viral Load, Pose Threat to Unvaccinated Patients, Co-Workers
A preprint paper by the prestigious Oxford University Clinical Research Group, published Aug. 10 in The Lancet, found vaccinated individuals carry 251 times the load of COVID-19 viruses in their nostrils compared to the unvaccinated
Is Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla so insouciant that he doesn’t know that vaccine-resistant strains have already appeared and are the consequence of his “vaccine”?
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Tuesday that, at some point in the future, a strain of COVID-19 that is resistant to vaccines is likely to emerge.
The corrupt medical establishment is trying to claim that variants are natural mutations, not created by the vaccine. In other words, the medical establishment is trying to cover up the fact that Antibody Dependent Enhancement is caused by the mRNA vaccine.
Corrupt Presstitutes Begin Their Crawl Back Down the Limb
For 20 months the scum presstitutes have hyped blind fear to drive Massive numbers of people into dangerous vaccination that spreads the virus, all the while censoring and demonizing the real scientists warning of the vaccine’s consequences. Now that the dire consequences of the dangerous vaccine are both obvious and documented, the presstitutes are doing an about face and breaking from the narrative by asking questions two years too late.
But the dumbshit US Dept of Homeland Security Is So Far Behind the Facts that the Fools have declared Covid vaccination-resistant Americans to be a National Security Threat
And the dumbshits in charge of Eatonville High School in Washington state are forcing students to wear tracking devices in order to contact-trace Covid cases
The US was running budget surpluses in the late forties and through much of the fifties. Americans were young, and there were far more workers producing than collecting government Social Security welfare checks.
Those days are gone, and although American workers continue to be highly productive, the burden each worker must bear to pay for the elderly and the unproductive continues to grow.
What we have now is a country heavily dependent on ever-larger amounts of government spending and monetary expansion.
When it comes to policy debates, it’s now pretty clear that if you’d like to sound very quaint and old fashioned, be sure to express some concerns over the size of the federal budget and deficit spending.
Such concerns are now taken about as seriously by the average politician in Washington as is the constitutionality of the PATRIOT Act. Virtually no one cares.
Admittedly, the lack of interest in spending was already largely in place before the covid crisis began. During the Trump administration, reckless federal spending was the norm, and inflation-adjusted federal spending surged even past spending in 2009, when the federal government was panicking over the financial crisis and the Great Recession. In other words, the Trump administration gave us crisis-level spending when there wasn’t even a crisis.
Not surprisingly, deficit spending was also remarkably high under Trump—precovid—as well. By 2019, Trump had signed off on a trillion-dollar deficit, something many thought to be outlandish during a nonrecessionary period before that.
But those numbers—including the numbers from the Great Recession bailout years—all look modest compared to the surge in spending that occurred with the covid panic of 2020 and 2021.
Let’s compare spending in the two periods. For example, from 2019 to 2020, federal spending rose 54 percent—from $4.5 trillion to $6.5 trillion, respectively—as Congress and the White House poured money into bailouts and stimulus. On the other hand, in the wake of the financial crisis, from 2008 to 2009, spending “only” increased 14 percent, from $3.6 trillion to $4.2 trillion.
On a per capita basis, the numbers were similar. Per capital federal spending rose 13 percent from 2008 to 2009, rising from $12,000 to $13,700 for each American. But from 2019 to 2020, per capita spending rose 44 percent, from $13,600 to $19,700. (These numbers are all in constant 2020 dollars.)
Spending Levels Similar to World War II
At this point, defenders of runaway spending will often suggest that what really matters is spending compared to gross domestic product (GDP).
So let’s look at that measure. In 2020, federal outlays as a percentage of the nation’s GDP surged to 31 percent, the highest number seen since 1945.
Similarly, the federal deficit as a percentage of GDP surged to nearly 15 percent in 2020. Again, this is the highest number seen of this measure since 1945.
(Proportional comparisons of this sort tend to understate the extent to which debt and spending is growing compared to the overall GDP. This is because government spending is itself a component of GDP, and since GDP is measured in dollars, monetary expansion—even without true growth in economic activity—can fuel GDP expansion as well.)
Also of political significance is the fact that while federal spending was taking off over the past eighteen months, growth in state and local spending nearly flatlined, dropping to 0.38 percent growth over the previous year. That’s the lowest growth rate in state and local spending since 2011, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, at the same time, federal spending increased by 25 percent—the largest year-over-year increase in federal spending since the Korean War.
All combined, this means federal spending surged to comprise more than two-thirds of all government spending in the US during 2020. We’d have to go back to the dark days of the Cold War and the Vietnam War to find the last time federal spending so dominated government spending in America.
This all reflects the fact that state and local governments are actually affected by economic crises. That is, when incomes and economic activity fall, state and local revenues—and spending—fall. Not so with the federal government, which, thanks to the central bank’s willingness to buy up US debt, can much more easily engage in large amounts of deficit spending than can state and local governments.
Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first.
…or the clear superiority of natural immunity, or the fact that the injections don’t even do the one thing the clinical trials alleged they could do (i.e., keep more severe illness at bay), it is clear that citizens who would rather think for themselves than swallow prefabricated lies are the ones who are going to come out ahead.
The deployment of clever linguistic tricks has created a hostile upside-down universe, where even the vaccine-injured are tarnished as “anti-vaxxers” or liars rather than acknowledged as ex-vaxxers who took risks that turned out to be life-changing.
The Defender is experiencing censorship on many social channels. Be sure to stay in touch with the news that matters by subscribing to our top news of the day. It’s free.
Psychological and linguistic manipulation are, for those in power, proven tools for building, consolidating and maintaining dominance — a reality keenly depicted in George Orwell’s never-more-relevant novel, “1984.”
As phrased by master propagandist Edward Bernays, an approximate contemporary of Orwell’s, the mind of the people “is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion.”
Recent events surrounding COVID vaccines have shown that medicine and public health — with the help of a complicit media — are particularly skilled at “pull[ing] the wires which control the public mind.”
The clever bag of linguistic tricks deployed by the medical cartel includes seeding evocative terms such as “vaccine hesitancy” and “lockdowns” (which is prison terminology) into popular and scientific discourse, forging slippery new definitions of words with formerly fixed meanings (such as “pandemic,” “herd immunity” and “vaccine”), and circling failed products back around by giving them the positive spin of “boosters.”
Ominously, medicine’s and public health’s verbal assaults encourage shaming of, or violence against, those who ask questions, while upholding the disingenuous pretense that vaccine mandates are compatible with freedom.
In this hostile upside-down universe, even the vaccine-injured are tarnished as “anti-vaxxers” or liars rather than acknowledged as ex-vaxxers who took risks that turned out to be life-changing.
One of the more insulting recent examples of linguistic weaponization involves a dubious psychiatric cover term, “functional neurological disorder” (FND), that is suddenly being trumpeted as an explanation for the tsunami of adverse events — especially severe neurological reactions — being reported all over the world in the aftermath of COVID vaccination.
Psychiatrists conveniently define FND — which they also refer to as a “psychogenic” (originating in the mind) or “conversion” disorder — as “real” nervous system symptoms that “cause significant distress or problems functioning” but are “incompatible with” or “can’t be explained by” recognized neurological diseases or other medical conditions.
Lest members of the public derive a “simplistic impression of potential links between the [COVID] vaccine and major neurological symptoms,” neurologists pushing the FND story have hastened to reassure people that the “close development of functional motor symptoms after the vaccine does not implicate the vaccine as the cause of those symptoms.”
One of these individuals is National Institutes of Health-funded neurologist Alberto Espay, who implausibly adds that COVID vaccination (which entails injection with high-risk substances and technologies) is just “a stressor or precipitant, much like any other stressor … such as a motor vehicle accident or sleep deprivation.”
Officials and the media are audaciously trotting out the FND narrative on both sides of the pond, as evidenced by a recent Daily Mail headline that read, “Videos of people ‘struggling to walk’ after getting their COVID vaccine are NOT result of jab itself but a condition triggered by stress or trauma.”
Helping with the spin, a member of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization straight-facedly attributed this “stress” to coercion, stating: “If people begin to feel they are being kind of forced against their will to do something, then in a sense that’s quite a damaging thing to do because it gives people the impression vaccination is something being imposed on them.”
Ask yourself why the media will not even mention the fact that this 23-year-old Irish footballer below, in perfect health, received a vaccine three days before dropping dead:
But this is the crucial page. Look at the bottom line.
Again, 402 deaths out of 47 008 cases in vaccinated; 253 deaths out of 151 054 cases in unvaccinated. If you get covid having been vaccinated, according to this data, you are much more likely to die than if you were not vaccinated!
Some years ago Italy was chosen by the global powers-that-be to become a social laboratory where the Great Reset would be tested and fine-tuned before being fully unleashed upon the world.
In the words of Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò, “Italy is a testing ground for the experiments of social engineering that the globalist agenda intends to extend to all governments over the span of the next ten years.”
On 30th August the Italian Health Dictatorship Regime intends to make what it thinks is a check-mate move and impose its COVID-19 vaccination passport, called the Green Pass, upon the entire population of Italy. This discriminatory and coercive ‘Green Pass’ is without doubt contrary to both international law and the laws of most domestic legal jurisdictions. It is creating a world where the majority of people are tricked or bullied, and generally compelled, into receiving a series of experimental gene modification jabs or vaccines still under clinical trial. It is creating a world where a rebelling minority will be cast out and refused access to social amenities and social recreation.
A movement which started on Good Friday in 2020 when just a dozen or so people tried to break the lockdown cordons and get to Mass at the Church of St Maria Maggiore in Rome, gradually built and expanded to the point that in July 2021 up to twenty-thousand fed-up and rebellious Romans gathered together at the Piazza del Popolo to really make and continue to build a heavyweight challenge against the Health Dictatorship and the Great Reset.
There are three main objectives: 1) To unite the people beyond the old, sterile, worn-out, and divisive, labels of Left and Right. 2) To draw together disparate groups and associations of un-skilled workers, tradesmen, restaurateurs and hoteliers, and medical and scientific professionals. 3) To stand united together and act as one until the Green Pass is defeated. The movement grew rapidly throughout Italy uniting more than a million people in a city by city mobilization.
On the 28th August, two days before the introduction of the Green Pass, a massive demonstration is due to take place in Rome along with other big protests in towns and cities all over the country. The Regime has long braced itself to meet, sometimes very violently, growing street protests but unexpectedly, and dangerously, for the Health Dictatorship something else has happened. A lawyer, Avv. Nicola Trisciuoglio, representing 52 of his colleagues in the legal profession, filed criminal complaints against the Italian Prime Minister, Draghi, and other public figures, accusing them of very serious offences such as conspiracy, murder, and manslaughter. The criminal accusations were filed with all 140 Public Prosecutors spread in all the Italian main cities of Italy.
In this way it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for the Regime to call in favours or intimidate all of the Public Prosecutor Offices to drop the criminal investigations. Indeed, nearly 100 of the Public Prosecutors have already begun to pursue criminal investigations based upon the complaints.
It’s expected that at least one of the Prosecution Offices will ask the Constitutional Court to examine the legality of the ‘Green Pass’.
In the las few hours the Procura di Avellino has decided to send the Green Pass to the Constitutional Court to decide whether it complies or not with Italian and European law. As part of this legal investigation the Public Prosecutors have also been requested to seize samples of the so-called vaccines so they can be independently analysed in neutral laboratories and the precise ‘ingredients’ established. The complex action against the tyrannical regime, the criminal actions commited and the struggle against the Green Pass are finally giving results.
WHETHER YOU ARE AMERICAN, BRITISH, CANADIAN OR FROM ANY OTHER PART OF THE WORLD PLEASE HELP ITALY AND ITALIANS IN THIS STRUGGLE THAT WILL REFLECT ON LIVES OF PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.
The elephant in the room, however, is the absence of actual symptomatic illness. The study only looked at positive test results, and we do not know whether more vaccinated people were symptomatic than the unvaccinated, or vice versa.
As has been explained many times before, a positive test result is not the same as active infection. A person with natural immunity may be re-exposed to the virus, and traces of it may show upon testing, but their immune system has effectively killed the virus and prevented illness.
According to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, if you’ve already recovered from a bout of COVID-19, the full-spectrum immunity mounted by your body may not be enough to prevent reinfection with the Delta variant, so your best bet is to get the COVID shot. Mid-August 2021 he told CNN:1
“… what we’ve understood, actually, from the studies about natural immunity, we are seeing more and more data that tells us that while you get some protection from natural infection, it’s not nearly as strong as what you get from the vaccine, especially with the Delta variant, which is the hardiest and most contagious variant we’ve seen to date. We need all the protection that we can get. That’s why the vaccines are so effective.”
Data Analysis Claims Unvaccinated More Prone to Reinfection
August 6, 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a case control study2,3 claiming that unvaccinated people are “more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus.”
The study used data reported to Kentucky’s National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) to assess SARS-CoV-2 reinfection rates in Kentucky during May through June 2021 among those who’d had confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection between March and December 2020.
The NEDSS data were then imported into a REDCap database that tracks new COVID-19 cases. A case-patient was defined as a resident with laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in 2020 and a subsequent positive test result during May 1, 2021, through June 30, 2021.
Vaccination status was determined using data from the Kentucky Immunization Registry. Patients were considered fully vaccinated if a single dose of Johnson & Johnson or a second dose of an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna) had been administered at least 14 days before reinfection. Compared to fully vaccinated residents, unvaccinated residents were 2.34 times more likely to test positive for SARS-CoV-2 reinfection.
The Obvious Flaw in CDC’s Study
The elephant in the room, however, is the absence of actual symptomatic illness. The study only looked at positive test results, and we do not know whether more vaccinated people were symptomatic than the unvaccinated, or vice versa.
As has been explained many times before, a positive test result is not the same as active infection. A person with natural immunity may be re-exposed to the virus, and traces of it may show upon testing, but their immune system has effectively killed the virus and prevented illness.
So, merely looking at positive test results is not the best way to ascertain whether the COVID jab actually provides better protection than natural immunity. And there are many reasons to suspect that it does not.
Other Shortcomings
The study authors also admit there are several other limitations to the findings, including the following:4
“First, reinfection was not confirmed through whole genome sequencing, which would be necessary to definitively prove that the reinfection was caused from a distinct virus relative to the first infection …
Second, persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated. Third, vaccine doses administered at federal or out-of-state sites are not typically entered in KYIR, so vaccination data are possibly missing for some persons in these analyses …
Fourth, although case-patients and controls were matched based on age, sex, and date of initial infection, other unknown confounders might be present. Finally, this is a retrospective study design using data from a single state during a 2-month period; therefore, these findings cannot be used to infer causation.”
It is correct that association does not equate to causation, and we’ve been repeatedly told to dismiss Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data for this very reason. Perhaps the same standard should be applied to this CDC investigation, as it tells us very little about the actual risk associated with reinfection.
For all we know, those with natural immunity tested positive for reinfection but had no symptoms, while vaccinated people tested positive and were actually ill. Which, in that case, would be the preferable outcome?
Hospitalization and Mortality Rates Are a Better Gauge
A far better gauge of how well the COVID jabs are working would be serious infection, hospitalization and death rates, and when we look at those, a different picture emerges.
In Israel, where vaccine uptake has been very high due to restrictions on freedom for those who don’t comply,5 data show those who have received the COVID jab are 6.72 times more likely to get infected than people who have recovered from natural infection.6,7,8
That too refers to test results, so let’s look at hospitalization rates instead. Here, we find a majority of serious cases and deaths are in fact occurring among those injected with two doses.
The following is a screenshot of graphs posted on Twitter.9 The red is unvaccinated, yellow refers to partially “vaccinated” and green fully “vaccinated” with two doses. The charts speak for themselves.
Do not be deceived by claims that unvaccinated patients make up 99% of COVID-19 deaths and 95% of COVID-related hospitalizations in the United States.10
These statistics were manufactured by looking at hospitalization and mortality data from January through June 2021 — a time frame when COVID jab rates were low. January 1, 2021, only 0.5% of the U.S. population had received a COVID shot so, clearly, unvaccinated made up the bulk of COVID-related hospitalizations last winter. By mid-April, an estimated 31% had received one or more shots,11 and as of June 30, just 46.9% were “fully vaccinated.”12
Why COVID Shot Cannot End COVID Outbreaks
Overall, it doesn’t appear as though COVID-19 gene modification injections have the ability to effectively eliminate COVID-19 outbreaks, and this makes sense, seeing how it’s mathematically impossible for them to do so. Since the absolute risk that needs to be overcome is lower than the absolute risk reduction these injections can provide, mass vaccination simply cannot have a favorable impact, even with a vaccination rate of 100%.
The four available COVID shots in the U.S. provide an absolute risk reduction between just 0.7% and 1.3%.13,14 (Efficacy rates of 67% to 95% all refer to the relative risk reduction.) Meanwhile, the noninstitutionalized infection fatality ratio across age groups is a mere 0.26%.15
Since the absolute risk that needs to be overcome is lower than the absolute risk reduction these injections can provide, mass vaccination simply cannot have a favorable impact, even with a vaccination rate of 100%.
Don’t believe it? There’s proof. July 14, 2021, BBC News reported16 there’d been an outbreak on the British Defense aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. Despite the entire crew being fully injected, 100 crew members tested positive. (It’s unclear whether any of them actually had symptoms.)
The recent outbreak onboard a Carnival cruise line ship is another example. All crew and passengers had presented proof of being jabbed, yet that didn’t prevent an outbreak from taking place.17
The reason is very simple. Just as we have been telling you from the beginning, the shot does not prevent you from getting infected with the virus or spreading it around. “Vaccinated” individuals have actually been shown to be just as infectious as unvaccinated people. Even if they have fewer or milder symptoms, their viral load is just as great when infected, according to the CDC.18
There’s No Control Group to Compare Against Anymore
For some reason, government leaders and health officials want a needle in every arm, and they don’t care what the side effects of the shots might be. This is evident by the fact that we now have tens of thousands of reported deaths (according to one whistleblower, 45,000 deaths have occurred within three days of injection19,20) and well over half a million injury reports following COVID “vaccination,”21 yet no action is taken to slow down or halt the campaign.
Historically, mass vaccination campaigns have been halted and drugs withdrawn after 25 to 50 deaths (depending on the product). We’re so far past that now, one wonders if there actually is a threshold at which authorities will take action to protect the public from unnecessary medical injury and death.
VAERS is tricky to maneuver, so the easiest way to get a glimpse into the current status is to go to OpenVAERS.com, where you get a simple summary breakdown of current COVID-related reports.
Equally telling is the fact that all control groups have been eliminated from the still-ongoing injection trials,22 with full support from a World Health Organization Expert Working Group23 so, in the end, we’ll have no way of really evaluating side effects.
This is the perfect way to hide the truth about these shots, and it violates the very basics of what a safety trial has always been required to have. You simply must incorporate a control group to compare the effects of the drug against in the long term, otherwise you will have no clue as to what complications have arisen.
Safety evaluations have also been intentionally undermined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which chose not to require vaccine makers to implement robust post-injection data collection and follow-up on the general public.
On top of that, the trials also do not appear to have oversight boards, which is standard practice for all human clinical trials. There’s no Data Safety Monitoring Board, no Clinical Event Committee and no Clinical Ethics Committee. How could this be?
If vaccine makers simply forgot to follow standard practices, it would mean we’re dealing with a truly staggering level of incompetence, as all COVID jab developers have made the same mistake. Which might be worse in this case? Intentional negligence or unintentional incompetence?
I’ve spent most of the summer sailing around the Greek Isles and reading up on the Spartans. Why the Spartans? Well, both of my mother’s parents were Spartans, and their parents and grandparents also; in fact the line goes back a very long way. Our house in Sparta I visited 25 years ago, but it was closed, like many museums tend to be in Greece when the temperature rises. (Everyone heads for the beach.) I think it was my grandfather who left it to the state, and it’s a beautiful museum right in the heart of Sparta.
When the Italians invaded Greece on Oct. 28, 1940, four of my mother’s brothers immediately volunteered for frontline duty. Their father had spent years as a cavalry officer in the Balkan wars, had been repeatedly wounded but lived to a ripe old age. I remember him suffering from old wounds but never, ever complaining. That was then, but this is now. Now is “We are incredibly proud of her and inspired by her actions and leadership.” This was issued by Visa, the sponsor of Simone Biles, after she threw in the towel and pulled out of several Olympic events. The Spartans might have come up with a rather different analysis. “Those who cancel me were canceled long ago by history and common sense.”
Sports people outing themselves as suffering from mental health problems is turning from a trickle into a steady flow, and criticizing them might lead to cancellation, something I welcome in view of the fact that those who cancel me were canceled long ago by history and common sense. But before I go on about the Spartans and athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles, who are now considered by the media to be superheroes for quitting, a word about what the average American who does not adhere to the lefty-trendy New York Times–Washington Post–CNN garbage thinks: Kneeling, gesturing, and turning their backs on the flag is seen as moronic, self-indulgent, and a kick in the teeth for those whose loved ones died defending that very flag. The average American does not want to see American athletes who hate America represent Uncle Sam. But try telling that to the flimflam men who run the media and professional sports. Politics are run by sound bites and focus groups, as are sports. Advertisers developed sound bite techniques about everything and anything: “You wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.”
There was no yellow to wonder about 2,500 years before because there were no yellowbellies among the 300 Spartans who faced 100,000 to 300,000 Persians in Thermopylae in 480 BC. That summer, when King Leonidas led out his tiny army of 300 to fight against the Persian invasion, none of them could have imagined that some 2,500 years later people around the globe would be writing books and making movies about them. That summer they felt they were merely doing their duty. Spartan mothers simply told their departing sons to either bring their shields with them or be lying on them. (I tan I epi tas.) “Black women backing out is powerful,” texted an American politician after Biles dropped out.
The Persian kingdom was so large at the time that Herodotus described it as stretching from sunrise to sunset, and legend had it that Xerxes’ army was 3 million strong. The ancient historian Taki has it as 300,000 to half a million, but the 300 Spartans were hardly daunted by the numbers. When King Xerxes was informed of the disparity, he offered the Spartans free passage back home. They refused. Then he demanded they at least put down their arms. “Molon labe,” came the answer, “come and get them.” Finally he threatened that there were so many archers in his army that their arrows would darken the sky. “Good,” came the answer, “we like to fight in the shade.”
When Xerxes sent spies to see what the Spartans were doing he was stunned to learn some were wrestling, others were grooming and combing their long hair. The confidence the Spartans showed was not as foolhardy as it seemed. The mountain pass at Thermopylae was a natural bottleneck where the numerical strength of the Persians was negated. The narrowest part was 150 feet wide. The fighting began and it was constant and relentless. A repeated maneuver whereby the Spartans would turn their backs feigning flight, then reform their ranks and cut down their pursuers, worked time and again. After two days of nonstop combat the Spartans were almost at full strength whereas the Persians had lost thousands. Then came Ephialtes, the modern name in Greek for a nightmare. Ephialtes was a local who knew of a secret path behind the Spartan line and sold it to Xerxes. Although his troops begged Leonidas to leave and fight another day, he chose to die with them. Glory is everlasting, he said.
After three days, the remaining Spartans headed by their king emerged and took the fight to the Persians. Herodotus describes the Spartans as frenzied, and they achieved a glorious death. Even unarmed, the Spartans fought on with bare hands and the Persians chose to kill them with arrows from afar. Twenty thousand Persians died, according to Herodotus. A simple monument celebrates their sacrifice: “Passerby, tell the Greeks that here we lie having done our duty.” Perhaps the purple-and-green-haired black lesbian Raven Saunders who demonstrated while receiving her silver medal should read up on the Spartans. But then, better not.
Consider the “precautionary principle,” the admonition that nothing should be allowed unless it’s proven to be totally safe. Now think of where mankind would be today had our ancestors had adopted this principle. The human race would be considerably smaller. Has it ever occurred to its advocates that the precautionary principle cannot even pass its own test?
Kudos to Glenn Greenwald, a rare leftist voice of sanity on so many issues, for opening his recent article this way:
In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.
He goes on to write that the “quickest and most guaranteed way to save hundreds of thousands of lives with policy changes would be to ban the use of automobiles, or severely restrict their usage to those authorized by the state on the ground of essential need (e.g., ambulances or food-delivery vehicles), or at least lower the nationwide speed limit to 25 mph.” (Watch the video version.)
But no one advocates any of those restrictions, and anyone who did would be dismissed as a fringe character. But why, considering how many lives would surely be saved (1.3 million worldwide)? It’s not because opponents don’t care about human life; it’s because people understand that the costs in so many ways would be far worse the benefits:
It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days). So foundational is the use of this cost-benefit analysis that it is embraced and touted by everyone from right-wing economists to the left-wing European environmental policy group CIVITAS….
Exactly so. Once you put safety not just first but above everything else you’re able to come up with the most insane proposals for reshaping society. Heaven help us from those who are concerned only about safety.
Risk is integral to life, social life included. As Thomas Sowell puts it, there are no solutions, only trade-offs–you can’t do only one thing. So each of us does cost-benefit analyses all the time in everyday life. As individuals we could be completely protected from other people simply by living as hermits. But few choose to do so for entirely understandable reasons. Instead we live among others, taking reasonable precautions. Indeed, some of the most admired places to live are the most densely populated places on earth. We accept the costs because the benefits dwarf them–so much so that we don’t normally have to explain it to other people.
But some people forget to apply this common sense in particular matters. Greenwald’s target is draconian COVID-19 policy: “It is now extremely common in Western democracies for large factions of citizens to demand that any measures undertaken to prevent COVID deaths are vital, regardless of the costs imposed by those policies.” Yet, he continues, “It is impossible to overstate the costs imposed on children of all ages from the sustained, enduring and severe disruptions to their lives justified in the name of COVID.
“However, “The latest CDC data reveals that the grand total of children under 18 who have died in the U.S. from COVID since the start of the pandemic sixteen months ago is 361 — in a country of 330 million people, including 74.2 million people under 18.”
Children, of course, are not the only ones who have suffered from lockdowns and lesser restrictions on their activities.
Unfortunately, opponents of these blunt-instrument, liberty-violating approaches, such as the authors and signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, are smeared, if not as uncaring sociopaths, then as blind ideologues or sell-outs.
Greenwald also properly see a class conflict in how the COVID policy has affected people:
The richer you are, the less likely you are to be affected by these harms from COVID restrictions. Wealth allows people to leave their homes, hire private tutors, temporarily live in the countryside or mountains, or enjoy outdoor space at home. It is the poor and the economically deprived who bear the worst of these deprivations, which — along with not having children at all — may be one reason they are assigned little to no weight in mainstream discourse.
He emphasizes that “this is not an argument in favor of or against any particular policy undertaken in the name of fighting COVID. What it is, instead, is an attempt to highlight the pervasive and deeply misguided refusal to assign any costs to the harms caused by anti-COVID policies themselves.”
Consider the “precautionary principle,” the admonition that nothing should be allowed unless it’s proven to be totally safe. Now think of where mankind would be today had our ancestors had adopted this principle. The human race would be considerably smaller. Has it ever occurred to its advocates that the precautionary principle cannot even pass its own test?
COVID is only the latest example of how the obsession with safety can be hazardous to our health. It is by no means the only one. The other most prominent case relates to fossil fuels and climate change. As I discussed recently, if the economic way of thinking–that is, the cost-benefit trade-off approach–informed the discussion of the environment and our place in it, that discussion would look very different. Why? Because people would realize that the elimination or radical reduction of fossil-fuel use worldwide literally would shorten billions of lives, and make the rest of them miserable. Even a small benefit from oil, gas, and coal would outweigh that cost. But in fact the benefits are immense.
The new analysis relies on the database of Maccabi Healthcare Services, which enrolls about 2.5 million Israelis. The study, led by Tal Patalon and Sivan Gazit at KSM, the system’s research and innovation arm, found in twoanalyses that people who were vaccinated in January and February were, in June, July, and the first half of August, six to 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people who were previously infected with the coronavirus. In one analysis, comparing more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of President Biden’s COVID advisors have been proven wrong about “the science” of COVID vaccines yet again. After telling Americans that vaccines offer better protection than natural infection, a new study out of Israel suggests the opposite is true: natural infection offers a much better shield against the delta variant than vaccines.
The study was described by Bloomberg as “the largest real-world analysis comparing natural immunity – gained from an earlier infection – to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use.” A few days ago, we noted how remarkable it was that the mainstream press was finally giving voice to scientists to criticize President Biden’s push to start doling out booster jabs. Well, this study further questions the credibility of relying on vaccines, given that the study showed that the vaccinated were ultimately 13x as likely to be infected as those who were infected previously, and 27x more likely to be symptomatic.
Alex Berenson, a science journalist who has repeatedly questioned the efficacy of vaccines and masks at preventing COVID, touted the study as enough to “end any debate over vaccines v natural immunity.”
1/ Wow. New Israeli preprint shows natural immunity to #SARSCoV2 is FAR superior to the artificial kind – vaccinated people were 13x as likely to be infected and 27x to have symptomatic infections as a matched cohort that was previously infected. And this is with Delta dominant. pic.twitter.com/hhD9h0vyMS — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) August 25, 2021
2/ The paper also shows that offering previously infected people one dose slightly reduced their infection risk (though not enough to outweigh side effects, I would argue). Along with the other emerging data, this paper should end any debate over vaccines v natural immunity… — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) August 25, 2021
The new analysis relies on the database of Maccabi Healthcare Services, which enrolls about 2.5 million Israelis. The study, led by Tal Patalon and Sivan Gazit at KSM, the system’s research and innovation arm, found in two analyses that people who were vaccinated in January and February were, in June, July, and the first half of August, six to 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people who were previously infected with the coronavirus. In one analysis, comparing more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher.
This time, the data leave little doubt that natural infection truly is the better option for protection against the delta variant, despite the fact that the US won’t acknowledge the already infected as having antibodies protecting them from the virus.
As the first country to achieve widepsread coverage by the vaccine, Israel is now in an unthinkable situation: daily case numbers have reached new record levels as the delta variant penetrates the vaccines’ protection like a hot knife slicing through butter.
At the very least, the results of the study are good news for patients who have already successfully battled COVID but show the challenge of relying exclusively on immunizations to move past the pandemic.
“This analysis demonstrated that natural immunity affords longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization due to the delta variant,” the researchers said.
Unfortunately, the study also showed that any protection is time-limited. Protection offered by natural infection wanes over time, just like the protection afforded by vaccines: The risk of a vaccine-breakthrough delta case was 13x higher than the risk of developing a second infection when the original illness occurred during January or February 2021. That’s significantly more than the risk for people who were ill earlier in the outbreak.
What’s more, giving a single shot of the vaccine to those who had been previously infected also appeared to boost their protection. Still, the data don’t tell us anything about the long-term benefits of booster doses.
This latest data showing the vaccines don’t offer anywhere near the 90%+ protection that was originally advertised by the FDA after the emergency authorization. Other studies are finding harmful side effects caused by the mRNA jabs are also more prevalent than previously believed.
MELBOURNE—As Australia continues to brutally enforce a total lockdown on their own citizens, the increasingly desperate population has reached out to the Taliban and begged them to come and liberate their country.
“If only those brave mujahadin fighters could ride in on their American tanks and Humvees, armed with American weapons, and liberate us all,” said local woman Charlotte Menda. “I mean, they aren’t perfect, but at least people can go shopping and walk their dog under Taliban rule. Anything would be better than this, right?”
According to sources in the country, Australians have been suffering under creeping totalitarian rule for years, and COVID only intensified the brutality and cruelty of the regime in the last year. In spite of this, the suffering of Australia has received little attention on the international stage.
“Australia has a proud tradition of being a prison colony,” said Prime Minister Scott Morrison while eating gourmet seafood in a deserted restaurant. “I’m proud to be returning our country back to her roots.”
Australians then chose a representative to fly to Kabul and ask the Taliban army to overthrow their tyrannical government and usher in an age of slightly less tyranny.
The Taliban are reportedly considering the request, and have promised a decision next month after they have finished embarrassing America.
by Tyler Durden
