Just Because It Is Legal Doesn’t Mean It Is Good

On Saturday, The Epoch Times posted an article about one of the problems with legalizing marijuana.

The article reports:

Cases of cannabis poisoning increased after legalization and decriminalization of the drug, according to a new meta-analysis published in the journal, Addiction.

The combined results of thirty studies—which focused on legalization and decriminalization in the United States and Canada—estimate a more than three-fold increased risk of poisoning after it was legalized. Studies specific to children revealed an even higher number with episodes increasing almost four and half times the rate prior to the drug being legal.

…There’s also the possibility that changing the laws added an element of confusion to the public, Cairns continued. Consumers might assume that if marijuana is legal, it must mean the drug is safe, she said. However, that is far from true.

“Increased availability and use of edibles (gummies and chocolates, for example) appears to be an important driver of the increase in poisonings, particularly among children,” said Cairns. “Edible cannabis has a higher risk of poisoning because people tend to consume larger quantities, and the effects of cannabis take longer to show up when ingested than they do when smoked. This is concerning because edibles are especially attractive to children.”

Cannabis poisoning sets in when smokers inhale too much of the drug too quickly. It also occurs when consumers feast on drug-infused edibles with high concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns symptoms like trouble walking, sitting up or even breathing can come on quickly or slowly depending on the source, and may take hours to subside. In some instances, emergency hospitalization is required.

Cannabis is a drug, and any drug has risks. People who continually take certain pain killers for arthritis can develop stomach ulcers; certain allergy medications can cause back pain. All drugs have side effects. Legalizing marijuana simply created another way for Americans to engage in activities that can be detrimental to their health.

Our Children As Guinea Pigs

On Friday, The Gateway Pundit reported that the COVID-19 vaccine was formally added to the routine immunization schedule for both children and adolescents by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday.

There are a lot of problems with this. First of all, generally speaking, children are not at risk for serious cases of Covid-19. Secondly, the current mutations of Covid-19 bear more of a resemblance to the common cold than they do to the serious disease that arrived here two years ago. Third, this vaccine has not been around long enough for us to know the long-term effects of the vaccine. Even the short term effects can be serious. If you search for ‘sudden deaths from Covid vaccine’ on the ‘tusksearch.com’ search engine, you can find numerous articles about the phenomenon. If you search on ‘duckduckgo’, you may find a few. The fact remains that there are more questions than answers regarding the vaccine.

The article reports:

Back in October 2022,  the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which provides advice and guidance to the Director of the CDC regarding the use of vaccines for the control of vaccine-preventable diseases, voted to recommend COVID-19 to be included in the 2023 childhood immunization schedule in 15 unanimous votes.

ACIP recommended the use of COVID-19 vaccines for everyone as young as 6 months and older. The COVID-19 vaccine and other vaccines may be administered on the same day.

Once CDC approves it, our Department of Health can exercise its rule-making authority to add it to the healthcare and school schedule at any time. And now it’s official.

The recommendation to include the experimental COVID vaccine was approved by the CDC together with doctors, nurses, and pharmacists on Thursday as they are bringing the COVID emergency declaration to an end.

The article cites the CDC claim that adding the vaccine to the list of recommended vaccines does not necessarily make it mandated.

The article notes:

The CDC claimed that adding the COVID vaccine to the list of immunization schedules does not mean it will be mandatory for school entry.

The agency stated that school-entry vaccination requirements are determined by state or local jurisdictions.

“Moving Covid-19 to the recommended immunization schedule does not impact what vaccines are required for school entrance, if any,” said Nirav Shah, M.D., director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, during the 2022 ACIP meeting. “Local control matters. And we honor that the decision around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is with the state level, the county level, and at the municipal level if it exists at all.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Our children are not guinea pigs and should not be treated as such.

The CDC Censored Information On Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs)

On Saturday, Hot Air posted an article about the CDC’s censorship Defensive Gun Uses statistics.

The article reports:

Gun control activists know that Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) are a thorn on their side because they make selling gun control harder. Therefore, in what can be uncharitably described as a conspiracy against the civil rights of The People, they mounted a months-long pressure campaign, using influence from a Democrat Senator and the White House, to privately meet with CDC officials to get higher-end DGU statistics removed from the CDC website.

Beth Reimels, Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said in one email to the three advocates on December 10th. “We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised.”

While conspiring with gun control activists behind closed doors, the CDC at the same time did not bother reaching out to the researcher whose higher-end DGU estimates were yanked from the CDC website:

Kleck, Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, stood by his research. He said the CDC did not reach out to him for his perspective before making the change. He argued the removal of the reference to his estimate was “blatant censorship” and said it was evidence of the politicization of the agency.

The article also notes the lack of media coverage of the censoring of the statistics:

What the CDC did was indeed censorship, but there’s more censorship at play here. And that’s the mainstream media’s complete and total blackout of this story. I have been following the news just about daily to see who does and doesn’t cover this story. So far, to the best of my knowledge, the only coverage from a large media organization has come from Fox News, who reported on the collusion between the CDC and gun control activists, and then followed up with another story on some Republicans in Congress demanding that the CDC reinstate the statistics. Other than these stories, there’s minor coverage at The Daily Caller, Real Clear Politics, and the New York Post which reports it as the “grumbling” of a researcher.

It seems as if some of our government agencies are not being honest about sharing important information with their fellow Americans.

An Interesting Change In Attitude From The CDC

On Saturday, The Patriot Post reported that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has evidently discovered natural immunity to Covid-19.

The article reports:

The CDC dropped quarantine recommendations for exposure, as well as social distancing at six feet. Significantly for schools, the CDC ended recommendations known as “test to stay” — the practice that students exposed to COVID should keep testing negative in order to remain at school instead of quarantining.

But the change that really jumped out to us was that there’s no longer any distinction between vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Read that again.

The novel vaccine was an exciting achievement and it brought hope of ending the pandemic. That did not, of course, actually happen. First, it wasn’t as effective at preventing infection or transmission as advertised. Second, the Left not only wholeheartedly leapt on the bandwagon but lectured, harassed, condemned, mandated, censored, and fired anyone who disagreed. It was an appalling descent into tyranny capped by Joe Biden’s mandates and firings.

Now the CDC tells us there’s no difference? Oops, we were wrong all along, the CDC now says. Where do the unvaccinated folks who lost their jobs go for recompense? Where do kids go to get those lost years of education? Where do all of us go to get back the money and sanity lost to economic devastation caused by shutdowns and government-induced inflation?

“We know that COVID-19 is here to stay,” said CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti Thursday. The new guidelines she authored are possible because “high levels of population immunity due to vaccination and previous infection, and the many tools that we have available to protect people from severe illness and death, have put us in a different place” [emphasis added].

She ought to be censored on social media for such dangerous right-wing misinformation.

The Associated Press reports, “An estimated 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity, either from being vaccinated or infected” [emphasis added].

Does that mean that everyone who is shadow-banned on Facebook (my right wing granny group for instance) can now be unshadow-banned? I doubt it. Does that mean that those of us who have had Covid and not had the shot are now no longer excluded from some employment opportunities? Does that mean that sanity will return to our country? (I doubt it.)

 

Searching For The Truth

On Saturday, Townhall posted an article about Americans and the Covid vaccine.

The article reports:

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, UCLA Geffen School of Medicine Doctor Joseph Lapado and Yale School of Public Health Doctor Harvey Risch are sounding the alarm that there may be serious underestimated risks involved with the side effects of the Wuhan Coronavirus vaccine.

This comes as an independent pollster found that a significant number of Americans regret receiving the vaccine in the first place. 

10 percent of those vaccinated said they wish they hadn’t done so, while 15 percent of adults said they have been diagnosed with a new condition by a medical practitioner weeks or months after the first dose. 

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) authorized the poll two years after the first vaccine was rolled out. 

“The fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports more than 232 million Americans ages 18–65 have taken at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, and 15 percent of those surveyed report a newly diagnosed condition is concerning and needs further study,” Laura Bono, CHD’s executive director said. 

The article lists some of the medical problems encountered by those who received the vaccine– blood clots, disrupted menstrual cycles, heart attacks, strokes, lung clots and liver damage. About 10 percent of the people who experienced these problems said that the problems were severe.

The article concludes:

The Epoch Times reported that in May, hospitals saw an increase in cases of heart inflammation among patients. They also noted that the media has given more attention to cases of blood clots despite myocarditis being more common. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci also admitted that vaccine caused menstrual irregularities, saying that the issue is “temporary” and that they “need to study it more.”

I wish they had studied it more before they demanded that everyone take the shot or lose their job.

Lied To Again

On Wednesday, The Epoch Times posted an article about the connection between the Covid-19 vaccines and heart inflammation.

The article reports:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has claimed that there was no known association between heart inflammation and COVID-19 vaccines as late as October 2021.

CDC officials made the claim, which is false, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for reports from a CDC team that is focused on analyzing the risk of post-vaccination myocarditis and pericarditis, two forms of heart inflammation. Both began to be detected at higher-than-expected rates after COVID-19 vaccination in the spring of 2021.

The team focuses on studying data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a passive surveillance system co-run by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The date range for the search was April 2, 2021, to Oct. 2, 2021.

“The National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases performed a search of our records that failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request,” Roger Andoh, a CDC records officer, told The Epoch Times. The center is part of the CDC.

No abstractions or reports were available because “an association between myocarditis and mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was not known at that time,” Andoh added.

Reports of heart inflammation after COVID-19 vaccination were first made public in April 2021 by the U.S. military, which detected the issue along with Israeli authorities well before the CDC.

While Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, said that month that the agency had looked for a safety signal in its data and found none, by the end of June CDC researchers were saying that the available data “suggest an association with immunization,” and in August described (pdf) the issue as a “harm” from vaccination.

The claim that the link wasn’t known “is provably false,” Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, told The Epoch Times via email. “Either the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing at CDC, or federal health officials are disseminating misinformation about what they knew about myocarditis following mRNA COVID vaccines and when they knew it.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that the FOIA response “raises even more questions about the agency’s honesty, transparency, and use, or lack thereof, of its safety surveillance systems, such as VAERS, to detect COVID-19 vaccine adverse events.”

I do not claim to understand the technical aspect of this article. However, I do believe that the CDC and vaccine manufacturers have not been honest about the long-term effects of the Covid vaccines. I am not sure that they understand the long-term effects of the vaccines. I do think the time has come to do away with vaccine mandates (the vaccine is still supposedly experimental and only to be authorized in a state of emergency) and get on with our lives.

Suspicions Confirmed

On Sunday, Red State posted an article about Silent Invasion, a book by Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator for President Trump. It’s a very interesting article that includes a few excerpts from the book that confirm what most of us already suspected.

The article notes:

If you read Birx’s bio, it is obvious that she was Fauci’s creature. She hitched her wagon to his star. He mentored her. The odds of her acting independently, and the odds of Fauci letting a molecule of power slip from his grasp, are slim. I think the nation would be unwise to arbitrarily absolve Fauci of his role in the COVID fiasco before a jury has returned a verdict.

Birx deliberately deceived and lied to President Trump and his advisers.

Shocking, right? The idea that a privileged and entitled liberal with a terminal case of god syndrome would deceive people to get her way, I mean, smack my ass and call me Sally; what will happen next?

This is from Jeffrey Tucker’s review of the Birx book.

Birx admits that she was a major part of the reason, due to her sneaky alternation of weekly reports to the states.

After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit.

Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.

As another example, once Scott Atlas came to the rescue in August to introduce some good sense into this wacky world, he worked with others to dial back the CDC’s fanatical attachment to universal and constant testing. Atlas knew that “track, trace, and isolate” was both a fantasy and a massive invasion of people’s liberties that would yield no positive public-health outcome. He put together a new recommendation that was only for those who were sick to test – just as one might expect in normal life.

After a week-long media frenzy, the regulations flipped in the other direction.

Birx reveals that it was her doing:

This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield…. Less than a week later, Bob [Redfield] and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House.

Keep in mind that these are her words. Lying to the American people and cheating were okay if it met her goals. That is a disgrace.

Can We Just Admit We Don’t Have The Answer Yet?

On Friday, The Epoch Times posted an article about the effectiveness of the Covid-19 booster shots.

The article reports:

The effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccine booster doses dropped well under 50 percent after four months against subvariants of the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a new study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines provided just 51 percent protection against emergency department visits, urgent care encounters, and hospitalizations related to COVID-19 during the time BA.2 and BA.2.12.1, subvariants of the Omicron virus variant, were predominant in the United States, CDC researchers found.

Both vaccines are administered in two-dose primary series.

After 150-plus days, the effectiveness dropped to just 12 percent.

A first booster upped the protection to 56 percent, but the effectiveness went down to 26 percent after four months, according to the study, which drew numbers from a network of hospitals funded by the CDC across 10 states called the VISION Network.

The subvariant was predominant between late March and mid-June.

The article also notes:

Underlining the waning effectiveness against severe illness, the majority of patients admitted to the hospitals between December 2021 and June 2022 had received at least two doses of the vaccines.

Further, the percentage of unvaccinated patients dropped during the later period, going from 41.6 percent to 28.6 percent (hospitalized patients) and from 41.4 percent to 31 percent (emergency department and urgent care patients), researchers found.

The researchers, some of whom work for the CDC, theorized that the protection—known as natural immunity—many unvaccinated people enjoy from having had COVID-19 could be a factor in the drop in effectiveness of the vaccines, even though adults with documented prior infection were excluded from the study.

“If unvaccinated persons were more likely to have experienced recent infection, and infection-induced immunity provides some protection against re-infection, this could result in lower VE observed during the BA.2/BA.2.12.1 period,” they wrote. VE stands for vaccine effectiveness.

“Although adults with documented past SARS-CoV-2 infection were excluded, infections are likely to be significantly underascertained because of lack of testing or increased at-home testing. In addition, although time since receipt of the second or third vaccine dose was stratified by time intervals, on average the time since vaccination was longer during the BA.2/BA.2.12.1 period,” they added.

Although the medical community recommends flu shots every year, they also admit that predicting the particular variant of the flu that will be present during that flu season is something of a crap shoot. It seems that we are having the same problem with Covid-19, also a virus. I suspect coming up with a truly effective vaccine against Covid infections is probably about as likely as coming up with a vaccine for the common cold. I think we still have a lot to learn.

The Numbers Are Changing

On Friday, The Epoch Times reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19.

The article reports:

The health agency quietly made the change on its data tracker website on March 15.

“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” the CDC says on the site.

The CDC relies on states and other jurisdictions to report COVID-19 deaths and acknowledges on its website that the data is not complete.

But the statistics are often cited by doctors and others when pushing for COVID-19 vaccination, including figures who believe virtually all children should be vaccinated. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, cited the tracker’s death total in November 2021 while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5- to 11-years-old.

Before the change, the CDC listed 1,755 children as dying from COVID-19 along with approximately 851,000 others, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has been tracking the updates.

The update saw the CDC cut 416 deaths among children and over 71,000 elsewhere, arriving at a total of just under 780,000.

The article notes:

Some of the deaths listed by the CDC appear unrelated to COVID-19. For instance, several deaths have drowning as a cause of death; several others were listed as being from a gun discharge, according to an Epoch Times review of the death codes.

For now, the update on the tracker was described as “great news” by Dr. Alasdair Munro, a clinical research fellow for pediatric infectious diseases at University Hospital Southampton, given that nearly a quarter of the pediatric COVID-19 deaths had vanished.

But Munro, writing on social media, called it “slightly worrying that this data was being used widely in the US to guide or advocate for policy.”

Some people called for the CDC to issue a public apology or at least announce such updates, similar to how some lower-level agencies have made clear lowering their death counts.

At some point we have to go back to the basic principle of ‘follow the money.’ Who was invested in the companies that made the vaccines? Were any of those people involved in putting together the death-from-Covid statistics? How many people in the pharmacy industry became millionaires because of the vaccines? These are the read questions.

A Constitutional Republic Will Only Stand As Long As Its Citizens And Voters Are Able To Stay Informed

On Tuesday, The Western Journal posted an article about the lack of transparency and misinformation coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the past two years or so.

The article notes:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being called out for not sharing the vast quantities of data it had been gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some medical experts are speculating that the reason why is the fear the data will be “misinterpreted” and used as justification not to follow the agency’s guidelines regarding vaccination and other matters.

“Tell the truth, present the data,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, The New York Times reported.

…Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the CDC, told the news outlet the reason much of the data has been withheld is “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.”

Bureaucracy is another reason.

The CDC is weighed down by multiple layers of bureaucracy, including a requirement to first run information to be released through the Department Health and Human Services and the White House.

“The CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, the Times reported.

“The steps that it takes to get something like this [covid data] released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the CDC.”

The article concludes:

In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal last month, Makary (Dr. Marty Makary, a professor and researcher at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) contended that another topic the CDC has been reluctant to address is natural immunity.

“For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused,” he wrote.

“Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination,” he continued.

Makary further noted the National Institutes of Health resisted acknowledging natural immunity.

“Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99 percent of them up to nearly two years after infection,” he wrote.

Makary argued the failure of the CDC to release the data sooner meant many who had previously recovered from COVID and had better immunity than those were just vaccinated needlessly lost their jobs.

He concluded that they should be hired back.

There was a political agenda here and a monetary agenda here. The CDC is too closely tied financially to the drug companies. There was more money in vaccines than there ever was in ivermectin!

Masking Our Children

On Monday, The New York Post posted an article by Dr. Joel Zinberg, MD, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and director of public health and wellness at the Paragon Health Institute. The article deals with the benefits and costs of masking children.

The article reports:

States around the nation, including Democratic ones such as New York and California, are lifting indoor mask mandates. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refuses to budge. It continues to recommend indoor masking in communities with substantial or high transmission — essentially the entire country — a stance that is particularly exasperating and harmful in regards to schools. The agency recommends masking all students ages 2 and older.

…Two days later, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief White House medical adviser, echoed his overcautious colleague, telling CNN that ending school masking would be “risky.”

Yet, whatever rationales were previously advanced to justify school mask mandates have long since disappeared and the benefit of masking children is outweighed by the cost.

It has been known almost since the beginning of the epidemic that children were not at high risk from the coronavirus. There was no reason to mask them in the first place (particularly since the mask does not keep the virus out and children have a tendency to touch the mask).

The article continues:

Other studies primarily done before vaccine approval confirm that students are not causing transmission in schools. Staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students. The correlation between school outbreaks and COVID incidence in the community suggests that adults infected in the community pose a far greater risk to students and staff than students do.

It is no surprise that the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recommends against masks for children 12 and younger. It only recommends masks for older students and adults living in areas with high COVID community transmission.

Walensky (CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky) has repeatedly cited an Arizona study that found schools without mask mandates were 3.5 times more likely to have COVID outbreaks than schools that required masks. Yet, as David Zweig showed in the Atlantic, multiple experts agree the study was so rife with methodological problems that its conclusions are worthless.

The article concludes:

Masks always have been unrealistic for schoolkids. As the European Centre noted, children “may have a lower tolerance to wearing masks for extended periods of time, and may fail to wear them properly.”

Moreover, masks may interfere with children’s ability to recognize and interact with their peers and teachers and could stunt their development. Mask proponents often cite a study showing that children have no more difficulty reading the emotions of people wearing masks than people wearing sunglasses. But that study found children’s ability to infer emotions were more accurate with uncovered faces compared to covering with masks or sunglasses.

Besides, when do children encounter an environment where everyone is wearing sunglasses?

Earlier in the pandemic, masks may have facilitated a return to in-person learning. But now there is widespread vaccine immunity and natural immunity after recovery, particularly with the highly transmissible Omicron variant. New monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals significantly reduce the risk of severe COVID illness. And case numbers are rapidly falling. These developments, combined with the dubious evidence supporting school mask mandates, mean that the time has come for the CDC to change its guidelines.

It will take years to assess the damage masks and at-home learning have done to our children.

 

Common Sense Finally Shows Up

On Wednesday, The Daily Caller reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released a study showing that natural immunity from prior infection granted stronger levels of protection against the Delta variant of COVID-19 than vaccination alone.

The article reports:

Before Delta became dominant, individuals who had natural immunity were experiencing higher case rates than individuals who were only vaccinated, the study found, but after Delta took hold, those with natural immunity caught COVID-19 less frequently than those who were only vaccinated.

…The study examined four categories of people — unvaccinated and vaccinated who survived a previous COVID-19 infection, and unvaccinated and vaccinated who had never been infected — in California and New York between May and November 2021. The highest case rates were among those who had neither been vaccinated or previously infected. The most protection against infection and hospitalization was in those who had both been vaccinated and survived an earlier bout with the virus.

Most of the press, as usual, preached the current media view on vaccines:

Many legacy media outlets covered the study by minimizing the finding that natural immunity outperformed vaccines and emphasizing that a combination of both provided the best protection. Headlines from the New York Times, Associated Press, CNN and others claimed that vaccination offers the “best” or “safest” protection according to the study.

In a press call Wednesday, the CDC’s Dr. Benjamin Silk, an epidemiologist that co-authored the study, did not elaborate on the increased protection natural immunity provides and repeated the administration line that every American should get vaccinated.

There are still many of us out here who wonder why we should take a vaccine that has not been in existence or been tested for the number of years that vaccines are usually tested. We have no idea what the long-term effects of this vaccine are because it hasn’t been in existence very long.

 

Concerning Numbers

On Wednesday WND posted an article about a study of the number of deaths caused by the Covid vaccine.

The article reports:

The CDC’s latest count of deaths attributed to COVID-19 vaccines is nearly 20,000, but a study by researchers at Columbia University estimates the actual number is 20 times higher.

The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, or VAERS, reports 19,886 deaths, 102,857 hospitalizations and a total of 946,461 adverse events due to COVID-19 vaccines through Dec. 3.

The article notes:

The Columbia researchers method of estimating underreporting was to use the regional variation in vaccination rates to predict all-cause mortality and non-COVID deaths in subsequent time periods, based on two independent, publicly available datasets from the U.S. and Europe.

They found that more than six weeks after injection, vaccination had a negative correlation with mortality. But within five weeks of injection, vaccination predicted all-cause mortality in nearly every age group, with an “age-related temporal pattern consistent with the U.S. vaccine rollout.”

Comparing the study’s estimated vaccine fatality rate with the CDC-reported rate, the researchers concluded VAERS deaths are underreported by a factor of 20, which is “consistent with known VAERS under-ascertainment bias.”

The article notes the impact of some of the research and the reluctance of Pfizer to release all of the information about the vaccine and some of the problems caused by it:

Files obtained from the Food and Drug Administration in November through a Freedom of Information lawsuit recorded 158,893 adverse events from the Pfizer vaccine in the first two and a half months of distribution, including 25,957 incidents of “nervous system disorders.”

The lawsuit was filed by a group called Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, comprised of more than 30 professors and scientists from universities including Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Brown. As WND reported, in court papers filed in December, the FDA proposed that it be given 55 years to release all 329,000 pages of documents related to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine requested by the group. The FDA has now modified that request, asking a judge for a delay of 75 years.

I am beginning to wonder how many of our government health officials own stock in the companies that are manufacturing the vaccines.

Following The Science?

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made to the Health and Human Services Department.

The article includes the response from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

So the letter states that the CDC has no information on whether people who have recovered from Covid have become infected again or have transmitted the disease to other people. It seems to me that in the world of looming vaccine mandates, that might be important information.

The article links to a substack article which states the following:

You would assume that if the CDC was going to crush the civil and individual rights of those with natural immunity by having them expelled from school, fired from their jobs, separated from the military, and worse, the CDC would have proof of at least one instance of an unvaccinated, naturally immune individual transmitting the COVID-19 virus to another individual.  If you thought this, you would be wrong.

My firm, on behalf of ICAN, asked the CDC for precisely this proof (see below).  ICAN wanted to see proof of any instance in which someone who previously had COVID-19 became reinfected with and transmitted the virus to someone else.  The CDC’s incredible response is that it does not have a single document reflecting that this has ever occurred.  Not one.  (See below.)

In contrast, there are endless documents reflecting cases of vaccinated individuals becoming infected with and transmitting the virus to others.  Such as this study.  And this study.  And this study.  And this study.  It goes on and on…

But it gets worse.  The CDC’s excuse for not having a shred of evidence of the naturally immune transmitting the virus is that “this information is not collected.”  What?!  No proof!  But yet the CDC is actively crushing the rights of millions of naturally immune individuals in this country if they do not get the vaccine on the assumption they can transmit the virus.   But despite clear proof the vaccinated spread the virus, the CDC lifts restrictions on the vaccinated?!  That is dystopian.   

At some point, Americans are going to have to realize that this is not about the vaccine or the virus and begin to reclaim their freedom.

The Next Step

On September 30, The Western Journal posted a commentary on the next overreach planned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They have already attempted to interject themselves between landlords and renters, doctors and patients, employers and employees, and now they are going after gun owners.

The commentary notes:

Walensky (CDC Director Rochelle Walensky) now has our Second Amendment rights in her crosshairs. She will tackle gun violence in America, which she considers to be an epidemic.

The CDC director signaled her intentions during a late August interview with CNN, when she labeled gun violence a “serious public health threat.”

“Something has to be done about this,” she told CNN. “Now is the time — it’s pedal to the metal time.”

“The scope of the problem is just bigger than we’re even hearing about, and when your heart wrenches every day you turn on the news, you’re only hearing the tip of the iceberg,” Walensky said. “We haven’t spent the time, energy, and frankly the resources to understand this problem because it’s been so divided.”

On Wednesday, NPR reported that “the CDC is now hoping to get a fuller picture of the data and long-neglected details on the impact of daily gun violence. The CDC and the National Institutes of Health, for the first time in nearly a quarter-century, are funding new research on guns to help reduce firearm-related injuries, deaths, crime and suicides.”

“Among several other gun research projects, the CDC is now providing funding to 10 state health departments so they can start collecting data in near-real time on emergency room nonfatal firearm injuries. This will allow doctors and epidemiologists to potentially identify trends and craft swift interventions, as they have done to contain the coronavirus pandemic and other national health emergencies.”

We should all worry when the government begins to collect data. It rarely leads to good things. Rather than looking at the injuries, maybe they should look at the places that have the highest amount of gun violence and note that gun control is part of the problem, not the solution.

The commentary concludes:

The last eight months have shown us that the Democrats seek total control over America. Our right to bear arms has never been more essential to our freedom.

Americans will never give up their guns. The explosion in gun sales over the past several years shows that Americans are cognizant of our government’s slow drift into socialism.

History has proven what happens when citizens surrender their guns to a nefarious ruling class.

In the 1990s, Australians handed over their guns to the government.

Look how well that’s worked out for them.

Our Constitution and Bill of Rights are the only things standing between us and tyranny. We need to work hard to protect both.

A New Level Of Federal Government Overreach

Yesterday The Epoch Times reported that the Biden administration is threatening legal action against governors who ban school mask mandates.

The article reports:

Governors who ban school mask mandates could face legal action from the federal government, President Joe Biden warned on Aug. 18.

Biden stated that he was directing Education Secretary Miguel Cardona “to take additional steps to protect our children.”

“This includes using his oversight authority and legal action, if appropriate, against governors trying to block and intimidate local school officials and educators,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “We’re not going to sit by as governors try to block and intimidate educators protecting our children.”

As an example, he said the federal government may use money from the American Rescue Plan to pay an educator who has their salary cut by a governor.

“I am going to say a lot more about children in schools next week that as we head into the school year remember this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, says masks are critical, especially for those not yet vaccinated, like our children under the age of 12,” Biden said. “So let’s put politics aside. Let’s follow the educators and scientists, who know a lot more about how to teach our children and keep them safe than any politician. This administration is always going to take the side of our children.”

Much of the science does not support either masks or vaccinations for children. Also, the federal government constitutionally has no role in education–that is up to the states. (However, we have ignored that for so long, I don’t know if we can get control back to the states.)

The article concludes:

After Biden’s threat, Christina Pushaw, press secretary for DeSantis, told The Epoch Times via email that “the forced-maskers often criticize Governor DeSantis for overruling ‘local control’ to protect parents’ freedom to make health and education decisions for their own children.”

“I doubt they will apply the same principle to this blatant federal overreach,” she said. “CDC bureaucrats and their politicized ‘guidance’—which does not have the force of law—shouldn’t interfere with parents’ rights, which are protected under Florida law. Governor DeSantis will continue to stand up for Florida families and defend our rights, no matter what the Biden administration attempts to do.”

This threat is aimed at Governor DeSantis. The Democrats are desperately looking for a political victory somewhere and are throwing mud against any wall they can find. Governor DeSantis will probably have a place on the Republican presidential ticket in 2024, and the Democrats would like to remove him from the picture before then. They have done similar things with candidates in the past and will continue until people wake up to what they are doing.

The Unmasking Of America

The Federalist posted an article today about the new mask guidelines from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The article lists five things wrong with President Biden’s new policy on mask wearing.

The article notes:

1. Biden Has Been Vaccinated For Months and Still Wears a Mask

2. His Tone Is Maddeningly Paternalist

3. His Simplistic Ultimatum Is Impossible to Enforce

4. Does This Mean Kids Too?

5. On The Bright Side, Does This Mean Masks Exempt You From Vaccine Passports?

It is becoming very obvious that once the government seizes any sort of power they are very reluctant to let go of that power. I would like to mention that the vaccine has not actually been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is approved under emergency use authorization.

The article also notes:

Back in March, the Biden White House was already working with corporations to develop a “vaccine passport” system.

Don’t let the president’s tweet fool you into thinking even a mask will save you from soon having to show proof of vaccination to fly, attend mass gatherings, and more. If your freedoms as an American citizen aren’t enough to protect from this kind of government micromanagement, a flimsy paper mask won’t do much.

At some point, Americans are going to have to reclaim their rights if they choose to remain a free country. My hope is that the reclaiming will be done through the election process.

 

So Why Is This Required?

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article about a statement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The article reports:

On Tuesday Tucker Carlson opened his show by questioning the CDC rules and data on mask wearing and the COVID-19.

Earlier this week the CDC confirmed that mask wearing was ineffective and over 50% of US coronavirus cases were patients who were habitual mask wearers.

The article quotes a Breitbart article:

Mass communications are now controlled by a tiny number of people, all of whom have identical agendas. There is no modern Anti-Mask League, there couldn’t be a modern Anti-Mask League. Facebook and Google would shut it down the first day. The governors of Michigan and New Jersey would indict its leaders.

Dissent used to be a defining feature of American life, but no more. Now, we have mandatory consensus. Masks are good. Anyone who questions the utter goodness of masks is bad…

…So what is the science on masks? Well, as it happened, we have the latest for you tonight. And the science comes interestingly from the CDC whose Director has told you that masks were magic, more effective than vaccines.

But the numbers from the CDC suggests otherwise. A new study conducted by 11 medical institutions analyzed a group of people who tested positive for COVID during the month of July. Here’s the interesting part.

Among those who were infected, more than 70% reported they had quote, “always worn a mask” for the preceding 14 days. Another 14.4% said they had quote, “often worn a mask.” In other words, almost everyone, 85% who got the coronavirus in July was wearing a mask and they were infected anyway.

So clearly this doesn’t work the way they tell us it works. Clearly, someone has been lying to us, many people actually. How did this happen? Well, the short answer is we’re not sure how so many people got the coronavirus were wearing masks, but there are clues, clues that our leaders appear to be ignoring.

We are always hearing “Trust the science” from those who want mandatory masks. Well, this is the science. Why are we still wearing masks.

Just for the record, when Tucker Carlson posted the CDC statement that masks were ineffective, Facebook censored his post. At some point you have to wonder why the establishment is so determined to keep us masked.

 

I Can’t Figures Out If This Is Good News Or Bad News

Yesterday Townhall posted the following headline, “Oops: It Looks Like the Vast Majority of Positive COVID Results Should Have Been Negative.” It seems very likely that we have been snookered!

The article reports:

According to The New York Times, potentially 90 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 have such insignificant amounts of the virus present in their bodies that such individuals do not need to isolate nor are they candidates for contact tracing. Leading public health experts are now concerned that overtesting is responsible for misdiagnosing a huge number of people with harmless amounts of the virus in their systems.

“Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time,” warns The Times.

So, if overtesting is causing “bottlenecks” that keep us from identifying contagious people in time, what does The New York Times believe the solution should be? More testing!

The article concludes:

It looks like the CDC was right, and not The Times, when the CDC issued guidance saying not everybody and their mother should get tested for COVID-19. 

If the coronavirus has made one thing clear, it’s that so-called “scientists” and “experts” are wrong all the time. They can’t accurately forecast a virus, they tell us different things about the effectiveness of a face mask, they insist the virus can’t spread at leftwing protests, and there’s a myriad of other examples too long to document here showing us the “experts” are really just making it all up as they go along, with their political biases on display for everyone with eyes to see.

There are some serious questions currently arising as to the necessity and wisdom of locking down our economy at all, much less continuing lockdowns. It may be time to take a another look at what we have done and what we should do in the future in dealing with the coronavirus.

When Science Becomes Political

Yesterday Hot Air posted an article titled, “Here’s three examples of why public trust in the scientific community is waning.” Taken together, these examples illustrate how ridiculous some members of the ‘scientific community’ have become in their statements against President Trump and in their support of all things of the political left.

The first example:

The protests over the death of George Floyd have brought to the surface a good example of why so many in the general public no longer trust what public health professionals are saying about the coronavirus pandemic. The information being given to us is confusing and ever-changing. Now the information is being filtered through the lens of social justice activism.

…An open letter signed by 1,300 epidemiologists and public health experts says that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.” These professionals specifically say that their support of racial injustice protests does not mean they endorse other gatherings – you know, like protests about stay-at-home orders. The open letter actually says that “COVID-19 among black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy.” Wow. Take that, white people.

The second example:

Example two is one of the scientists from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). They, too, have written a letter. Scientists from the philanthropic organization funded by Zuckerberg but separate from Facebook are none too pleased that the evil Orange Man is allowed to post freely on Facebook without censorship. They long for some authoritarian action (stricter policy enforcement) to be taken against the President of the United States because he spreads “inaccurate information and incendiary language contrary to CZI’s mission to “build a healthier, just, and more inclusive future.”

The third example:

A third example comes from Dr. Fauci and the CDC. Separately they have sent messages that large protests will likely produce a spike in coronavirus cases. Fauci said Friday that protests are “the perfect set-up” for spreading COVID-19. Fauci was sure to put into his warning that the protesters have a constitutional right to do so “because the reasons for demonstrating are valid.” Thanks, Doc. Validity doesn’t override the danger to the public though, does it? Also, he mentions that tear gas and pepper spray make people cough and sneeze, thus increasing the possibility of transmitting the virus.

Somehow I seem to remember that there were a lot of people very concerned when business owners were protesting. There were some serious questions asked about whether the pandemic overrode constitutional rights. It seems as if those questions have disappeared now that the political left is protesting (rioting and looting).

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. There are a lot of details that are very interesting.

I think all of us are beginning to wonder if we can trust anyone who claims to be an expert.

Good News On Covid-19

Yesterday John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line Blog that included some good news about the coronavirus. Generally speaking it seems that a lot more people have had the virus without knowing it, and thus the death rate is much lower than originally thought. Americans are also in the early process of creating ‘herd immunity,’ which should prevent the overwhelming numbers of serious cases originally predicted.

The article includes the following graph:

As you can see, we are on the downside of the bell curve. It should be noted that the number of deaths from the coronavirus is a lagging indicator and may increase in the coming two weeks before going down.

The article reports:

…there is growing evidence that many more Americans have had COVID-19 than has generally been thought. Reuters reports that of the sailors on board the COVID-stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, 60% of those who tested positive for the virus were asymptomatic. This is a higher percentage than was previously estimated by Dr. Fauci, 25%-50%. The Reuters reporter doesn’t seem to understand that this is good news, for two reasons.

First, it means that the fatality rate for COVID-19 is lower than most have believed. I think the balance of evidence so far is that the Wuhan virus is somewhat more lethal than the usual seasonal flu, but of the same order of magnitude. It is possible, however, that it may prove to be no worse, statistically, than the average flu.

Second, it means that the U.S. is closer to achieving herd immunity than previously believed. This ABC News story is to the same effect:

The first large-scale community test of 3,300 people in Santa Clara County found that 2.5 to 4.2% of those tested were positive for antibodies — a number suggesting a far higher past infection rate than the official count.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that we are still a long way from the levels that confer herd immunity.

The article concludes:

Currently, global COVID deaths are just under 30% of the average for a seasonal flu bug, per the WHO. Those numbers are likely wrong, because China and Iran have almost certainly underreported their fatalities. If we assume that China’s true fatality number is ten times what it tells the WHO, and Iran’s is three times, then total global fatalities from COVID-19 would be 41% of an average flu season, so far.

For the U.S., according to CDC, the COVID-19 deaths to date equal 53% of the deaths from seasonal flu two yeas ago.

COVID-19 is a disease, and there nothing good to be said about diseases. But today’s news is generally positive.

One of the reasons I don’t trust the Chinese numbers of people who died from the coronavirus is an article in The Epoch Times on March 22, 2020, that reported the following:

The number of Chinese cellphone users dropped by 21 million in the past three months, Beijing authorities announced on March 19. Deaths due to the CCP virus may have contributed to the high number of account closings.

That’s an awful lot of people who suddenly decided they didn’t need their cell phones.

Good News About The Coronavirus

The Gateway Pundit is reporting today that Washington doctors successfully treated a Coronavirus patient with experimental anti-viral medication and the patient “significantly” improved in hours. That is fantastic news.

The article reports:

Dr. George Diaz, a section chief for infectious diseases at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett joined Arthel Neville on FOX News on Sunday morning to discuss the successful treatment of the center’s coronavirus patient.

Dr. George Diaz: About a week into his course he got worse developed pneumonia. At that point given the reports we had gotten out of China… At that point we elected to give him… the experimental Remdesivir, antiviral medication. And within 24 hours he improved significantly. This was quite encouraging and he improved and thereafter remained without fever and felt much better. Over the next few days he improved to where we thought he could be discharged at home under the care of the local health district.

Arthel Neville: And you said you used, I believe an experimental anti-viral medication, that you gave this patient. Can you apply this treatment to ALL people infected with the coronavirus or does it depend on the stage of their infection?

Dr. George Diaz: Yes, at this point the CDC has been working with the authorities in China and have recently opened a large clinical trial of Chinese patients looking at those with severe disease as well as those with mild to moderate disease. We are very much looking forward to the trials.

This is wonderful news. It remains to be seen if this medication will work on all cases of the virus–viruses mutate, but it is a wonderful first step.

 

This Really Should Not Be A Campaign Issue

Yesterday The Hill posted an article about Democrat campaign ads claiming that the Republicans cut funds to the Center for Disease Control and that is the reason we are not successfully fighting Ebola.

The article reports:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) launched an ad campaign on Monday blaming Republicans for cutting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC)  budget to fight diseases like Ebola.

“Republicans voted to cut CDC’s budget to fight Ebola,” the paid online ads state, citing a 2011 budget vote that included cuts to the agency’s spending. At the same time, the ads point to the most recent House GOP budget resolution and argue that “Republicans protect tax breaks for special interests.”

That is a rather serious charge. Thankfully, it is not true.

On Sunday, Politico posted an article by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal that explained that the CDC budget has not been cut–the problem is how the money going to the CDC has been spent.

The article at Politico explains:

Unfortunately, however, many of those funds have been diverted away from programs that can fight infectious diseases, and toward programs far afield from the CDC’s original purpose.

Consider the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a new series of annual mandatory appropriations created by Obamacare. Over the past five years, the CDC has received just under $3 billion in transfers from the fund. Yet only 6 percent—$180 million—of that $3 billion went toward building epidemiology and laboratory capacity. Especially given the agency’s postwar roots as the Communicable Disease Center, one would think that “detecting and responding to infectious diseases and other public health threats” warrants a larger funding commitment.

Instead, the Obama administration has focused the CDC on other priorities. While protecting Americans from infectious diseases received only $180 million from the Prevention Fund, the community transformation grant program received nearly three times as much money—$517.3 million over the same five-year period.

So where is the money going? The community transformation program pays for such things as “increasing access to healthy foods by supporting local farmers and developing neighborhood grocery stores,” or “promoting improvements in sidewalks and street lighting to make it safe and easy for people to walk and ride bikes.” So the problem is not how much money the CDC received–it has to do with how the money was spent. There is nothing wrong with helping communities, but it is not wise to do it at the expense of doing research on infectious diseases–the actual mission of the CDC.

Governor Jindal reminds us what the duties of our government are:

Our Constitution states that the federal government “shall protect each of [the States] against Invasion”—a statement that should apply as much to infectious disease as to foreign powers. So when that same government prioritizes funding for jungle gyms and bike paths over steps to protect our nation from possible pandemics, citizens have every right to question the decisions that got us to this point.

We need to get back to following the U. S. Constitution–it works very well when it is followed.

 

American Society Is Moving In The Wrong Direction

CNS News is reporting today that the U. S. fertility rate has hit a record low.

The article reports:

The fertility rate is the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15-44. In 2012–according to the Dec. 30, 2013 CDC report “Births: Final Data for 2012″–the U.S. fertility rate was 63.0. That was down from 63.2 in 2011, the previous all-time low.

“The 2012 general fertility rate (GFR) for the U.S. was 63.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44, down slightly (less than 1%) from the record low rate reported for the nation in 2011 (63.2),” said the CDC report.

The U.S. fertility rate has dropped from year-to-year for each of the last five years. In 2007, it was 69.3. In 2008, it was 68.1. In 2009, it was 66.2. In 2010, it was 64.1. In 2011, it was 63.2. And, in 2012, it was 63.0.

Since 1960, the fertility rate in the United States has declined 46.6 percent. In that year, 118 babies were born per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44.

Of the 3,952,841 babies who were born in the United States in 2012, said the CDC report, 1,609,619—or 40.7 percent–were born to unmarried mothers.

The family is the foundation of American society. The fact that 40 percent of the children born in the United States in 2012 were born to unmarried mothers does not say good things about the future of the family. Children who live with their two original parents generally do better in school, do not get in trouble with the law, and generally fare better in life. Also, children in two-parent families are generally better off financially. Two-parent families are generally not dependent on the government for support. The number of babies born to unwed mothers is both a financial and societal problem for America–it costs the government money and will eventually result in higher crime rates. It is not a good thing.

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