Tag Archives: Covid pandemic

Follow The Money

Posted on by

On Sunday, The New York Post posted an article about the relationship between the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical industry during the Covid pandemic.

The article reports:

During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that Big Government was very cozy with Big Pharma.

Now we know just how close they were.

New data from the National Institutes of Health reveal the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.

Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.

Information about this vast private royalty complex is tightly held by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). My organization, OpenTheBooks.com, was forced to sue to uncover the royalties paid from September 2009 to October 2021, which amounted to $325 million over 56,000 transactions.

We had to sue a second time, with Judicial Watch as our counsel, to pry open this new release.

Payments skyrocketed during the pandemic era: Those years saw more than double the amount of cash flow to NIH from the private sector, compared to the prior 12 combined. All told, it’s $1.036 billion.

It’s unclear if any of the COVID vaccine royalties from Pfizer and Moderna, the latter of which settled with NIH by agreeing to pay $400 million, is even included in these new numbers. NIH isn’t saying.

Anthony Fauci is currently testifying before a House subcommittee hearing about the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the origins of the virus. There are a lot of things that the American people are entitled to know about the virus, its origins, the effectiveness of the vaccine, and the dangers of the vaccine. Hopefully these hearings will provide some of that information. However, if the public was intentionally misled, there need to be consequences. We have had an awful lot of hearings on various subjects and very little consequences.

Houston, We Have A Problem

Posted on by

On Monday, Townhall posted an article about President Biden’s speech at the NCAAP Dinner on Sunday night. President Biden stated that he was Vice-President during the pandemic. The Covid pandemic began in 2019. President Biden was Vice-President from January 2009 until January 2017.

The article notes:

NBC News reported recently that Joe Biden’s aides and campaign advisers want him to shorten his remarks at public events. It’s a refocus on quality, not quantity. To everyone else, we only see the president’s handlers making sure Mr. Magoo doesn’t sound as bad as he is. Yet, even shortened speeches aren’t going to save Biden. The man is a serial liar. If he doesn’t drop a whopper, he sounds like a man with dementia. At the NAACP dinner in Detroit last night, Biden was aloof and dishonest. 

It might not be his fault—this time, it might be the dementia, which is why the president should not seek a second term. Yet, a blunder that’s a lie and shows his age is one of those moments that only gives the GOP cannon fodder to hit on the issue that 86 percent of Americans agree on, which is that Joe is too old for a second term. Biden said he was vice president when referencing the COVID pandemic during the event.

Politics has truly overruled common sense. If the debates happen, they will only confirm what we already know. Leaving this man in charge of America in his current mental state is foolish and dangerous.

 

Do We Really Want To Give Away American Sovereignty?

Posted on by

On February 19th, American Greatness posted an article about the pandemic treaty the World Health Organization (WHO) is negotiating.

The article reports:

Despite the immense influence wielded by the United Nations, attention to its rumblings is typically rare outside the international crisis du jour. Breaking from this trend, the ongoing negotiation of a pandemic treaty at the World Health Organization has captured the global spotlight long before reaching its anticipated conclusion. Yet, despite this heightened attention, the public debate on how to head off future pandemic threats has largely overlooked the potential impact of the WHO Pandemic Agreement on fundamental freedoms, notably freedom of expression.

Underway since March 2023, the pandemic accord negotiations seek to establish legally binding rules to enhance international cooperation and to strengthen the role of the WHO in preventing, preparing for, and responding to future pandemics.

To purportedly achieve these objectives, the draft text currently under consideration would commit parties to “tackle” such things as misleading information, misinformation, or disinformation, without offering a definition for these terms or specifying how this would be done. It would also require the “management” of so-called “infodemics,” defined as “too much information, false or misleading information, in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak” causing “confusion” as well as “mistrust” in health authorities. These provisions cast a looming shadow of censorship that should alarm anyone who values open discourse and transparent governance.

America is blessed in that our Founding Fathers gave the power to sort out misinformation and truth to the citizens of our country. That sorting was not to be left to the government. We saw during the Covid pandemic that a disease could be used as a weapon to trample the rights supposedly guaranteed by our Constitution. Understand that these rights were not given by our Constitution–they were supposed to be protected by our Constitution. Also understand that the American Constitution was put in place to limit the power of the government–not the rights of the people. I am not willing to surrender those rights again.

How To Stop Government Medical Overreach Regarding Covid

Posted on by

On Thursday, David Horowitz at The Conservative Review posted a list of ten bills that would put an end to the government overreach that was part of the response to the Covid pandemic.

Here is the list:

1. Hold pharma executives liable for concealing info on vaccine safety

2. Ban health departments from issuing public health edicts that violate liberty

3. Block all federal public health edicts from enforcement within the state

4. Ban mRNA vaccines

5. Keep mRNA out of food and other products

6. Report vaccine injury

7. Ban vaccine status discrimination

8. Prohibit vaccines that did not undergo human trials

9. Unquestionable religious exemption from all vaccines

10. End abuse of emergency powers

Please follow the link above to read further details. I believe we all think that some of the actions taken during the pandemic were not scientifically based. Why were churches closed and casinos left open? Why were big box stores open and small businesses closed? The actions taken by our government during Covid resulted in the largest transfer of wealth in the history of America. The middle class got poorer and the elites got richer. The rules during the Covid pandemic were the dream of the Washington elites. Let’s not do that again.

This Statement Is Going To Have Repercussions!

Posted on by

On Monday, Townhall posted an article about a recent statement by President Biden that is going to create some problems for those pulling the levers of power in Washington.

The article reports:

President Biden declared the COVID-19 pandemic “over” during an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” an acknowledgement that prompted anger among liberals and questions from conservatives.

Noting that it’s the first Detroit Auto Show in three years, host Scott Pelley asked the president if that was a sign the pandemic was over.

While noting the virus continues to be “a problem,” Biden admitted, “the pandemic is over.”

“If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it’s changing, and I think [the Detroit Auto show resuming] is a perfect example of it,” he added.

The article notes the problems resulting from this statement:

Conservatives, meanwhile, pointed out there is no justification for any Covid restrictions to be in place anymore or any vaccine or mask mandates to remain. He also just upended his administration’s argument for its student loan bailout. 

The article concludes:

According to Politico, the statement was not part of his planned remarks and “caught several of his own health officials by surprise.”

There were several other statements made during the “60 Minutes” interview that the Biden administration staff is working hard to clean up. On Monday The American Thinker posted an article detailing some of the other missteps by President Biden during the interview. The missteps include issues such as America’s policy on Taiwan, inflation, the raid on Mar-a-Lago and last of all, his own fitness for office.

 

Analyzing The Data

Posted on by

Issues & Insights recently posted an article comparing how the blue and red states and cities have handled the COVID pandemic. We need to learn from the mistakes made.

The article reports:

…Those that hewed to the Red State model of lower taxes, less regulation, and respect for the rule of law thrived – while those that followed the “woke” blue-state model, built on socialist top-down control, forced equality, and divisive racial identity politics, suffered.

One of the new studies, by Phil Kerpen of The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, and published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ranked states by how they performed in three major areas during the pandemic: economics, education, and mortality.

That study, for good reason, has garnered much attention. It shows that red states, in general, beat blue states hands down during the pandemic, largely due to the latter’s dedication to damaging COVID lockdowns.

“Shutting down their economies and schools was by far the biggest mistake governors and state officials made during COVID, particularly in blue states,” said Moore, a co-founder of the Committee To Unleash Prosperity.

New Jersey was the worst-performing state, while neighboring blue-state giant New York was next, ranked 49th. Also flunking out were California, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.

“They had high age-adjusted death rates, they had high unemployment and significant GDP losses, and they kept their schools shut down much longer than almost all other states,” according to the study.

So who did best? Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota – and Florida.

Meanwhile, a second study from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that there has been massive population movement away from large blue-state cities toward red-state cities.

The article concludes:

As for New York, its leaders seem to think crime-ridden streets and more government spending will do the trick. Sorry, but New York’s losing its wealthiest citizens after years of misrule.

Far-left Democrats have an iron lock on government in Albany, so tax cuts and a crackdown on crime seems highly unlikely. In the meantime, one key group is leaving the state and city of New York in droves: Millionaires.

“New York’s share of the nation’s total millionaire earner population dropped to 9.9%, down from 12.7% as of 2010, the year after the state enacted a supposedly temporary and ultimately permanent higher rate on millionaire earners,” noted E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy think tank.

Good riddance you say? Millionaires pay 40% of taxes in New York. So losing so many to Florida, Texas and other red states is a disaster. All New York will suffer.

Truth is, America is being re-made, moving van by moving van, family by family, as the states’ demographic profiles and political leanings undergo dramatic shifts. It all points to a possible shift in political power toward conservative-leaning red states and away from once-dominant blue states. But how big that shift is remains to be seen.

As we’ve said before, the red-state model works. It has proved itself in good times and bad. Americans, you do have a choice: Red pill, or blue pill. Which is it going to be?

Our government was designed to give individual states the power to experiment with ideas to see what worked and what did not. The idea was that less successful states would copy what the successful states did. Unfortunately in our highly politically-charged atmosphere of today, blue states are not interested in learning from red states. Hopefully they will change their ways as their populations relocate.

Fear Is A Powerful Tool That Government Bureaucracies Use Well

Posted on by

On Tuesday, Townhall posted an article about the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. At this point there have been a lot of mixed messages and a lot of confusion about the seriousness of the virus and how the treat it effectively. Actually, the information on how to treat the virus effectively has been pretty much left out of any news you hear about the virus.

The article reports:

Well, take a break from being mad and read what Johns Hopkins doctor Dr. Marty Makary wrote about new studies about natural immunity which is ignored by Fauci and company. He also rehashed an old Fauci statistic that shreds the current push for new mask protocols and possible lockdowns (via WSJ) [emphasis mine]

The news about the U.S. Covid pandemic is even better than you’ve heard. Some 80% to 85% of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection. There’s ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed.

Only around 10% of Americans have had confirmed positive Covid tests, but four to six times as many have likely had the infection. A February study in Nature used antibody screenings in late summer 2020 to estimate there had been seven times as many actual cases as confirmed cases. A similar study, by the University of Albany and New York State Department of Health, revealed that by the end of March 2020—the first month of New York’s pandemic—23% of the city’s population had antibodies. That share necessarily increased as the pandemic spread.

[…]

Natural immunity is durable. Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis reported last month that 11 months after a mild infection immune cells were still capable of producing protective antibodies. The authors concluded that prior Covid infection induces a “robust” and “long-lived humoral immune response,” leading some scientists to suggest that natural immunity is probably lifelong. Because infection began months earlier than vaccination, we have more follow-up data on the duration of natural immunity than on vaccinated immunity.

[…]

Skeptics of natural immunity point to Manaus, capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, where reports in January suggested a wave of re-infections despite herd immunity. But the initial estimate of those infected was incorrect because it was based on antibody testing among those who donated convalescent plasma—an unrepresentative subgroup of the population. A follow-up study debunked the re-infection hypothesis and found only three confirmed re-infections in the entire state, whose population exceeds four million. Other studies have confirmed that re-infections are rare and usually asymptomatic or mild.

Some health officials warn of possible variants resistant to natural immunity. But none of the hundreds of variants observed so far have evaded either natural or vaccinated immunity with the three vaccines authorized in the U.S.

Should the previously infected be vaccinated? My clinical advice to healthy patients with natural immunity is that one shot is sufficient, and maybe not even necessary, although it could increase the long-term durability of immunity. A University of Pennsylvania study of people previously infected with Covid found that a single vaccine dose triggered a strong immune response, with no increase in that response after a second dose. A separate study from New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine concluded that “the antibody response to the first vaccine dose in individuals with pre-existing immunity is equal to or even exceeds the titers found in naïve”—never-infected—“individuals after the second dose.”

[…]

Dr. Fauci said last Aug. 13 that when you have fewer than 10 cases per 100,000, “you should be able to open up safely and clearly.” The U.S. reached that point in mid-May. It’s time to stop the fear mongering and level with the public about the incredible capabilities of both modern medical research and the human body’s immune system.

When was the last time you heard anyone who was pressuring people to get vaccinated talk about the natural immunity that comes from having recovered from the disease? When was the last time you heard anyone who was pressuring people to get vaccinated talk about the inexpensive treatments for the coronavirus? It’s time to have those discussions.