Vietnam Finds Dangerous New Virus Variant

Vietnam has discovered a new coronavirus variant that's a hybrid of strains first found in India and the U.K., the Vietnamese health minister said Saturday.

Nguyen Thanh Long said scientists examined the genetic makeup of the virus that had infected some recent patients and found the new version of the virus. He said lab tests suggested it might spread more easily than other versions of the virus.

Viruses often develop small genetic changes as they reproduce, and new variants of the coronavirus have been seen almost since it was first detected in China in late 2019. The World Health Organization has listed four global "variants of concern" – the two first found in the U.K. and India, plus ones identified in South Africa and Brazil.

Long said the new variant could be responsible for a recent surge in Vietnam. Infection has spread to 30 of the country's 63 municipalities and provinces.

Vietnam was initially a standout success in battling the virus. In early May, it had recorded just more than 3,100 confirmed cases and 35 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

But in the last few weeks, Vietnam has confirmed more than 3,500 new cases and 12 deaths, increasing the country's total death toll to 47.

Most of the new transmissions were found in Bac Ninh and Bac Giang, two provinces dense with industrial zones where hundreds of thousands of people work for major companies, including Samsung, Canon and Luxshare, a partner in assembling Apple products. Despite strict health regulations, a company in Bac Giang discovered that one-fifth of its 4,800 workers had tested positive for the virus.

In Ho Chi Minh City, the country's largest metropolis and home to 9 million, at least 85 people have tested positive as part of a cluster at a Protestant church, the Health Ministry said. Worshippers sang and chanted while sitting close together without wearing proper masks or taking other precautions.

Vietnam has since ordered a nationwide ban on all religious events. In major cities, authorities have banned large gatherings and have closed public parks and nonessential businesses, including in-person restaurants, bars, clubs and spas.

Vietnam so far has vaccinated 1 million people with AstraZeneca shots. Last week, it sealed a deal with Pfizer for 30 million doses, which are scheduled to be delivered in the third and fourth quarters of this year. It is also in talks with Moderna that would give it enough shots to fully vaccinate 80% of its 96 million people.

https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/vietnam-finds-new-virus-variant

'This is why Big Tech must never be the arbiter of truth': Republicans slam 'arrogant' Facebook for thinking it can 'decide where COVID comes from' - as it FINALLY scraps ban on 'man-made virus' posts

Republicans in Congress pounced on Facebook after the tech giant suddenly reversed its its policy of removing posts calling the COVID-19 'man-made' now that President Joe Biden has ordered the intelligence community to review the origins of the coronavirus.   

'The arrogance of @Facebook to decide where and how precisely covid originated, and who should be able to talk about it, is stunning. But sadly typical,' fumed Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Twitter.

'The more we learn, the clearer it is that Communist China played a role in killing millions of people,' said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.).

'This is why Big Tech must never be the arbiter of truth,' she said in a statement to DailyMail.com.

The blasts come as the 'lab leak' proposition has gone from a notion derided as a conspiracy theory to something viable enough that senior government officials are demanding be at least examined.

Ted Cruz tweeted: 'This is why the Big Tech overlords shouldn't be involved in fact checking'.  

Also slamming the company was Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.). 'This was another sorry attempt by Facebook to shut down discussions that didn’t fit its political narrative. Social media platforms should encourage open debate instead of blocking content that offends their political views,' he said. 

The tech giant was already facing political pressure in Congress over its efforts to impose guardrails on false election claims at election time and its privacy practices, as well as its role as a conduit for potential election interference and its overall market power. 

'In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps,' the company said in a statement Wednesday.

That was a stark turnaround from February, when it came out with a statement on its policy for 'removing more false claims about Covid-19 and vaccines.'

'Following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines,' it said then.

Since that time, many top scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, have said the potential of a lab leak should at least be investigated.

Fauci said at a hearing this week if he still believed the virus was a 'natural occurrence.' 'I still believe that the most likely scenario was that this was a natural occurrence, but no one knows that 100 per cent for sure,' Fauci responded. 

'And since there's a lot of concern, a lot of speculation, and since no one absolutely knows that, I believe we do need the kind of investigation where there's open transparency and all the information that's available to be made available to scrutinize.' 

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) deemed the Biden administration's intel investigation 'too little, too late.' 

'Twitter users have never been stopped from sharing stories about the lab theory. Last September, Chinese virologist Dr. Li Meng Yan was suspended. She claimed it was because she'd promoted the theory. Twitter reactivated her account a month later. While neither Twitter nor YouTube have banned people from discussing the theory, they do both have policies on blocking COVID content that they deem to be 'misleading'. 

Twitter on Thursday told that it wasn't changing its policies on the subject, but a spokesman refused to confirm which stories Twitter deems to be false. YouTube, a which is owned by Google, has said nothing on the subject.'

Facebook was accused of 'showing its true and ugly colors' and smothering free speech to cosy up to China as it scrapped its ban on posts debating whether Covid-19 could be man-made - but only after Joe Biden ordered the CIA to probe if the virus came from a Wuhan lab.

Mark Zuckerberg's global policy chief Nick Clegg, the former British Member of Parliament and Liberal Democrat leader, has also been branded 'feeble' for allowing months of censorship on the social network.

Critics branded Facebook's behavior had been 'contemptible' and begged them to respect free speech rather than 'ingratiating' themselves with states such as China, which has banned the website but remains a $5billion-a-year ad market. 

The criticism spanned to Britain as well. British Conservative Member of Parliament Peter Bone told MailOnline: 'It does seem to me that Facebook is not an open platform for people to put their views on. It is an open platform for people to put their views on as long as they agree with Facebook.

'Their decisions are based on politics not on principle... if it is fashionable with the liberal elite it can go down. If it is liberal elite say it it must be OK, if it's President Trump that says it it must be awful.

'The thing that Trump was saying is exactly the same as Biden is saying, but Trump was according to Facebook not allowed to say that. Whereas everyone loves Biden from Facebook therefore it must be right. It is one rule for one political view and another for another.'

And the liberal media in the US, who lampooned Donald Trump when he said a year ago said he had 'a high degree of confidence' that the virus escaped from a lab, have finally conceded that he may have been right - after a year ridiculing the suggestion. 

Facebook ruled in February it would 'remove' any posts that claimed that coronavirus was 'man-made' or that the virus was 'created by an individual, government or country' - branding it 'misinformation' and a 'debunked claim' that required 'aggressive action' from moderators.

But today the tech giant reversed its ban on its users discussing the theory, just hours after President Biden ordered his intelligence agencies to launch a probe into whether it was man-made after all - and report back in 90 days.  

The tech firm has been accused of bowing to Beijing, liberal media outlets as well as left-wing politicians and commentators, who reacted furiously when then president Donald Trump laid blame for the fast-spreading virus on Beijing, calling it the 'China virus' or 'Kung Flu' and suggesting there was evidence it was borne from a laboratory in Wuhan, the epicentre of the pandemic in early 2020.  

'Social distancing does not help prevent the spread of Covid-19' 

The fundamental principle of social distancing – staying away from other people – is clearly a good way to stop the virus spreading. But scientists and authorities have disagreed on suitable distances.

In the UK the rule is 2 metres (6'6') or 'one metre plus' if someone is wearing a mask or is outdoors or behind a screen. Experts said almost no virus particles could make it through 2m of moving air to infect someone.

But the World Health Organization is less strict and its official guidance on social distancing is to keep people 1m (3'3') apart. Some countries have followed this while others have been more cautious, like Britain.

A study by MIT in Boston found that social distancing indoors could give people a false sense of security and that it wasn't enough on its own to stop the spread of Covid, which is airborne. 

China has reacted furiously to Biden's call for a new investigation into the virus's origins, accusing him of 'politicising' the issue and suggesting that US biolabs should be investigated instead.

Lijian Zhao, foreign ministry spokesman who has been Beijing's point-man in trying to pin blame for the pandemic outside the country's borders, accused the US of trying to shift blame away from its own high Covid case and death counts - and suggested security services may be involved in a cover-up.

Meanwhile Hu Xijin, editor of the state mouthpiece Global Times newspaper, accused Biden of trying to discredit a WHO investigation which concluded that a lab leak is 'unlikely' - though critics have previously blasted that report as a China-centric whitewash.

China's American embassy also hit out, accusing Biden and his security services of being 'fixated on political manipulation and (the) blame game' in a statement on its website.

Earlier this week, Project Veritas claimed that it obtained leaked documents from whistleblowers inside the company which prove that the social network is testing an algorithm that would rate users' comments according to a 'vaccine hesitancy score.'

Those comments which discourage others from taking the vaccine would be demoted, according to the documents obtained by investigators.

After months of minimizing that possibility as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is joining worldwide pressure for China to be more open about the outbreak, aiming to head off GOP complaints the president has not been tough enough as well as to use the opportunity to press China on alleged obstruction.

In another sign of shifting attitudes, the Senate approved two Wuhan lab-related amendments without opposition, attaching them to a largely unrelated bill to increase US investments in innovation.

One of the amendments, from Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, would block US funding of Chinese 'gain of function' research on enhancing the severity or transmissibility of a virus.

Paul has been critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious-disease expert, and aggressively questioned him at a recent Senate hearing over the work in China.

The other amendment was from GOP Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and it would prevent any funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Both were approved without roll call votes as part of the broader bill that is still under debate in the Senate.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that the White House supports a new World Health Organization investigation in China, but she added that an effective probe 'would require China finally stepping up and allowing access needed to determine the origins.'

Administration officials continue to harbor strong doubts about the lab leak theory.

Rather, they view China's refusal to cooperate in the investigation — particularly on something of such magnitude — as emblematic of other irresponsible actions on the world stage.

Privately, administration officials say the end result, if ever known, won't change anything, but note China's stonewalling is now on display for the world to see.

'Because nobody has identified a virus that's 100 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2 in any animal, there is still room for researchers to ask about other possibilities.'

Andy Slavitt, Biden's senior adviser for the coronavirus, said Tuesday that the world needs to 'get to the bottom ... whatever the answer may be.'

'We need a completely transparent process from China; we need the WHO to assist in that matter,' Slavitt said. 'We don't feel like we have that now.' 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9626231/Josh-Hawley-leads-outrage-against-arrogant-Facebook-deleting-man-virus-posts.html

A reprieve

The core biopsy I had last week showed that my cancers are of a type that is susceptible to immunotherapy. My oncologist has recommended a drug which should cure me -- no certainty of course.  The cure will be a rather long road requiring at least 4 months so no early results can be expected.  There is however now hope that I could be back to my old form until something else gets me -- JR

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Has the Covid vaccine blood clot puzzle been solved? Rare side effect from Johnson & Johnson and AztraZeneca shots is caused by cold virus used to deliver the jab - and can be fixed, scientists claim

German scientists claim they have discovered why some coronavirus vaccines cause blood clots - and how to fix it.

Two vaccines, one from Johnson & Johnson and the other from AstraZeneca-University of Oxford have been linked to rare, but serious, blood clots, particularly among women under age 50.

In the U.S., J&J's shot was paused for 11 days by federal health regulators while, in Europe, some countries have stopped using AztraZeneca's jab completely and others, like the UK, recommend that younger women get a different vaccine.

But in a new pre-print paper published on Wednesday, researchers at Goethe-University of Frankfurt and Ulm University, in Helmholtz, say the problem lies in the adenovirus vector - a common cold virus used so the vaccine can enter the body.

What's more, they say the vaccines can be adapted to prevent the rare side effect from occurring, reported the Financial Times.

Dr Rolf Marschalek, a professor at Goethe University, told the Financial Times the reason the vaccines have been causing these problems is because they are adenovirus vector vaccines.  

Both J&J's and AstraZeneca's vaccine combine genetic material from the new virus with the genes of the adenovirus - which causes the common cold - to induce an immune response.

The cold virus is altered so it cannot make you sick and a little section of the COVID-19 vaccine genetic material, which codes for the spike protein, is inserted.

The spike protein is what the virus uses to enter and infect our cells. The vaccine is injected and the body recognizes the protein and makes antibodies against it.

That way, if you become ill with the real virus, your body recognizes it and knows how to fight it off. 

Marschalek says the vaccine is sent into nucleus of our cells, where the genetic material is found, instead of into the cytosol fluid, liquid found inside cell where the virus makes it proteins.  

Marschalek told the Financial Times that after entering the nucleus, parts of the spike protein break off and create mutated versions of themselves, which then enter the body and trigger the rare blood clots.

In particular, the vaccines were causing a condition known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST).

CVST is a rare type of blood clot that blocks the brain's sinus channels of draining blood, which can cause hemorrhages.

It occurs in about five per million people in the general population.

In most cases, CVST occurred in combination with low levels of blood platelets, also known as thrombocytopenia. 

As of Wednesday, the J&J vaccine has been linked to 28 cases in the U.S. out of more than 10.4 million shots.

Meanwhile, the AstraZeneca vaccine has been linked to 242 clotting cases and 49 deaths in the UK out of nine million shots and more than 100 in continental Europe out of 16 million.

Comparatively, Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna vaccines use newer messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

By comparison, mRNA vaccines use part of the pathogen's genetic code and give instructions for our cells to make part of the spike protein so the body can recognize the virus and attack if we become infected.

Marschalek told the Financial Times that with mRNA vaccines, the genetic material of the spike protein is sent directly to the cell fluid and does not enter the nucleus. 

'When these...virus genes are in the nucleus they can create some problems,' Marschalek told the Financial Times.

He says there is a fix, however, and says the vaccine can be genetically modified so the spike protein doesn't split apart when it enters our cells.

He says he has not spoken to AstraZeneca yet, but that J&J has contacted his lab and that he is working them to improve their shot.  

'[J&J] is trying to optimize its vaccine now,' Marschalek told the newspaper. 

'With the data we have in our hands we can tell the companies how to mutate these sequences, coding for the spike protein in a way that prevents unintended splice reactions.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9622627/German-scientists-claim-figured-Covid-vaccines-cause-blood-clots.html

Belarus is a Greenie dream

Belarus is much in the news these days so I thought I might add some notes

I was talking recently to a lady of Belarusian heritage who still speaks Russian and who still has close family in Belarus.  She reports that people who know Belarus are often very complimentary about it.  It seems well-organized and orderly with very little crime.  It is not a rich country (average income of $8,000 pa) by Western standards but most people eat well and products from all over Europe are to be found in the shops.  Some people who know the place say that Belarus is the best country in the world to live in.

Something that Greenies might like is that the roads are good but traffic jams are few. Belarus has an extremely good and comprehensive public transport system. So people get more exercise by walking and can do so without wading through vehicular pollution. It's a Greenie dream in action. Greenies would also like that over 40% of its 207,600 square kilometres (80,200 sq mi) is forested.

Climate skeptics would like that most of its electricity is thermal generated and that they have a nuclear power station under construction.

* The capital city, Minsk, has a population of about 2 million. It was completely destroyed during the Second World War, but, following the example of Warsaw, it was rebuilt in the same place and now is an attractive city

* Minsk is a very green and clean city. In addition to numerous parks, here is the third largest botanical garden in the world.

* Minsk is a very safe city. In the list of 378 most dangerous cities from Numbeo, Minsk was on the 351th place in terms of danger and became the safest city among the former Soviet Union countries. Belarus itself is one of the safest countries in the world according to statistics.

* It is also surprising for big cities that it's relatively quiet at night, relatively few nightclubs and bars.

* Public transport is always on time. Surprisingly, but it's true: the schedule is maintained with a possible deviation of a couple of minutes.  The American Green/Left wants to get people out of their cars and onto public transport.  Belarus shows it can be done.

So you see what people mean when they find a lot to like about Belarus. 

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DeSantis Signs Bill to Stop Big Tech Censorship of Floridians

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed into law a bill—the first of its kind in the United States—allowing Floridians to sue Big Tech platforms.

A number of free speech advocates, including Cuban and Venezuelan exiles, state senators, and deplatformed influencers, stood behind DeSantis as he made the announcement at Florida International University on May 24.

Courts may award up to $100,000 in damages to an individual if a social media platform censors or shadowbans a user’s content, deplatforms a user, or if it hasn’t applied censorship or deplatforming standards in a consistent manner, according to the text of the bill.

“We will be the first state to hold Big Tech accountable,” DeSantis said at a press conference. “They are exerting a power that really has no precedent in American history.”

Big tech companies that violate the bill, SB 7072 Social Media Platforms, can be sued by Floridians for monetary damages. The state’s attorney general can bring action against companies that violate this law under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.

As an example, the governor mentioned that people were deplatformed for discussing the Wuhan lab leak theory regarding the origins of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, whereas now that theory has become a topic of mainstream discussion.

“2021 looks more like the fictitious 1984,” the governor said.

The law also blocks Big Tech from deplatforming Floridian political candidates. The Florida Election Commission will impose fines of $250,000 per day on any social media company that deplatforms any candidates for statewide office. The fine is $25,000 per day when deplatforming candidates for other offices.

While Floridians have the right to block anyone, it’s not the role of Big Tech to censor, said DeSantis.

“SB 7072 is a bold first step to reining in Big Tech tyranny by defending the rights of all Floridians in the digital space,” DeSantis said. “Over the years, these platforms have changed from neutral platforms that provide Americans with the freedom to speak to enforcers of preferred narratives.

“Florida is the first state to hold Big Tech accountable by empowering each and every Floridian silenced by arbitrary corporate censorship to fight back. This is a groundbreaking bill that protects Floridians from Silicon Valley’s power grab.”

If social media platforms are found to have violated antitrust law, they’ll be restricted from contracting with any public entity. That “antitrust violator” blacklist imposes real consequences for Big Tech oligopolies’ bottom line. According to DeSantis, the law will also require social media companies to be transparent about their content moderation practices and give users proper notice of changes to those policies.

According to Florida state, the new law will likely be able to withstand legal challenges, as it contains language that explains how Big Tech companies are different from other corporations, and that Section 230 requires companies to act in good faith—something the governor accuses Big Tech of not always following.

Florida Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez said at the same conference that “Florida is taking back the virtual public square as a place where information and ideas can flow freely.”

“Many of our constituents know the dangers of being silenced or have been silenced themselves under communist rule,” she said.

“Thankfully, in Florida we have a Governor that fights against big tech oligarchs that contrive, manipulate, and censor if you voice views that run contrary to their radical leftist narrative.”

Florida won’t be the only state enacting such a law, according to DeSantis.

“We are seeing other states now following suit,” he said. “It starts in Florida but it doesn’t end in Florida.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/desantis-signs-bill-to-stop-big-tech-censorship-of-floridians_3827083.html

Why does Facebook still ban users from saying Covid was man-made even as Dr Fauci casts doubt on virus origins? And Italian journalist is censored by YouTube for claiming it was created in Wuhan lab

A fresh spotlight has been thrown on how tech giants police Covid 'misinformation' after Dr Antony Fauci questioned whether the virus was man-made in China - a sentiment banned across swathes of social media.

Facebook policies outlining what kinds of 'misinformation' its users cannot post about, specifically picks out theories that the virus was 'man-made' or 'manufactured' - the very theory Fauci was discussing.

At the same time, an Italian journalist claimed last week to have been censored by YouTube over a book which questions whether the virus was engineered in a Wuhan lab, despite America's top disease expert saying it warrants investigation.

These inconsistencies beg the question whether social media's 'misinformation' witch-hunt has gone too far in trying to prevent the spread of dangerous lies, and actually stifles productive debate instead.

For example, on vaccines: A large number of Facebook policies deal with clear misinformation - such as outlawing claims that jabs contain 'the mark of the beast', or turn you into a monkey.

But the site also says it bans 'claims that COVID-19 vaccines kill or seriously harm people (such as causing blood clots.)'

That is despite the fact that medical regulators in Europe and elsewhere have seen fit to put warnings on AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson jabs saying they can cause blood clots - albeit in vanishingly rare cases.

Meanwhile YouTube also has clear-cut policies banning untruths, such as saying prayer will cure the virus or that Covid isn't real.

But the site's policies ban posts questioning the efficacy of masks or debating lockdown measures - even though government guidance on both has changed many times since the start of the pandemic, largely thanks to debate about their benefits.

Separate rules on advertising on YouTube outlaw adverts around 'sensitive events' such as Covid, banning anything that 'potentially profits' from the event 'without a benefit to users' - though what exactly qualifies as a 'benefit' is not explained.

It was those advertising rules that Italian journalist Fabrizio Gatti fell foul of when adverts for his book - The Infinite Error: The Secret Story Of A Pandemic That Should Have Been Avoided - were 'blacklisted' from Google last week.

Google said the video violates the rules because it 'displays speculative intent or lacks reasonable sensitivity around a global health crisis.'

But Elisabetta Sgarbi, whose company is publishing Gatti's book on Covid, told Italian news agency Ansa: 'There is a big difference between "gratuitous offense" and the right to criticize.

'[The book] documents the responsibilities of the Chinese regime, the allied governments and the WHO in the delayed response to the Covid-19 pandemic... which should have avoided.

'I hope that Google... can help encourage reflection and discussion on the health and human catastrophe that has hit the world.'

Mr Gatti added: 'I express my full solidarity with colleagues who have been or will be economically damaged, just for giving space to... my research.

'I hope that Google will revise its position as soon as possible. We already have to put up with the Chinese regime and the consequences of its failure to contain Covid.

'[Google's action] it is yet another symptom of a very worrying drift.

'Once once the infection is overcome with vaccines, as I write in my book, we will have to defend our democracies from totalitarianism and the digital monopoly.'

Other policies that might get adverts banned from Google are ones which 'appear to profit from a tragic event with no discernible benefit to users', adverts selling products 'which may be in insufficient supply', and those which 'claim victims of a sensitive event were responsible for their own tragedy.'

Both Facebook and Google say the policies were created in response to the spread of misinformation as the pandemic spread, and aim to direct people towards reliable information and stop the spread of claims that could cause harm.

But others, such as former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson - whose own books were temporarily banned from Amazon or questioning the science behind masks and lockdowns - say they amount to censorship.

'Big Tech censorship of opposing views on COVID is a huge problem, and it's part of an even bigger problem,' he said.

'This isn't about COVID, it's about whether or not as a society we're going to allow people who have views that are sort of outside what the mainstream media want you to believe, to present those views,' he continued.

Last year, Google was criticised after directing search engine users away from the Great Barrington Declaration - a petition started by prominent academics urging a re-think on lockdowns.

Instead of being shown the petition itself at the top of search queries, Google users were instead shown articles and pages critical of it, according to Spiked.

Google also said in October last year that it had pulled more than 200,000 videos from YouTube, including one from Scott Atlas - who at the time was a physician advising the US government.

Meanwhile Facebook has also been pulling down pages that question whether lockdowns are effective, while attaching fact-check labels and warning notices to some news articles.

The company says it has removed over 18 million pieces of content across Facebook and Instagram globally since the start of the pandemic for violating its rules, and has displayed warning labels on 167million pieces of COVID-19 content on Facebook.

While Amazon refused to disclose its policies around censorship at the time, Google and Facebook both publish detailed lists about what users can and cannot post.

The firms say they are acting to prevent the spread of 'misinformation' - but what exactly constitutes misinformation is something they cannot agree even among themselves.

For example, Facebook's policy specifically bans any post that says coronavirus is 'man-made' or 'manufactured' - though users are allow to speculate that the virus may have leaked from a lab.

Google-owned YouTube's policy, meanwhile, makes no mention of banning videos discussing 'man-made' Covid.

However, YouTube does ban posts that discuss the use of Hydroxychloroquine as a Covid treatment - something that Facebook does not specifically outlaw.

Both sites ban content discussing whether face masks help stop the spread of Covid and whether social distancing is effective.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9612833/How-Facebook-bans-users-saying-Covid-man-made.html

23 May, 2021

'Rigged': Mollie Hemingway's Definitive Account of the 2020 Election Democrats Won't Want You to Read

Bestselling author Mollie Hemingway is ready to set the record straight on the 2020 election with a definitive account of what happened from the fiery showdown between Donald Trump and Joe Biden to the U.S. House and Senate races that determined the precarious balance of power we now see on Capitol Hill.

In Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Hemingway promises to reveal the backstory of the "devastating triple punch that took down the Trump presidency," Regnery Publishing—a fellow Salem Media affiliate—announced Tuesday. "Americans who feel silenced, subjected, and betrayed are about to learn the truth about a scandalous election," the publisher promises.

"What happened during the 2020 election deserves to be investigated and discussed," noted Hemingway in a column announcing her book due out this September. "It must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to it, but because of that opposition. That is why I am writing a book about what happened before, during, and after the 2020 presidential election."

Just as she did in Justice on Trial—her book co-authored with Carrie Severino telling the full story of the contentious confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—Hemingway is sure to expose the truth of what went down before, on, and after November 3, 2020.

"If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election," wrote Hemingway in her announcement of Rigged, scorching Democrats for their hypocrisy and feigned moral superiority.

"My book will contain never-before-told eyewitness stories about what really went down in 2020, not just in the presidential race, but in tight House and Senate races as well. The book will contain analysis of how media and Big Tech oligarchs used their power to control information on the Internet to manipulate people’s behavior before and after the 2020 election. My book will contain not just interviews about the election with top officials from the Trump White House and presidential campaign, but also interviews with Trump himself."

"I have no doubt that the same powers that worked to oust Trump in 2020 will do everything they can to suppress this book in 2021," Hemingway admitted. "But I don’t care. The story has to be told."

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2021/05/11/mollie-hemingway-rigged-story-has-to-be-told-n2589263

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Biden Gets a Real Vaccine Job

Instead of coasting along on Operation Warp Speed, he needs to vaccinate the world for global security.

By now you’ve heard that the Biden administration’s attempt to waive drug company patents will make virtually no difference to poor countries fighting the Covid pandemic. Oddly, you’ve heard it from both supporters and opponents of his action.

It won’t improve vaccine makers’ incentive to maximize production; they have every incentive now. It won’t improve affordability of the vaccine, already the best bargain in history. The World Bank has $4 billion burning a hole in its pocket to help poor countries acquire and distribute shots when available.

Nor is a lack of competition, aka monopoly, the problem: Fifteen vaccines, including four Russian and five Chinese, are already approved for large swaths of earth’s population, with dozens more in development.

The only real challenge is hiking production fast enough of a specialized product that didn’t exist a few months ago in order that everybody in the world can receive it.

The voices in Mr. Biden’s ear were the same voices that always clamor for invalidating drug company patents, regardless of circumstance. On Monday, in response to another clamor, he finally relaxed the U.S. claim on surplus vaccine coming off factory lines for the benefit of countries in deep struggle against the Covid virus. Remember these episodes next time the Biden administration tells you it isn’t just living off the capital of Operation Warp Speed, it’s “innovating” on its own.

More clearly than ever, the previous U.S. administration and the current British one were astonishing aberrations, casting aside bureaucratic caution, throwing billions at vaccine makers on grounds that it was impossible to waste money when the potential payoff was so high. Other countries, we’ve slowly come to understand, engaged in more hand-waving than action, their officials hesitant to commit to purchases for fear of being accused of overpaying, buying the wrong vaccine, or too much coziness with drug makers. Result: Money is not flowing to vaccine production that could be; the time and attention of vaccine makers is consumed with political gamesmanship it shouldn’t be.

Should investors devote scare resources to high-risk efforts to replace ingredients in short supply? Should they pour concrete for factories that might sit idle for want of equipment and materials? All the wrong signals were sent.

Covax, a vehicle for vaccinating poor countries born a month before Warp Speed, was sidetracked by multilateral virtue signaling. To show the magnanimity of its sponsors, most nations would get the vaccine free despite the availability of aid money, though this would mean Covax lacked any cash flow of its own to secure production commitments. In the name of equity, supply would be dribbled out to many countries simultaneously rather than focused on those that could use it. Congo recently tried to return 1.3 million doses in danger of expiring, having administered fewer than 1,000 shots.

Pledges by the U.S. and other countries did not result in what the World Bank delicately calls “encashment.” Covax’s self-praising sponsors seemingly didn’t want it competing with them for early vaccine supply. Now with the U.S. swimming in more vaccine than it can use, it’s still sitting on rights to 60 million AstraZeneca doses not yet approved for U.S. consumption that could be used elsewhere.

OK, countries will put their own voters first. The Biden administration’s overwhelming priority was to pass a superfluous domestic bailout package, on top of those already passed, so it could claim credit for the pandemic recovery already visible around the corner.

Politicians will act politically; only offensive is the unusual sycophancy of the U.S. press in covering the Biden administration’s political motives.

A top international aid official tells me Mr. Biden’s latest patent proposal, however popular with the left, would only upset the beneficial dynamic that led investors to pour billions into mRNA technology in the first place. The same incentive is attracting billions now to develop booster vaccines as well as more-practical delivery methods (e.g., nasal spray).

Happily Angela Merkel and other European leaders seem set to stop the charade at the World Trade Organization, whose approval would be needed. Maybe a new dawn of realism is breaking. The absurd credit Team Biden keeps bestowing on itself is wearing thin. It’s about time, because there’s a real job to be done. Amid the horrors in India you’ve been reading about, a billion Indians have yet to be exposed to the virus. Inoculating them and millions of others in Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Nigeria and other giant urbanized developing countries—and, yes, China—may yet be the difference between global stability and instability in the coming decade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-gets-a-real-vaccine-job-11621632565

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

One Voter Bloc That Democrats Are Losing in Texas...And It's a Key One

Texas is becoming a blue state. It’s one of the Democratic Party’s unicorns. Every time, there’s been disappointment. In 2014, folks thought that Wendy Davis had a chance to be governor. She ended up getting less than 40 percent of the vote. Beto O’Rourke fell short in his bid to unseat Ted Cruz. Hillary Clinton also failed in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Oh, I know—the margins of victory weren’t as high in years past. Sure. But the Democratic Party’s extreme facelift towards Marxism has a lot of Hispanic voters switching parties. The Daily Caller News Foundation has more:

“I am starting to see this need to connect with the Hispanic community and let them know nationwide that it’s the Republican party that offers opportunities,” Adrienne Pena-Garza, chair of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, told the DCNF.

Pena-Garza grew up in Texas as the daughter of a Democratic state legislator who switched parties and became a Republican around 2010. Pena-Garza told the DCNF that her father’s community reacted very strongly to his switch, noting that he had been beloved as a Democrat but was treated with incivility as a Republican.

But Pena-Garza also switched parties, concerned by the policies and talking points she was witnessing from Democratic lawmakers.

“Things have shifted dramatically,” she said. “I grew up as a strong Catholic,” she said. “This area has got strong Catholic roots today, Christian roots. Being pro-life and pro God was very important to me as an individual. And my family is a family that has served its country. My grandfather served in World War II and in the United States Navy, and my brother served 20 years honorably in the United States Air Force. I saw that the Democrat party was just moving quickly to the left and towards socialism. And those just did not did not align with my values any longer.”

This isn’t shocking. The 2020 election saw scores of Hispanics flee the Democratic Party from California to Florida. In Texas, the border counties which are Hispanic-majority saw support for Trump almost quintupled since 2016. The summer of rioting last year, along with the Left’s incessant call to defund the police cost Democrats a ton of votes. And it will continue to do so if scores of white liberals swell the ranks. College-educated white liberals are outliers when it comes to American politics. They want a liberal vs. conservative electorate which isn’t favorable to them. As David Shor, a liberal data scientist and pollster noted, most nonwhite voters are not liberal and do not see the issues through the lens of the ‘woke’ Left, even on issues like racial resentment. They’re far, far apart—on everything. Not the best groundwork for those who believe Democrats have an advantage due to demographics. The 2020 election pretty much shredded that given that Trump was only 43,000 votes from winning a second term.

At any rate, it seemed as if Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. There was a period where Democrats probably could have solidified things with this voter bloc, but anti-police/pro-crime overtures, political correctness, and other extreme lefty narratives sunk the ship. One area Shor notes as an example of white liberals projecting a narrative onto a voter bloc where the data doesn’t exist is immigration. Hispanic voters aren’t overly liberal on this issue, but the pro-open borders nonsense they’ve been peddling seems to be pushing Hispanic voters to back Republicans. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum noted that for eons, analysts noted that if the GOP just moderated a bit, they could nab a solid chunk of Hispanic voters. Now, it seems that’s happening but only because the Democratic base has become increasingly more insane.

This bodes well for the GOP, especially in Texas. It's a red state and it will remain a red state as long as the woke white Left continues to drive the messaging and agenda items.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/05/10/why-you-should-feel-confident-about-texas-remaining-a-red-state-n2589218

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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

'Rigged': Mollie Hemingway's Definitive Account of the 2020 Election Democrats Won't Want You to Read

Bestselling author Mollie Hemingway is ready to set the record straight on the 2020 election with a definitive account of what happened from the fiery showdown between Donald Trump and Joe Biden to the U.S. House and Senate races that determined the precarious balance of power we now see on Capitol Hill.

In Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Hemingway promises to reveal the backstory of the "devastating triple punch that took down the Trump presidency," Regnery Publishing—a fellow Salem Media affiliate—announced Tuesday. "Americans who feel silenced, subjected, and betrayed are about to learn the truth about a scandalous election," the publisher promises.

"What happened during the 2020 election deserves to be investigated and discussed," noted Hemingway in a column announcing her book due out this September. "It must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to it, but because of that opposition. That is why I am writing a book about what happened before, during, and after the 2020 presidential election."

Just as she did in Justice on Trial—her book co-authored with Carrie Severino telling the full story of the contentious confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—Hemingway is sure to expose the truth of what went down before, on, and after November 3, 2020.

"If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election," wrote Hemingway in her announcement of Rigged, scorching Democrats for their hypocrisy and feigned moral superiority.

"My book will contain never-before-told eyewitness stories about what really went down in 2020, not just in the presidential race, but in tight House and Senate races as well. The book will contain analysis of how media and Big Tech oligarchs used their power to control information on the Internet to manipulate people’s behavior before and after the 2020 election. My book will contain not just interviews about the election with top officials from the Trump White House and presidential campaign, but also interviews with Trump himself."

"I have no doubt that the same powers that worked to oust Trump in 2020 will do everything they can to suppress this book in 2021," Hemingway admitted. "But I don’t care. The story has to be told."

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2021/05/11/mollie-hemingway-rigged-story-has-to-be-told-n2589263

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

Biden Gets a Real Vaccine Job

Instead of coasting along on Operation Warp Speed, he needs to vaccinate the world for global security.

By now you’ve heard that the Biden administration’s attempt to waive drug company patents will make virtually no difference to poor countries fighting the Covid pandemic. Oddly, you’ve heard it from both supporters and opponents of his action.

It won’t improve vaccine makers’ incentive to maximize production; they have every incentive now. It won’t improve affordability of the vaccine, already the best bargain in history. The World Bank has $4 billion burning a hole in its pocket to help poor countries acquire and distribute shots when available.

Nor is a lack of competition, aka monopoly, the problem: Fifteen vaccines, including four Russian and five Chinese, are already approved for large swaths of earth’s population, with dozens more in development.

The only real challenge is hiking production fast enough of a specialized product that didn’t exist a few months ago in order that everybody in the world can receive it.

The voices in Mr. Biden’s ear were the same voices that always clamor for invalidating drug company patents, regardless of circumstance. On Monday, in response to another clamor, he finally relaxed the U.S. claim on surplus vaccine coming off factory lines for the benefit of countries in deep struggle against the Covid virus. Remember these episodes next time the Biden administration tells you it isn’t just living off the capital of Operation Warp Speed, it’s “innovating” on its own.

More clearly than ever, the previous U.S. administration and the current British one were astonishing aberrations, casting aside bureaucratic caution, throwing billions at vaccine makers on grounds that it was impossible to waste money when the potential payoff was so high. Other countries, we’ve slowly come to understand, engaged in more hand-waving than action, their officials hesitant to commit to purchases for fear of being accused of overpaying, buying the wrong vaccine, or too much coziness with drug makers. Result: Money is not flowing to vaccine production that could be; the time and attention of vaccine makers is consumed with political gamesmanship it shouldn’t be.

Should investors devote scare resources to high-risk efforts to replace ingredients in short supply? Should they pour concrete for factories that might sit idle for want of equipment and materials? All the wrong signals were sent.

Covax, a vehicle for vaccinating poor countries born a month before Warp Speed, was sidetracked by multilateral virtue signaling. To show the magnanimity of its sponsors, most nations would get the vaccine free despite the availability of aid money, though this would mean Covax lacked any cash flow of its own to secure production commitments. In the name of equity, supply would be dribbled out to many countries simultaneously rather than focused on those that could use it. Congo recently tried to return 1.3 million doses in danger of expiring, having administered fewer than 1,000 shots.

Pledges by the U.S. and other countries did not result in what the World Bank delicately calls “encashment.” Covax’s self-praising sponsors seemingly didn’t want it competing with them for early vaccine supply. Now with the U.S. swimming in more vaccine than it can use, it’s still sitting on rights to 60 million AstraZeneca doses not yet approved for U.S. consumption that could be used elsewhere.

OK, countries will put their own voters first. The Biden administration’s overwhelming priority was to pass a superfluous domestic bailout package, on top of those already passed, so it could claim credit for the pandemic recovery already visible around the corner.

Politicians will act politically; only offensive is the unusual sycophancy of the U.S. press in covering the Biden administration’s political motives.

A top international aid official tells me Mr. Biden’s latest patent proposal, however popular with the left, would only upset the beneficial dynamic that led investors to pour billions into mRNA technology in the first place. The same incentive is attracting billions now to develop booster vaccines as well as more-practical delivery methods (e.g., nasal spray).

Happily Angela Merkel and other European leaders seem set to stop the charade at the World Trade Organization, whose approval would be needed. Maybe a new dawn of realism is breaking. The absurd credit Team Biden keeps bestowing on itself is wearing thin. It’s about time, because there’s a real job to be done. Amid the horrors in India you’ve been reading about, a billion Indians have yet to be exposed to the virus. Inoculating them and millions of others in Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Nigeria and other giant urbanized developing countries—and, yes, China—may yet be the difference between global stability and instability in the coming decade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-gets-a-real-vaccine-job-11621632565

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

One Voter Bloc That Democrats Are Losing in Texas...And It's a Key One

Texas is becoming a blue state. It’s one of the Democratic Party’s unicorns. Every time, there’s been disappointment. In 2014, folks thought that Wendy Davis had a chance to be governor. She ended up getting less than 40 percent of the vote. Beto O’Rourke fell short in his bid to unseat Ted Cruz. Hillary Clinton also failed in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Oh, I know—the margins of victory weren’t as high in years past. Sure. But the Democratic Party’s extreme facelift towards Marxism has a lot of Hispanic voters switching parties. The Daily Caller News Foundation has more:

“I am starting to see this need to connect with the Hispanic community and let them know nationwide that it’s the Republican party that offers opportunities,” Adrienne Pena-Garza, chair of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, told the DCNF.

Pena-Garza grew up in Texas as the daughter of a Democratic state legislator who switched parties and became a Republican around 2010. Pena-Garza told the DCNF that her father’s community reacted very strongly to his switch, noting that he had been beloved as a Democrat but was treated with incivility as a Republican.

But Pena-Garza also switched parties, concerned by the policies and talking points she was witnessing from Democratic lawmakers.

“Things have shifted dramatically,” she said. “I grew up as a strong Catholic,” she said. “This area has got strong Catholic roots today, Christian roots. Being pro-life and pro God was very important to me as an individual. And my family is a family that has served its country. My grandfather served in World War II and in the United States Navy, and my brother served 20 years honorably in the United States Air Force. I saw that the Democrat party was just moving quickly to the left and towards socialism. And those just did not did not align with my values any longer.”

This isn’t shocking. The 2020 election saw scores of Hispanics flee the Democratic Party from California to Florida. In Texas, the border counties which are Hispanic-majority saw support for Trump almost quintupled since 2016. The summer of rioting last year, along with the Left’s incessant call to defund the police cost Democrats a ton of votes. And it will continue to do so if scores of white liberals swell the ranks. College-educated white liberals are outliers when it comes to American politics. They want a liberal vs. conservative electorate which isn’t favorable to them. As David Shor, a liberal data scientist and pollster noted, most nonwhite voters are not liberal and do not see the issues through the lens of the ‘woke’ Left, even on issues like racial resentment. They’re far, far apart—on everything. Not the best groundwork for those who believe Democrats have an advantage due to demographics. The 2020 election pretty much shredded that given that Trump was only 43,000 votes from winning a second term.

At any rate, it seemed as if Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. There was a period where Democrats probably could have solidified things with this voter bloc, but anti-police/pro-crime overtures, political correctness, and other extreme lefty narratives sunk the ship. One area Shor notes as an example of white liberals projecting a narrative onto a voter bloc where the data doesn’t exist is immigration. Hispanic voters aren’t overly liberal on this issue, but the pro-open borders nonsense they’ve been peddling seems to be pushing Hispanic voters to back Republicans. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum noted that for eons, analysts noted that if the GOP just moderated a bit, they could nab a solid chunk of Hispanic voters. Now, it seems that’s happening but only because the Democratic base has become increasingly more insane.

This bodes well for the GOP, especially in Texas. It's a red state and it will remain a red state as long as the woke white Left continues to drive the messaging and agenda items.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/05/10/why-you-should-feel-confident-about-texas-remaining-a-red-state-n2589218

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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

New Study Shows COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects May Be More Common and Severe in Recovered Recipients

A new study of COVID-19 vaccine recipients globally should give the public health community a reason to reevaluate recommendations that everyone needs to be vaccinated regardless of prior infection with the virus. The researchers surveyed slightly more than 2,000 self-reporting vaccinated individuals who were at least seven days past their first vaccine dose and monitored their reports of side effects and their severity through the vaccination process. They compared the results for recovered patients with a confirmed COVID-19 PCR or antigen test with those who had not had COVID-19. From the study (emphasis mine):

People with prior COVID-19 exposure were largely excluded from the vaccine trials and, as a result, the safety and reactogenicity of the vaccines in this population have not been previously fully evaluated. For the first time, this study demonstrates a significant association between prior COVID19 infection and a significantly higher incidence and severity of self-reported side effects after vaccination for COVID-19. Consistently, compared to the first dose of the vaccine, we found an increased incidence and severity of self-reported side effects after the second dose, when recipients had been previously exposed to viral antigen. In view of the rapidly accumulating data demonstrating that COVID-19 survivors generally have adequate natural immunity for at least 6 months, it may be appropriate to re-evaluate the recommendation for immediate vaccination of this group.

While this is the first study of its kind and certainly warrants further examination, particularly because the side effects were self-reported, it acknowledges something that the public health bureaucracy, including CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Anthony Fauci, rarely, if ever, mention. The science has consistently shown an adequate immune response in recovered patients, and we also know that the response includes more than just antibodies. In March, researchers found the immune response was durable at eight months with minor declines in several immune system components, including T cells, B cells, and neutralizing antibodies. According to The New York Times:

“That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.

The findings are likely to come as a relief to experts worried that immunity to the virus might be short-lived, and that vaccines might have to be administered repeatedly to keep the pandemic under control.

And the research squares with another recent finding: that survivors of SARS, caused by another coronavirus, still carry certain important immune cells 17 years after recovering.

The study above is in addition to several studies on durable natural immunity noted in the research paper on side effects. Clearly, this type of research should be ongoing, but it is only valuable if our public health officials share it broadly, and to date, they have not. Even if it is emerging data, there have been no reports of large numbers of reinfections with any COVID-19 variant causing severe illness or death in recovered patients. This fact appears to reinforce the research findings to date.

The new study also compared side effects between the mRNA and viral vector vaccines:

Moreover, this is the first head-to-head real-world comparison of the self-reported safety of viral vector versus mRNA vaccines, with the latter associated with a 58% decreased incidence of self reported severe side effects, requiring hospital care. While more recipients of mRNA vaccines reported at least one (any) side effect, the difference was predominantly driven by the frequent local reactions, while the incidence of each of the systemic side effects evaluated, which are more burdensome to the recipients, was significantly reduced. Recipients of the viral vector-based vaccines were relatively older. However, differences in the incidence of adverse events were confirmed in multivariate analyses accounting for the age of the respondents as a covariate. Moreover, given that older people reported side effects less frequently, potential bias due to age difference would be expected to favour viral vector-based vaccines. These findings may have an impact on vaccine choice, and health policies.

Hooman Noorchashm, M.D., Ph.D., has warned of the possibility of a harmed minority in the public health bureaucracy’s rush to vaccination. He is not an anti-vaxxer by any means, views the development of the COVID-19 vaccines as a medical miracle, and has received the COVID-19 vaccination himself. Noorchashm raised the issue of receiving the vaccine after recovering because of how vaccine-induced immune responses work during an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight:

I want to reiterate as we have before, the most unprecedented thing that we’re doing in this vaccine campaign is that we’re deploying it indiscriminately into folks who have been recently or previously infected. And I think that we shouldn’t underestimate what the effect of a vaccine-driven immune response is on the tissues in individuals who have been previously infected, that literally, the antigenic footprint of the virus persists in the tissues of the previously infected.

So, it’s not a far stretch to imagine that those tissues, such as the inner lining of the blood vessel, will be targeted by the vaccine immune response.

To simplify, the sites where a recovered patient’s body fought off the virus—the lungs, the heart, the blood vessels, and even the brain, to name a few—remain physiologically “marked.” Vaccine-generated immune cells will attack these sites in the body as if they are still infected, potentially causing problems. Given the number of organs in the body that COVID-19 reportedly infects, Noorchashm’s explanation made me wonder if this phenomenon could cause the range of adverse reactions seen on VAERS data, from diarrhea to blinding headaches, high fevers, and shortness of breath. This study is the first to provide insight into a possible answer to those questions.

Anyone interested in finding out if they have a current immune reaction to COVID-19 can order a T-Detect test. It does not require a doctor’s order and can be completed at a local lab. The CDC estimates that only 1 in 4.3 infections with COVID-19 have been confirmed by testing. This test may be worthwhile for those who did not receive a positive test but are hesitant to get the vaccine to help them better assess their risk in conjunction with their doctors.

It would be great if our public health gurus would acknowledge recovered immunity. Then colleges and employers could accept proof of immunity in place of proof of vaccination, at least while researchers continue to study the question of the durability of naturally acquired immunity. Given this first glimpse regarding the increased severity of side effects, it would be irresponsible not to. And worth wondering why, if they do not.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2021/05/18/new-study-shows-covid-19-vaccine-side-effects-more-common-and-severe-in-recovered-recipients-n1447874

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

Why Does the Left Seemingly Hate Israel?

With more than 3,000 rockets having been fired into Israel by Hamas recently, the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war.

It is not just that it fears that “The Squad,” Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of Antifa, and woke institutions such as academia and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel. It is also terrified that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon, the Democratic Party will end up as disdained as the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

The new core of the Democrats, as emblemized by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, has in the past questioned the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel, and occasionally has had to apologize for puerile anti-Semitic rants.

The left in general believes we should judge harshly even the distant past without exemptions. Why then, in venomous, knee-jerk fashion, does it fixate on a nation born from the Holocaust while favoring Israel’s enemies, who were on the side of the Nazis in World War II?

It was not just that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi sympathizer. Egypt, for example, welcomed ex-Nazis for their hatred of Jews and their military expertise, including infamous death camp doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim and Waffen-SS henchman Otto Skorzeny. The Hamas charter still reads like it is cribbed from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The left claims it champions consensual government and believes the United States must use its soft-power clout to isolate autocracies. But the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas refuse to hold free and regularly scheduled elections. If an Israeli strongman ever suspended free elections and ruled through brutality, U.S. aid would be severed within days.

If history and democratic values can’t fully explain the apparent hatred of Israel on the left, perhaps human rights violations do. But here, too, there is another example of radical asymmetry. Arab citizens of Israel enjoy far greater constitutional protections than do Arabs living under either the Palestinian National Authority or Hamas.

Is the left bothered by the allies of Hamas? After all, most are autocracies such as Iran and North Korea.

We return, then, to other reasons for the woke contempt directed toward Israel.

In part, the Western left always despises the unapologetically successful—as if they are inevitably beneficiaries of unfair privilege. Underdog Israel was not so hated from 1947 to 1967. Then, it was poorer, more socialist, and in danger of being extinguished by its many neighboring enemies.

But after the victories in the 1967 and 1973 wars, the Israeli military proved unconquerable in the region, no matter how large the numbers, wealth, and armaments of its many enemies.

For the left, Israel’s current strength, confidence, and success mean it cannot be seen as a victim, but only as a victimizer. As its Iron Dome missile defenses knock down the flurry of Hamas rockets, and as its planes take out the military installations that launched those rockets, the left bizarrely believes Israel wins too easily and acts “disproportionately.”

The left also has a strange idea of current “imperialism” and “colonialism.” The general rule is that Westerners cannot settle in numbers in the non-West. But the reversal is certainly not true.

Millions of Middle Easterners are welcomed into Belgium, France, Germany, the U.K., and the United States. Yet Jews have been in what is now Israel since nearly the dawn of civilization. And their 1947 borders only grew after they were attacked and threatened with extinction.

The left claims that its anti-Israelism has had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. But it is almost impossible now to make that distinction, when woke criticism obsesses over democratic Israel and ignores far greater oppressors and oppressed elsewhere.

Why are there no demonstrations in major Western cities damning the Chinese government for putting 1 million Muslim Uighurs in camps? Why are the world’s millions of former refugees—the Volga Germans, the East Prussians, the Cypriot Greeks—long forgotten, and yet the Palestinians alone are deified for being perpetually displaced?

Our formal NATO ally, Turkey, received little global pushback for its treatment of the Kurds, or its frequent intolerance of religious minorities. Why does Israel alone always earn such venom?

Hating democratic Israel while it is under attack is not just a reflection of the new woke and ethically bankrupt left. It is also a symptom of a deeper pathology in the West, one of moral equivalence, amoral relativism, and self-loathing.

Hating Israel has become the surrogate Western way of hating oneself.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/05/20/why-does-the-left-seemingly-hate-israel

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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

Science Catches Up -- And Burns You All

The article below is an attempt to explain simply what has appeared in a prestigious  academic journal article.  Unfortunately, even the simplified account takes  lot of brain strain to follow.  One can only hope that those who do understand it take notice of it

There is a reason science is a process and until you understand something you should keep your ******ned mouth shut.

Especially when all you have against 40+ years of hard science is computer models.

Massssskss was one of them.  I warned early on that physics said masks could not work if the virus was in aerosols or transmitted in feces, no matter whether the feces were manually spread or through aerosols.  We knew this was virtually certain when a mass-spread event happened twice in Wuhan and Hong Kong in apartments on the same vertical drain stack where there were no P-traps; the people infected did not know each other and thus any other form of transmission other than through fecal aerosol was wildly improbable.  That was ignored.  We then had the German meatpacking plant where everyone was wearing masks and yet a huge outbreak took place across tens of feet, a claimed impossibility.  Yet it happened and was proved by RNA sequencing; the researchers were able to identify the index and daughter cases and thus conclusively prove that the infections happened in that plant via that route, despite masks.

Now MIT has weighed in and said the same thing. They try to sidestep the mask issue in their "research" but fail; nothing less than an N95, which is not a mask but rather a respirator, stops aerosols, and source control does not work even with N95s because when you exhale the positive pressure escapes around the edges and for aerosols goes right through the gaps.  Workplaces and airlines have banned N95s with exhaust valves which preserve the seal on your face and thus are the only ones that will provide protection for you against inhaling said aerosol.  Non-valved respirators repeatedly break said seal and thus render it ineffective within minutes.  Don't believe me?  Put on an N95 without a valve and do some sanding where there's lots of dust, when you take it off let me know what you find around the edges where the respirator used to be.  This is why you want the ones with a valve and why the ones I have for such work have a valve.

Pay attention to this paper folks and note its publication date, January 2021.  Nobody has paid any attention to it at all yet it is peer-reviewed in Nature, one of the "better" medical publications.  I will start right here with what you do not want to read, but you damn well should before you take the shots.

This T cell-mediated immune response is even more important as studies on humoral immunity to SARS-CoV-1 provided evidence that antibody responses are short-lived and can even cause or aggravate virus-associated lung pathology

Note that when you get the shot the first thing you get is antibodies; you may get a T-cell reaction.  This pre-existing knowledge, from SARS (CoV-1) entirely explains why people who just got vaccinated often get hammered by the virus and frequently end up in the hospital or die.  It marks the premise of attempting to vaccinate out of a pandemic where transmission is actively occurring as stupid.

You go get the shot.  Five days later you get the virus.  You have not yet developed immunity and the partial expression makes it worse.

You would have been better off, by far, taking the same infection straight up front.  It likely would have harmed you less.

This generally applies, by the way, to all vaccines and all viruses.  The government and researchers know this.  They've known this for decades.  It's fact.  It's why you don't wait until the measles is raging around you to get a measles vaccine and the same is true for the flu shot; you get it before the flu season starts for this very reason.  Attempting to vaccinate out of a raging infection does not work and in fact kills people.

Yeah, if you don't get infected during that latent period you get protection.  But if you do get infected you're screwed and all of the two-dose shots have a roughly four week window during which you get hosed instead of protected.  Israel's data, by the way, proves this is real; Berenson has been reporting on it since the beginning of the year and I've noted it as well.

If you remember I've also pointed out that multiple studies have shown that somewhere between 30-50% of the population is T-cell reactive to Covid-19 despite never having had it, nor SARS or MERS, its alleged "precursors."  But those studies were non-specific; that is, they looked for T-cell reactivity but never tried to identify the specific protein sequences and their part of the whole that was involved.  This study does, and it finally puts light on basically the entire reason that what we've done is not only wrong it's criminally stupid.

These folks did what we should have done originally -- they isolated a panel of 120 peptides that comprised roughly 10% of the entire virus, containing 57% and 1% of the nucleocapsid and spike proteins.  Note that while the "spike" facilitates entry into the cell there is evidence that it is, standing alone, pathological -- that is, it causes disease in the human body without the rest of the virus.  The nucleocapsid portion, on the other hand, is the part that is responsible for replication; if it is tagged and the cell containing it is destroyed then viral replication is prevented even though penetration of the cell has occurred.

 

This fully explains the wild divergence in outcomes even among similarly-morbid people.  The more "matches" you have on a pre-existing basis the more-fully your immune system can recognize the virus and while you will get infected if those matches are among the nucleocapsid section you're much more-likely to drive it off without serious consequence.

Note that among the "PRE" (not-infected) collection of samples all were prior to November of 2019 and thus presumed non-infected.  We in fact know there were infections during that time frame but most in that group were from wildly before Covid-19 by as much as 10 years or more, so the cross-contamination percentage is going to be very low.

Now let me point to the data itself.

Of the SARS donors, 100% showed T cell responses to cross-reactive and/or specific ECs (HLA class I 86%, HLA-DR 100%; Fig. 5d,e), whereas 81% of PRE donors showed HLA class I (16%) and/or HLA-DR (77%) T cell responses to cross-reactive ECs (Fig. 5d).

81% eh?  Isn't that an interesting number?  Where have we seen that before?

You know damn well where, don't you? It's the rough percentage of alleged Covid-19 infections that were either asymptomatic or very low-symptom for which no medical treatment was sought and, in many cases, not detected.

So it wasn't 30 or 50% who had pre-existing protection it's actually roughly 8 in 10!  This was not a "novel, everyone is susceptible" virus at all.  It never was.  You were lied to from the very beginning and thus all the "models" based on that were trash.

Again, just a bit further down:

Taken together, SARS-CoV-2 T cell epitopes enabled detection of post-infectious T cell immunity in 100% of individuals convalescing from COVID-19 and revealed pre-existing T cell responses in 81% of unexposed individuals.

Now we know why Diamond Princess happened the way it did.  It was never possible for more than 20% of the people on that ship to get seriously-symptomatic Covid-19 despite being cooped up in close quarters for weeks with an aerosol-spread disease and cruise passengers generally being wildly-overrepresented for various morbidity factors.  It also completely explains why one of two people quarantined in the same cabin got sick and the other did not.

We also know why my friend's grandfather was killed by it but his equally-morbid grandmother was not touched symptomatically even though she tested positive despite literally sleeping in the same bed with him until he wound up in the hospital and ultimately expired.

We also know why there is no place on the planet that has seen >20% of people with significant, symptomatic disease from Covid-19.  Not a single place has had that happen, even where sanitation is crap and people spread it like crazy (e.g. Iran where they lick monuments sequentially -- literally.)

This study explains every single example seen everywhere in the world, including high-concentration examples, of infection with Covid-19 back to the start of the pandemic.  We now know why no more than 20% of any exposed population has ever exhibited materially-serious disease -- it simply was not possible as no more than 20% of the population was potentially susceptible to serious disease.  Ever.  Period.

EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT OTHERWISE WAS FALSE AND EXACTLY ZERO SO-CALLED "PUBLIC HEALTH" AUTHORITIES OR POLITICANS HAVE EVER ADMITTED TO THIS, YET IT IS NOW SCIENTIFICALLY PROVED THEY WERE COMPLETELY FULL OF CRAP FROM THE FIRST DAY ONWARD AND WE KNEW SO, BUT NOT WHY, AFTER DIAMOND PRINCESS AS I HAVE REPEATEDLY POINTED OUT.

NOW WE KNOW WHY -- WITH SCIENTIFIC CERTAINTY.

Let me distill this down for you before I go on:

In 100% of the persons who had and recovered from Covid-19 and 81% of those who have never had the virus a vaccine may well be worthless as they already have T-cell response.  While this will not prevent them from getting it again there is questionable at best benefit over their existing immunological state but there is risk, including a risk of death, from the side effects.

Furthermore, evidence was provided for a lower recognition frequency of cross-reactive HLA-DR EC in hospitalized patients compared to donors with mild COVID-19 course, which might suggest a lack of pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 T cells in severely ill patients.

No kidding?  Gee, yet more points of contact with the obvious?

Then there's this:

Our observation that intensity of T cell responses and recognition rate of T cell epitopes was significantly higher in convalescent patients compared to unexposed individuals suggests that not only expansion, but also a spread of SARS-CoV-2 T cell response diversity occurs upon active infection.

Let me be clear: The entire premise of all of the "mitigations" and demand for mass-vaccination relied on a lie; that this was a "novel" virus to which nobody had existing resistance.  We now know that's false; 81% of the population in fact does have existing immunity and further, that immunity is strengthened, materially so, by natural infection.  In short if you have said partial resistance you want to get the disease as the odds of you being seriously harmed are statistically zero yet you will perfect your immunity and from a public health perspective you want those people who are not going to be seriously harmed to get it naturally, not take a ******ned shot because it is that perfection of immunity that stops the disease from being of harm to the public on a durable basis.

It gets worse -- the resistance isn't to the spike, it's almost-exclusively to the nucleocapsid portion of the virus among those with existing resistance; the largest set of reactions by far was to the nucleocapsid, not the spike.  This is very strong evidence that it is that nucleocapsid reactivity that provides effective resistance to serious disease.  The existing "vaccines" do not and cannot provide this since they encode only the spike.

Again for those who are reading-comprehension challenged: The existing vaccines are worthless for building said perfected immunity since the data is that the nucleocapsid section, which the vaccines do not code, is where most of the pre-existing resistance against serious disease resides.

Who is in the "not at risk" group?  Basically everyone under 50; said persons have comprised less than 5% of the deaths and especially those under 18 who almost never get serious ill or die.  This means we should have never closed schools, never masked kids and in fact we should have encouraged the equivalent of mass chicken-pox parties for both children and healthy young adults, especially in colleges.  The current push to vaccinate college students is not only stupid it's directly counter-productive to them building a robust and durable, likely life-long, immune response to this specific virus including the variants.

Further this paper points out that induction of immunity against the spike may well be worthless or even harmful.  Again "prevention of infection" is meaningless if it is bypassed and you get hammered, as has repeatedly occurred during the window following vaccination.  Indeed, such might even enhance the progress of infection and mortality and if that's not enough insult there's reason to believe the same enhanced risk may also present itself on the "back end" as antibodies to the spike wane too with no way to know when that window occurs in a specific individual.

It is quite clear from this study that recognition of the nucleocapsid proteins is the difference between asymptomatic or mild infections and severe ones; the correlation is exact and yet exactly zero of the existing vaccines target anything other than the spike.  You cannot build immunity to that which is not presented.  With the spike now having evidence of direct pathology and in fact quite possibly being why serious organ damage and death occur with natural infection we have clearly gone down the wrong road with "warp speed" and in fact may have done irrevocable and severe harm to millions of Americans while failing to induce long-term nucleocapsid immune recognition which occurs via natural infection and is the key to turning a potential infection into a nuisance at worst.

Short-term prevention of "infection" among the 81% of those with existing T-cell recognition to the nucleocapsid proteins is not only stupid it is likely to kill people over the intermediate and longer term since those who are not vaccinated and get infected with partial resistance build additional and durable immunity via said low-symptom and asymptomatic infections which do not materially harm them and blocking that process is harmful, not helpful.

This group includes nearly all young adults and children for which people are trying to force vaccination.

There are some holes in this study that require more work; specifically, trying to pin down how much protection is afforded by which specific nucleocapsid recognition profile, and how cytokine production bears on that along with binding properties.  This is definitely not the last word on such by any means, but it is a rather important contribution -- and one we should have pursued given that it certainly appears to fully explain the low-symptom and asymptomatic "infections."  The authors note this and intend to do further study.  Good!

What is not clear yet is where the cross-reactivity came from; it's obviously some other disease and it didn't kill the person with it; perhaps intentional infection with something that causes nothing more than a cold would be a good idea eh?  Of course first we must identify what gave that 80% of the population their cross-reactivity, which we have not done -- again, on purpose, despite having a full year to work on it.

To repeat this study is 100% congruent with what we have seen thus far in the wild with this virus.

EVERY LAST BIT OF IT.

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=242205

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Also see my other blogs.  Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

 

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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Australian team develop antiviral treatment that could reduce virus by 99.99 per cent

A team of Queensland scientists has co-developed a “gene-silencing” antiviral treatment that could effectively kill COVID-19, in what’s been dubbed an “important missing piece” in the arsenal against the virus.

Nigel McMillan and his team from the Menzies Health Institute at Griffith University, alongside scientists from City of Hope research centre in the US, say the “next-generation” antiviral approach could stop the virus from replicating in the lungs.

Professor McMillan said stage one clinical trials revealed the antiviral treatment reduced the viral load in mice lungs by 99.99 per cent.

The antiviral treatment reduces viral load in the lungs by 99.99 per cent, according to the Queensland-led team.
The antiviral treatment reduces viral load in the lungs by 99.99 per cent, according to the Queensland-led team.
While traditional antivirals, such as Tamiflu and remdesivir, reduce symptoms and help people recover earlier, this new technology uses small-interfering RNA to attack the virus’s genome directly, stopping the virus from replicating.

Lipid nanoparticles, designed at Griffith University and City of Hope, will be used as the drug delivery vehicle to deliver the siRNA to the lungs.

Professor McMillan said the treatment had proved incredibly effective in mice trials.

“Treatment with virus-specific siRNA reduces viral load by 99.99 per cent,” he said.

“These stealth nanoparticles can be delivered to a wide range of lung cells and silence viral genes.”

The treatment can work on all betacoronavirus, including the original SARS virus, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus which causes COVID-19), and any new variants that could arise in the future, because it “targets ultra-conserved regions in the virus’s genome”.

“We have also shown that these nanoparticles are stable at 4C for 12 months, and at room temperature for greater than one month, meaning this agent could be used in low-resource settings to treat infected patients,” Professor McMillan said.

The team is hoping to progress to the next stage of trials by the end of the year, and if proven effective, could be made available commercially by 2022.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/coronavirus/qld-based-team-develop-antiviral-treatment-that-could-reduce-virus-by-9999-per-cent/news-story/5f7f8b170d3229af4199062bfefdebea

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What the Left Ignores About Anti-Asian Hate Crime

Data shows that blacks are the primary perpetrators of violent crimes against Asians.

In his speech before a few joint members of Congress last month, Joe Biden insisted that the greatest terrorist threat our nation faces is “white supremacy.” Then, after asserting that George Floyd’s death presented an opportunity to address the country’s “systemic racism,” Biden praised the Senate for passing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act “to protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from the vicious hate crimes we’ve seen this past year.” The message is clear: According to Biden and his fellow Democrats, the root problem plaguing the nation is white racism.

However, despite all the pontification and accusations regarding “white supremacy” being the supposed source for the rising number of hate crimes against Asian Americans, neither the media nor Democrat politicians care to genuinely examine the facts or report them. The facts not only fail to support the “white supremacy” narrative, they contradict it.

Ying Ma, author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, notes, “Political leaders, activists, and the media have widely attributed the rise in hate crimes to former President Donald Trump’s controversial use of the terms ‘China virus’ or ‘kung flu’ … [but the] racially motivated violence [is] in heavily Democratic areas and from demographic groups that overwhelmingly opposed him.”

Ying Ma observes that the problem of anti-Asian hate crimes predates Trump. She reports, “A survey conducted by the San Francisco Police Department in 2008 revealed that 85% of the city’s violent crimes were black-on-Asian, a figure officials in this notoriously liberal city confronted with ‘squeamishness.’” The officials’ “squeamishness” was likely due to the data not supporting the Left’s white supremacy narrative that sees racism as a whites-only problem.

And it’s not just San Francisco witnessing this same race dynamic. Other major urban areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle have seen the same.

In an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Ying Ma noticed something about those most often engaged in attacks against Asian Americans. “They don’t quite look like white supremacists,” she said. “They don’t look like white voters or Trump voters. In fact, many of these attacks have occurred in heavily Democratic cities where they did not vote for Trump in 2020 or 2016.” She adds, “What the Democrats or the far left have done, actually quite effectively, in the past year or so, is to libel former President Trump for something that the Democrats themselves actually are very much guilty of. And what is that? That is their silence and their cowardice before black-on-Asian attacks that often occur in America’s urban areas.”

Finally, Ying Ma rightly contends, “America must not only inquire but engage in a long overdue, honest conversation about the prevalence of black crime and the existence of racism among nonwhite Americans. The goal is not to vilify an entire race for the crimes of individuals, nor is it to absolve individuals of other races who commit racist acts.”

Individuals need to be held accountable for their actions, not the ethnic group from which they come. A high or low melanin count is not a metric for measuring morality.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/79890-what-the-left-ignores-about-anti-asian-hate-crime-2021-05-14

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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