Not with a bang but a lawsuit: Is this the way the Covid vaccines end?

Dr Barry Schultz was a highly respected paediatrician, surgeon and obstetrician in Adelaide. He was also a Covid vaccine skeptic. He was not opposed to conventional vaccines. He had immunised thousands of children and was fully vaccinated. He was concerned about the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines, so much so that when he was sent the paperwork to become eligible to administer the novel gene-based injections which were only provisionally approved he knew that if anything went wrong he was the one who could be sued. So he wrote on the back of the form ‘get stuffed’ and told his staff to send it back.

Nonetheless, he had to be vaccinated to be able to be able to treat his patients in hospitals. So on 2 October 2021 he had his first Pfizer jab. Within three days he had blood in his urine. He also suffered nose bleeds. Both are adverse events associated with Covid vaccination. He booked to see a specialist but continued to work 80 hours a week. He never got to that appointment. Two weeks after his first jab he woke at 2:30am on Tuesday 19 October haemorrhaging internally, including in his brain, and vomiting blood profusely. He was taken immediately to hospital where he was eventually pronounced dead.

It is well established in Covid medical literature that it is the spike protein – found in both vaccines and the virus – that damages blood vessels causing haemorrhaging. Given that his death occurred less than three weeks after the jab, the vaccine should be suspected of having contributed to his death. Yet his widow, a registered nurse, had to battle for over a year before the Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Agency finally agreed to submit a report to the TGA which listed the Pfizer vaccine as being suspected of contributing to his death.

This week, his brother Phil was one of over 500 people who have joined a class action lawsuit filed in the federal court of Australia by Brisbane lawyer Natalie Strijland. All have suffered serious or life-threatening events or are the relatives of those who have died following Covid vaccination. Many have have been left with significant disabilities. As the news filters out about the class action, the first of its kind in Australia, more people are joining each day. Dr Melissa McCann, who instigated the action, is crowdfunding to assist with legal and travel costs. Any compensation awarded will be shared entirely by the injured and the bereaved.

The applicants will argue that the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) did not fulfil its duty to properly regulate the vaccines which resulted in considerable harm to Australians. The respondents are the Australian government, the Department of Health and Aged Care Secretary Dr Brendan Murphy, who announced in early April that he will retire in July, and the former head of the TGA Adjunct Professor John Skerritt who just retired from the public service in mid-April.

So far there have been 986 deaths and over 138,000 adverse events that have been reported to the TGA following Covid vaccines. That dwarfs the reports of death for all flu vaccines since records began in 1971 – only 28 deaths and 3,924 adverse events. Even so, the Covid vaccine reports are almost certainly an understatement. A Harvard study commissioned by the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 showed that reports to the regulator of vaccine injuries may represent only one per cent of those who are injured.

Yet despite the mounting claims of deaths and injuries the TGA insists that only 14 deaths are ‘likely to be related to vaccination’ – 13 following an AstraZeneca (AZ) jab and one following Moderna.

AZ’s vaccine was quietly withdrawn from Australia on 21 March but the TGA maintains this has nothing to do with safety even though it is suspected of contributing to the deaths of 484 Australians – 100 aged 18 to 64, 342 aged 65 and above, and 42 Australians whose age is apparently unknown.

So why has the AZ vaccine been withdrawn? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the pharma giant is being sued in the UK by a group representing the vaccine injured and dead which includes the husband of popular BBC North radio broadcaster Lisa Shaw? She was only 44 when she died a week after her AZ jab of vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, an acknowledged sometimes deadly side effect.

What about Pfizer? It seems highly unlikely that not a single death has been caused by its vaccines in Australia when smaller countries such as New Zealand and Singapore acknowledge that it has caused deaths. There have been over 5,300 reports of myocarditis and/or pericarditis in people following Covid vaccination, both of which can be caused by Covid vaccines. In 23 cases the person died and in 16 of those cases it was following a Pfizer vaccine. These were not elderly people. In seven cases the person was aged between 18 and 64, in six cases they were aged 65 and above and in three cases the age was unknown.

How is it possible not to know someone’s age when they die when the TGA claims it is ‘carefully monitoring and reviewing reports of myocarditis and pericarditis’ and ‘closely reviews all deaths reported in the days and weeks after Covid-19 vaccination’? These facts should be easy to establish. The name, age and type of vaccine administered are recorded on the Australian Immunisation Register for every vaccination in Australia and the age of death is recorded on every death certificate. Yet in 28 deaths the TGA has not identified the type of vaccine and in 92 deaths the TGA says that it doesn’t know the age of the person.

What is surprising is not that the TGA has withdrawn the AZ vaccine but that it is still recommending all other Covid vaccines to anyone aged 5 years or older. Denmark, Sweden and Norway stopped recommending the vaccine for children and healthy adults at different points in 2022. Even the World Health Organisation urged countries this April to treat vaccinating healthy children and adolescents as a ‘low priority’. Switzerland, the global headquarters for many pharmaceutical companies, has said that at present it no longer recommends Covid vaccinations for anyone. Doctors may still administer the jabs but will bear the risk of liability. Is this the way the Covid vaccines will end, not with a bang but a lawsuit?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/not-with-a-bang-but-a-lawsuit/

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

More on the Class action lawsuit over Covid vaccine injuries 'There has been a cover-up'

A landmark Covid-19 vaccine injury class action lawsuit has been filed against the Australian government and the medicines regulator.

The nation-wide suit, which reportedly has 500 members including three named applicants, seeks redress for those allegedly left injured or bereaved by the Covid-19 vaccines.

One of the applicants who suffered a severe heart condition after getting the Pfizer jab is even claiming there was 'cover-up' during the vaccine rollout which hid the potential risks.

The federal government, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and the Department of Health - in addition to a number of senior public servants - are all named as parties to the class action, which was filed in the New South Wales Federal Court on Wednesday.

The named parties are accused of negligence in their approval and monitoring of Covid-19 vaccines, breach of statutory duty and misfeasance in public office.

The lawsuit was organised by Queensland GP Dr Melissa McCann who raised over $105,000 through crowd funding. 'These injured and bereaved have suffered immense loss, pain and grief,' Dr McCann tweeted.

'Just as heartbreaking has been the gaslighting and silence, which has left them feeling abandoned. We cannot simply 'move on' from covid and leave them behind.'

Dr McCann has been critical of the existing compensation scheme, claiming it was 'not fit for purpose'.

'Many vaccine-injured Australians who cannot access compensation through the Services Australia scheme now find themselves abandoned, with no support,' Dr McCann said.

The size of the compensation claim being sought is not yet clear.

The TGA has been contacted for comment.

The TGA’s latest health safety report, published on 20 April, reveals that adverse risks are extremely low. here were 138,307 total adverse event reports from nearly 66 million vaccine doses administered - a rate of just 0.2 per cent.

'The protective benefits of vaccination far outweigh the potential risks,' the report states.

The medicines regulator has identified a total of 14 reports where the cause of death was linked to vaccination and said there was no new vaccine-related deaths identified since 2022.

'The TGA closely monitors reports of suspected side effects (also known as adverse events) to the COVID-19 vaccines,' it said.

'This is the most intensive safety monitoring ever conducted of any vaccines in Australia.'

But instructing solicitor Natalie Strijland, of Brisbane law firm NR Barbi, said the action would argue the TGA caused considerable harm and damage by failing to regulate the COVID-19 vaccinations properly.

The class action names three applicants, one of whom is 41-year old father-of-two Gareth O'Gradie.

Mr O'Gradie, a teacher from Melbourne, was left with a 20-centimetre scar down his chest after developing severe pericarditis — inflammation of the lining around the heart — following his first Pfizer vaccination in July 2021.

He did not respond to various medications and therapies and in February 2022 doctors performed open heart surgery to remove his the pericardial sac lining his heart.

The TGA said myocarditis and pericarditis were 'usually temporary conditions, with most people getting better within a few days', noting that the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) 'continues to emphasise that the protective benefits of the vaccines far outweigh the rare risk of these side effects'.

But Mr O'Gradie believes there has been 'misinformation about the safety' of the vaccines from the government. 'I think there has been some cover-up,' he told news.com.au.

'There was a lot of, you know, 'We need to not scare the public as part of the vaccine rollout, so let's not publicise these things.' There was a large, intentional withholding of information — that doesn't give people informed consent.'

He claimed that he was 'totally not or never have been anti-vaccine'. 'I'm pro-science, I'm well educated,' he said.

Mr O'Gradie told The Australian that he was worried about the 'anti-vaccine lobby piggybacking' on the class action.

He is joined by two other lead claimants: Antonio Derose, 66, who developed encephalomyelitis (inflammation in the brain and spinal cord) following his AstraZeneca jab and Anthony Rose, 47, who claims severe cognitive impairment and chronic fatigue following his Moderna vaccination.

The existing compensation scheme, which is open to Australians who 'suffer a moderate to severe impact following an adverse reaction to a TGA-approved COVID-19 vaccine', has been heavily criticised for being difficult to access and too narrowly focused.

As of April 12, Services Australia had received 3501 applications and paid 137 claims totalling more than $7.3 million. Another 2263 claims are still in progress, while 405 have been withdrawn and 696 deemed not payable.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12015497/Australian-government-hit-class-action-lawsuit-Covid-vaccines.html

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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

Very weak study in defence of masks

The journal Plos One on Friday slapped an “expression of concern” on the Burnet Institute’s controversial July 2021 paper, which purported to show that mandating masks was the “single most important control measure” that turned around Victoria’s second Covid wave in 2020 “almost overnight”.

In October 2021, experts told news.com.au that the supposed “world-first” study was riddled with basic errors and should never have been published in a major journal, blasting the paper as “crap”, “extremely lightweight” and “very, very low quality”.

The Burnet Institute – an influential public health body that advised the Victorian government on its Covid response – stood by its findings and described the scientists’ comments to news.com.au as “disappointing and unprofessional”.

But Plos One has now acknowledged flaws in the study with a lengthy notice appended to the paper. An expression of concern – one step above a correction but short of a retraction – is used to “alert readers of serious concerns about published work”.

“After publication of this article, readers raised a number of concerns, including about the methodology, the limitations of the study design, and whether the conclusions are fully supported,” Plos One editors wrote in the notice.

“The Plos One editors consulted with two members of the editorial board and a statistical advisor who advised that the study design is associated with a number of weaknesses that are discussed in the article, and which are unavoidable because of ethical issues that would be associated with a randomised controlled trial in the context of a pandemic, but that there were also additional weaknesses.”

For the study, the Burnet Institute looked at photos from The Age newspaper to conclude that mask usage rose from 43 per cent to 97 per cent after the July mandate came into effect.

Medical researcher Dr Kyle Sheldrick told news.com.au in 2021 that it was “hard to think of a worse methodology to answer this question than just looking at which photos are collected by a metropolitan newspaper”.

“I was staggered to see this was published by a major journal,” he said. “If a student came to me and said, I’m going to compare these two sets of photos and draw some conclusion about whether a policy worked, you would send them away to think about it.”

Another researcher, an eminent Australian clinician and scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity, was equally scathing. “I agree, it’s crap,” he said. “It’s extremely lightweight. I think it’s a totally feeble article. It doesn’t have a rigorous methodology and it is weak in its scientific inference.”

Concerns were also raised about other aspects of the paper, including that it singled out the mask mandate as the key reason for the fall in Covid transmission out of all of Victoria’s sweeping lockdown measures.

Plos One’s editors acknowledged the three main issues raised with the paper – the photographic observation of mask usage, self-reported mask wearing survey data, and unmeasured confounding variables such as curfews, movement restrictions and closures.

On the photos, Plos One’s editors noted it was “unclear whether such images are representative of mask usage in the population”.

They also noted the Survey of Covid-19 Responses to Understand Behaviour (SCRUB) sample size was “small and may not be representative of the population”.

In response, the Burnet Institute’s authors indicated that “the sample sizes were not inappropriately small for the purpose, noting that the high-powered interrupted time series study found a highly statistically significant change in the growth rate of the epidemic that coincided with the mask mandate”.

Plos One’s editors also noted that “the study design could not exclude the possibility of contributions from unmeasured confounding variables, including the implementation of a curfew and movement restrictions on 2nd August 2020 and closure of childcare facilities, schools, and non-essential businesses on 5th August 2020”.

“According to the cumulative expert input received by the Plos One editors, the results of the published study contribute to the field of mask evaluation research, provided results are not overinterpreted and limitations are acknowledged,” they wrote.

“The Plos One editors felt that the conclusions, including those that imply causation, a direct correlation between Covid-19 cases and mask mandates, and the ability of masks for controlling epidemics, were not suitably tempered in light of the limitations of the study design. The Plos One editors issue this expression of concern to inform readers about the above considerations regarding study design and interpretation of the results.”

The Burnet Institute has been contacted for comment.

It comes after a major Cochrane Review – considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine – earlier this year assessed 78 high-quality scientific studies, and found “wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference” when comparing masking with non-masking to prevent Covid.

The bombshell findings proved controversial and sparked a war of words between Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library, and the study’s lead author Tom Jefferson.

“Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Soares-Weiser said in a statement in March.

“[The study’s] wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologise. While scientific evidence is never immune to misinterpretation, we take responsibility for not making the wording clearer from the outset.”

Jefferson subsequently hit back at suggestions the apology from Soares-Weiser meant the study had been retracted.

“It was upsetting,” he told journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Cochrane has thrown its own researchers under the bus again. The apology issued by Cochrane is from Soares-Weiser, not from the authors of the review.”

Jefferson claimed Soares-Weiser, in response to media pressure, had “gone outside the normal channels and made decisions without any consultation with the authors of the review”.

“It is unacceptable,” he said. “We are the copyright holders of the review, so we decide what goes in or out of the review. We do not change our reviews on the basis of what the media wants.”

https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/human-body/burnet-institute-mask-study-hit-with-expression-of-concern-notice-by-journal-plos-one/news-story/fb467b8bb49c852803c490f6c1e69152

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

Face masks may raise risk of stillbirths, testicular dysfunction and cognitive decline due to build-up of carbon dioxide, study warns

Face masks may raise the risk of stillbirths, testicular dysfunction and cognitive decline in children, 'explosive' new research suggests.

A review of dozens of studies on face coverings suggested they can cause mild carbon dioxide poisoning when worn over long periods.

The German academics who carried out the research believe masks create a pocket of dead space between the mouth and mask, which traps the toxic gas.

They say the build-up of CO2 in pregnant women's bodies could cause complications for the unborn fetus. They point out that CO2 also contributes to oxidative stress, which can affect cognition and cause testicular issues in men.

But independent doctors have questioned the conclusions of the study — which never directly looked at health complications and mask use, describing the link as 'unlikely'.

Alluding to the surge in stillbirths during the pandemic, the German researchers said: 'Circumstantial evidence exists that popular mask use may be related to current observations of a significant rise of 28 percent to 33 percent in stillbirths worldwide.'

'[And] reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance of two full standard deviations in scores in children born during the pandemic,' the researchers wrote in the paper, published in the journal Heliyon.

But the study could not conclusively prove that the masks were directly responsible for any of these complications.

Dr Stuart Fischer, an emergency care physician in New York, questioned whether there was a 'toxic buildup' of CO2.

He said: 'I wouldn’t say this happens, because the body adjusts the pH, the acid/base balance very quickly. Respiratory acidosis due to facemasks is unlikely although short-term side effects might affect people with chronic lung disease.'

The German research team gathered data from 43 previously published studies on exposure to CO2, mask-wearing and pregnancy.

They found that after wearing a mask for more than five minutes, CO2 levels in the inhaled air rose to between 1.4 percent and 3.2 percent.

One mask study conducted in Germany, researchers measured the CO2 concentration of air behind surgical masks worn by 15 healthy men. Within 30 minutes, the CO2 concentration rose to roughly 2.8-3.2 percent.

In another study in Italy, scientists measured the air under surgical masks worn in a lab and found a concentration between 0.22 and 0.29 percent within five minutes.

Masks provide breathing resistance and create a dead space that traps CO2, leading to more inhaled and re-breathed CO2, the reviewers said.

The gas makes up around 0.04 percent of all inhaled air, for comparison, and the Department of Agriculture said safe levels should be below 0.5 percent for eight-hour exposure.

The researchers then looked at studies that focused on the effect of similar CO2 levels on animals such as mice and rats.

Mammals such as mice and rats with prolonged exposed to 0.3 percent carbon dioxide gave birth to offspring which had 'irreversible neuron damage', the review found.

In total, the researchers looked at studies dating back from the start of the scientific databases they searched until November 30, 2021.

The main caveat of the research is that the studies looking at the potential toxic effects of carbon dioxide are animal studies - because these experiments would not be ethical in humans.

The researchers also noted that none of the studies in their review looked directly at mask use and miscarriages, infertility and neurodevelopment disorders.

The researchers also noted that the exact effects of toxic levels of CO2 on unborn life is not known in great detail.

Carbon dioxide is known to contribute to oxidative stress, which the researchers suggested would hinder fetal development.

Dr Kevin Bass, cell and molecular biology PhD student, said on Twitter that the new paper was 'explosive'.

But he said: 'We do not have any good evidence in pregnant women... of the long-term effects of mask-wearing and therefore no evidence that these effects occur in women.'

He added: 'All we have are animal studies and a clear indication that changes in CO2 concentrations do occur in mask-wearing women.'

Stillbirths and pregnancy complications rose during the Covid pandemic, and preeclampsia and other pregnancy complications were blamed on the virus.

Factors other than mask-wearing are likely to be at play, such as hospital closures and delayed care.

It comes after three years of fierce debate about the effectiveness of masks.

Mask mandates on transportation systems in America were backed by penalties of up to $3,000 for repeat offenders.

Former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr Anthony Fauci initially advised people not to wear masks, which he later claimed because he was concerned there would not be enough for healthcare workers.

He went on to advise that everyone should wear a mask.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11982039/Face-masks-raise-risk-stillbirths-testicular-issues-cognitive-decline-study-says.html

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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

Dentists: Unexplained Pain, Tooth Loss and Bone Problems May Be Linked to COVID-19 Vaccine

Before business owner and busy mom Alana Parker experienced severe oral pain and facial swelling after receiving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, she had good dental health with never so much as a cavity.

When her symptoms progressed and an ulcer had grown to the point where the bone was protruding, causing her to lose large fragments of her jawbone, Parker knew she was in serious trouble.

“I was begging them to pull my tooth out but there were no signs of it being decayed,” Parker told The Epoch Times, noting she was passed back and forth between a dentist and endodontist trying to determine what was wrong.

It wasn’t until Parker found Alabama orofacial pain and dental sleep medicine specialist Dr. Amy Hartsfield that she felt she was on the road to recovery.

Hartsfield, a private practice dentist in Homewood, Alabama, obtained her specialization from the American Board of Orofacial Pain and the American Board of Dental Sleep Medicine after practicing 14 years of general dentistry.

Parker isn’t the only patient she’s seen with severe facial pain issues. Since the vaccines were rolled out, Hartsfield has seen an exponential increase in patients with head and facial neurovascular and myofascial pain, including headaches, toothaches not caused by the tooth, osteonecrosis of the jaw, sleep issues, tinnitus, and oral and facial autoimmune conditions.

“I’ve seen patients with no previous history of health issues [who] have perfectly healthy teeth and now have pain syndromes associated with these healthy teeth,” she said. These types of injuries affect both the nerves and blood vessels.

Dental Issues and COVID-19

In her research, Hartsfield discovered an array of health issues the COVID-19 vaccine spike protein can cause, many of which are related to immunity and blood microclots.

She also discovered that this is the first time polyethylene glycol (PEG) has been used in a vaccine. The use of PEG has become increasingly controversial since it can cause a number of serious immunological reactions, including anaphylaxis, which can be life-threatening.

The vaccine has been shown to cross the blood-brain barrier, circulate throughout the bloodstream, and has been found in most organs, all with the potential for serious health consequences.

Since the blood supply is important to all areas of the body including the bones, microclots can have a detrimental effect on bone health.

Microclots and Orofacial Bone Loss

There are tiny capillaries that feed the bone, and with microclots occurring in the orofacial area, you’re going to start losing bone density around it, Hartsfield explained.

Cheryl Alverson, 79, came to Hartsfield after having all of her lower teeth extracted due to a massive recurring infection that caused extensive bone loss.

Hartsfield immediately ordered multiple blood tests, including several specifically related to blood clotting. “They showed I had microclots all through my body,” said Alverson.

Hartsfield explained that microclots can interfere with bone healing after extractions. What happened with Alverson typically only occurs in patients who have been on osteoporosis medication or had radiation therapy, neither of which applied to Alverson.

Alverson had received the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines and a subsequent booster shot before her issues began, and she had not been infected with the COVID-19 virus prior to seeing Hartsfield.

She had good teeth but spontaneously had pain in her lower left jaw. Shards—pieces of her mandible—broke off out of her gum tissue, she said.

Parker’s case started only a few months after she had received the COVID-19 vaccine. With Parker, there was a “dying off of the bone,” said Hartsfield.

Parker’s bloodwork showed extreme inflammation across multiple body systems—and with four loose teeth and not enough energy to drive a car, Hartsfield built a team around her of five specialists and put her on a protocol of medications and vitamins to support her recovery. (pdf)

Microclots not only interfere with bone health but can affect the nerves, which also rely on capillaries for survival. Without adequate blood supply to the nerves, they too will develop problems, said Hartsfield.

A Surge in Facial Pain

Birmingham, Alabama-based endodontist Dr. John Collier told The Epoch Times he’s seen an “unbelievable amount of increasing facial pain” in the last couple of years.

He refers his patients to Hartsfield if he determines the pain is not caused by the patient’s tooth.

I had a patient with tremendous facial pain, implants, and an implant allergy, said Collier. Hartsfield is the “detective who goes through all the layers of what’s causing this,” he said.

While Collier can’t say whether or not his patients’ conditions were caused by the COVID-19 vaccine, he’s confident that stress from the pandemic and the country’s toxic political environment are contributing factors.

“There’s a lot of clenching and grinding and a lot of muscular pain,” he said.

Likewise, oral surgeon Dr. Doug Denson from Birmingham, Alabama, who has also sent patients with facial pain to Hartsfield, said it’s impossible to say for sure whether it’s COVID or the vaccine causing the symptoms he’s been seeing.

“In my opinion, correlation does not always equal causation … again, there have been some odd symptoms since the pandemic started. It’s just impossible to tell the exact mechanism or cause,” he said.

Still, Denson noted the uptick of unexplainable pain symptoms in a significant portion of the population affected by COVID immediately after the pandemic started, specifically trigeminal neuralgia, which is sudden, severe facial pain.

Hartsfield has also seen an increase in neuropathy of the trigeminal nerve, as well as major issues related to inflammation and cytokine storms.

Increase in Inflammation and Cytokine Storms

Cytokines themselves are small proteins released by cells in the body, including those of the immune system where they coordinate the body’s response to fight infections and trigger inflammation.

Hartsfield isn’t the only practitioner who has noted an escalation in inflammatory abnormalities and cytokine storms since the onset of COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines.

Denson has also seen an increased number of patients of all different ages with inflammation of the tongue and hyper-inflammatory responses, including osteomyelitis, an infection of the jaw that is very difficult to treat because the blood supply to the jaw is not great.

These maladies would typically be seen in older individuals rather than in a younger, healthy population.

Dr. Liz Kivus, a periodontist practicing in Alabama, told The Epoch Times she has also seen a marked increase in inflammatory symptoms such as gingival inflammation, since COVID-19 and the related vaccines.

Kivus further noted an increase in lichen planus, an inflammatory condition of the skin and mucous membranes that often results in an itchy rash that can affect various areas of the body, including the mouth, arms, legs, trunk, nails, and scalp.

We see this when patients’ immune systems are broken down, said Kivus. Patients have even said, “I’m too uncomfortable to brush my teeth and to eat.”

After seeing so many patients with unexplained issues since the pandemic and when COVID vaccines were released, Hartsfield believes it’s important to consider a patient’s vaccination status.

Consideration of Vaccination Status

“I have to screen these people to see if they’ve been vaccinated, when and how many times, and then I see if I can treat them,” said Hartsfield.

Most practitioners are not asking when the patient had COVID or when the patient had their vaccines, she said.

Hartsfield attributed some of her knowledge as coming from highly publicized critical care doctors who were “canceled” during the pandemic, including the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

She also studied the information released by Department of Defense whistleblower Lt. Col. Theresa Long, M.D., MPH, an aerospace medicine doctor and Army Brigade flight surgeon who reported the unusual diagnoses and alarming trends after the introduction of COVID-19 vaccinations.

“When you ask the whole population to have a mandatory vaccine that has more side effects than any other vaccines in history showing in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, you will definitely see injuries,” said Hartsfield.

She noted that some patients and practitioners do not consider whether the patient’s ailments may have resulted from the COVID vaccine, while others come into her office knowing that their health issues directly relate to taking the vaccine.

It is really sad, she said. I just had a 25-year-old man in my office stating he has been gaslit by a number of practitioners when he mentioned his head and ear pressure had started within days of taking the vaccine, said Hartsfield. He was reluctant to tell me he thought his health issues were from the vaccines because other providers made him feel crazy.

Parker, who to this day still has elevated C-reactive protein and some orofacial pain and swelling, attributed her symptoms to a short-circuiting of the immune system and microclots.

“I’ve been chronically ill for nearly a year and unfortunately my two 12-year-old girls have seen me sick over and over—I think that has been alarming for them,” said Parker. “It’s been a journey—I don’t feel that it’s going to kill me but it was touch and go there for a while.”

“I hate that we haven’t been able to openly talk about it because I had the resources and freedom to receive treatment,” said Parker. “I can’t imagine people that do not have the resources to treat it.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/dentists-unexplained-pain-tooth-loss-and-bone-problems-may-be-linked-to-covid-19-vaccine_5201385.html

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

RFK Jr. Says Middle Class Was ‘Systematically’ Wiped Out by COVID-19 Lockdowns

Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said COVID-19 lockdowns across the United States decimated the middle class, suggesting that it has yet to recover.

“The strength of a nation comes from a strong economy and a vibrant middle class,” Kennedy told Fox News over the weekend, “and we have wiped out the middle class in the country systematically.”

The 69-year-old, who is a prominent skeptic of vaccines, stated that COVID-19-related policies benefited the elite ruling class at the cost of the middle class. Those lockdowns, he asserted, shifted $4 trillion in wealth from the middle class to a “new aristocracy of billionaires.”

Those lockdowns “created 500 new billionaires,” Kennedy stated. “The Oxfam report, which came out this week, shows that the billionaires that existed at the beginning of the pandemic, the people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Bezos, Bloomberg, etc., increased their wealth by 30 percent during the pandemic. From the lockdowns. And [Bezos’s] Amazon got to shut down all of its competitors.”

And Kennedy, the son of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, stated that he believes that former President Donald Trump initiated those lockdowns.

Kennedy added, “I’m in a better position to run against Donald Trump than any of the Democrats because I can hold him accountable for the worst thing that he did, which was the lockdowns.”

However, Trump, as president, had little authority to issue lockdowns at the state or local level. And in early 2020, Trump said that keeping the United States shut down would “ultimately inflict more harm than it would prevent.” For those remarks and others, mainstream media outlets frequently criticized Trump and essentially blamed his policies for the rise of COVID-19-related deaths that year.

“It’s important for all Americans to recognize that a permanent lockdown is not a viable path forward producing the result that you want or certainly not a viable path forward,” the president said in April 2020, about two months after the first COVID-19 cases were detected inside the United States after spreading from mainland China.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/rfk-jr-says-middle-class-was-systematically-wiped-out-by-covid-19-lockdowns_5215413.html

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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

A growing number of scientists are sounding the alarm about the risks of both COVID and its cures

Those raising evidence-based concerns about the adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines are often labeled purveyors of misinformation, and derided as anti-scientific conspiracy theorists and paranoid kooks. Or worse. Bill Kristol tweeted in late 2021 that, “there is blood on the hands in 2021 of the unvaccinated and especially their enablers and encouragers who know better.” However, there are a number of prominent scientists, doctors, and independent researchers who are wary of both COVID infection and the vaccines. Many of these figures are worried about one particular piece of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: the spike protein, which allows the virus to enter your cells, and which was chosen to be the featured element used in the Moderna, Pfizer, J&J, and AstraZeneca vaccines. The available evidence shows that COVID, especially in light of new forms of treatment, is not as acutely deadly as once feared, and while mortality attributable to the COVID vaccines has not been definitively characterized, it is likely relatively rare. But some scientists are concerned by the potential effects of repeated exposure to the spike protein, and therefore the advisability of further boosters that contain it, given that we are going to be frequently reexposed to the circulating virus. Those voicing these concerns, however, have been subjected to censorship, ostracization, and damaging attacks on their reputations.

Take, for example, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. On his DarkHorse podcast on June 21, 2021, Weinstein sat down with mRNA pioneer Dr. Robert Malone (COVID-vaccinated) and Silicon Valley inventor turned COVID investigator Steve Kirsch (COVID-vaccinated) to discuss the potential dangers of the vaccines rapidly being distributed around the country and across the world. The focus? The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which is produced when the mRNA from the vaccines enters your cells.

By June 21, 2021, Weinstein felt there was enough evidence to demonstrate that the spike was “cytotoxic” (toxic to cells) and asked for Malone’s take. Malone not only concurred but said he had already warned the FDA about that potential risk “months and months and months ago.” On June 3, 2021, according to an email provided to Tablet, Malone contacted Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, regarding his concerns about “circulating spike protein, and the associated implications.” Malone said on the podcast that his contacts inside the FDA ultimately felt that his evidence wasn’t strong enough to prove that the spike alone was “biologically active.” Dr. Marks has not responded to Tablet’s requests for comment.

Not one week after Weinstein’s podcast, as the concept of a toxic spike protein spread across the internet, the new fact-checking police leapt into action. Reuters wrote, “Posts are sharing the false statement that the spike protein in COVID-19 vaccines is cytotoxic, suggesting that it kills or damages cells. There is no evidence to support this,” and quoted a couple of experts. The fact check deemed Weinstein’s claim “false,” just as it had once done with the assertion that COVID-19 was likely created in a laboratory. As it turns out, the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is now considered extremely toxic to many human systems—a conclusion reached in paper after paper. Evidence to support this has also been found in tissue samples from deceased COVID patients, and those who were suspected to have died due to complications from vaccination, as well as those with post-vaccination myocarditis.

Every virus, like every organism, is made up of proteins, which are in turn made up of complex chains of amino acids. These are the microstructures of life itself. Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are composed of four main types of proteins: envelope, membrane, nucleocapsid, and spike. The spike protein’s primary role is to help the virus attach to cells, gain entry, and propagate itself. To begin with, the ruthless efficiency of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein makes it an extremely dangerous bit of biology. But also, this spike is itself a pathogen. This assessment is not breaking news; researchers who studied past human coronaviruses, especially SARS, noted that the spike protein can cause inflammation and increase disease severity. In fact, a 2005 study in the prestigious Nature Medicine journal proved that the spike protein of SARS, due to its effects on the now-famous ACE2 receptor, can “cause severe and often lethal lung failure.”

But the SARS-CoV-2 version makes those past spikes look simple by comparison. Dr. Paul Marik, the founder and chief scientific officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, and the second-most-published critical care physician in the world, told Tablet that the only substance he’s aware of as toxic as the SARS-CoV-2 spike is cyanide. “Cyanide kills you quickly, spike kills you over a prolonged period of time. It’s truly astonishing the things it does.” Marik thinks that spike is the primary driver of COVID’s virulence, which he saw firsthand while treating severely ill patients during the first wave of the pandemic. “It is the most vicious disease I have ever seen. People have said this is like the flu, and it’s no big deal. Let me tell you … It is an extremely evil disease. It’s difficult to treat. It responds poorly and it kills people slowly over time.”

Veteran viral pathologist Dr. Gerard Nuovo, a retired professor at Ohio State University and an active researcher of COVID-19, was similarly shocked after looking at tissue samples from people who died from the illness. “I said to myself, I have never seen a fatal viral infection with so much viral protein in the target organ, which as you know is the lung.”

Here are some of the things that the spike protein has been found to have the potential to do. In the cardiovascular system: One segment of spike can signal the cells of blood vessels in the lungs to grow, causing “thickened” vessel walls typical of pulmonary hypertension, a condition that makes it harder for the heart to pump blood into the lungs; that same fragment, S1, can damage the cells which line the inside of every blood vessel in the body including the lungs; can damage the cells in your heart which work in concert with those cells; can cause the heart to become fibrotic; and can, says this 2022 paper, even contribute to the development of myocarditis, an inflammatory condition of the heart muscle which weakens it, and can cause sudden death in recovered patients. The Cleveland Clinic estimates that the survival rate for myocarditis is 80% after one year and 50% after five.

In the blood: Spike can deform our clotting cells—or platelets—sometimes irreversibly activating them; it binds to blood clotting proteins and creates clots that are “structurally abnormal”; it can cause microclots from red blood cells clumping together that deplete blood oxygen levels. David Scheim, an independent researcher who co-authored a study published in December 2022 about those microclots with a team from France’s famed Méditerranée Infection Institute in Marseille, told Tablet that their experiment revealed the red blood cell clumping “is actually visible [to the naked eye], it forms a film so you don’t even need a microscope, you just add the spike to a suspension of red blood cells and you see this clumping.”

In the brain: The S1 fragment of spike has been shown to move straight across the blood brain barrier, the all-important gatekeeper of the brain, in humanized mice. Once it’s in, the spike can damage cells that line the walls of blood vessels in the brain, lead to memory loss, or disrupt the mitochondria of similar brain blood vessel cells, potentially triggering “a more severe form of stroke.” Perhaps more ominously, certain sequences on the S1 portion of the spike are able to bind to amyloid proteins that have been known to cause severe neurological disease. The proteins that spike is able to bind are related to the development of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Creutzfeldt-Jacob, an irreversible, and fatal brain disease. Additionally, the spike itself may be considered an amyloid, a misfolded protein that can grow and form fibrous plaques. Think of the 1958 horror classic The Blob, but at a cellular level.

In short, spike can contribute to cardiovascular damage, brain damage, blood clots, autoimmunity, cell deformation, and cell-to-cell fusion. As Walter Chesnut, an independent researcher, has previously written, “It is a Swiss Army Knife of death.” Chesnut co-authored an article in 2021 with a group of scientists, doctors, and journalists that included Luc Montagnier (who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of HIV) outlining what may tie together all of the spike’s nasty effects. They theorized that spike preys on our DNA, and that repeated exposure will prematurely age us, leading to earlier death by natural causes. “Spike is spike. The more the worse,” Chesnut told Tablet.

The Chesnut and Montagnier et al. hypothesis that spike protein can accelerate biological aging is still novel, and not widely accepted. Professor Masfique Mehedi, a microbiologist and virologist who has studied Ebola at the prestigious Rocky Mountain Laboratories, and whose work shows that COVID spike can enter the nucleus of our cells, told Tablet that their hypothesis may be “premature.” There is, however, mounting evidence that the larger idea that vaccine-induced spike could be harming people is worth taking seriously.

The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is not precisely identical to the spike used in the vaccines, though they are very similar. First of all, at any given point in time, the wild-type spike is mutating (e.g., omicron) with unknown consequences, whereas the vaccine spikes are predetermined. But the design of the vaccine spike was deliberately altered from the original in at least two key ways: to increase stability, and to “lock” the protein in its “prefusion” shape, in the hopes that it would teach our immune system to recognize and neutralize the virus’s spike before it has a chance to bind to our cells.

One argument against the spike protein hypothesis of vaccine injury—meaning the notion that exposure to the spike protein is the main cause of the vaccine’s potentially severe side effects—is that due to the changes locking the spike in its prefusion shape, it can’t cause the damage alleged. However, many of the examples provided above of spike-related pathologies don’t require cell-binding, but rather just require exposure.

Because of how dangerous it is, some believe that it’s a secondary question where the spike is coming from, COVID or the treatments for COVID—all that really matters is that it’s coming into contact with your cells. “The more spike, the greater the risk. So if you have COVID and get vaccinated, you have a greater risk, if you are vaccinated and you get COVID, you have a greater risk,” Marik said. In February 2023, a group of researchers from the University of Colorado seemed to affirm Marik’s contention. After assessing a small group of patients with myocarditis, they concluded: “These observations suggest that myocardial injury during COVID-19 or after mRNA vaccination may be produced by the same Spike protein–based mechanism, which may be amenable to preventative or therapeutic strategies.”

A second argument against the hypothesis is that there simply isn’t enough spike released into the blood after vaccination to cause the kinds of issues we’ve seen in COVID patients. “The low doses of the spike protein in the vaccine, in our experiments anyway, didn’t cause any recognizable damage,” Dr. Nuovo told Tablet. Nonetheless, Nuovo abstained from getting his third vaccine dose because “the initial vaccine data showed that people who didn’t get the booster were still very well protected against severe COVID, and the second point was I didn’t see the point of introducing more spike protein into my body if there was no benefit to be coming from it … because the spike protein per se does have some toxicity associated with it.”

There is another way that the vaccines might be causing harm. Due to FOIA requests from Judicial Watch and others, we now know that the vaccine material travels beyond the upper arm muscle throughout the body, in spite of the CDC’s web page maintaining the 2020 narrative that it stays put. Because the vaccines were designed to express the full-length spike protein in our cells, some researchers like professor Mehedi worry that the vaccines could be inducing a major attack of the immune system against healthy cells throughout the body. “An unfortunate & unimaginable detrimental consequence … face[d] by everyone who took it due to a poor and unacceptable design by the low-grade researchers and opportunistic makers.”

That kind of candor is hard to come by when the price for expressing an idea or trying to test a theory can be the destruction of one’s career and social life, as happened to numerous researchers and scientists, including Marik. For his views on COVID treatment in the ICU, like not wanting to use the highly toxic antiviral drug remdesivir, and probably for his stated viewpoint on the spike protein and vaccines, Marik was suspended from his role as ICU director of Sentara General Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, in late 2021. He resigned from his role as professor at East Virginia Medical School shortly after. Marik says his colleagues no longer talk to him. “Not a single one.”

Yet, the data has a way of piling up, even if many in science, media, and government have avoided acknowledging its implications: By October of last year there had been at least 1,250 studies published in medical journals documenting events as disparate as Bell’s palsy, multiple sclerosis, central venous thrombosis, encephalitis, inflammatory bowel disease, myocarditis, etc. after vaccination. For one awful example, take this recent case report from Tokushima University in Japan documenting the “fatal multi organ inflammation” of a 14-year-old girl after her booster. Then there are the adverse event-monitoring systems, the joint-run CDC/FDA VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) being the most notable. As of March 31, 2023, there have been over 1.5 million adverse events reported in the system, with nearly 200,000 involving hospitalization. While VAERS is a very imperfect system, with some critics claiming massive underreporting and others, overreporting, there is a clear signal that injuries are occurring. German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said in a March 2023 interview that the rate of “serious vaccination damage” may be as high as 1 in 10,000.

Defining the ultimate numbers of how many people are being affected by various side effects is a difficult task, but looking at the original trial data does give some context. Last September, a team of researchers, including two from UCLA, one from Stanford, and one editor of the British Medical Journal, published a study in Vaccine titled, “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults,” which reviewed the Pfizer and Moderna trial data. While the investigators note that their study was hampered by their lack of access to the raw data, which the companies have not made available, they concluded that, “The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes.”

It is too early to say definitively if these vaccine injuries are caused by the spike protein (or the proprietary lipid nanoparticles or the fragmented, low-quality mRNA or something else) but there is certainly enough evidence to consider this as a possibility. And yet the doctors and scientists who have been trying to raise significant questions have been often ignored, bullied, or silenced.

Bret Weinstein’s podcast was demonetized on YouTube. Walter Chesnut was removed from Twitter for half of 2022. A peer-reviewed paper, which concluded that the spike protein can actually damage our DNA’s ability to repair itself—not all that distant from what Chesnut is now proposing—was retracted by the journal Viruses, though the explanation seemed at least as political as purely scientific. Indeed, in working on this piece, Microsoft Word even prevented me from opening the link to Chesnut and Montagnier’s France Soir article about the aging hypothesis, stating in its pop-up warning, “conclusions related to vaccine safety are not validated and lacked experimental support.” The state of California passed a law last year that essentially muzzles doctors from offering a dissenting opinion on the “contemporary scientific consensus” on COVID. Professor Mehedi, who is more concerned about the vaccines turning the immune system against our cells than about spike, told Tablet that doubts he’s raised about the vaccine design and the subsequent potential for damage are simply ignored by his fellow scientists. “Nobody listen[s] to me, even,” he said, adding: “We are not critical thinkers.”

The COVID epoch is still very young. SARS-CoV-2 most likely didn’t exist before 2019; mRNA tech has been in the works for 30 years, but it had never been deployed widely in humans until 2021. The Moderna vaccine was designed in two days, with the company’s CEO, Stepháne Bancel, telling The New York Times, “this is not a complicated virus.” The vaccine’s adverse events, meanwhile, have been studied for only about two years now, and have been downplayed by our public health apparatus and media. There are immunologists who believe that repeated exposure to SARS-CoV-2 could be extremely detrimental to our basic immune function over time, and others who believe the vaccine can cause similar devastation to our defenses, both potentially explaining the reemergence of rare latent viral syndromes and fungal infections now emerging around the world. We don’t know what we don’t know. In fact, we’re just starting to find out.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/the-spike

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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

The Smoking Gun in the Senate Report on Covid Origins

Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee released its full report, detailing the evidence that researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology started working on a vaccine for the virus that causes Covid-19 before the rest of the world had even heard about the virus. In this light, it is not surprising that most Americans agree with the FBI and Livermore Labs: The most likely cause of the Covid-19 pandemic was a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

How Could the Wuhan Lab Research a Covid Vaccine before the Outbreak?

By 2019 the Wuhan Institute of Virology had collected, at a minimum, approximately 20,000 bat- and other animal-virus samples from field expeditions conducted all across China.

After going into caves and other locations to collect the samples and, in some cases, live bats, researchers would take the samples back to Wuhan, where they “routinely underwent initial evaluation in Biosafety Level 2 settings where they were first evaluated, usually by graduate students, for the presence of SARS-related beta coronaviruses. If viruses were present, researchers then attempted to isolate and sequence the virus.”

This information is in the full report on the origin of Covid-19 released yesterday by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The report is 300 pages and has 1,570 footnotes.

The information about the Biosafety Level 2 labs comes from a thesis on the “Geographic Evolution of Bat SARS-related Coronaviruses” submitted to the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences by Yu Ping, a graduate student pursuing a degree of Master of Natural Science in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, supervised by Professor Cui Jie and Professor Shi Zheng-Li, which was published in June 2019. You can read that thesis here. You may recognize the name Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her work with that species, the one who told Scientific American early in the pandemic that when she first heard about the virus spreading through Wuhan, she initially wondered, “Could they have come from our lab?”

This is significant because the safety standards at Biosafety Level 2 labs are not as extensive and stringent as those at Biosafety Level 4 labs. Level 2 labs handle bacteria and viruses such as Lyme Disease and the standard flu; Level 3 labs handle more dangerous pathogens such as anthrax and HIV; and Level 4 labs handle the most dangerous viruses, such as Ebola.

Last week, the Washington Post published an excellent report examining the safety record of China’s government-run laboratories overall, not just focusing on the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control. The opening anecdote is terrifying:

In the summer of 2019, a mysterious accident occurred inside a government-run biomedical complex in north-central China, a facility that handles a pathogen notorious for its ability to pass easily from animals to humans.

There were no alarms or flashing lights to alert workers to the defect in a sanitation system that was supposed to kill germs in the vaccine plant’s waste. When the system failed in late July that year, millions of airborne microbes began seeping invisibly from exhaust vents and drifting into nearby neighborhoods. Nearly a month passed before the problem was discovered and fixed, and four months before the public was informed. By then, at least 10,000 people had been exposed, with hundreds developing symptomatic illnesses, scientific studies later concluded.

The events occurred not in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus pandemic began, but in another Chinese city, Lanzhou, 800 miles to the northwest. The leaking pathogens were bacteria that cause brucellosis, a common livestock disease that can lead to chronic illness or even death in humans if not treated. As the pandemic enters its fourth year, new details about the little-known Lanzhou incident offer a revealing glimpse into a much larger — and largely hidden — struggle with biosafety across China in late 2019, at the precise moment when both the brucellosis incident and the coronavirus outbreak were coming to light.

Perhaps the most chilling quote in the article comes from biosecurity expert Robert Hawley, “who for years oversaw safety programs at the U.S. Army’s maximum-containment lab at Fort Detrick, Md.” Hawley told the Post he saw “‘imprudent’ lab practices in inspection reports obtained by a congressional oversight committee.”

“It is very, very apparent that their biological safety training is minimal,” Hawley said.

The closest thing to a smoking gun in the full Senate report is the evidence that researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology began working on a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, before almost anyone else in the world had heard of the virus:

November 2019 also appears to be the timeframe that PLA researchers began development of at least two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Professor Zhou Yusen, Director of the 5th Institute at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), worked with the WIV, and possibly at the WIV, episodically, for several years prior to the pandemic. Zhou or AMMS researchers may have been working at the WIV no later than the Fall of 2019 conducting research for a paper that he coauthored with two WIV researchers, Shi Zhengli and Chen Jing, on a known adverse effect of SARS-related vaccines and antibody treatments. There is reason to believe Zhou was engaged in SARS-related coronavirus animal vaccine research with WIV researchers beginning no later than the Summer or early Fall of 2019. Zhou submitted one of the first COVID-19 vaccine patents on February 24, 2020.

The patent includes mouse-derived serological data from vaccine-related experiments which experts, consulted with during this investigation, assess could not have been completed unless Zhou’s team began work on vaccine development before the known outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in late December 2019. The research required both access to the sequence of and the live SARS-CoV-2 virus. Several experts assessed that Zhou likely would have had to start this vaccine development research no later than November 2019 to achieve the February patent submission date. Zhou later published transgenic mouse infection and vaccine challenge studies in mice, including humanized mice and non-human primates. The location(s) where Zhou’s animal vaccine challenge studies were performed was not disclosed. There is reason to believe that these vaccine experiments were performed at the original WIV’s downtown Wuhan campus and possibly at the Wuhan University Institute of Animal Models located approximately a mile from the WIV.

PLA AMMS Major General Wei Chen led a second, separate, effort to develop another candidate COVID-19 vaccine. Chen collaborated with the China state-owned biopharmaceutical company SinoPharm. Chen’s vaccine experiments with humanized mice, ferrets and non-human primates occurred at the Harbin veterinary research facility BSL-4 laboratory in northern China.124 Human clinical trials began in mid- March 2020. Chen submitted a patent for her vaccine March 18, 2020 Based on this timeline, experts believe Chen would have had to begin her vaccine efforts no later than early December 2019. Chen’s vaccine candidate was also dependent on the availability of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic sequence that would not be published until January 11, 2020. However, unlike Zhou, there is no evidence that Chen’s vaccine efforts were associated geographically or temporally with the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

This is further evidence that the Chinese government knew it was dealing with a contagious virus and deliberately lied to the rest of world that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” up until January 20, 2020.

This is one of the many maddening aspects of this matter. Even if this all traces back to a natural transmission of someone ordering bat soup or grilled pangolin in a seafood market, or as Jon Stewart memorably characterized it, “Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili,” the Chinese government was still lying when the world needed the truth and lives were at stake. We all had years of our lives taken away from us because the Chinese government refused to acknowledge that there was a contagious virus spreading around their country and the world. In the month of January 2020, more than 1,300 flights from China arrived at 17 U.S. airports, carrying roughly 381,000 passengers.

When did the Covid-19 pandemic start? The Senate HELP committee report indicates that people in Wuhan were starting to notice an abnormal rate of viral infections in October and November:

Eyewitness accounts, media reports, epidemiological modeling and additional academic studies further support October 28 to November 10 as the window of emergence. Diplomats stationed at the U.S. Consulate General in Wuhan have attested to observations of what they believed at the time to be the early onset of a ‘bad flu’ season. The Deputy Consular Chief recalled: “By mid-October 2019, the dedicated team at the U.S. Consulate General in Wuhan knew that the city had been struck by what was thought to be an unusually vicious flu season. The disease worsened in November.” These observations were reported to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing during this period.

By one measure, the argument about the lab-leak theory, which has gone on for about three years, is effectively over. Those of us who suspect human error is the cause of one of the world’s greatest modern calamities have persuaded an overwhelming majority of the American public of that.

A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in March showed 64 percent of Americans think the pandemic was “caused by a laboratory leak” and just 22 percent believe it was “caused by a natural transmission from animals to humans.” Another poll taken a week earlier by Economist/YouGov showed an even stronger split in favor of a lab leak: 66 percent to 16 percent. If I were a meaner person, I would characterize the zoonotic origin as a fringe theory.

That Senate report also acknowledges the potential for a “zoonotic spillover” — after all, either this virus or its evolutionary precursor had to be in a bat at some point — but points out the frustrating lack of conclusive evidence:

To date, China has not acknowledged the infection or positive serological sample(s) of any susceptible animal prior to the recognized outbreak. Genetic analysis of published SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the early outbreak does not show evidence of genetic adaptation reflecting passage through a susceptible animal species such as a palm civet, raccoon dog or mink. To this end, no intermediate host has been identified.

Despite these facts, three data points do present themselves to support the zoonotic origin theory. First, approximately 33 percent of the earliest known human COVID-19 cases (with symptom onset dates in mid- to late-December 2019) were associated with the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. Second, several animal species susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were sold live and in poor animal welfare conditions at the market. Finally, the identification of genetic sequences of raccoon dogs in samples taken from the market in early 2020 confirm that this susceptible intermediate host was at the market at the time of the outbreak. As noted, “there is no data . . . associating SARS-CoV-2 with the presence of any of these animals.” These data themselves, however, do not explain the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Senate committee report was overseen by the now-retired North Carolina GOP senator Richard Burr. Back in November, the Charlotte Observer editorial board thundered that “Richard Burr, who typically keeps a relatively low profile, seems to be playing games on his way out of office.” The board referred to the lab-leak theory as “a Covid conspiracy,” contending that the interim report “fueled the fire of disinformation that has been blazing since the pandemic began. It also gives the COVID conspiracy theorists a new bone to chew on.”

Because Burr is usually “low profile” and isn’t a bomb-thrower, a frothing-at-the-mouth demagogue, or an unhinged conspiracy theorist, shouldn’t the editorial board sit up and take notice when he is putting his name behind a contention like this?

FBI director Christopher Wray is not a wide-eyed conspiracy theorist. The U.S. Department of Energy, and in particular the Livermore Labs’ “Z Division,” is not full of guys who believe lizard people walk among us and who insist they saw Elvis at their local convenience store. Former CDC director Robert Redfield is not some nut who believes in healing crystals and werewolves.

In the face of the biggest and most consequential mystery in modern history, some of us looked at the remarkable coincidence of a novel coronavirus most like those found in bats emerging near not one but two laboratories doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats — going back to April 3, 2020, I remind you. And in response, we’ve gotten name-calling, sneers, and smears.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-smoking-gun-in-the-senate-report-on-covid-origins/

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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

Some Americans Shouldn’t Get Another COVID-19 Vaccine Shot, FDA Says

A big change: The vaccines we have all been using are now de-authorized. Only the bivalents are now approved, despite there being little evidence of their effectiveness. Amazing. A "bivalent" targets more than one strain of the virus

Some Americans cannot receive another COVID-19 vaccine dose, U.S. regulators said on April 18, as they made sweeping changes to the vaccine system.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the changes, including replacing the old Pfizer and Moderna vaccines with updated bivalent shots that had previously only been available as boosters.

Regulators are also scaling back the number of recommended doses for most individuals, including people who haven’t received a shot.

Key changes include:

Most unvaccinated Americans are still being encouraged to get a COVID-19 vaccine but only need a single dose of a bivalent, the FDA said. The exception is young children. Children aged 6 months through 5 years can receive two doses of Moderna’s bivalent while those aged 6 months through 4 years can get three doses of Pfizer’s bivalent.

Americans who have received a primary series of a COVID-19 vaccine and one of the bivalent boosters still cannot get an additional dose, unless they’re in certain groups.

Any individual 65 years old or older can receive a bivalent dose, even if they’ve already received one, provided four months or more has elapsed since their last shot.

People aged 5 and older and deemed immune compromised can get another bivalent at least two months after their last shot, even if it was a bivalent, and can get additional doses “at the discretion of, and at intervals determined by, their healthcare provider.”

Little Data to Support Bivalents

The FDA authorized the original vaccines in late 2020 based on clinical trial efficacy data. The original vaccines targeted the Wuhan virus strain, which hasn’t circulated since 2020.

The updated bivalents target the Wuhan strain and the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of the Omicron strain. The subvariants were displaced in 2022.

Regulators authorized the bivalents as boosters in 2022 despite no clinical trial data being available. In letters formally announcing the bivalents as replacing the old vaccines, the FDA made clear that scientists aren’t sure whether the bivalents protect against COVID-19.

“Based on the totality of the scientific evidence available, FDA concluded that it is reasonable to believe that Pfizer-BioNTech COVID‑19 Vaccine, Bivalent may be effective in individuals 6 months of age and older for the prevention of COVID-19,” the letter to Pfizer states. The same language was used for Moderna’s shot.

Most of the data supporting Pfizer’s expanded authorization comes from the old vaccines and a bivalent that has never been used in the United States. The only trial data for the available bivalent showed that children had higher levels of neutralizing antibodies when they received a bivalent. Antibodies are thought to protect against COVID-19.

No clinical trial data for Moderna’s shot was cited, and no efficacy data was cited for either vaccine.

Dr. Peter Marks, a top FDA vaccine official, claimed in a briefing that “the available data continue [to] demonstrate that vaccines prevent all serious outcomes from COVID-19, including hospitalization and death.” It’s not clear which data he was citing, and the FDA did not respond to a request for comment.

The FDA cited a single observational study in its letter to Pfizer. English researchers reported in The Lancet that vaccination with an old vaccine in addition to previous infection provided strong protection against symptomatic COVID-19 through March 2022. Other research has found that prior infection alone is as good as or better than vaccination.

Other observational studies have found the updated vaccines provide transient protection against hospitalization and poor protection against infection.

Seroprevalence data indicates a majority of Americans have recovered from COVID-19, the FDA noted. That’s an important acknowledgement, Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Gandhi said she agrees that only the elderly and immune suppressed should receive another dose, as opposed to the entire population. Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said that he sees the vaccines as largely unnecessary.

“The current vaccines are out-of-date, any new ones will be out-of-date by the time they are generally available, and mostly everybody already has SARS-CoV-2 antibodies anyway,” Risch told The Epoch Times via email. “At this point, the vaccines are thus not generally useful products for serving a public health function.”

Change Made to Boost Uptake

Uptake of the vaccines was high after they were authorized, but has dropped considerably since. Just 16.7 percent of the U.S. population has received a bivalent shot, compared to 69.4 percent who received a primary series of the old vaccine.

FDA officials said the changes announced on April 18 were made to simplify the vaccine composition, reduce the complexity of the available doses, and increase uptake.

“This approach will help us achieve higher vaccination coverage across the country,” Marks told reporters. “If anything comes out of this action, we’re hoping that it can encourage people who have not received the bivalent booster to go out and consider getting one.”

The newly rolled out system is for the spring, as officials are planning to meet over the summer to discuss a fall regimen. They plan to adapt COVID-19 vaccines to the influenza model, updating strains in the vaccines each year.

Advisers to the agency backed the pivot to bivalents in a January discussion. Some said they favor updating the strains in the future.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/some-americans-shouldnt-get-another-covid-19-vaccine-shot-fda-says_5203409.html

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

Prominent AIIMS Physician-Scientist Suggests COVID-19 Booster Shot May Do More Harm than Good

A physician with India’s All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, a group of autonomous public medical universities of higher education under the jurisdiction of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, went on the record for Indian media recently that for those that have already been infected by SARS-COV-2, the booster may “do more harm than good.” However, he didn’t elaborate on the basis for that statement. With rising numbers of COVID-19 cases in India, Dr. Sanjay Rai recently expressed his opinion that despite the fact that many experts are advising the COVID-19 booster, at this point during the pandemic, the booster may do more harm than good. The context is a rising COVID-19 infection rate in India but also in other Asian nations such as Japan, China, and South Korea. TrialSite’s founder Daniel O’Connor also had a fascinating discussion with Dr. Rai, who pointed to mounting evidence plus decades of public health science as backing his position. He also referenced that in addition to the 11 COVID-19 vaccines currently under emergency listing by World Health Organization (WHO), at least another 382 such products are listed by WHO in either clinical development or preclinical development. He pondered what could be driving such an enormous product development push?

Rising cases

According to multiple media and the Indian government, cases of COVID-19 have surged in India, with over 10,700 cases reported; 1,500 more cases were registered in New Delhi, with a purported infection rate at 33%. See a breakdown of India cases (and other data). Clearly, the number of cases is minuscule compared to previous waves. Hence the advisory for all to get the booster if they have not been vaccinated within a certain period of time based on the current Indian schedule.

A critical point of view

Yet Dr. Sanjay Rai, an AIIMS Hospital professor of Community Medicine in New Delhi, shared his opinion recently that the booster dose may not be advised, as reported in India Times Healthworld.

“Due to the mutation in the RNA virus, the cases will continue to increase and decrease. The situation will continue like this in the coming times as well. There is no need to panic about this. The people that will get infected with the new variants will create new immunity. But despite all this, the more important thing is whether the severity, hospitalization, or the death rate is increasing.”

He continued, “In the initial phase of COVID, when people were not infected in large numbers, people did not have herd immunity, then they needed more vaccines. But now, almost all the people have herd immunity, then they needed more vaccines. But now almost all the people in the country have been infected, after which natural immunity has been formed in them. This is more effective in protecting against any virus than the vaccine. Also, we cannot stop any new web with the vaccine, it only reduces death and severity. Giving more steroids to prevent infection may do you more harm than good.”

Further discussing the topic of natural immunity, Dr. Rai pointed to a growing body of research backing his position on natural immunity.

“And you have been protected from death and severity for a long time. At present, both corona and influenza are infecting people. Influenza is a viral infection that comes every year and infects people according to season. How effective will the booster dose of the vaccine be? No research has come to the fore regarding this. Only on the basis of possibilities we cannot say that booster dose will be beneficial for people at this time.”

Heavily vaxxed societies

Dr. Rai points out to heavily vaccinated societies such as Japan, where the cases of SARS-CoV-2 continue to come and go and come again.

“All these countries have been highly vaccinated, Japan has got 4 doses of the vaccine, yet the corona infection was once again spreading very fast there. COVID-19 spread rapidly even after vaccination in these countries because they kept zero COVID-19, people did not have natural infection due to which people got infected even after being vaccinated.”

Emphasizing the superiority of natural infection to vaccine-induced protection—not a discussion that will be as freely discussed in North America—the key point is that if a person hasn’t been infected then they should get vaccinated.

Rai continued:

“There is no research on how effective the booster dose will be if you are already infected. And if this new variant is infecting you by bypassing natural immunity, then it can also bypass the vaccine and infect you.”

TrialSite discussion

TrialSite had a brief discussion with Dr. Rai, who was familiar with the media platform. The AIIMS physician-scientist informed Daniel O’Connor that his position is based on the accumulation of evidence in clinical trials and real-world data over the past three years of the pandemic. Dr. Rai shared that the SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 aren't new now—“We have a lot of data, and that must truly be evidence-based, not acting out of a fear-based impulse.”

Rai emphasized that he has conducted at least ten COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials, including a booster study in India. He is very much pro-vaccine and simply is following what he knows is as the standard science and sound public health principles he has learned throughout his career.

The AIIMs doctor suggested a comparison with polio or smallpox, pointing to very good, stable sterilizing vaccines with the current COVID-19 reality. For example, Rai pointed to the World Health Organization (WHO) tracker with 11 vaccines granted emergency listing with 183 vaccines in various stages of clinical development and even another 199 vaccines in preclinical development.

Again, comparing the polio and smallpox or measles and mumps vaccine reality with COVID-19, with at least 382 COVID vaccines in either clinical or preclinical development, Rai suggested there could be other vested interests driving such a reality. See the WHO COVID-19 vaccine tracker.

Dr. Rai pondered aloud in the discussion, “What kind of vested interests are behind this global product development push?”

On to the endemic reality
The AIIMS doctor continued to emphasize that what Indian society (and other places around the world) are now dealing with will go on forever. So, assuming he is correct (and this media cannot be certain one way or another), this means that much like the flu, COVID-19 is here to stay.

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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

US Compensates People Injured by COVID-19 Vaccines for First Time

The United States has for the first time paid people who were injured by COVID-19 vaccines.

Three people received compensation for their injuries through the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), run by an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, officials said in a new update.

One person who suffered severe allergic shock received $2,019, according to the agency, the Health Resources and Services Administration. One person who suffered heart inflammation, or myocarditis, received $1,582. Another who suffered myocarditis received $1,032.

The manufacturer of the vaccines was not made public. Information about the people who received the payments has also not been made public.

The payouts mark the first time the U.S. government has paid people who were injured by the COVID-19 vaccines, which can cause serious problems as well as death and were first introduced in late 2020.

Under the CICP, people who survive their vaccine-induced injury can receive money for unreimbursed medical expenses and lost employment income.

The newly granted compensation appears to only be for medical expenses, Wayne Rohde, author of The Vaccine Court, told The Epoch Times.

“These amounts are so low that you can credibly assume that this was just only for unreimbursed medical expenses, and that’s it,” Rohde said. “It’s unconscionable what they’re doing, but that’s this program.”

Most previous payments were for people injured by an H1N1 vaccine, including for Guillain-Barre syndrome. Some received hundreds or thousands of dollars. Eight received at least $106,723. The highest payment on record is $2.2 million.

The Health Resources and Services Administration, which runs the program, did not respond to requests for comment.

CICP

The CICP is the only venue people can get compensation from the federal government because of the COVID-19 emergency declaration first issued during the Trump administration. Most vaccines administered in the United States are covered by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. People who receive compensation through the latter are eligible for more money, in part because more categories are covered, have longer to file, and can have attorney fees covered.

To get compensation from the CICP, a person must prove a “causal connection” between the vaccine taken and a serious physical injury or death, with the connection being supported by “compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence.” The person must also show unreimbursed medical expenses or that they lost income because they were unable to work due to the injury.

Relatives of people who died can ask for survivor death benefits.

The cap for CICP on death benefits is $423,000 and the cap on lost wages is $50,000 but key questions remain, including whether survivors automatically get a full payout if their claim is approved and whether future medical care for the injured could be covered, Rohde said.

Program administrators have largely declined to share details about the program’s payments and claims that have been rejected.

While the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program payments come from a pool formed through a tax on each vaccine, CICP payments are made from appropriations from Congress.

Still Waiting

The first COVID-19 vaccines were authorized in December 2020. A third was cleared in the spring of 2021. They were promoted widely by U.S. health officials and taken by hundreds of millions of Americans.

Historic numbers of adverse events following vaccination have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, helping authorities determine that events like severe allergic shock, or anaphylaxis, and myocarditis are caused by the vaccines.

While anyone can enter a report into the reporting system, the CICP only accepts applications filed within one year of an event. The program also only covers a small number of events at present, though what it covers exactly has not been made public.

As of April 1, 8,133 applications to CICP allege injuries and/or deaths from COVID-19 vaccines. Hundreds have been denied because of a lack of sufficient medical records or other problems, authorities say. Thousands more are pending review or are being reviewed.

Just 23 have been determined to meet the standard for compensation, including the three that were compensated.

One person suffered myocarditis from a COVID-19 vaccine but did not have “eligible reported losses or expenses,” according to CICP administrators.

Of the remaining 19 applicants waiting for compensation, 18 suffered from myocarditis, a related condition called pericarditis, or a combination of myocarditis and pericarditis. The other approved claim was for angioedema, a skin condition.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-compensates-people-injured-by-covid-19-vaccines-for-first-time_5200854.html

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

One Moment He Was in Command of a 150,000-Pound Plane, Next He Was Technically Dead

On a clear spring day in 2022, Capt. Bob Snow steered an Airbus A321 toward its destination gate, as he had done thousands of times during his 31-year career with American Airlines.

But Snow almost didn’t live to talk about Flight 1067 from Denver to Dallas. Shortly after arriving safely in Texas, Snow collapsed in the cockpit. He was in cardiac arrest.

The crisis struck without warning; Snow had felt fine that day. He was a healthy, lean 60-year-old with no history of heart trouble.

However, Snow had taken a COVID-19 injection under the threat of being fired from his job; Snow believes the shot put him at greater risk for a sudden cardiac malfunction.

Regardless of what touched off the medical emergency, it rendered Snow unconscious. And if he had blacked out just a few minutes sooner, the plane’s co-pilot (officially called a “first officer”) would have been under extreme pressure to prevent a terrible accident.

Instead, circumstances aligned perfectly to avert tragedy for Snow, his co-pilot, and their planeload of about 175 passengers.

“I count my lucky stars, and I count my blessings,” Snow told The Epoch Times in March as the first anniversary of his near-fatal encounter approached. While grateful for being alive, Snow laments being robbed of his health, which disqualifies him from flying airplanes—a lifelong passion.

In a widely circulated video, shot while he was still hospitalized, Snow became one of the nation’s first pilots to go public with vaccine-related concerns. He remains convinced that more investigation is needed, especially because once-rare reports of pilot incapacitations seem to be happening more frequently. Seven pilot incapacitations made headlines last month.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-depth-one-moment-he-was-flying-a-150000-pound-plane-the-next-moment-he-was-technically-dead_5203062.html

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

California Church Faces $1.2M Fine for Defying COVID-19 Mandates, Says Not 1 Case of Covid Traces Back to Worship Services

A California Superior Court judge ordered a church to pay more than $1 million in fines for refusing to comply with COVID-19 mask mandates during the pandemic.

The church, Calvary Chapel San Jose, slammed the ruling and Santa Clara County’s efforts to defend the fines in court, arguing that not one case of COVID-19 has been traced back to the church’s worship services.

“There hasn’t been a single COVID-19 case traced to the church. To claim that this about public safety is just false,” Bob Tyler, president of Advocates for Faith & Freedom, which represents the church in court, told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday following the ruling Thursday. “In actuality, this is about the right of churchgoers to freely practice their faith without interfere or discrimination.”

“The church just wants to be afforded the same treatment and consideration as liquor stores, strip clubs, and other so-called essential businesses,” Tyler added.

Judge Evette Pennypacker ruled that Santa Clara County’s masking and social distancing orders were lawful and that the church had to pay $1.2 million in fines for violating them.

While the church had pointed out that some other institutions had received conditional and temporary exemptions for mask requirements, the court rejected the claim that these exemptions undermined the county’s authority to impose requirements on the church. A fire chief, for example, legally removed his mask to exercise in close proximity to his colleagues. By contrast, Calvary Chapel worshippers removed their masks for an entire service.

The judge ruled that the Christian church’s leaders “repeatedly announced their refusal to comply with masking requirements, never reported to the county that they had come into compliance with the masking requirement, and to this day maintain that they were never required to comply with that requirement at any time under any circumstances.”

“It should appear clear to all—regardless of religious affiliation—that wearing a mask while worshiping one’s god and communing with other congregants is a simple, unobtrusive, giving way to protect others while still exercising your right to religious freedom,” Pennypacker wrote. “Unfortunately, [church leaders] repeatedly refused to model, much less, enforce this gesture. Instead, they repeatedly flouted their refusal to comply with the public health orders and urged others to do so ‘who cares what the cost,’ including death.”

However, Pennypacker rejected further fines that the county had imposed, ruling that the extra fines amounted to “fining [Calvary Chapel] for the same violation twice.”

“The court was partially correct when it declared almost $2 million of the $3 million in fines to be unlawful,” Tyler told The Daily Signal. “The State Court’s legal analysis is simply flawed as to the remaining fines.”

He said the church plans to appeal the ruling and he expressed hope that “the court of appeal will ultimately correct the error by declaring all of the fines unconstitutional.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/18/california-church-faces-1-2m-fine-defying-covid-19-mandates-says-not-1-case-traces-back-worship-services/

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

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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