Science, Politics, and COVID: Will Truth Prevail?

By Scott W. Atlas

The COVID pandemic has been a tragedy, no doubt. But it has exposed profound issues in America that threaten the principles of freedom and order that we Americans often take for granted.

First, I have been shocked at the unprecedented exertion of power by the government since last March — issuing unilateral decrees, ordering the closure of businesses, churches, and schools, restricting personal movement, mandating behavior, and suspending indefinitely basic freedoms. Second, I was and remain stunned — almost frightened — at the acquiescence of the American people to such destructive, arbitrary, and wholly unscientific rules, restrictions, and mandates.

The pandemic also brought to the forefront things we have known existed and have tolerated for years: media bias, the decline of academic freedom on campuses, the heavy hand of Big Tech, and — now more obviously than ever — the politicization of science. Ultimately, the freedom of Americans to seek and state what they believe to be the truth is at risk.

Let me say at the outset that I, like all of us, acknowledge that the consequences of the COVID pandemic and its management have been enormous. Over 500,000 American deaths have been attributed to the virus; more will follow. Even after almost a year, the pandemic still paralyzes our country. And despite all efforts, there has been an undeniable failure to stop cases from escalating and to prevent hospitalizations and deaths.

But there is also an unacknowledged reality: almost every state and major city in the U.S., with a handful of exceptions, have implemented severe restrictions for many months, including closures of businesses and in-person schools, mobility restrictions and curfews, quarantines, limits on group gatherings, and mask mandates dating back to at least last summer. And despite any myths to the contrary, social mobility tracking of Americans and data from Gallup, YouGov, the COVID-19 Consortium, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have all shown significant reductions of movement as well as a consistently high percentage of mask-wearing since the late summer, similar to the extent seen in Western Europe and approaching the extent seen in Asia.

With what results?

All legitimate policy scholars today should be reexamining the policies that have severely harmed America’s children and families, while failing to save the elderly. Numerous studies, including one from Stanford University’s infectious disease scientists and epidemiologists Benavid, Oh, Bhattacharya, and Ioannides have shown that the mitigating impact of the extraordinary measures used in almost every state was small at best — and usually harmful. President Biden himself openly admitted the lack of efficacy of these measures in his January 22 speech to the nation: “There is nothing we can do,” he said, “to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”

Bizarrely, though, many want to blame those who opposed lockdowns and mandates for the failure of the very lockdowns and mandates that were widely implemented.

Besides their limited value in containing the virus, lockdown policies have been extraordinarily harmful. The harms to children of suspending in-person schooling are dramatic, including poor learning, school dropouts, social isolation, and suicidal ideation, most of which are far worse for lower income groups. A recent study confirms that up to 78 percent of cancers were never detected due to missed screening over a three-month period. If one extrapolates to the entire country, 750,000 to over a million new cancer cases over a nine-month period will have gone undetected. That health disaster adds to missed critical surgeries, delayed presentations of pediatric illnesses, heart attack and stroke patients too afraid to go to the hospital, and others — all well documented.

Beyond hospital care, the CDC reported four-fold increases in depression, three-fold increases in anxiety symptoms, and a doubling of suicidal ideation, particularly among young adults after the first few months of lockdowns, echoing American Medical Association reports of drug overdoses and suicides. Domestic and child abuse have been skyrocketing due to the isolation and loss of jobs. Given that many schools have been closed, hundreds of thousands of abuse cases have gone unreported, since schools are commonly where abuse is noticed. Finally, the unemployment shock from lockdowns, according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study, will generate a three percent increase in the mortality rate and a 0.5 percent drop in life expectancy over the next 15 years, disproportionately affecting African-Americans and women. That translates into what the study refers to as a “staggering” 890,000 additional U.S. deaths.

We know we have not yet seen the full extent of the damage from the lockdowns, because the effects will continue to be felt for decades. Perhaps that is why lockdowns were not recommended in previous pandemic response analyses, even for diseases with far higher death rates.

To determine the best path forward, shouldn’t policymakers objectively consider the impact both of the virus and of anti-virus policies to date? This points to the importance of health policy, my own particular field, which requires a broader scope than that of epidemiologists and basic scientists. In the case of COVID, it requires taking into account the fact that lockdowns and other significant restrictions on individuals have been extraordinarily harmful — even deadly — especially for the working class and the poor.

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Optimistically, we should be seeing the light at the end of the long tunnel with the rollout of vaccines, now being administered at a rate of one million to 1.5 million per day. On the other hand, using logic that would appeal to Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, in many states the vaccines were initially administered more frequently to healthier and younger people than to those at greatest risk from the virus. The argument was made that children should be among the first to be vaccinated, although children are at extremely low risk from the virus and are proven not to be significant spreaders to adults. Likewise, we heard the Kafka-esque idea promoted that teachers must be vaccinated before teaching in person, when schools are one of the lowest risk environments and the vast majority of teachers are not high risk.

Worse, we hear so-called experts on TV warning that social distancing, masks, and other restrictions will still be necessary after people are vaccinated! All indications are that those in power have no intention of allowing Americans to live normally — which for Americans means to live freely — again.

And sadly, just as in Galileo’s time, the root of our problem lies in “the experts” and vested academic interests. At many universities — which are supposed to be America’s centers for critical thinking — those with views contrary to those of “the experts” currently in power find themselves intimidated. Many have become afraid to speak up.

But the suppression of academic freedom is not the extent of the problem on America’s campuses.

To take Stanford, where I work, as an example, some professors have resorted to toxic smears in opinion pieces and organized rebukes aimed at those of us who criticized the failed health policies of the past year and who dared to serve our country under a president they despised — the latter apparently being the ultimate transgression.

Defamatory attacks with malicious intent based on straw-man arguments and out-of-context distortions are not acceptable in American society, let alone in our universities. There has been an attempt to intimidate and discredit me using falsifications and misrepresentations. This violates Stanford’s Code of Conduct, damages the Stanford name, and abuses the trust that parents and society place in educators.

It is understandable that most Stanford professors are not experts in the field of health policy and are ignorant of the data about the COVID pandemic. But that does not excuse the fact that some called recommendations that I made “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science.” That was a lie, and no matter how often lies are repeated by politically-driven accusers, and regardless of how often those lies are echoed in biased media, lies will never be true.

We all must pray to God that the infamous claim attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels — "A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth" — never becomes operative in the United States of America.

All of the policies I recommended to President Trump were designed to reduce both the spread of the virus to the most vulnerable and the economic, health, and social harms of anti-COVID policies for those impacted the most — small businesses, the working class, and the poor. I was one of the first to push for increasing protections for those most at risk, particularly the elderly. At the same time, almost a year ago, I recognized that we must also consider the enormous harms to physical and mental health, as well as the deaths attributable to the draconian policies implemented to contain the infection. That is the goal of public health policy — to minimize all harms, not simply to stop a virus at all costs.

The claim in a recent Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) opinion piece by three Stanford professors that “nearly all public health experts were concerned that [Scott Atlas’s] recommendations could lead to tens of thousands (or more) of unnecessary deaths in the U.S. alone” is patently false and absurd on its face. As pointed out by Dr. Joel Zinberg in National Review, the Great Barrington Declaration — a proposal co-authored by medical scientists and epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford — "is closer to the one condemned in the JAMA article than anything Atlas said.“ Yet the Great Barrington Declaration has already been signed by over 50,000 medical and public health practitioners.

When critics display such ignorance about the scope of views held by experts, it exposes their bias and disqualifies their authority on these issues. Indeed, it is almost beyond parody that these same critics wrote that "professionalism demands honesty about what [experts] know and do not know.”

I have explained the fact that younger people have little risk from this infection, and I have explained the biological fact of herd immunity — just like Harvard epidemiologist Katherine Yih did. That is very different from proposing that people be deliberately exposed and infected — which I have never suggested, although I have been accused of doing so.

I have also been accused of “argu[ing] that many public health orders aimed at increasing social distancing could be forgone without ill effects.” To the contrary, I have repeatedly called for mitigation measures, including extra sanitization, social distancing, masks, group limits, testing, and other increased protections to limit the spread and damage from the coronavirus. I explicitly called for augmenting protection of those at risk — in dozens of on-the-record presentations, interviews, and written pieces.

My accusers have ignored my explicit, emphatic public denials about supporting the spread of the infection unchecked to achieve herd immunity — denials quoted widely in the media. Perhaps this is because my views are not the real object of their criticism. Perhaps it is because their true motive is to “cancel” anyone who accepted the call to serve America in the Trump administration.

For many months, I have been vilified after calling for opening in-person schools — in line with Harvard Professors Martin Kulldorf and Katherine Yih and Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya — but my policy recommendation has been corroborated repeatedly by the literature. The compelling case to open schools is now admitted even in publications like The Atlantic, which has noted: “Research from around the world has, since the beginning of the pandemic, indicated that people under 18, and especially younger kids, are less susceptible to infection, less likely to experience severe symptoms, and far less likely to be hospitalized or die.” The subhead of the article was even clearer: “We’ve known for months that young children are less susceptible to serious infection and less likely to transmit the coronavirus.”

When the JAMA accusers wrote that I “disputed the need for masks,” they misrepresented my words. My advice on mask usage has been consistent: “Wear a mask when you cannot socially distance.” At the time, this matched the published recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO). This past December, the WHO modified its recommendation: “In areas where the virus is circulating, masks should be worn when you’re in crowded settings, where you can’t be at least one meter [roughly three feet] from others, and in rooms with poor or unknown ventilation” — in other words, not at all times by everyone. This also matches the recommendation of the National Institutes of Health document Prevention and Prophylaxis of SARS-CoV-2 Infection: “When consistent distancing is not possible, face coverings may further reduce the spread of infectious droplets from individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection to others.”

Regarding universal masks, 38 states have implemented mask mandates, most of them since at least the summer, with almost all the rest having mandates in their major cities. Widespread, general population mask usage has shown little empirical utility in terms of preventing cases, even though citing or describing evidence against their utility has been censored. Denmark also performed a randomized controlled study that showed that widespread mask usage had only minimal impact.

This is the reality: those who insist that universal mask usage has absolutely proven effective at controlling the spread of the COVID virus and is universally recommended according to “the science” are deliberately ignoring the evidence to the contrary. It is they who are propagating false and misleading information.

Those who say it is unethical, even dangerous, to question broad population mask mandates must also explain why many top infectious disease scientists and public health organizations question the efficacy of general population masking. Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, for instance, wrote that “despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks.” Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta says there is no need for masks unless one is elderly or high risk. Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya has said that “mask mandates are not supported by the scientific data… . There is no scientific evidence that mask mandates work to slow the spread of the disease.”

Throughout this pandemic, the WHO’s “Advice on the use of masks in the context of COVID-19” has included the following statement: “At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.” The CDC, in a review of influenza pandemics in May 2020, “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.” And until the WHO removed it on October 21, 2020 — soon after Twitter censored a tweet of mine highlighting the quote — the WHO had published the fact that “the widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider.”

My advice on masks all along has been based on scientific data and matched the advice of many of the top scientists and public health organizations throughout the world.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/78213

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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U.S. Accuses Russia of Launching a Disinformation Campaign Against Pfizer Vaccine

U.S. officials believe that Russia is carrying out a disinformation campaign to discredit the Pfizer COVID vaccine. Russian intelligence has been trying to cast doubt on the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine in an effort to boost their own Sputnik V vaccine.

Four publications acting as fronts for Russian intel agencies have been publishing disinformation, trying to convince Americans that the approval of the Pfizer vaccine was rushed and shortcuts were taken.

“We can say these outlets are directly linked to Russian intelligence services,” an official at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center told the newspaper. “They’re all foreign-owned, based outside of the United States. They vary a lot in their reach, their tone, their audience, but they’re all part of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem.”

Insider:

Russia announced a successful coronavirus vaccine in August, but Sputnik V was approved under questionable circumstances. It was released before it went through phase 3 trials. In the United States, phase 3 is a requirement before a drug or vaccine can be vetted and approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The rushed timeline led health officials to speculate whether the Kremlin coerced vaccine makers into putting out Sputnik V quickly to gain a leg up in the global race for a cure to the novel coronavirus.

China is still in the game as well, inking vaccine deals with several countries. But it goes without saying that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the gold standard and are in the most demand around the world.

The problem for other countries is getting their hands on some. The U.S. is “vaccine hoarding” according to the WHO because we are choosing to vaccinate our own citizens before giving it away to others. Here’s where Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine can make inroads in this massive market, and Russian intelligence is doing all they can to help.

Wall Street Journal:

“The emphasis on denigrating Pfizer is likely due to its status as the first vaccine besides Sputnik V to see mass use, resulting in a greater potential threat to Sputnik’s market dominance,” says a forthcoming report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on the danger that authoritarian governments pose to democracies and that is part of the German Marshall Fund, a U.S. think tank.

The foreign efforts to sow doubts about the vaccine exploit deep-seated anxieties about the efficacy and side effects of vaccines that were already prevalent in some communities in the U.S. and internationally. Concern about side effects is a major reason for vaccine hesitancy, according to U.S. Census Bureau data made public last month.

In addition, Russian state media and Russian government Twitter accounts have made an effort to openly disparage and sow doubts about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine.

The Russians have dismissed any idea that the FSB or GRU are engaged in disinformation against the COVID vaccines but the publications mentioned by the State Department have deep ties to Russian intelligence and it’s not likely that they would be conducting this kind of campaign without the approval of top intelligence officials.

Russia can do its worst but its credibility on the vaccine issue leaves much to be desired.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/03/07/u-s-thinks-russia-has-launched-a-disinformation-campaign-against-pfizer-vaccine-n1430613

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As an Industry Faces Destruction, It Grows a Voting Coalition

Imagine if you had a job. A good job, one that required skill and critical thinking and had a broad impact in the community where you lived. A job you didn’t just show up to do. It was a job you were good at, and because of it, you were able to provide a roof over your family’s head, put your children through college or help pay for their wedding, and once a year, it gave you the ability to carve out a week or two to take the family on vacation.

Now imagine that job becomes the center of political debate, one far removed from the Laurel Mountains, where this town sits. Within two decades, your profession goes from being championed by the Democratic Party and labor officials to one that they want to destroy.

John Fisher and Harvey Charles were standing outside of the Acosta Mine mechanic station here in Somerset County. Both still had traces of coal dust on their hands and faces. Both had just finished their shifts and were cleaning up themselves and their equipment. Fisher works in the mine; Charles transports the coal.

Fisher has been doing this job since 1989, when he returned home after serving four years in the U.S. Marine Corps. The 52-year-old says he travels 67 miles one way every day from his home in Cherry Tree in Clearfield County to do his job at the mine.

He describes his day, which begins not with walking into the mine, but crawling.

“I get here, what? 4:30 a.m. Make sure everything’s running. Then, I go underground and fix what’s broken. All over, in the pots, in the slop, in the bad roof, in the good roof.” He explains all the vulnerabilities that exist in a mine that require monitoring and daily repairs.

Here, metallurgical coal gets mined. It is used exclusively for the steel production that supports the construction of bridges, roads, highways, homes, factories, distribution centers, churches and other businesses supporting the country’s infrastructure and economy.

Fisher explains the core business here is producing and selling metallurgical coal to domestic and international steel and coke (a porous fuel) producers: “It’s a good living. I like what I do, or I would not be doing it.”
So does Charles, who says he’s been in the industry since 1987. “Right out of high school, I followed in the footsteps of my father and grandfather.”

“I used to be the maintenance foreman. Now I’m just a truck mechanic,” he said of his job to make sure all of the massive dump trucks used to haul the coal out of the hollow are in working order.

They acknowledge their industry is in the center of a political storm and their fate does not rely on how many improvements the industry does to make it clean. “Politicians and the press need a good guy and a bad guy to either win a race or tell a story. We used to be the good guys that everyone stood up for,” Fisher says and then shrugs.

“Now we are the bad guys.”

Pick up the daily newspaper and you will find mining will get blamed for everything from the growth of the deer tick population to last year’s mild winter (this winter has not been mild).

Several things bother Fisher and Charles regarding how others look upon those in the mining industry. One is the stereotype of anyone in their business as either anti-intellectual or anti-clean environment. The former they consider insulting, the latter ridiculous.

“Not only do we drink the water and breathe the air here, but we also hunt, fish and swim here. We are the first people who want whatever we do here to be safe,” Fisher said. It is a common refrain from energy workers across the country.

The other thing that gets under their skin is when politicians flippantly suggest they can quickly get another job. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently said people who lost their job to climate justice might find a climate-conscious job.

And President Joe Biden suggested coal miners should just learn to code. Last year in New Hampshire, in the middle of a brag of how former President Barack Obama had placed him in charge of judging what the jobs of the future would be, he said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well.”

It is still astounding to witness the contempt and disdain politicians and the press have toward the lives and livelihoods of people who aren’t like them, people who don’t live in their ZIP codes or attend the same universities they did.

People who work with their hands don’t start a conversation by asking you where you work. It is rare to find anyone here who would say your profession is irredeemable and that you need to do something they find worthy. Traditionally, when a job or an industry has a problem, they work on fixing it or correcting it rather than destroying it.

People often asked after the 2020 election what will happen with the Trump voters (Fisher and Charles voted for him twice). The thing is this complex conservative populist coalition existed long before it helped catapult Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016.

His win was, in part, the result of a culture that became detached from the people they served in various institutions, whether it was the government, the entertainment industry or the college campus. Many people ultimately rejected all of them.

But if you never understood that, if you always thought it was about Trump, you never understood who they were and why they vote the way they do.

And you never understood how someone who lives in the suburbs of Arizona or Kenosha, Wisconsin, or Miami could have anything in common with someone who works the mines in Appalachia. And you didn’t understand that because you didn’t care to, because you hoped for its destruction.

There will be two endings to this story. The first is industries such as coal or shale, or the creation of pipelines, will continue to get attacked and dismantled, costing people their jobs. As Fisher said, politicians and the press always need a bad guy.

And the other ending is this coalition will grow — despite the press incorrectly believing one person caused it and having the audacity to think they have the power to dismantle it.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/salena-zito/2021/03/02/as-an-industry-faces-destruction-it-grows-a-voting-coalition-n1429253

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Blue collar workers going Republican

An NBC News poll released last week reflects one of the most significant political trends of the past 30 years – the realignment of blue-collar workers who’ve left the party of Planned Parenthood and Drag Queen Story Hour for the party of energy-independence, fair-trade deals and border security.

The poll shows that between 2010 and 2020, the Republican share of blue- collar votes rose from 45% to 57%. Within the same demographic, its Hispanic vote went from 23% to 36%, while its black working-class vote went from 5% to 12%.

In 1992, Bill Clinton carried 49% of counties where at least 25% of the workforce was employed in manufacturing. In 2016, Donald Trump took 95%. What used to be one of the left’s most reliable constituencies is now going the way of evangelicals in their flight from a party that’s lost both its mind and its soul.

Writing in The Detroit News on April 10, 2019, Terry Bowman (a 22- year UAW/Ford worker) charges: “While Democrats fight for policies that crush working-class communities, Republicans and our president are fighting for blue-collar jobs and traditional American values.”

The geezer in the White House is becoming a job-killing machine. On Day One, the Keystone XL-Pipeline was axed. And that’s just a down-payment on Biden’s debt to the Greenies. But, not to worry. As John Forbes Kerry assured us, unemployed pipeline workers can get good-paying jobs manufacturing solar panels – in China.

It’s infuriating the way Democrats can speak so nonchalantly about sacrificing the opportunities of others. Campaigning in 2016, the warm and lovable Hillary Clinton boasted, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business!” This from someone who probably never lifted anything heavier than a nail file.

Under Biden’s welcome-mat policy, the Border Patrol has been ordered not to arrest illegals unless they commit multiple homicides within eyesight. He’s starting to admit the first of 25,000 “asylum” seekers, and blue-collar workers will get to pay for a process that will lead to the loss of more of their jobs.

But jobs isn’t the whole picture.

Most of the white working-class is solidly middle-American: church-going, socially conservative (pro-life, pro-marriage and pro- traditional morality). Many are gun-owners, veterans and reservists, patriotic and not embarrassed to show it and mystified by those who are. And, are you sitting down Nancy, they refuse to apologize for being white.

If a guy drives a pick-up truck with a gun-rack and a tool box in back, and an American flag decal, chances are he isn’t a community organizer who votes Democratic.

In short, workers are everything liberals have come to loathe – an animosity that’s reflected in Obama’s bitter-clingers comment, Hillary’s basket of deplorables and Biden’s dregs of society.

The Democrats have become the party of Alice-in-Wonderland social policy – the party that refuses to criticize Antifa and Black Lives Matter even as they turn our cities into barbecue pits, the party that turns a blind eye to urban riots but sees white supremacy everywhere, the party of defund the police and sanctuary cities, the party of climate-change cultists, the party of “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” the party that tried to take an innocuous reference God out of its 2012 platform, the party of abortion up to the moment of birth, the party of LGBTQ, and now, the party of transgenderism.

Bowman writes: “My father, a retired UAW/Ford worker, was a life-long Democrat” who voted for Trump in 2016 and now says “I don’t know the damn Democrat party anymore.” Ronald Reagan used to say he didn’t leave the Democrats; they left him.

Unlike their white-collar counterparts, blue-collar workers didn’t have an opportunity to be indoctrinated by their college professors – but Biden wants them to pay the debts of those who were. They are less likely to heed the so-called experts. They don’t get their news from The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. They’re not afraid to voice views that get conservatives banned by Facebook and Twitter.

While the GOP is becoming the party of labor, the Democrats are firmly in the hands of coastal elitists.

Business Insider listed the billionaires who bankrolled Biden’s 2020 campaign. It reads like the Fortune 500 and includes the CEOs -- or their wives -- of Microsoft, Google, Lucasfilm, Estee Lauder, Dream Works, Hyatt, J.P. Morgan Chase, Linkedin and Comcast/Universal. Remember when the media used to whine about Republicans as the party of the super-rich?

You think they care about the guy who worries about making this month’s mortgage payment or if he’ll still have a pension when he retires? In a pig’s eye.

Since Jimmy Carter, blue-collar workers have been worked over by the Democrats. Now, they’re returning the favor. With the Republicans, they’ve found their real home.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/lunch-box-donald-why-blue-collar-workers-are-don-feder/?utm_campaign=2069283&utm_content=2840889

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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UK: 35 people deaf and 25 blind after taking mRNA vaccine shots

Among people in the U.K., 35 cases of deafness and 25 cases of blindness have been reported by people who have taken the experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The numbers are derived from the U.K. Yellow Card vaccine reporting scheme, which is the British equivalent to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

Both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca mRNA COVID vaccines were given temporary authorization in the U.K. by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the former in mid-December 2020, and the latter at the beginning of January 2021. Since then, the Yellow Card scheme has flagged a combined 191,832 individual adverse events, or side effects, of varying degrees of injury. Of the injuries recorded, AstraZeneca’s vaccine consistently performed the worst, accounting for 60% of all adverse events, and 58% of deaf and blind reports. Additionally, of the 402 fatalities, 197 were reported following use of the Pfizer formula, and 205 after taking AstraZeneca’s vaccine.

The latest data, which runs up to February 19 and was published on February 22, reveals a plethora of debilitating side-effects, but this has not alarmed officials at the MHRA who maintain that “no other new safety concerns have been identified from reports received to date.” They conclude from this that the “overall safety experience with both vaccines is so far as expected from the clinical trials.”

The regulator doubled down on supporting the jabs, stating that the “expected benefits of the vaccines in preventing COVID-19 and serious complications associated with COVID-19 far outweigh any currently known side effects,” including deafness, blindness, and death.

The MHRA justified this position by citing the passively analytical nature of recordings on the Yellow Card scheme: It is a self-reporting system. This means that none of the serious injuries, or even the deaths, are confirmed by a licensed doctor, giving the MHRA some leeway to declare that “the available evidence does not currently suggest that the vaccine caused the event.”

Rather, the MHRA favors use of the term “temporally-related” to describe the succession of adverse events from injection with the vaccine, which they describe as “events occurring following vaccination but may or may not be caused by the vaccine.”

John Stone of Children’s Health Defense noted that, despite the passive reporting system used by the MHRA, “[n]evertheless, the very distinct event profiles of two products [COVID-19 vaccines] filtered through the same system after 15 million vaccine administrations [in the U.K.] would suggest that there is something to be investigated and explained.”

A pattern of adverse results has been established regarding use of the Pfizer vaccine, which can be seen by examining its use in the U.S., following the award of “Emergency Use Authorization” by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December. In both the U.K. and the U.S., use of the Pfizer vaccine has brought about similar results, accounting for the majority of post-vaccination injuries in America. VAERS has recorded 19,907 cases of adverse events arising after taking a COVID-19 vaccine, 64% of which are linked to Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, and 36% attributable to Moderna’s equivalent jab.

In the U.S., VAERS reported 23 cases of complete deafness and 27 of unilateral deafness, with Pfizer’s jab making up 76% of complaints. Additionally there have been 29 cases of partial or complete blindness, over half of which followed the Pfizer vaccine.

Experimental mRNA vaccination programs in Israel, too, are returning grim results, with a new analysis of vaccine-related deaths demonstrating a dramatic rise in both young and elderly people dying after taking the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine over those who have died after encountering the pathogen naturally.

Upon investigating the Israeli Health Ministry’s own data on the nation’s vaccine rollout, Dr. Hervé Seligmann, a member of the faculty of Medicine at Aix-Marseille University, and engineer Haim Yativ revealed that Pfizer’s mRNA experimental vaccine killed “about 40 times more [elderly] people than the disease itself would have killed” during a recent five-week vaccination period.

Among the younger class, the researchers discovered that these numbers are compounded to death rates at 260 times what the COVID-19 virus would have claimed in the given time frame.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/uk-35-people-deaf-and-25-blind-after-taking-mrna-vaccine-shots

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Would the Real Fascists Please Stand Up?

One of the Left's favorite pejoratives for the Right is completely backwards.

“I do think that [there are] fascistic tendencies” in the Republican Party, pontificates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks “we certainly saw a lot of fascist sympathizing” at the Conservative Political Action Conference this past weekend, especially from the man she loves to hate, Donald Trump. Worse, AOC added, “There are legitimate white supremacist sympathizers that sit at the heart and at the core of the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives,” and “American white supremacy” is the driving force of this supposed fascism overtaking the GOP.

This sounds serious.

Or it would if anything AOC said ever made a lick of sense. As usual, however, her historical ignorance is a feature, not a bug, in service to the radical Left’s political agenda. And she’s far from the only leftist spouting such nonsense. It’s coming from other elected Democrats, from their lickspittles in the Leftmedia, and from their intelligentsia in education. Whether it’s offhand comments on cable news shows, “think” pieces littering the Internet, or academic papers and classes, leftists yelling “fascism!” as an inaccurate pejorative for conservatives has a long and storied history in America.

But what is fascism anyway? For all the public school-educated “progressives” out there, perhaps a history lesson is in order, and who better to give it than the esteemed Thomas Sowell. In a 2008 column, he explained it quite simply:

Real Fascism [was] introduced into Italy after the First World War by Benito Mussolini.

The Fascists were completely against individualism in general and especially against individualism in a free market economy. Their agenda included minimum wage laws, government restrictions on profit-making, progressive taxation of capital, and “rigidly secular” schools.

Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run.

That sure does sound an awful lot like today’s Democrat agenda. Who are the real fascists? The alleged “racists” who want an American melting pot and Rule of Law for everyone, or the ones pushing government takeover of healthcare, energy, finance, education, etc., as well as race-based policies and an aggressive and totalitarian cancel culture?

The Nazis, by the way, were really only adding a racialist and nationalist variation to fascism, which is why American leftists today deliberately distort the meaning of those words and project upon their Republican opponents what they themselves are guilty of doing and perpetuating. It’s why they laughably call their rioting fascist goons “antifa,” which is short for “anti-fascist.”

In fact, conservatives might do better to trade in the word “socialism” for “fascism” to describe Democrat proposals. Few Democrats want the government to literally own the means of production. Instead, as Sowell said in a 2012 column on the subject, “[They want] government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.” That’s the textbook definition of fascism.

The truth is fascism, Nazism, socialism, and communism are all variations on a leftist theme of control and power. Don’t let them tell you that your rejection of that totalitarianism makes you the fascist when reality is quite the opposite.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/78106-would-the-real-fascists-please-stand-up-2021-03-02

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The Conservative Identity Crisis

When a movement’s flagship publication features a “This We Believe” statement on its cover, as National Review recently did, you know there’s a problem. But the problem itself is not new.

Last summer, The American Conservative published a special edition devoted to the question, “What Is American Conservatism?” The issue drew on essays by dozens of self-identified conservatives, each attempting to define the movement. Reading through them, one might get the impression that conservatism is not one point of view but a whole slew of them. Yet in truth, there is only one important intellectual schism on the right worthy of attention: that between those who embrace the legacy of the European Enlightenment and those who reject it.

The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, was the revolution against the institutions of statism and superstition that freed human minds and human relationships in the 16th and 17th centuries. As Steven Pinker has aptly noted, the free minds and free markets that resulted from this revolution are the reason for the relative prosperity and security we enjoy today.

I can only imagine how liberating and exciting it must have been to have lived through that time when David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and America’s Founding Fathers were overthrowing an old intellectual and political orders and creating new ones. I like to think it must have felt similar to the 1980s of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, when ideas such as the flat tax, school vouchers, private Social Security accounts, deregulation, and privatization were sweeping the globe, promoted with palpable energy and enthusiasm by a raft of newly created conservative think tanks.

A decade later, as the 20th century came to a close, Communism and big government were in retreat, and free-market reforms remained ascendant everywhere. But alas, the 21st century has seen considerable backsliding, which has fueled the rise of those on the other side of the conservative schism: the folks who reject the legacy of the Enlightenment.

This school of thought is aptly represented in What Is Conservatism?, the classic essay collection edited by Frank Meyer and published a little over 55 years ago. I recently reread the book, seeking to find anything in it that might engage a politically agnostic college student, making him eager to be part of the conservative movement. Sadly, I came up empty.

The kind of conservatism pushed by What Is Conservatism? doesn’t just fail to win converts; it also isn’t prepared to solve real-world problems. About the same time that Meyer’s book was published, Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom. The two books are as different as night and day. Whereas the essays Meyer edited are backward-looking, Friedman’s book is forward-looking. Whereas the former lamented change, the latter called for the kind of change that liberates people and makes their lives better.

Friedman was well aware that his approach to public policy was very different from that of conventional conservatives. He even avoided calling himself a “conservative,” preferring to identify with the tradition of classical liberalism. But his ideas came to dominate American conservatism anyway, at least until the development of the movement’s present schism. And for those of us who still believe in them, there is much work to be done going forward.

In every large city in the country, large numbers of low-income minority families are forced to live in substandard housing and send their children to failing schools. They benefit the least from almost every public service, from transportation to health care to public safety. They are also denied job opportunities by medieval-style occupational-licensing laws. These cities are almost always run by Democrats, usually liberal Democrats. A reformist conservative agenda would advocate school choice, the liberation of the housing and job markets, and private alternatives to essential city services.

Likewise, too many American seniors are trapped in antiquated social-insurance schemes that should be an embarrassment to a civilized society such as ours. They are misled on a daily basis by Social Security bureaucrats who encourage them to take early retirement, giving up benefits that are growing at a 3 percent, no-risk, real rate of return every year. Then when they do take a part-time job, they face the highest marginal-tax rates in the nation—as high as 95 percent in some cases. Seniors on Medicare are the only people in the country who cannot have a health-savings account or direct, 24/7 access to a primary-care physician as an alternative to the emergency room. As I argue in my book New Way to Care, we desperately need to reform Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the disability system, and other forms of social insurance that were designed in a different century to meet different needs.

These are only a few of the ways in which an activist conservative agenda could liberate people and markets, reform institutions, and make the world better for the most vulnerable among us. But for that to happen, the conservative movement will first have to decide whether it wants to embrace its Enlightenment roots or reject them.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13412&omhide=true

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IN BRIEF

Conservative comic strip "Mallard Fillmore" dropped (Washington Times)

A dose of common sense: New York Public Library will keep all of its Dr. Seuss books circulating (Examiner)

Children as young as five forced to have "diversity and inclusion" lessons in New Jersey schools (Daily Wire)

Number of illegal border crossings now six times what Obama considered a "crisis" (Daily Wire)

DOD took hours to approve National Guard request during Capitol riot, commander testifies (NPR)

Damages from February winter storms could be as high as $155 billion (UPI)

Evangelical adoption agency Bethany dangerously opens doors to LGBT families (Disrn)

Governor Andrew Cuomo, who should resign over nursing home scandal, refuses to resign over sexual harassment scandal (Post Millennial)

Hyatt Hotels backtracks, slams CPAC — which it hosted — for "hate" and "hostility" (Disrn)

Arkansas lawmakers send governor near-total abortion ban (Fox News)

Policy: We already have an alternative to massive student-loan cancelation (National Review)

Advisers of Governor Andrew Cuomo altered report on nursing home deaths (Fox News)

Number of child migrants crossing the border is overwhelming HHS (Axios)

Second SUV filled with illegal immigrants catches fire near U.S. border (Disrn)

Senators from both aisles introduce bill to repeal Biden's war powers following Syria strike (Fox News)

The United States is now averaging two million vaccine doses administered per day (NY Times)

Connecticut lifting all capacity restrictions on restaurants, gyms, offices, and houses of worship (Forbes)

Mississippi legislature wisely approves bill banning males from competing against women (Daily Wire)

Supreme Court drops "sanctuary city" cases following Biden DOJ request (Fox News)

Swing and a miss: California high school stupidly gives baseball team two-week suspension for taking a picture without masks (Disrn)

Policy: Biden could overstimulate the economy into a crisis (National Interest)

Policy: Job creation, not a $15 minimum wage, will reduce poverty (Daily Signal)

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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AstraZeneca vaccine DOES work against Brazil's 'super-covid,' report claims: Unpublished data will show Oxford's shot works against worrisome variant that may weaken others

AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine does protect against the feared Brazilian coronavirus variant, sources close to the matter said of unpublished data from an Oxford University trial.

Preliminary data from a study conducted at the university indicates that the COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca is effective against the P1, or Brazilian, variant, a source with knowledge of the study told Reuters on Friday.

The data indicates that the vaccine will not need to be modified in order to protect against the variant, which is believed to have originated in the Amazonian city of Manaus, said the source, who requested anonymity as the results have not yet been made public.

So far, there are at least 13 cases of the Brazilian variant in seven US states, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has dragged its feet on the authorization of the AstraZeneca shot, and is not expected to do so until at least next month.

US trials for the AstraZeneca shot are ongoing, and the FDA typically does not accept results from other countries.

But results are in from other nations, including the UK, South Africa and Brazil - all of which have seen variants emerge, and spread across the globe, including to the the US.

In the aggregate of those countries, the AstraZeneca vaccine's efficacy rose to 82 percent after a second dose, given three months after the first.

Earlier data found that the vaccine reduced the risk of coronavirus infection by 78 percent.

That was markedly superior to the performance of the Chinese-made CoronaVac, which was only about 50 percent effective.

Importantly, the AstraZeneca vaccine was 100 percent effective at preventing severe disease and death from COVID-19, according to its data published February 3.

It's difficult to know how prevalent Brazil's P1 variant was in the country during earlier stages of the trial. Now, the variant is dominant there.

The Reuters report suggests that AstraZeneca may soon release data specific to how the vaccine performed in Brazil during the most recent round of trials.

The source did not provide the exact efficacy of the vaccine against the variant. They said the full results of the study should be released soon, possibly in March.

Early results indicated the AstraZeneca vaccine was less effective against the South African variant, which is similar to P1. South Africa subsequently paused the use of the vaccine in the country.

The information comes as a small-sample study suggested the COVID-19 vaccine developed by China's Sinovac may not work effectively against the Brazilian variant.

Responding to a request for comment, Fiocruz, which sent the samples that formed the basis of the study, told Reuters it did not have any information on the study, as it was being led by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.

Representatives for AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Brazil is currently confronting a brutal and long-lasting second wave of the coronavirus, hitting a daily record of 1,910 deaths on Wednesday.

The P1 variant is among the factors that epidemiologists believe is contributing to a rise in cases and deaths, and there has been concern in the scientific community about the variant's resistance to vaccines.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9330441/Oxford-study-indicates-AstraZeneca-effective-against-Brazil-variant-source-says.html

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UK: Facebook is silencing debate on lockdown

Two of the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration on their brush with Big Tech censorship.

JAY BHATTACHARYA & MARTIN KULLDORFF

On 2 February, we put up a post in favour of the Covid vaccine on the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) Facebook page. We, as two of the primary authors of the GBD, are firmly in favour of voluntary vaccination, using vaccines that regulatory authorities have carefully evaluated and approved for use. Our post argued for prioritising the elderly for vaccination against Covid-19 as a tool for the focused protection of this vulnerable group. It generated a vigorous debate in the comment section among people against the Covid vaccines and people who agreed with us.

On 4 February, without warning, Facebook deleted the entire Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) page. The only explanation it provided was that the page violated its ‘community standards’, but it did not specify what standards the page violated. A week later, again without any explanation, Facebook restored the page.

The Great Barrington Declaration, now signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians, proposes a radically different approach to the Covid epidemic that eschews lockdown in favour of focused protection of the vulnerable. Many governments worldwide have adopted elements of our approach by prioritising the elderly living in nursing homes for vaccination and expanding the set of permitted activities (such as schooling) despite rising cases.

Other governments have adopted draconian lockdowns – including forced quarantines for the healthy and extended closures of schools and businesses – to address the epidemic. In many places, this lockdown strategy has successfully protected the zoom class, who can work from home without losing their jobs, while exposing the working class and the vulnerable to Covid infection.

Given the stakes, the scientific debate between lockdown and focused protection is of intense interest to nearly everyone on the planet. As co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, we are admittedly partisans in this debate. However, we recognise that these are complicated topics that require the open engagement of many minds, even those who disagree with us, to arrive at the truth. For good reasons, the Enlightenment enshrined free scientific inquiry as a primary good. A tolerance for contrary argument is essential if we are ever to exit the intellectual cul-de-sacs we inhabit.

Well, okay, fine, the reader may be thinking. Maybe Facebook made a mistake in suppressing the Covid-lockdown debate, but it recognised its error and corrected the problem within a week. Plus, there are other venues for the scientific debate to take place. What is the harm?

First, for many people, Facebook is a primary source for their news; Facebook banning content has at least a temporary effect on the information they see and the thoughts they have. Second, as should be evident from the debate over vaccination policy that preceded the Facebook ban, the Great Barrington Declaration site itself is followed by people with a diverse set of opinions on key aspects of Covid policy. Shutting down the site led many people to leave the page and closed one of the few venues where civil and open discussion between people with differing views happens on these topics. Most Covid-related policy discussions occur in closed environments, where people and scientists speak with those who already agree with them. The GBD Facebook site is an exception worth preserving.

Third, and most importantly, even a temporary ban imposes reputational harm to the shuttered site and the people behind it. For good or ill, Facebook has taken upon itself the role of hall monitor, and those who violate its editorial standards lose credibility in the eyes of many. The question is whether Facebook deserves its role as arbiter of questions of science and science policy. What are the scientific credentials of the people who censored the site, or (perhaps more relevantly) of the engineers who wrote the algorithms that censored it? Do they really have the omniscience to know that imprinting a scarlet letter on the GBD is good for our society?

Economists have a handy rule of thumb that it is more accurate to infer what people value by their actions and choices rather than from their words. It is useful to apply this rule here, especially since Facebook has not explained its actions beyond its invocation of ‘community standards’. First, Facebook is undecided on whether to permit open scientific debate on its site, at least concerning Covid policy. Second, since it was a pro-vaccine post that preceded the ban, perhaps Facebook community standards oppose the Covid vaccines or at least prioritising vulnerable seniors to receive them?

Facebook, like nearly every company whose success depends on the extensive use of its online services, stands to benefit financially from extended lockdowns. Though this pecuniary motive may not have played a direct, conscious role in its censorship of the GBD site, it certainly must have played some role in its editorial policies and ‘community standards’. Facebook clearly does not know how to use the power it wields to shape public understanding of science responsibly.

The impulse by those who wield the power to suppress their adversaries’ words and ideas stretches back to at least Cain and Abel. This power is usually exercised by repressive regimes, like Mao’s, who sent his Red Guards house to house during the 1966 Cultural Revolution to find and burn books that espoused the old, dangerous ideas opposed by the Communists. Religious and political considerations typically motivate the censors, which often include non-state actors. What is new in the world today is ostensibly progressive technocrats enthusiastically censoring scientific discussion and debate.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/15/facebook-is-silencing-debate-on-lockdown

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Dems Push End to Election Integrity

The Democrats' massive HR 1 election bill is a recipe for tyranny.

It might as well be called the “Ensure Democrat Electoral Victory Act” given what’s in the massive 800-page election overhaul bill put forward by House Democrats. HR 1, which Democrats have ironically dubbed the “For the People Act,” is anything but for the people. Rather than seeking to reestablish and shore up the badly abused state election laws Americans witnessed in the 2020 election, HR 1 would seek to codify the abuses. As Representative Tom Cole (R-OK) observed, “This is a bill that is about preserving the present Democratic majority. It is a bill by the majority, for the majority, and is intended to entrench the majority in power for years to come.”

HR 1 would essentially federalize national elections by mandating that states adopt voting rules such as a right to no-excuse mail-in ballots, elimination of voter ID laws, same-day registration and voting, 10-day post-election day acceptance of mail-in ballots, no laws against ballot harvesting or limits on the number of ballots a person can return, a 15-day early-voting mandate, and giving out-of-prison felons the right to vote — all while also making it harder for states to clean up their voter rolls. These are just a few of the terrible rules entrenched in HR 1, and it encapsulates the Left’s election strategy going forward.

Furthermore, the bill would create a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices, which is an obvious effort to dictate to the High Court how it would be allowed to rule on cases.

In short, HR 1 is a recipe for tyranny.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court refused a perfect opportunity to tackle last year’s election integrity issues — and thus lay a roadblock in the way of HR 1 — when the justices inexplicably declined to hear the case against a Pennsylvania courts’ unilateral judicial rewrite of the state’s election laws, making an end run around the state legislature. Justice Clarence Thomas blasted his colleagues’ decision to pass on the case: “The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling.” And why wouldn’t SCOTUS weigh in now, when we’re free and clear of any pending election? Now is the time to address this, not the 11th hour before an election. Moreover, as Thomas noted, “Changing the rules in the middle of the game is bad enough. Such rule changes by officials who may lack authority to do so is even worse.”

SCOTUS has, however, decided to hear another election case, Brnovich v. DNC. At issue are Arizona’s requirements that voters who cast their ballot on election day must do so in their assigned precinct and the state’s prohibition against ballot harvesting. (Both are common state laws.) Democrats have dubiously argued that Arizona’s laws violate the Voting Rights Act by creating a standard that infringes on minorities’ right to vote. A federal judge has ruled there is no evidence to support the Democrats’ claims, a decision that a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel agreed with but was then overruled by the full court.

It appears likely that SCOTUS will find in Arizona’s favor by ruling that the Ninth Circuit was in error in overturning the decision, though as narrow rulings are the wont of Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s probable that the Court will avoid ruling on the merits of Arizona’s election laws, or to truly clarify the Voting Rights Act. If they take the narrow path, the justices will only be kicking the proverbial can down the road. Repairing the gaping holes caused by Democrats and lower courts in the nation’s election integrity will remain left undone. A fair election system should matter to all parties, but clearly for Democrats, the only concern is working to establish a system that ensures their victory.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/78108-dems-push-end-to-election-integrity-2021-03-02

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Early signs COVID-19 vaccine jab ‘clobbers’ more transmissible variants

British researchers say there is growing evidence that the full two courses of existing vaccines will “clobber” the more transmissible strains of COVID-19 — a development that could help unlock international travel and help relieve millions of people from lockdowns.

The emergence of strains in countries with major coronavirus outbreaks, including Britain, Brazil and South Africa, have led to further international travel restrictions and measures. Governments have feared the strains would be resistant to the vaccines that were designed before their discovery.

This week the Australian government extended the international border closure by another three months, citing the more transmissible strains that had emerged overseas.

Britain has also introduced hotel quarantine for travellers from countries where the strains are prevalent and stopped recreational international travel.

Professor Tim Spector, from King’s College London and principal investigator with Britain’s ZOE COVID Symptom study – where millions of Britons log their symptoms and vaccine side effects – told an online webinar that early fears about the variants’ resistance to vaccines might prove to be unfounded.

“There’s been some more reassuring data showing that once you’ve had the second dose, it really clobbers all the variants; we just need time to show that,” Spector said.

Ellie Barnes, a professor in hepatology and experimental medicine at Oxford University and member of the UK Coronavirus Immunology Consortium, said there was data showing the jab worked well against the South African variant, but only after the second dose.

“We’ve got Oxford data which basically shows that after one dose your antibody titre [concentration] is not so high – it’s high but it’s not super high – and that is not enough to neutralise the South African [variant],” Barnes said.

“After you give the second dose you get really robust neutralisation of the South African variant, so I think we can be reassured of that.

“And even after a single dose the data from these vaccines in South Africa itself shows a single dose prevents you from hospitalisation and severe infection. “But you do need the second dose to get fully protected.”

Barnes said the same outcome was likely against the Brazilian variant, which is similar to the strain that emerged in South Africa. She said the next generation of COVID-19 vaccines would be specifically designed to counteract the South African variant and said she was not sure that annual vaccines would be required, as has been previously touted.

“There’s only so many mutations a virus can make before it’s no longer able to infect cells; it’s unlikely to go on indefinitely,” she said. “SARS-CoV-2 is not the same as influenza. I’m not sure we’ll need vaccines every year; we’ll see, time will tell.”

Barnes said there was emerging data to support anecdotal reports of people who had previously had COVID-19 experiencing stronger side effects to the vaccine.

She said this was because the body’s T-cells were activated by the COVID-19 infection and their memory was able to respond “very rapidly” to vaccination.

“So if you’ve been infected before and then you get a first dose of vaccine, you have a really excellent response to that single dose comparable to someone that wasn’t infected before and was on their second dose - that’s the data that’s just coming out in pre-prints,” she said.

She said it was for this reason that it is recommended people wait one month after being infected with COVID-19 to receive their vaccine.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/early-signs-covid-19-vaccine-jab-clobbers-more-transmissible-variants-20210304-p577ll.html

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Are Liberals Really More Egalitarian?

Recent studies find conservatives treat others more equally than liberals

Recent experiments reveal that in some cases it is liberals who tend to treat information and people more unequally on the basis of sex, race, and group status.

In a set of studies, liberals wished to censor written passages that portrayed low-status groups unfavorably more than identical passages that portrayed high-status groups unfavorably, whereas conservatives treated the passages more comparably.

This does not necessarily mean that liberals are not egalitarian. It might be that liberals prioritize equality of outcomes and view unequal treatment (at least for a time) as a means of attaining equal outcomes.

On personality measures, liberals are more egalitarian than conservatives. This preference for equality is often measured with the Social Dominance Orientation Scale, which contains items about both equality of treatment (e.g., “We would have fewer problems if we treated people more equally”) and equality of outcomes (e.g., “We should strive to make incomes as equal as possible”).

However, sometimes personality scales do not map onto behavior in expected ways. For example, despite the fact that conservatives score higher in epistemic needs for certainty, they appear to be no more politically biased than liberals (i.e., no more likely to evaluate politically congenial information more favorably than otherwise identical politically uncongenial information). A paper forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science replicated this “symmetrical bias” pattern in two nationally representative studies, finding that epistemic needs for certainty actually did not predict political bias.

So, consistent with liberals’ self-reported support for equality, do they treat people and groups more equally than conservatives? Several recent studies over the past few years cast doubt on this proposition.

Scholars test for unequal treatment (sometimes also called bias) by presenting participants with identical or very similar stimuli (for example, a scientific finding, a resume) and manipulating whom or which group that piece of information is about (for example, a scientific finding about men or women, a resume for a Black or a White job applicant), and then having participants evaluate the piece of information. To the extent that people treat the stimuli differently in the different sex or race conditions, this is considered unequal treatment or a bias. If people rated a male candidate as more qualified for a job than a female candidate with the exact same resume, this would be considered an unequal treatment or bias in favor of men (or against women).

Recent experiments and quasi-experiments of this kind suggest that, at least sometimes, it is liberals who tend to treat information and people more unequally on the basis of sex, race, and group status.

Evaluations that favor or disfavor some groups

For example, two sets of studies by two different research teams found that participants evaluated science on sex differences more favorably when women were portrayed more favorably than men (as better drawers and less prone to lying and as more intelligent) than when men were portrayed more favorably than women. In both of these sets of studies, these tendencies were stronger as participants were more politically liberal.

Similarly, in a more naturalistic study on Twitter, liberals were more likely to amplify the successes of female and Black athletes than male and White athletes, whereas conservatives treated the successes of groups more similarly.

In another set of studies, White liberals presented less self-competence to Black than White interaction partners, whereas White conservatives treated Black and White interaction partners more similarly. And in another set, liberals had stronger desires to censor passages that portrayed low-status groups unfavorably than identical passages that portrayed high-status groups unfavorably, whereas conservatives treated the passages more comparably.

Other teams of researchers have found similar patterns in other domains. For example, people had more generous acceptance criteria for admitting Black than White candidates to an honor society, and this tendency was stronger among liberals. Whereas those high in social dominance orientation favored a White over a Black job applicant, the reverse tendency to favor a Black over a White job applicant was stronger among those low in social dominance orientation.

And whereas those high on system justification (correlated with more conservative ideology) found jokes that target low-status and high-status groups similarly funny, those low on system justification (liberals) found jokes that target low-status groups less funny than those that target high-status groups.

Limitations and a word about future research

These findings are far from a comprehensive overview of the literature on these kinds of studies. In order to draw any conclusions that one group (liberals or conservatives) treats groups and people more equally in general, one would need to conduct a thorough meta-analysis (if anybody wants to conduct a meta-analysis, perhaps as part of an adversarial collaboration, do let me know). Moreover, it seems quite possible that preferences for equality of treatment and equality of outcomes in relation to political ideology have changed over the past couple of decades and may continue to change in the future, and so one would have to take time into account as well.

However, these results may suggest that we cannot assume that liberals, being more egalitarian than conservatives, treat individuals and groups more equally. They might not.

This does not necessarily mean that liberals are not the egalitarians they claim to be. It might be that liberals—first and foremost—prioritize equality of outcomes and view unequal treatment (at least for a time) as a means of attaining equal outcomes.

But likewise, that conservatives are more tolerant of inequality of outcomes does not necessarily mean conservatives oppose equality. It might be that conservatives—first and foremost—prioritize equality of treatment and view unequal outcomes (at least for a time) as an unfortunate side effect.

None of this research can adjudicate which of these positions (if either) is more empirically or morally justified. But it may lead one to wonder whether the relationships between ideology and egalitarianism are more complicated than certain mainstream narratives suggest.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202102/are-liberals-really-more-egalitarian

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IN BRIEF

Pentagon: One militia member killed, two injured in Syria airstrike (UPI)

We're shocked — shocked! Iran rejects Biden offer to discuss new nuclear deal (Disrn)

California lawmakers reach agreement to return schools to in-person learning (UPI)

Minneapolis prepares for unrest during Derek Chauvin trial next week (Examiner)

Virginia to become 16th state to legalize marijuana (Daily Caller)

Andrew Cuomo backers reevaluate fundraising amid sexual harassment probe (CNBC)

Conservative United Methodists detail breakaway plan (World)

Golden Globes suffer ratings nightmare (Disrn)

Biden State Department nominee Victoria Nuland is a defender of Chinese propaganda (Free Beacon)

Twenty-three embarrassing Andrew Cuomo takes that just didn't age well (Disrn)

Base with U.S. troops in Iraq attacked with rockets after being targeted by Iran (Jerusalem Post)

ICE conducting human smuggling investigation after California crash that killed more than a dozen (Fox News)

ICE locks Twitter account that alerted public of illegal immigrants freed by sanctuary cities (Washington Times)

Treasury Department sanctions Russian officials in response to the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny (Treasury.gov)

Home prices surged by 10% in January, the largest annualized jump since 2013 (Forbes)

Prices at the pump are going up thanks to Texas's epic cold snap (Examiner)

Governor Cuomo to be stripped of pandemic emergency powers in legislative deal (NBC New York)

Poll finds more Americans concerned about Black Lives Matter riots (55%) than Capitol riot (45%) despite the Leftmedia's ignoring the former and obsession with the latter (Disrn)

Earth's green vegetation has increased 10% since 2000 (Disrn)

Skipping mammograms raises odds for breast cancer death in women (HealthDay News)

Policy: Bringing back pork would be a disaster (National Review)

Woke Mob Believes CPAC Stage Is Nazi Symbolism — The Leftmedia pushes the conspiracy theory by claiming it resembles a symbol used by the SS.

We Are All Essential — Mike Rowe tells John Stossel that COVID rules had a huge unintended consequence: They crushed work, sapping meaning from many people's lives.

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'NINETY PER CENT of Germany's severe Covid-19 patients have migrant background and more than half are Muslim' despite making up 4.8% of the population

More than 90 per cent of severely ill coronavirus patients in Germany have a 'migrant background', a leading doctor has said, prompting claims that the government is turning a blind eye to the issue to avoid igniting a race row.

Thomas Voshaar, the head doctor at a German lung hospital, said a survey of leading medics had found that many of the sickest patients were what he described as 'patients with communications barriers'.

In a conference call of health experts, reported by Bild, Voshaar said he had raised the issue with Angela Merkel's health minister Jens Spahn - while the head of Germany's top diseases institute, Lothar Wieler, described it as a 'taboo'.

Wieler added that the number of Muslims in intensive care was 'clearly above 50 per cent' even though they make up only around five per cent of Germany's 83million population.

Voshaar told the February 14 conference call that government warnings about the dangers of the virus were 'simply not getting through' to migrant communities.

He said top doctors had compiled figures from intensive care wards in November and December 2020 and January 2021, the peak months of the second wave.

'According to my analysis, more than 90 per cent of the intubated, most seriously ill patients always had a migrant background,' he said. 'We agreed among ourselves that we should describe these people as 'patients with communications barriers'. We don't seem to be getting through to them.'

Wieler, the RKI chief, called for authorities to engage with imams to get through to Muslim communities, calling the issue a 'taboo' and a 'real problem'. 'There are parallel societies in our country. You can only put that right with proper outreach work in the mosques, but we're not getting through. And that sucks,' he said.

Wieler said the proportion of Muslims in intensive care wards was 'clearly above 50 per cent', even though they make up only around 4.8 per cent of the population.

Asked by Bild about the conference call, Wieler did not deny what was said but described it as a 'private, informal exchange' rather than conclusive findings.

Voshaar said that everyone he had spoken to about his findings, including health minister Spahn, had reacted with a sense of 'oh God'.

But Merkel is not thought to have discussed the issue in her regular meetings with state premiers.

Experts on the conference call are said to have raised fears that the German government was avoiding confronting the issue for fear of triggering a racism debate.

Migrants and integration are a sensitive political issue in Germany, which unilaterally took in more than a million refugees from war-torn Syria in 2015. That spurred the growth of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which surged into parliament in 2017 and severely weakened Merkel's authority.

One politician in Merkel's party acknowledged that there might be 'language barriers' but said the dangers should be clear by now regardless of background.

Minority groups have been hardest-hit in many countries, including in the UK where studies have shown a higher mortality rate among black and Asian people.

But Germany's RKI has published no official figures on infection or death rates among different ethnic groups.

The new revelations are the latest blow to Merkel's government which is already facing criticism over the slow vaccine roll-out and long-running lockdown.

Meanwhile, Merkel wants to start easing virus curbs from next week with surveys suggesting Germans are losing patience with the lockdown. 'We're coming out of a long lockdown and must now proceed step by step,' Merkel said in a video call with MPs from her conservative bloc.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9320323/Coronavirus-Germany-90-severely-ill-patients-migrant-background.html

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Could a vaccine against South African 'super-Covid' prevent ALL forms?

Scientists have found a potential silver lining to the worrisome South African coronavirus variant: antibodies developed to it may protect against other variants.

Lab tests by Africa Health Research Institute scientists suggests that antibodies triggered by exposure to the country's dominant coronavirus variant can prevent infection by other variants, the scientists said on Wednesday.

The opposite is true of people infected with other variants. The immunity someone gains from prior infection with earlier forms of the virus or even the UK's B117 variant is less protective against South Africa's B1351 variant.

And the discovery that antibodies to B1351 may offer broader immunity suggests that making vaccines that trigger these immune cells could mean a vaccine for that variant may protect against all of the currently circulating forms.

Better yet: Moderna announced Wednesday that it has shipped enough supplies to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for trials of its booster shot designed specifically to combat B1351 to begin.

If infection rates can be kept low enough to close the window of opportunity for new variants to arise, Moderna's booster vaccine and others designed to block B1351 could have a good shot at ending the pandemic.

The clinical trial has not yet begun, but will include both participants who got two doses of Moderna's original vaccine in the earlier trial and participants who have never had the vaccine or COVID-19.

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said Wednesday that it could have booster doses ready later this year. 'We look forward to beginning the clinical study of our variant booster and are grateful for the NIH’s continued collaboration to combat this pandemic,' Bancel said in a statement.

'As we seek to defeat COVID-19, we must be vigilant and proactive as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerge. Leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are moving quickly to test updates to the vaccines that address emerging variants of the virus in the clinic.

'Moderna is committed to making as many updates to our vaccine as necessary until the pandemic is under control. We hope to demonstrate that booster doses, if necessary, can be done at lower dose levels, which will allow us to provide many more doses to the global community in late 2021 and 2022 if necessary.'

Although the UK's B117 variant is certainly spreading more quickly than other variants, the SOuth African form has much more concerning mutations.

In addition to be an estimated 50 percent more infectious, changes in its spike protein - the portion of the virus that allows it to infect human cells - make the variant less 'visible' to antibodies developed based on other forms.

The variant doesn't totally nullify the effects of current vaccines - which were designed based on the genetic makeup of earlier circulating forms of the virus - but they do weaken it.

Potency was reduced by about five-fold in the lab for Moderna's original shot, and by about two fold for Pfizer's vaccines.

Johnson & Johnson's one-shot reduced infection risks by 64 percent in South Africa, where the variant is dominant, compared to 72 percent in the US, where there are only 65 confirmed cases, according to the CDC.

But all three companies are now working on booster shots, with Moderna's leading the pack as it takes a step closer to clinical trials.

The findings in the South African laboratory studies offer hope that COVID-19 vaccines based on the 501Y.V2 variant first identified late last year could protect against multiple variants circulating in different parts of the world.

The more contagious variant drove a second wave of infections in South Africa that peaked in January and is believed to have spread to many other countries in Africa and other continents.

'We used plasma...from people that were infected in this latest wave with the 501Y.V2' - another alphanumeric name for the variant that emerged in South Africa - 'and we used it against the first-wave virus...what we found is that it could neutralize, OK not as well as it could neutralize itself but it's not bad at all,' Alex Sigal from the Africa Health Research Institute told a news conference.

Sigal said vaccines designed with the 501Y.V2 variant in mind 'might be cross-protective to other variants...this gives you some idea how this problem of variants can be solved.'

Penny Moore, a professor at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, said the antibody response from the 501Y.V2 variant was only reduced threefold against the first-wave virus, whereas the response from the first-wave virus was reduced nine-fold against 501Y.V2.

'It's not that the antibodies that are triggered by 501Y.V2 are somehow magical, there is a drop-off, ... but unlike the antibodies triggered by the original variant they seem to somehow have a little bit more breadth,' she told the same briefing.

Salim Abdool Karim, a top government adviser on COVID-19, noted that major vaccine manufacturers including Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson were already making vaccines based on the 501Y.V2 variant.

Moderna had already adapted its shot and was putting it into human studies, he added.

He predicted that by the end of 2021 most vaccine manufacturers would have adapted their shots, 'not because they are specifically worrying about the virus coming from South Africa... but because key mutations in the 501Y.V2 are actually also present in many other variants.'

Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said the research was encouraging and that genomics surveillance had helped the government respond to the pandemic.

South Africa has recorded by far the most COVID-19 infections and deaths on the African continent, at 1.5 million cases and over 50,000 fatalities to date.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9321281/South-African-scientists-antibodies-variant-offer-cross-protection.html

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The real president who is running things instead of Biden!

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a reasonable deduction

When you really think about it, would you let a seventy-eight-year-old man run the country? Nah, they couldn’t be that stupid.
Or…could they? Anyway, what seems to be happening now is that Joe Biden is being sent out to make the speeches and do the smiling and the waving. Just because someone has the title doesn’t mean they are the one in charge. Anyone that has ever seen an officer in the military get chewed out privately by an upper enlisted person knows that’s the case

The fact of the matter is, they are going to try and insulate Joe Biden as much as humanly possible.

Former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice has been tapped to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council in the Biden administration, but former acting DNI Ric Grenell believes she could be in control of a lot more.

“I think you need to watch Susan Rice very closely,” he said on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “She will be the shadow president.”

Susan Rice, known for launching regime change war in Libya, trying and failing to launch regime change war in Syria, and blaming Benghazi on a YouTube video has returned to the White House briefing room— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 26, 2021

Grenell called Biden’s pick “interesting” considering Rice has no experience in domestic policy but nonetheless will be “incredibly influential” under the new administration.

Having served in the Obama administration as a national security adviser, Rice already understands the “entire apparatus,” Grenell said.

“I think the reality is, she’s going to be running foreign policy, domestic policy,” he said. “She’s probably extremely happy that Kamala Harris is going to be preoccupied with the Senate… and won’t have a lot of time to get into policy issues.”

Wow, Biden Policy Advisor Susan Rice, who never fully answered why she was unmasking Americans and evaded the truth in multiple interviews about Benghazi is now going to discuss a top priority for Biden Admin, Racial equity (equality)— Sara A. Carter (@SaraCarterDC) January 26, 2021

Grenell theorized that the Democrats elected Biden because he could be swayed.

“We saw him raise his hand during the Democratic primary for some really radical ideas,” he said. “The progressives have clearly taken over him… And Susan Rice being right there at the White House to be the shadow president is probably exactly where she wants to be.”

http://2020conservative.com/revealed-the-real-president-who-is-running-things-instead-of-biden-2/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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French doctors slam 'AstraZeneca bashing' as France enacts U-turn on jabs for over-65s

French doctors have blamed deep domestic scepticism of AstraZeneca on the “bad press” it has received, including criticism from Emmanuel Macron that it was “quasi-ineffective” for the elderly.

The indirect criticism of the French president, who was forced to say he would take the jab if necessary last week, came as Gallic health regulators said they would make the jab available for the over 65s.

Mr Macron fanned Gallic scepticism over the jab developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University in January hours before it received a green light from the European Medecines Agency by saying: “Everything points to thinking it is quasi-ineffective on people older than 65, some say those 60 years or older."

Since then, French reports of flu-like side-effects among dozens of health workers further tainted its image.

That contributed to a dearth of demand in France, where only 24 per cent of AstraZeneca stocks have been used, according to the health ministry.

That is well below a target set at 80-85 per cent and compares with 82 per cent for vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech and 37 per cent for those made by Moderna.

"It is true that we are facing issues with AstraZeneca vaccines," said a health ministry official.

The scepticism prompted Jacques Battistoni, head of the MG France doctors' union to denounce the widespread "AstraZeneca bashing" that was causing many vials to go unused.

France’s vaccination coordinator, Alain Fischer, has also complained that the "bad press" surrounding the shot was "deeply unfair".

All vaccines combined, France has only injected three million people with a first dose and 1.6 million a second to date. The UK has given at least one dose to more than 21 million people. However, France has administered two injections to roughly twice as many citizens - preferring initially to target only the over 75s and health workers.

However, after talking down the AstraZeneca jab, the country has now abruptly changed its tune, with Mr Macron urging people to take it.

"If this is the vaccine I'm offered, obviously I would take it," he said after a European Council meeting on Friday.

On Monday, French health minister Olivier Veron said that the vaccine would now be made available to those between 65-75 with serious health risks.

The French U-turn came after the release of a recent study published in Scotland that showed the AstraZeneca shot lowered the chance of being hospitalised for four to six weeks by 94 per cent after one shot and was effective in older people.

The World Heath Organisation has also recommended the jab for over-65s.

In light of this, the French health minister said: “The higher health council now considers as of today that all three vaccines that we have in France have a remarkable efficacy to protect people against the risk of severe forms of Covid-19."

“As a result, I can announce that from now on people aged 50 and above who have conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure or a history of cancer can be vaccinated with AstraZeneca, including those aged 65 to 74.”

The previous advice had been for the UK-Swedish company’s vaccine to be given only to people aged 50 to 64 with comorbidities and to healthcare workers. Those over 75 will continue to receive the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, he added.

It remains unclear whether France will also eat humble pie over previous criticism of the UK's decision to space out jabs.

Last month, France's Europe minister Clément Beaune slammed the practice, saying: "I don't think our public would accept that we take all those risks against the advice of our scientists."

However, the country's top health body now says there is sufficient evidence to space out AstraZeneca jabs by up to 12 weeks. The health ministry has not said whether it would heed the advice.

The French government has come under fierce criticism in recent weeks for a sluggish and inefficient vaccination rollout. Authorities are also battling the highest vaccine scepticism in the Western world. Around half of health workers in French care homes do not want to get a jab.

There are fears the country, which has a blanket 6pm to 6am curfew, may have to impose lockdowns in at least 20 departments in the coming days due to rising infection rates. Authorities are “seriously considering” weekend lockdowns in the Paris region.

On Monday, the daily death toll was 379 and 3,544 Covid patient were in intensive care with 25,430 people hospitalised. The incidence rate in the Paris area is now 322 per 100,000.

Schools remain open and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo on Tuesday suggested that classes should take place outside in city squares and parks where possible - an idea the education ministry and unions said could be possible.

Mr Macron on Monday told the French to “hold tight for another four to six weeks”. On Tuesday, government spokesman Gabriel Attal insisted there was “light at the end of the tunnel with vaccination”, adding that this would be accelerated as pharmacies were to authorised to give people jabs.

The French change of tune on AstraZeneca came as Belgium's health council advised authorities to lift a ban on the vaccine for the over 55s on Tuesday. Belgium had previously ruled out authorising the jab for the over 55s, blaming a lack of clinical data.

In Canada, the vaccine was authorised for people who are 18 and older by drug regulator on Friday but the regulator noted that available clinical trial data was too limited to reliably estimate how well the vaccine worked in people 65 and older.

But it also said "emerging real world evidence" in places that had already started using the vaccine suggested a potential benefit and no safety concerns.

Germany is under pressure to change its vaccination strategy after the country's top vaccine regulator acknowledged that advice against giving the AstraZeneca jab to over 65s had been flawed.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/02/france-approves-astrazeneca-vaccine-over-65s-despite-president

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Democrats Manufacture Racism

If you wanted to tear apart a country, really have the people hate each other, the playbook Democrats are following would be the way to do it. Take something irrelevant, but over which people can do nothing, and build it up into everything. Convince people others are out to get them, thereby absolving them of any responsibility for problems in their life, and they will eventually give up. Convince others they are perpetrators of something horrible, which only works with those out of real problems, and you have the makings of Nazi-esque powers of manipulation. This is what Democrats are doing with race, and it can no longer simply be laughed off. It must be actively confronted and exposed.

The tip of the spear in this mental race-war movement on the left are Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, with their personal Mein Kampfs, “How to Be an Anti-Racist” and “White Fragility.” The basic premise of each book is white people are racists and everyone else is a victim. The only way for a white person to not be a racist is to self-flagellate on the altar of progressive politics while cutting a big check to whichever of these grievance grifters happens to be collecting a big payday from the nearest school that day.

It’s a hell of a racket. Who knew there were literally millions to be made in telling rich white liberals their skin is the root of all problems in the world? I wish I had thought of it. If I had known wealthy suburbanites led lives so devoid of meaning that they’d turned to mental masochism, I would’ve happily told them how awful they are and for half the price. They disgust me, but it never occurred to me to rip them off.

Now an entire industry of phony race-grievance exists, and it’s motivating damn near everything the Democratic Party does.

We now have the Cartoon Network running public service announcements telling children to “see color” when it comes to people. In a little less than 60 years we’ve gone from Martin Luther King changing the world with the words, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” to a cartoon character telling kids, “My experience with anti-black racism is really specific. Other people of color experience other forms of racism, too. But you won't see any of that if you 'don't see color.’”

You could light the eastern seaboard by plugging MLK’s grave into the power grid, he’s turning over in it so fast.

Professional grievance has power over stupid people now, and everyone is excited to play.

Someone with the title “principal chief of the Cherokee Nation” asked Jeep to discontinue using the name “Jeep Grand Cherokee” because why not? The Redskins are now “the Washington football team,” and college newspapers happily run opinion pieces on fears of how “Mid-Semester Residential Experience could enforce settler colonialism.”

The last in that list, which comes from American University, laments “The large influx of predominantly affluent white students into D.C.’s ‘chocolate city,’ a term that refers to its large population of Black citizens, could evoke similar effects of settler colonialism and negatively impact the community.” A conservative speaking at an event in the same zip code as AU would cause a student riot and condemnation from the school’s administrators and faculty, but not straight-up racism, like complaining white students who return to campus early are probably going to get black people sick and “are likely not planning to give back to the communities that they reside in and will buy out stock at stores and malls, making the resources in those communities limited.”

Switch the races and it’s something the KKK could’ve written. Given the environment the left has created in this country, the student who wrote it will now be faced with a “Sophie’s choice” between a show on MSNBC and s Cabinet post in the Biden administration.

This racism as anti-racism can only exist as long as people keep funding it. DiAngelo has a new book coming out that promises to keep the gravy train rolling for her and the industry. Called “Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm,” because no one will ever be “woke” enough. The description says “Dismantling white supremacy requires white people to commit to a lifetime of education and accountability.”

Keep sending those checks, left-wing suckers, but leave the rest of us the hell out of it. Stop playing along, and stop being silent. They can’t cancel all of us, but we have to cancel them. Starving the beast is the only way to kill it. Don’t buy their books, don’t watch their networks, don’t patronize their sponsors (both those that advertise on their shows and the companies that cut them checks). It’s gonna suck, but not buying Coca-Cola is a small price to pay for refusing to subsidize a company that tells its employees to “try to be less white.” And don’t be silent, no matter what they scream back at you.

In their pursuit of manufacturing racism out of thin air for control over people, Democrats are exposing themselves as the racists they’ve always been. Let them. Just refuse to participate in it with them. Let them choke on it. They deserve nothing better.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/02/28/democrats-manufacture-racism-n2585452

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IN BRIEF

Federal judge says national ban against COVID-19-related evictions illegal (UPI)

FBI pinpoints a single suspect in the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick (Business Insider)

Federal officials charge more than 300 in Capitol riot (NBC)

Saudi Crown Prince Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, U.S. intelligence report concludes (Forbes)

Nancy Pelosi's domicile to pull a staggering $120 million from police budget to give to black communities (Disrn)

"San Francisco has seen a sharp rise in violent crime over the past year, with homicides alone rising 35%. Homelessness and drug use has also risen to historic levels."

SCOTUS rules Santa Clara County churches may open indoor services (Disrn)

"Anti-ICE" rioters smash windows, force businesses to board up in Portland (Daily Wire)

Campus police release video proving University of Minnesota student lied about being profiled, harassed (Disrn)

Here's a HuffPo article encouraging parents to support "sex-change" surgeries for their children next to another discouraging people from neutering their dog (Not the Bee)

Judge rules Miss United States of America pageant can exclude men (Disrn)

Dezinformatsiya: NBC rushes to explain why crimes against Asians aren't always hate crimes (Hot Air)

White House shifts thinking on Beijing Winter Olympics boycott as pressure mounts over Uyghur genocide (Examiner)

House Republicans push compromise bill aimed at codifying LGBT "rights" and religious protections (Free Beacon)

Personal income (10%) and spending (2.4%) soared in January (CNBC)

Policy: Joe Biden's Syria airstrike hit the wrong target (1945)

Policy: Rare earth elements aren't that rare, but they're vital to national security (Heritage Foundation)

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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