Inflation: Senile Joe Biden’s inflation diagnosis and cure will make the disease worse

Biden wrote at The WSJ that his plan has three parts:

“First, the Federal Reserve has a primary responsibility to control inflation. My predecessor demeaned the Fed, and past presidents have sought to influence its decisions inappropriately during periods of elevated inflation. I won’t do this. I have appointed highly qualified people from both parties to lead that institution. I agree with their assessment that fighting inflation is our top economic challenge right now.”

As with everything else, Joe is a little late to the party here. The Fed, through quantitative easing, has already ramped up the money supply so high that it will be very difficult to rein in inflation. You can’t un-ring a bell and dumping trillions of unsupported cash into the economy will show up. Americans see it whenever they go to the store or to the gas station.

Not “interfering” with the FED’s actions won’t earn Biden a pass here. He’s already done more than enough to set the inflation avalanche in motion. Staying out of the way now won’t alleviate the pain of those in its path. We’d best prepare our shovels to dig out from being buried by the flow.

Joe went on, “Second, we need to take every practical step to make things more affordable for families during this moment of economic uncertainty—and to boost the productive capacity of our economy over time. The price at the pump is elevated in large part because Russian oil, gas and refining capacity are off the market. We can’t let up on our global effort to punish Mr. Putin for what he’s done, and we must mitigate these effects for American consumers. That is why I led the largest release from global oil reserves in history. Congress could help right away by passing clean energy tax credits and investments that I have proposed. A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats...”

Huh? The CEO’s Joe referenced must be Democrats. Since the vast majority of American energy is still realized through burning fossil fuels, how is it possible to reduce bills by cutting supply of what, pardon the expression, drives the economy? Biden must feel boxed in a corner with this green energy nonsense, so politically speaking, he can’t and won’t let it go. But ask your regular consumer whether he or she would be satisfied with tax credits and/or federal subsidies for windmills and solar panels and ethanol instead of just pumping more oil out of the ground, and he'll tell you to go catch a slow boat to China.

Even if Biden were correct, which he’s not, utility bills wouldn’t be reduced now, next year, or anytime soon by mass emphasis on “green energy”. Benefits twenty years down the line won’t “help” consumers pay for stuff in 2022. Here, again, Biden doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.

In his piece, Joe also wrote that Democrats would fix the supply chain, build more housing and lower prescription drug prices by empowering Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. This was standard Democrat-speak for more government price controls and useless interference in the free market. He also shifted responsibility to Congress for inaction on his ideas (which basically singles out Senator Joe Manchin). Do we want Joe Biden’s “help” here? No thanks.

Biden lays out the third part of his plan: “Third, we need to keep reducing the federal deficit, which will help ease price pressures. Last week the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit will fall by $1.7 trillion this year—the largest reduction in history. That will leave the deficit as a share of the economy lower than prepandemic levels and lower than CBO projected for this year before the American Rescue Plan passed. This deficit progress wasn’t preordained. In addition to winding down emergency programs responsibly, about half the reduction is driven by an increase in revenue—as my economic policies powered a rapid recovery.”

Not so astonishingly, Biden claims credit for “reducing the deficit” from the previous years, which not-so-loosely translated means, the government is spending slightly less than it was during the wanton appropriations binge during the COVID pandemic. While it may be true that the feds aren’t engaging in the splurging orgy that they were two years ago -- and last year, thanks to the $1.9 trillion, party-line vote “relief” bill -- the budget is still not even close to balancing.

Predictably, one of the many things Biden neglected to mention is the effect that paying higher interest rates to finance the enormous national debt will have on the annual budget. Every percentage point higher in interest adds up quickly when you’re servicing $30+ trillion that you’ve borrowed from the FED, China, taxpayers, whomever. How much will it cost in interest to finance what was borrowed a decade ago?

Not to mention, what about the revenues lost from the senseless reductions in energy production? Democrats never credit the significant tax collections that are generated from oil, gas and coal development. While it may not be possible to drill our way out of government deficits, every bit counts. God gifted the United States with the capability to not only achieve energy independence, but also to export the fuels to a thirsty global market.

As I’ve argued many times, boosting energy prices makes everything more expensive. Farmers don’t have electric tractors and combines and there aren’t “green energy” semi-trucks to transport the harvest, either.

Further, we have not yet begun to see the full effects of the inflation to come. Reports are emerging that food prices will increase dramatically when farmers harvest their crops and send them to market. In other words, the more they’re paying for fertilizer now to grow the same amount of grain or feed their livestock as the year before, the more they’ll ask for when they bring the crops for sale.

And what about all the personal credit card debt Americans are accumulating in trying to deal with the skyrocketing prices? Interest rate hikes will be found here, too, which will compound the already serious problem.

It’s clear by his repeated excuses and denials of culpability that Joe Biden neither understands what’s causing inflation nor how to deal with it. Government “help” has already done enough damage and every extra tidbit of tinkering with the free market will exacerbate the problem. Democrats brought the political anger upon themselves by elevating a senile dunce to the presidency.

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/the-right-resistance-senile-joe-biden-s-inflation-diagnosis-and-cure-will-make-the-disease-worse

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Hispanic breakthrough?

In another sign the November midterm elections will see widespread losses for Democrats, another poll finds Hispanic voters are more likely than white voters to disapprove of Joe Biden’s job performance and prefer Republicans control Congress.

The poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University and released May 18, found only 35 percent of all registered voters approved of Biden’s job performance, with 57 percent disapproving. Additionally, 47 percent of registered voters preferred Republicans win control of the U.S. House, with 43 percent preferring Democrats. (These numbers have actually declined even further, but we’ll stick with this particular poll for now.)

But what is surprising to many is Hispanics, generally considered a reliable Democrat voting bloc, are now more likely than white voters to disapprove of Biden and prefer Republicans.

When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling his job as president?,” only 32 percent of white registered voters expressed approval. Among Hispanics it was even lower, at only 26 percent approval.

The trend continued in party approval. When asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job?” Hispanics were more likely than whites to express approval, 33 percent to 28 percent.

Only 24 percent of Hispanics approve(d) of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job,” compared to 27 percent of whites.

While support for Republicans isn’t optimal, the rock-bottom approval of Biden and Democrats appears to be fueling strong Hispanic support for GOP candidates.

When asked “If the election were today, would you want to see the Republican Party or the Democratic Party win control of the United States House of Representatives?,” 48 percent of Hispanic registered voters backed Republicans and 34 percent backed Democrats.

All About the Money

I have a feeling that Hispanics, like all other subsets of our population, are starting to look at the bottom dollar. And at this point, there isn’t one. Families are going under with mounting fuel costs, skyrocketing grocery bills, and no relief in site. Even the little bitty babies are suffering from a formula shortage that Biden refuses to address properly. But he doesn’t mind giving Ukraine $40 Billion. How many Hispanic families could that money help?

Clearly, inflation is rampant. The consumer price index jumped another 8.3% in April alone. This trend isn’t slowing down. Not only is Bidenflation a problem, but we’re headed into stagflation– a stagnant economy mixed with inflation that is so bad, the 1970s are back for an encore performance.

That’s not the worst of our problems. Biden is the worst of our problems. Whether we’re talking foreign relations, military leadership, inflation, supply chain, trade, lingering effects of the scamdemic, the issue is really not what matters. What truly matters is what approach our leaders are taking to solve these crises. And that’s where we see what a demented clown is sitting in the White House.

https://theblacksphere.net/2022/06/hispanics-are-abandoning-democrats-droves/

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One Picture Of Trump’s Home Has Just Burst The Liberal Bubble!

The left loves to tout that President Trump and his supporters are white supremacists who hate women and want to steal your candy, but as we know that is hardly the truth. Trump is the one leader that we have had in a very long time that actually promotes unity to the American people, and wants to make American great for all that live in our nation.

However, that just doesn’t fly with liberals whose only desire is to destroy our country from the inside with division and hatred.

Now, to fly in the face of that ridiculous rhetoric from the left, a new picture is floating around Twitter that literally smacks these hateful leftists and their lies.

Caleb Hull posted a picture on the HUGE social media site showing Trump’s employees laughing, smiling, and trying to get a picture with him. Take a few seconds to focus on a different person each time you look at the picture. As Hull says, there is a LOT going on!

Did you notice what I noticed?

Yeah, there all sorts of diversity happening in that picture and they seem, do I dare say…happy?

There were lot of positive tweets about the picture but all have been deleted by Twitter

https://dailyallegiant.com/one-picture-of-trumps-home-has-just-burst-the-liberal-bubble-2/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The end of energy free trade

Russia’s attack on Ukraine is redrawing the world’s energy map, ushering in a new era in which the flow of fossil fuels is influenced by geopolitical rivalries as much as supply and demand.

Over the past half-century, oil and natural gas have moved with relative freedom to the markets where they commanded the highest prices around the world. That ended abruptly when Russian tanks rumbled across the Ukraine border on February 24, triggering a barrage of trade sanctions by the US and Europe targeting Russia that have plunged global commerce into disarray.

During the past week, the European Union agreed to its toughest sanctions yet on Russia, banning imports of its oil and blocking insurers from covering its cargoes of crude.

Whatever new order emerges won’t be fully clear for years to come. But traders, diplomats and other experts in energy geopolitics generally agree that it will be more Balkanized, and less free-flowing, than what the world has seen since the end of the Cold War.

Three likely axes of energy influence are emerging: the US and other Western nations, which have used their massive economic and purchasing power as a political weapon; China and large emerging nations such as India, Turkey and Vietnam, which have rebuffed Western pressure and continued doing business with Russia; and Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern oil-producing nations, which have sought to maintain neutrality, and may stand to gain market share in the years to come.

“We are in a real hinge of history,” said Chas Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Freeman, who is now a senior fellow at Brown University, said Europe can never again trust Russia to be its primary energy provider, and that even if sanctions are lifted, countries are proposing costly new infrastructure and endorsing long-term alternative supply contracts that will lock in the new energy map.

The new order promises to make the energy trade less efficient and more expensive, potentially putting commodities at the centre of the next global economic crisis, said Zoltan Pozsar, a former official at the Treasury Department who now heads short-term interest-rate strategy at Credit Suisse Group AG.

A German embargo of Russian crude would likely mean that instead of Russian oil reaching Hamburg in a week or two, it would take several months to travel to China, he noted. Conversely for Middle Eastern oil, the embargo would trigger a longer voyage to Europe for crude that would have ordinarily gone to Asia. Such inefficiencies will drive up the costs of shipping, insurance, and financing that underpin the energy trade, he said.

Many predict Russia’s energy industry, the backbone of its economy, will contract because the loss of its largest market cannot be completely replaced. Western financial and technological sanctions will undermine Russia’s ability to maintain current revenues and production levels, these people say.

“Russia’s days as an energy superpower are over,” said Daniel Yergin, the vice-chairman of S&P Global and a noted oil-industry historian.

But the new map isn’t without risks to American power and the country’s standing as the guarantor of global trade. Since the end of World War II, the US dollar has been the default currency for oil transactions, which has helped maintain its centrality to the global economy.

Leveraging the might of the US financial system to muster sanctions against Russia has called into question its reliability as a place to store wealth, Mr Freeman said.

Now Saudi Arabia, India and other developing countries are exploring conducting energy transactions in non-US dollar currencies. Russia has similarly begun seeking recompense in rubles for its fossil fuels.

“We may have had good reasons, but the US has politicised the trade of energy,” Mr Freeman said.

Geopolitics and energy have always been linked, and US. sanctions against Iran and Venezuela have disrupted global oil flows in recent years. But since the end of the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s, the relatively free trade of commodities, backed by US. military and financial might, has been a hallmark of the international system.

That is now changing. During a speech in April, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that in the wake of Russia’s invasion, it was time to redesign Bretton Woods, the system of trade rules adopted in 1944 that prioritised economic efficiency and international cooperation. Ms Yellen advocated for “friend-shoring” supply chains of critical raw materials by deepening trade ties with “a group of countries that have strong adherence to a set of norms and values.” Trade flows are already being redirected as Western energy companies pull out of Russia and shippers, lenders and insurers refuse to touch Russian exports.

The EU, in beginning to implement its embargo on Russian oil exports today, joins Australia, the US, UK and Canada. Following concerns Hungary raised about the economic impact, the embargo will exempt oil delivered from Russia via pipelines. Still, by the end of the year, the embargo would cover 90 per cent of previous Russian oil imports, EU officials said.

Russian oil exports to the EU, the U.S., the UK, Japan and South Korea have already fallen by 563,000 barrels per day, or 32 per cent from February to April. A full EU ban would mean some 2.8 million barrels per day of crude and 1.1 million barrels per day of products that normally flow into Europe will have to find a new market, according to investment bank Piper Sandler.

European leaders will find it more difficult to wean themselves off Russian natural gas, which typically accounts for more than 30% of the EU’s supply and mostly comes via pipeline. JPMorgan Chase estimates that by the end of the year Europe will still receive between 81 per cent and 94 per cent of the amount of Russian gas it took in 2021. The EU has said it would stop using Russian oil and gas by 2027, but ending its reliance on Russian energy could come at a heavy cost.

Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s coordinator for energy security, has worked with foreign officials and energy executives to bolster alternative supplies of oil and gas to Europe to blunt the pain.

But Europe and the US are operating under an additional constraint: Mr. Hochstein said the US won’t provide incentives for long-term fossil-fuel investments that run counter to its plan to encourage a transition to greener energy sources.

“We’re trying to help Europe, stabilise the market and protect U.S. consumers while making Putin pay the price and do that without cheating our overall goal of reduced fossil-fuel usage,” Mr Hochstein said.

EU leaders have said they would now accelerate ambitious plans to build out renewable energy projects as a result of the war, but concede Europe will need more fossil fuels in the interim.

Increased demand coupled with Western energy sanctions against Russia that will cut its output may lead to physical shortages of global oil, according to Joseph McMonigle, secretary-general of the Saudi Arabia-based International Energy Forum.

“If Russia is removed from the export market, there will be a global recession that kills demand,” Mr McMonigle said.

Saudi comeback Middle Eastern producers look poised to be winners in the emerging energy map. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states had been under pressure to diversify away from fossil fuels in recent years due to growing global concerns about climate change. But President Joe Biden called on the kingdom to drill more in the lead up to war, a stark turnaround from his presidential campaign, when he called the nation a pariah.

Retired Admiral Dennis Blair, who served as then president Barack Obama’s first director of National Intelligence, said despite efforts to pivot US foreign policy away from the region, the importance of the Middle East to US interests has been elevated again by the war.

“We need to have a very eyes-open, transactional relationship with Saudi, where we do have to go back to being their ultimate provider of defence until we can electrify our transportation and transition to more diverse energy sources,” Mr Blair said.

State-owned energy giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co, known as Saudi Aramco, which recently overtook Apple Inc. as the world’s most valuable company, is already receiving more requests for its crude from buyers in Europe. More broadly, Saudi officials say the war has shown that aggressive targets to reduce carbon emissions by rapidly cutting fossil fuel usage were unrealistic.

“The kingdom finds it laughable that last year, several countries, including the United States, have been pressuring them to stick to [plans to zero out carbon emissions by 2050] but now are asking them for more oil,” said a Saudi official.

After rejecting U.S. requests for more production for months, OPEC and its allies agreed Thursday to a bigger-than-expected output increase, allowing Saudi Arabia to potentially pump more crude and paving the way for a potential oil-for-security deal with the US and a visit from President Biden later this month.

“The Russian invasion has taught the world one thing loud and clear: We need more Saudi oil,” another Saudi official said.

Challenge for Russia Russia’s new imperative is deepening ties with Asia, and especially China, to offset the looming loss of its European market.

Such a pivot is particularly necessary for Russia’s natural-gas exports, which are less fungible than its oil, and will require a massive infrastructure build-out to find a new home. Russia previously exported as much as 200 billion cubic metres of gas a year to Europe, by far its biggest market. It sold about 33 bcm to Asia last year.

Russia has a handful of proposed pipelines and liquefied natural gas projects, which convert the gas to a liquid enabling seaborne trade, that would boost its ability to send gas to Asia, but many of the projects are technically challenging and expensive, and Western sanctions will hamper their progress, say analysts.

The most important planned project is a roughly 1600-mile (2570km) pipeline connecting Russia’s Yamal peninsula to China, called Power of Siberia 2. The first Power of Siberia project cost more than $US50 billion ($69bn) and took more than five years to build. It will send nearly 40 bcm to China at full capacity and the second could send as much as 50 bcm of gas to China.

When the two countries agreed to terms on the first pipeline in 2014, China extracted relatively cheap gas prices. “Our Chinese friends drive a hard bargain as negotiators,” Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked at the time.

China holds even more negotiating power this go-round, due to Russia’s desperation to offset European lost revenues, said Ed Chow, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Russia could, at most, sell as much as 120 bcm of gas to Asia by 2030, and at a lower price than it fetches in Europe, according to CSIS.

“Everyone will try to take advantage of the fact that Russia needs them more now,” Mr. Chow said.

Russian diplomats are rushing to counter U.S. efforts to deter Russian energy from finding a new home. Russian oil cargoes bound for India, Turkey, China and other “friendly” countries increased by more than 1.2 million barrels per day from February to April, a 146 per cent increase, according to JPMorgan Chase.

Russian state-run natural gas giant Gazprom redirected several LNG tankers from Japan to China and India, an official said in an interview, a pre-emptive move in case Tokyo joins the Western embargo.

But Asian buyers are unlikely to fully supplant Europe as a market for Russian oil and gas over the long term, say analysts and traders. Though India has rebuffed calls to embargo Russian oil, it is buying Russian barrels at a steep discount in the same way China has sought natural-gas discounts.

Losing its nearest and largest market will cost Russia billions of dollars in energy revenues every year. Coupled with biting technological sanctions, this will seriously degrade the country’s ability to sustain its current oil-and-gas production levels. The IEA estimates the amount of Russian production offline could triple to 3 million barrels per day by the end of 2022 amid the EU oil sanctions, suggesting a nearly 27 per cent decrease in pre-war production levels.

Some Russian energy officials privately concede Russia will be unable to dodge prolonged Western energy sanctions.

“Russia was shocked at how united the West was on sanctions,” the Gazprom official said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/the-end-of-energy-free-trade/news-story/4c1dca56a888fac10f6811134368b46d

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New York Times Backtracks on COVID-19 Lockdown Harm

The New York Times (NYT), one of the leading media outlets to publish favorable articles on lockdowns and other extreme measures to battle the COVID-19 virus, has done an about-face on its position, at least on how such policies have impacted children and the lockdown harm they have caused.

On May 5, 2022, the media outlet ran an article titled, ‘Not Good for Learning,’ which details evidence that school shutdowns cost students dearly in terms of math and reading scores based on standardized Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) test results.

“Remote learning was a failure,” wrote the writer, David Leonhardt.

The impetus for the change on lockdown harm appears to come from a new study from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. The study, titled “Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” reviewed MAP test data for 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states, plus D.C.

The study revealed that, on average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window. However, students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse, losing an average of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

The article also referenced an October 2020 article by Emily Oster in The Atlantic titled, “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,” which detailed data she had collected from 47 states that indicated an average student infection rate of a scant 0.13 percent. Even higher-risk staff were infected at a rate of only 0.24 percent.

Low-Risk Group

A few months into the pandemic, there was a growing body of evidence that school-aged children were among the lowest risk groups for serious infection or transmission of the SARS-CoV2 virus.

“The experience of Sweden shows that the school shutdowns were never justified,” said Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder, and president of the Brownstone Institute. “Even based on demographic data from January 2020, we knew this already. The elites sacrificed a whole generation of school kids, and the public is demanding answers now. Rightly so.”

Other MSM publications also have been slow to admit that early fearmongering and the resultant shutdowns are increasingly being demonstrated to have been pointless. Few have linked draconian policies to the devastating consequences being seen today such as supply chain shortages, empty retail and grocery shelves, soaring energy costs, and inflation, following the trillions of dollars that were pumped into the U.S. economy in the name of COVID-19 emergency relief.

Media narratives on lockdown harm began to soften in 2022 when poll after poll demonstrated the weariness of the public from the restrictions and a mid-term election looming in November. A key study gave media outlets little room for defending masks and lockdowns.

A meta-data analysis conducted by three respected economists from Johns Hopkins University, Lund University in Sweden, and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies and published in January 2022, found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020, including shelter in place orders, masks mandates, and social distancing, only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2 percent.

Still, Newsweek published a February 7, 2022 hit piece on the study titled, “Did a Johns Hopkins Study ‘Prove’ Lockdowns Don’t Work? What We Know So Far.” The article criticized the study for not being peer-reviewed and that alleged “right-leaning outlets,” including The National Post, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal had reported on the study.
The article failed to mention that peer reviews are not always the gold standard. In 2020, the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine retracted peer-reviewed studies discrediting off-label drugs to treat and prevent COVID-19.

The Newsweek article concluded not with a factual rebuttal of the study, but rather with a dogmatic claim, not by a medical scientist or epidemiologist, but by an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, named Seth Flaxman.

“Smoking causes cancer, the Earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission,” Flaxman said. “None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.”

Can’t Deny Growing Evidence

Tucker says it is impossible for mainstream media outlets to ignore the growing evidence that the lockdowns were a costly mistake.

“Not even the New York Times can deny the crisis caused by the shutdowns, which affects the whole of society, especially the catastrophic educational losses,” said Tucker. “What’s outrageous is the lack of responsibility here. The NYT essentially began this era with its promotion of COVID lockdowns. The losses are incalculable. We need honesty not only about the effects but also about the cause. Their own venue was a major player.”

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2022/06/lockdown-harm/

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During the Omicron Wave, Death Rates Soared for Older People

Despite strong levels of vaccination among older people, Covid killed them at vastly higher rates during this winter’s Omicron wave than it did last year, preying on long delays since their last shots and the variant’s ability to skirt immune defenses.

This winter’s wave of deaths in older people belied the Omicron variant’s relative mildness. Almost as many Americans 65 and older died in four months of the Omicron surge as did in six months of the Delta wave, even though the Delta variant, for any one person, tended to cause more severe illness.

While overall per capita Covid death rates have fallen, older people still account for an overwhelming share of them.

“This is not simply a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor in global health at Boston University who studies age patterns of Covid deaths. “There’s still exceptionally high risk among older adults, even those with primary vaccine series.”

The Omicron Wave Was Deadlier Than Delta for Older People in the U.S.

That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.

In much of the country, though, the booster campaign remains listless and disorganized, older people and their doctors said. Patients, many of whom struggle to drive or get online, have to maneuver through an often labyrinthine health care system to receive potentially lifesaving antivirals.

Nationwide Covid deaths in recent weeks have been near the lowest levels of the pandemic, below an average of 400 a day. But the mortality gap between older and younger people has grown: Middle-aged Americans, who suffered a large share of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are now benefiting from new stores of immune protection in the population as Covid deaths once again cluster around older people.

And the new wave of Omicron subvariants may create additional threats: While hospitalizations in younger age groups have remained relatively low, admission rates among people 70 and older in the Northeast have climbed to one-third of the winter Omicron wave’s towering peak.

“I think we are going to see the death rates rising,” said Dr. Sharon Inouye, a geriatrician and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It is going to become more and more risky for older adults as their immunity wanes.”

Deaths have fallen from the heights of the winter wave in part because of growing levels of immunity from past infections, experts said. For older people, there is also a grimmer reason: So many of the most fragile Americans were killed by Covid over the winter that the virus now has fewer targets in that age group.

But scientists warned that many older Americans remained susceptible. To protect them, geriatricians called on nursing homes to organize in-home vaccinations or mandate additional shots.

In the longer term, scientists said that policymakers needed to address the economic and medical ills that have affected especially nonwhite older Americans, lest Covid continue cutting so many of their lives short.

“I don’t think we should treat the premature death of older adults as a means of ending the pandemic,” Dr. Stokes said. “There are still plenty of susceptible older adults — living with comorbid conditions or living in multigenerational households — who are highly vulnerable.”

The pattern of Covid deaths this year has recreated the dynamics from 2020 — before vaccines were introduced, when the virus killed older Americans at markedly higher rates. Early in the pandemic, mortality rates steadily climbed with each extra year of age, Dr. Stokes and his collaborators found in a recent study.

That changed last summer and fall, during the Delta surge. Older people were getting vaccinated more quickly than other groups: By November, the vaccination rate in Americans 65 and older was roughly 20 percentage points higher than that of those in their 40s. And critically, those older Americans had received vaccines relatively recently, leaving them with strong levels of residual protection.

As a result, older people suffered from Covid at lower rates than they had been before vaccines became available. Among people 85 and older, the death rate last fall was roughly 75 percent lower than it had been in the winter of 2020, Dr. Stokes’s recent study found.

At the same time, the virus walloped younger and less vaccinated Americans, many of whom were also returning to in-person work. Death rates for white people in their late 30s more than tripled last fall compared to the previous winter. Death rates for Black people in the same age group more than doubled.

The rebalancing of Covid deaths was so pronounced that, among Americans 80 and older, overall deaths returned to prepandemic levels in 2021, according to a study posted online in February. The opposite was true for middle-aged Americans: Life expectancy in that group, which had already dropped more than it had among the same age range in Europe, fell even further in 2021.

“In 2021, you see the mortality impact of the pandemic shift younger,” said Ridhi Kashyap, a lead author of that study and a demographer at the University of Oxford.

By the time the highly contagious Omicron variant took over, researchers said, more older Americans had gone a long time since their last Covid vaccination, weakening their immune defenses.

As of mid-May, more than one-quarter of Americans 65 and older had not had their most recent vaccine dose within a year. And more than half of people in that age group had not been given a shot in the last six months.

The Omicron variant was better than previous versions of the virus at evading those already weakening immune defenses, reducing the effectiveness of vaccines against infection and more serious illness. That was especially true for older people, whose immune systems respond less aggressively to vaccines in the first place.

For some people, even three vaccine doses appear to become less protective over time against Omicron-related hospital admissions. A study published recently in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine found that trend held for people with weakened immune systems, a category that older Americans were likelier to fall into. Sara Tartof, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, said that roughly 9 percent of people 65 and older in the study were immunocompromised, compared with 2.5 percent of adults under 50.

During the Omicron wave, Covid death rates were once again dramatically higher for older Americans than younger ones, Dr. Stokes said. Older people also made up an overwhelming share of the excess deaths — the difference between the number of people who actually died and the number who would have been expected to die if the pandemic had never happened.

Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, found in a recent study that excess deaths were more heavily concentrated in people 65 and older during the Omicron wave than the Delta surge. Overall, the study found, there were more excess deaths in Massachusetts during the first eight weeks of Omicron than during the 23-week period when Delta dominated.

As older people began dying at higher rates, Covid deaths also came to include higher proportions of vaccinated people. In March, about 40 percent of the people who died from Covid were vaccinated, according to an analysis of figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fewer older Americans have also been infected during the pandemic than younger people, leading to lower levels of natural immunity. As of February, roughly one-third of people 65 and older showed evidence of prior infections, compared with about two-thirds of adults under 50.

A drop-off in Covid precautions this winter, combined with the high transmissibility of Omicron, left older people more exposed, scientists said. It is unclear how their own behavior may have changed. An earlier study, from scientists at Marquette University, suggested that while older people in Wisconsin had once been wearing masks at rates higher than those of younger people, that gap had effectively disappeared by mid-2021.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/health/omicron-deaths-age-65-elderly.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Explaining the Left/Right divide

In 2004 I wrote an article for a sociology journal under the above heading. It looked at the Left/Right divide over the last 1,000 years, with a particularly extensive focus on the Tudor period.

On looking back on the article, I was pleased to find that what it said was still applicable today. A lot has happened since 2004, however, so I have updated the article to include recent examples. You can find it here.

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'Long COVID' Is Not Grounds for More Mandates

Though the CDC claims people who choose not to get the COVID vaccine are more at risk of "long COVID," a new study reveals there is a negligible difference in risk for "long COVID" symptoms between those with and without the vaccine.

"Long COVID" refers to cases of COVID-19 in which affected individuals continue experiencing symptoms for weeks or months after initially contracting the virus. The CDC says, "people who did not get a COVID-19 vaccine may be more at risk for developing post-COVID conditions (or long COVID)."

According to the study from Nature Medicine, vaccines only decrease the risk of long COVID by about 15 percent.

One in five adults experience long COVID symptoms according to the CDC. But Dr. Greg Vanichkachorn, director of the COVID activity rehabilitation program at the Mayo Clinic, said "the majority of folks with long COVID have not had severe infections" (via NBC).

Booster vaccines do very little, if anything, to prevent long COVID according to Vanichkachorn (via NBC):

I do not think boosting will do much to prevent long COVID with the vaccine. We have many patients with breakthrough infections who are as vaccinated as possible. We also have not seen much of a difference between variants with long COVID symptoms.

Many are still encouraging masking to prevent COVID, even though the mandates in the past two years have not prevented transmission of the virus. Dr. Margaret Liu, chair of the board of the International Society for Vaccines, has highlighted such concerns (via Medical News Today):

A big reason that I and other physicians are still being so careful to still mask and to avoid as much as possible situations of exposure is that prevention of any COVID-19 infection is still the best strategy to avoid long-haul COVID.

The CDC has not provided any statistics relating to deaths caused specifically by long COVID and COVID deaths in general are going down. But as Townhall reported, lockdowns saw an increase in drug overdose deaths, domestic violence, and more harmful consequences.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/maddywelsh/2022/06/01/long-covid-is-not-grounds-for-more-mandates-n2608007

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‘Significant’ Cases of Neurological Disorder Associated with the AstraZeneca Vaccine

A UK study by University College London has confirmed “small but significant” cases of the serious Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), a rare neurological disorder associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID-19.

The researchers speculate that “the majority or all” of the 121 UK cases of GBS (pdf) in March to April 2021 were associated with first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine administered in January.

“A similar pattern is not seen with the other vaccines or following a second dose of any vaccine,” said lead author Prof. Michael Lunn on May 30.

The team observed that from January to October 2021, 996 GBS cases were recorded in the national database but with an unusual spike from March to April with about 140 cases per month rather than 100.

To identify whether any or all of these cases were linked to vaccination, the team linked dates of GBS onset to vaccination receipt for every individual and found that 198 GBS cases (20 percent of 966) occurred within six weeks of their first dose of COVID-19 vaccination in England; of these, 176 people had an AstraZeneca vaccination, 21 for Pfizer, and 1 for Moderna.

The researchers found no excess GBS cases associated with mRNA vaccines, but observed 5.8 excess cases of GBS per million doses of vaccine for AstraZeneca, equating to a total excess between January to July 2021 of around 98–140 cases, confirming the association between the vaccine and GBS.

GBS is a rare and serious neurological disorder that occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks its own nerves, typically resulting in numbness, weakness, pain in the limbs, and sometimes even paralysis of breathing.

The disease is commonly associated with Campylobacter infections that prompt the body to attack its own nerves.

However, GBS cases were also observed in the 1976 following administration of the swine flu vaccine as well as modern influenza and yellow fever vaccines, though none of them had rates as high as AstraZeneca.

Whilst the majority of the vaccination-associated GBS patients had recovered from symptoms of weak limbs, weak deep tendon reflexes, and monophasic sleep, one patient in the study had recurring neuropathic symptoms well after the second dose.

The patient initially developed facial paralysis on both sides and a tingling sensation in their limbs after the first dose and improved with treatment. However, two weeks after receiving their second dose, they developed increasing weakness with pain, changes in their nerves, and only partial response to the treatment.

Researchers are currently still speculating the reasons behind rises in GBS cases following the vaccine.

“It may be that a non-specific immune activation in susceptible individuals occurs, but if that were the case similar risks might apply to all vaccine types,” said Lunn.

“It is therefore logical to suggest that the simian adenovirus vector, often used to develop vaccines, including AstraZeneca’s, may account for the increased risk.”

Studies in the United States have also confirmed increased cases of GBS after receiving adenovirus vector COVID-19 vaccines, with significant cases of the disease associated with the vaccine.

According to the CDC, 1 to 2 people out of 100,000 in the United States develops GBS, however, a 2022 U.S. study found the incidence in receivers of J&J’s adenovirus vaccines to be 32.4 per 100,000 people within 3 weeks following the vaccine; well above the background rate.

A spokeswoman for AstraZeneca told The Epoch Times that “vaccination of any kind is a known risk factor for GBS” and “the small number of GBS cases [following the AstraZeneca vaccine] appears similar to increases previously seen in other mass vaccination campaigns.”

She wrote that reports of GBS have been very rare following vaccination and that “current estimates show that globally the vaccine has helped prevent 50 million COVID-19 cases, five million hospitalizations, and to have saved more than one million lives.

“The Emergency Medical Associates and other international bodies including the WHO, have all stated that the benefits of vaccination continue to outweigh any potential risks.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/significant-cases-of-neurological-disorder-associated-with-the-astrazeneca-vaccine_4503326.html

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The Colorado and Ohio Model Programs That Train Teachers to Defeat Active Shooters

For many years there has been debate about allowing teachers to be armed to protect students. This post describes an established training program for teachers who choose to do so in compliance with school rules. The program is FASTER—short for Faculty/Administrator Safety Training & Emergency Response. Introduced in Ohio, FASTER could be adopted by every state and school, at no cost to taxpayers, and at considerable saving of lives.

FASTER was created in Ohio in December 2012, following the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. FASTER Ohio's website, FASTER Saves Lives, is the best resource for information about the program. FASTER Colorado was founded by Laura Carno; it has been adopted as a supported program of the Independence Institute, the Denver think tank where I work. Pilot programs for FASTER have begun in Utah and Arizona.

In the last decade, FASTER has trained thousands of teachers and other school staff in emergency medicine and emergency armed defense.

FASTER training is voluntary. No teacher or staffer should be forced to carry a firearm. For teachers and staff who want training, FASTER offers 26 hours over three days.

Almost all FASTER participants already have been issued a concealed handgun carry permit. The permits authorize concealed carry almost everywhere in one's home state; they also authorize concealed handgun carry in many other states (because of interstate reciprocity, like with drivers' licenses).

FASTER teaches specific skills for school protection. Legally, schools are said to act in loco parentis—in place of parents. Parents defend their children. Therefore, teachers defend their students. That's what FASTER participants think, and FASTER prepares them to do so.

FASTER graduates learn the medical and defensive skills relevant to stopping a school shooter from taking lives. FASTER instructors are law enforcement trainers. They teach FASTER classes two of the skills they teach law enforcement officers: treating gunshot wounds and defeating active shooters.

Part of FASTER training is a very specific subset of emergency medicine: how to keep a gunshot wound victim alive while waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

The other major component of FASTER is close-quarters combat against active shooters. FASTER teaches the same skills and techniques that law enforcement officers are taught.

To graduate from FASTER, one must exceed the marksmanship criteria required in one's state for certified law enforcement officers—such as Colorado's Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST). The three days of FASTER training make graduates well-prepared against school shooters; the classes do not prepare graduates to perform unrelated medical or law enforcement functions, such as dealing with heart attacks or conducting traffic stops.

FASTER charges tuition to cover expenses, but scholarships are available for employees of any school district that cannot afford tuition.

A school shooting you probably haven't heard about, unless you live in Colorado, took place on May 7, 2019, at the STEM High School in Highlands Ranch. When two armed criminals invaded a classroom, student Kendrick Castillo rushed them. His heroism allowed all other students to escape, but Kendrick was fatally shot. Kendrick's parents, John and Maria Castillo, speak to FASTER classes and explain the necessity of armed staff. This May, they held a fundraiser for FASTER Colorado, in honor of Kendrick.

There has never been a problem of any FASTER teacher causing an accidental discharge, or having a gun taken by student. FASTER training rigorously teaches weapons safety and retention.

FASTER Colorado executive director Laura Carno explained FASTER on the Jesse Watters show last week. More information about FASTER is available in Lauro Carno's article for The Hill, and in a New York Daily News article she coauthored with me, Arming teachers can protect kids.

FASTER is not the only good idea about preventing or thwarting school shootings. Implementing FASTER does not prevent consideration of any other school safety idea.

According to a recent poll of likely general election voters by The Trafalgar Group, 57.5% believe that preventing trained teachers from carrying firearms in schools makes schools more dangerous; 30.8% disagreed. Democrats felt the same way as the general public, although by a smaller margin: 48.2% to 41.3%. People aged 18-24 were the most supportive of armed teachers, with 62% for and 21% against.

So far, FASTER has a perfect record of prevention and a zero record of negative side-effects. School officials, politicians, or anti-gun activists who prevent willing, well-trained staff from protecting students are refusing to prioritize student safety

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/01/faster-teaches-teachers-how-to-save-lives/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New Lancet Study Destroys the CDC's Justification for School Mask Mandates

The Lancet, a world-renowned medical journal, is out with a new study debunking a highly-cited CDC study that was used to support mask mandates in schools.

Specifically, the study not only replicates the CDC study, which found a “negative association” between masks and pediatric cases of Covid-19, it also extends the study to include more districts over a longer period of time. In the end, the new study had nearly “six times as much data as the original study.”

“Replicating the CDC study shows similar results; however, incorporating a larger sample and longer period showed no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates,” the study finds.

“These results persisted when using regression methods to control for differences across districts. Interpretation: School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways. We failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval.

Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables. Randomized studies can more reliably inform public health policy.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2022/06/01/lancet-study-on-masking-n2608053

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Following the Chinese Communist example was a mistake -- including the suppression of dissent

SARS-CoV-2 started in Wuhan in late 2019. After several waves swept through the world and left millions of people dead, the world is now entering the endemic phase. The scars that COVID-19 have left behind, however, are very fresh and very deep. Leaders in government, science, and medicine, along with the general public, must work together to heal, and to make sure that these scars do not turn into a cancer that eventually kills humanity.

The Dark Forces

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governs China by controlling every aspect of people’s lives. When SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, the CCP was in a celebratory mood. It planned to showcase its economic achievements and celebrate the Chinese New Year with huge banquets. No virus should have dared to come to spoil the party. Therefore, the CCP silenced those people sounding the alarm.

Then, when they found out that the virus was spreading and killing many, in order to show the world that they were powerful and capable of controlling viral spread, they implemented a draconian lockdown in Wuhan.

The CCP then intentionally allowed the spread of the virus to the rest of the world by continuing international flights out of Wuhan while cancelling domestic flights. In this way, the CCP protected itself while infecting other countries.

As a result, the rest of the world suffered huge losses while China enjoyed zero-COVID for most of 2020 and 2021. The CCP then took every opportunity to “educate” the world that their system is better than the inefficient western democracy and should be implemented across the whole world for the sake of “the shared destiny of humankind”. After all, it was in the CCP’s Constitution (as revised in October 2017) that it is CCP’s duty to advance “the shared destiny of humankind” with the CCP’s superior governing system.

Xi Jinping even suggested honoring the CCP with a gold medal in COVID control at the party celebrating the conclusion of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

Unfortunately, many in the West admired the CCP and followed the CCP’s playbook.

The Lancet, Nature, and many other scientific journals praised the Chinese response. For example, the Lancet published an article on April 18, 2020 claiming, “The quick containment of COVID-19 in China is impressive and sets an encouraging example for other countries.”

Government-imposed lockdowns, vaccine mandates, keeping people in fear, and silencing scientific debate have all garnered approval from the global scientific community.

But for those of us who noticed that the public health information being disseminated often contradicted itself, it seemed that Dark Forces had been in control.

Silence and Censorship Make Bad Science

Some of us have known all along that the public health agenda of advancing pharmaceutical talking points, disseminating fear, and insisting that only a for-profit, rushed to market vaccine would not stop COVID.

Others of us are just waking up to the inconvenient truth that the entire pandemic response may have been wrong and that our blind obedience and trust in authority were misguided.

No matter what your beliefs are about COVID, vaccines, lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and school closures, however, it’s important to understand that the only way out of the collective mess humanity is in right now is to be willing to disagree, talk honestly, and encourage the process of scientific inquiry.

Yet since the beginning of the COVID crisis, when honest scientists, professors, and medical doctors began to speak up, they were, and continue to be, silenced, canceled, de-platformed, and defamed.

Even now, “science” has become so politicized that doctors willing to speak truth to power have lost their jobs, their social standing, and their licenses to practice medicine.

Questioning COVID Protocols

Just a few months into the pandemic, scientists start to question the COVID measures being implemented.

Health care professionals noticed that when their patients were put on ventilators, instead of recovering, they were dying.

Others saw that COVID was treatable, and that they could use a combination of off-label drugs like ivermectin and anti-inflammatory steroids to calm the immune system’s cytokine storm that the virus seemed to provoke in order to help their patients recover.

These observations led to the Great Barrington Declaration, which was a project spearheaded by three visionaries: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford.

They described themselves as infectious disease specialists and public health scientists who have “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”

Published in October of 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration currently has more than 930,500 signatories.

“Current lockdown policies,” the Great Barrington Declaration insisted, “are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” These include, “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health—leading to excess mortality in the years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.”

The Declaration pointed out that school children and the underprivileged were “disproportionately harmed.”

As hopeful as the Declaration made many feel, it was relentlessly criticized and largely ignored. It seemed that throughout 2021, many people preferred to blindly put their trust in the government and in what a growing number call the government’s lies.

For whatever reasons (political, emotional, Dark Forces), people throughout the free world were willing, and even eager, to allow newly minted pharmaceutical billionaires to forward a narrative that lined their corporate pockets. It was as if the world were gripped by a dark force.

But 2022 has not turned out to be “2020 too.” Instead, starting in January of 2022, major scientific journals are rebelling against the one-sized-fits-all no-debate-allowed agenda. It was then that the British Medical Journal, one of the most prestigious health journals in the world, published an editorial insisting that the raw data that has been used to justify such an aggressive worldwide push to get the COVID vaccine be made fully and immediately available for public scrutiny.

Three months later, an editorial was published in the April edition of Surgical Neurology International: “COVID UPDATE: What is the truth?” by retired neurosurgeon Dr. Russell L. Blaylock. Blaylock was frank and direct in his condemnation of the public health policies implemented to contain COVID-19.

Indeed, he unapologetically calls the pandemic “one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies.”

Real Science Is Not Dogmatic

Fake science is dogma that cannot be debated, nuanced, challenged or changed. Real science is not dogmatic. It can be debated and considered. But scientific freedom can only be defended when each one of us stands up and defends it.

Now for the good news. There are indications that the pro-science pro-freedom movement is becoming more mainstream every day.

In March, Joe Wang attended a conference in Washington, D.C. to inaugurate the Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College. This new academy’s mission is to educate people about “the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”

Everyone who attended the conference was already aware, to some degree, of the American government’s war on science. But there we were, in America’s capital, able to hold a conference criticizing the rich and powerful, without having the police knocking at our door. Just ask yourself, what happened to Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan whistleblower in 2020, who purportedly died of the virus in a Chinese hospital? And what happened to the top COVID expert in Shanghai, Dr. Wenhong Zhang, who had to give up his belief of co-existing with the virus and “full-heartedly” endorse the Xi Jinping’s zero COVID policy?

We must use of what limited freedom we still have now in the United States to avoid the fates of Dr. Zhang and Dr. Li.

In April, Jennifer Margulis attended a medical freedom conference for doctors and other healthcare workers in Conroe, Texas. It was hosted by pediatrician Angelina Farella, a conventionally trained doctor who has testified against the COVID vaccines. Dr. Farella’s testimony has led biased media outlets, including The Independent, to give her the moniker of being an “anti-vaccine” doctor despite the fact that she gives vaccines in her office every day. Over eighty medical doctors attended the conference, sharing their clinical data and successful treatment protocols.

“People are sick and dying and doctors won’t treat patients,” Ben Marble, M.D., an emergency room doctor, said. “Is this a 2-year long Twilight Zone episode or what?”

He called the way patients were being treated in the emergency rooms an “epic failure” and explained that he quit his job as an emergency room doctor in order to be able to treat patients. Marble, who founded a website that treats people for free called MyFreeDoctor.com, said, “[We’ve] treated over 200,000 people for COVID and lost six.”

May the Force Be With Scientists and Doctors Who Fight Back
The fight for scientific freedom is important to our lives, and the lives of generations to come. To be honest, scientists and doctors are not particularly good at these kinds of fights, which involve not only science, which they are good at, but also interacting with politicians, the mainstream legacy media, and social media.

Luckily, the scientists and doctors are stepping up anyway and it’s time for us to join them. It’s time to say enough is enough, just as Blaylock has.

Silencing free speech and co-opting science can have deadly consequences. “The first thing that the Nazis did was fear, propaganda, and censorship,” says Vera Sharav, a child survivor of the Holocaust.

She said, “The free press was ended the minute Hitler took over. Information is freedom. People who are informed do not march in unison. It’s only those who are being fed lies that frighten them and that keep them in a state of total anxiety who will follow orders without a second thought. They’ve become conditioned not to trust their own instincts.”

As founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, Sharav has been speaking openly about the disturbing parallels between the German state’s control of information in the 1930s and today’s trend to silence dissent. For instance, the Germans justified eugenics, which was widely accepted among scientists even in the United States, by insisting that they were “following the science,” Sharav said.

We all need to rally behind the scientists, researchers, and doctors who are striking back. It is only with our support that the side of what is true will prevail and vibrant and long-lasting good health be realized.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/may-the-force-be-with-them-scientists-fight-back_4502259.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CDC Director Issues Alert on Pfizer’s COVID-19 Pill: ‘You Might Get Symptoms Again’

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky warned that Pfizer’s COVID-19 pill Paxlovid can lead to a rebound in symptoms.

“If you take Paxlovid, you might get symptoms again,” Walensky told CBS News on Tuesday. “We haven’t yet seen anybody who has returned with symptoms needing to go to the hospital. So, generally, a milder course.”

Another researcher who is not affiliated with the CDC said that he has observed such a scenario.

“People who experience rebound are at risk of transmitting to other people, even though they’re outside what people accept as the usual window for being able to transmit,” Dr. Michael Charness of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Boston told CNN on Tuesday.

After a patient recovers from COVID-19, the aforementioned rebound has occurred between two and eight days later, according to the CDC. The agency, however, told CBS that the benefits of taking Paxlovid outweigh the risks of COVID-19, namely among those who are at a high risk of developing severe symptoms from the virus.

About a week ago, the agency issued an alert to health care providers about the rebound, saying that patients who took Paxlovid either test positive for the virus after having tested negative or will experience COVID-19 symptoms.

“A brief return of symptoms may be part of the natural history of SARS-CoV-2 infection in some persons, independent of treatment with Paxlovid and regardless of vaccination status,” the federal health agency said at the time. SARS-CoV-2 is another name for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.

“Limited information currently available from case reports suggests that persons treated with Paxlovid who experience COVID-19 rebound have had mild illness; there are no reports of severe disease. There is currently no evidence that additional treatment is needed with Paxlovid or other anti-SARS-CoV-2 therapies in cases where COVID-19 rebound is suspected,” the CDC added.

The Epoch Times has contacted Pfizer for comment. Pfizer told CBS that it is observing a rebound rate of approximately 2 percent and is continuing to monitor patients.

“We have not seen any [COVID-19] resistance emerge to date in patients treated with Paxlovid,” a spokesperson for the company told Reuters this week.

In recent weeks, doctors have increasingly prescribed Paxlovid, which has been authorized to treat at-risk people. But some health care workers told Reuters they are putting off prescribing the medication.

“I am shying away from giving it to people who are very low- risk, and are not terribly ill, particularly people who are vaccinated and boosted,” said Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology for Northwell Health, in an interview with the news agency. He will still prescribe the bill to people who have significant health conditions or are aged 75 and older.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/cdc-director-issues-alert-on-pfizers-covid-19-pill-you-might-get-symptoms-again_4503262.html

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WHO European director Dr Hans Kluge says monkeypox requires 'urgent' action

People should reduce their number of sexual partners to help fight the spread of monkeypox, the World Health Organization has urged.

Dr Hans Kluge, the head of WHO's European division, has warned the current outbreak of the tropical disease 'may not be containable'.

He warned Europe had become the new epicentre of the virus, with the outbreak linked to sexual transmission at raves and festivals on the continent.

Dr Kluge insisted the virus 'will not require the same extensive population measures' as Covid but said 'significant and urgent' action was needed to prevent more cases.

The WHO stopped short of calling for contacts of known cases to be quarantined but called for 'critical' twice-daily temperature checks and 'close monitoring'.

Dr Kluge said that while cases have been concentrated in men who have sex with men, there was nothing stopping it from spreading to other groups.

The WHO earlier this week upgraded the global threat level to 'moderate', warning that community spread could lead to vulnerable patients or children catching the virus, which also spreads from touch, or interaction with contaminated surfaces or clothes.

In total, there have been 606 confirmed cases of monkepox across the globe, with 130 more suspected since the first infection was found at the start of May.

Around 70 per cent of the confirmed or suspected cases have been in Europe, with the UK count now at 190. Only Spain has seen more cases.

The LGB Alliance — a trans-exclusionary gay rights group — attracted criticism on Monday after calling for all commercial sex venues to be closed ahead of Pride month, which begins today.

UK monkeypox cases rise to 190 as 11 more Brits test positive
Another 11 monkeypox cases were recorded in Britain yesterday, health officials announced.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said the new patients were all in England, bringing the UK total to 190.

Officials said the 'risk to the general public from monkeypox is still low' but it is advising anyone with a new rash or scabs to self-isolate.

Until now, those with suspected or confirmed cases of the tropical disease were being urged to seek advice from NHS 111 or a sexual health service.

But officials said the move to introduce quarantine was to prevent further spread 'now that community transmission is occurring here in the UK and other countries'.

Experts have previously linked the outbreak to two festivals in Europe: The Gran Canarian pride festival, held between May 5 and 15, and a large-scale fetish festival in Antwerp, which ran from May 5 to May 8.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKSA) updated its own guidance on Monday night to tell people to wear condoms during sex for eight weeks after clearing the virus.

Anyone in Britain who develops a new rash or blister is being urged to quarantine and call 111 — and not to leave isolation 'until you've been told what to do'.

They are also been ordered to abstain from sex or close contact with others 'until their lesions have healed and the scabs have dried off'.

Dr Kluge said in a statement last night: '[Europe] remains at the epicentre of the largest and most geographically widespread monkeypox outbreak ever reported outside of endemic areas in western and central Africa.

'Based on the case reports to date, this outbreak is currently being transmitted through social networks connected largely through sexual activity, primarily involving men who have sex with men.

'Many — but not all cases — report fleeting and/or multiple sexual partners, sometimes associated with large events or parties.'

Dr Kluge said all young people, regardless of gender or sexuality, are at risk of the virus and should be aware of the symptoms.

He said gay and bisexual communities have shown 'rapid health-seeking behaviour', adding 'we should applaud them' for coming forward with symptoms early.

But he warned festivals and parties planned over the coming months could lead to further outbreaks of the virus.

He said: 'The potential for further transmission in Europe and elsewhere over the summer is high.

'Monkeypox has already spread against the backdrop of several mass gatherings in [Europe].

'Over the coming months, many of the dozens of festivals and large parties planned provide further contexts where amplification may occur.'

The WHO said event organisers should share 'accurate, practical and targeted information' with attendees over summer.

The LGB Alliance had a statement calling for gay saunas to be closed taken down by Twitter on Monday.

In the statement, the group said: 'Monkeypox is spreading and gay and bisexual men have been affected disproportionately.

'That’s why we are calling on all commercial sex venues, such as saunas, leather/fetish bars and clubs with dark rooms to be closed for a month.'

Critics accused the group of homophobia, arguing the move would lead to stigmatisation ahead of Pride month.

But LGBA insisted the move would have helped 'save Pride' by preventing huge outbreaks just before the main events scheduled over the next four weeks.

Malcolm Clark, head of research at LGBA, told the Daily Telegraph: 'We were really lucky this time that it wasn't another Aids, but what would have happened if it was?

'We would have been complaining about stigmatisation and still taking our time. It appears that 30 years after HIV, we haven't learnt anything.

'It's pure luck that this is a disease nobody dies from, but it could have easily been something else, it could have easily been worse. We should thank our lucky stars.'

Andy Seale, from the WHO's department for HIV, hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections, on Monday said Pride parades pose little risk of spreading monkeypox.

He said most transmission is linked to 'enclosed spaces' such as nightclubs and there is no 'enhanced risk' of transmission at the annual celebrations.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10874047/Monkeypox-Cut-number-sexual-partners-help-fight-virus-urges.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Putin will never truly conquer Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has never been completely clear about his war aims. But he gives clues. He endlessly talks of the brotherhood of Russians and Ukrainians – and in this relationship he always puts Russia first. In Ukraine he wants Russian language schooling to be restored and he of course wishes to annex more Ukrainian territory. He would like Russian businesses to receive privileged access and for Ukraine to be barred from having an independent foreign and security policy. In other words, he wishes to pursue ‘Russification’.

Russification is an objective that has taken changing forms over the centuries. Under the Russian Empire, the tsars saw Ukraine as a problem as they feared the growth of nationalism. The Ukrainian language was restricted in the press. Ukraine made no appearance on official maps. The territories around Kyiv were called Malorossia (Little Russia) while those near the Black Sea were dubbed Novorossia (New Russia). These names expressed an insistence that the entire destiny of Ukrainian speakers lay with Great Russia.

Imperial Germany coveted Ukraine’s wheat fields and iron mines during the Great War. When Soviet Russia went down to defeat in 1918, the Germans established a Ukrainian puppet state which was obliged to supply them with the grain and labour they craved. Ukrainians nevertheless cherish those brief months as their first experience of statehood. When the communists took charge after the ensuing civil war, Vladimir Lenin saw that Ukraine would remain difficult to rule inside the USSR unless granted the status of a Soviet republic and permitted a degree of cultural and linguistic autonomy – as Putin sees it, this was a cardinal blunder of statecraft that prepared the way for a split between Moscow and Kyiv.

Joseph Stalin eyed Ukraine as crucial for his forcible imposition of collective farming from the late 1920s. Ukrainian agriculture had been central Europe’s breadbasket before 1914 and the intention was to fund Soviet industrialisation by means of massive cereal exports. Instead there was searing damage to peasant farms and millions of Ukrainians perished in the avoidable famine. Stalin also reintroduced restrictions on the Ukrainian language. More Russians than ever moved to Ukraine seeking work in the mines and steel plants. Moscow offered the Ukrainian people little except poverty and repression. This was one of the reasons why many initially welcomed the Nazi invaders in 1941 – another event that Putin has not forgotten.

Throughout the decades that followed, Soviet rulers met with trouble in Ukraine. Stalin’s occupation forces at the end of the second world war had to contend against partisans who fought to thwart the reimposition of Soviet rule. The communist order was restored by the 1950s. The Ukrainian Soviet republic acquired a seat at the United Nations – perhaps Putin thinks this a blunder on Stalin’s part. Ukraine never became the ‘model’ of Marxist-Leninist affluence that Lenin and Stalin had envisaged and the USSR failed to grow enough food for itself, far less to export grain to foreign parts.

When Mikhail Gorbachëv announced reforms of communism in the late 1980s, he tried to keep a lid on Ukrainian nationalism. But the collapse of the Soviet economy intensified Ukrainians’ resentment about their treatment by Moscow. Leonid Kravchuk, the communist leader in Kyiv, sniffed the nationalist wind in 1991 and aligned himself with Ukrainian opinion by demanding a referendum on independence. That December, after Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to secede, the USSR fell apart – an event described by Putin as the century’s ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe’.

Throughout the 1990s the Ukrainian economy was in a deep depression and was mocked by Russian rulers who themselves had little to boast about. Ukraine’s politics, however, were looser than Russia’s. In the present century they have given rise to presidential electoral contests won by candidates who wanted close ties with the European Union and an open democratic system under the rule of law. Under Volodymyr Zelensky this orientation was consolidated. Putin’s Crimean land grab in 2014 persuaded even the millions of pro-Russia Ukrainian citizens that Ukraine should prioritise cooperation and alliance with the West. Putin’s bullying of Russia’s ‘brother people’ turned that nation into hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism.

So how could Putin ever go about denationalising Ukraine and making it more Russia-friendly? The collapse of Ukrainian statehood now seems unlikely thanks to the bravery of its politicians and armed forces. Territorial annexation is another matter. Large parts of the Donbas, apart from Kharkiv, are occupied by Russian forces. The Black Sea coast has also been overrun. Currently what is left of Ukraine is blockaded by the Russian navy.

In order to keep hold of what he already has, Putin has imposed puppet administrations in the occupied territories. He has recognised the Donetsk and Luhansk so-called people’s republics, and he may well arrange plebiscites for their incorporation in the Russian Federation on similar terms to Crimea. He has already deported thousands of Ukrainian citizens deep into Russia. A further campaign of ethno-political cleansing is probable. The Russian language will be re-imposed. Russian business interests will be privileged. All this is possible but it would require a massive enduring presence of security forces to stamp out Ukrainian resistance.

A Russian military victory even in Donbass and along the Black Sea coast could never be without horrendous costs for Russia’s ruling group and big business. Russia would remain the world’s pariah state and economy. Resentment of Russia both in the conquered and still-free parts of Ukraine would be greater than anything known to Nicholas II, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Putin will surely at some point – let’s hope it is soon – be asked whether his ‘special military operation’ was worth it all. And it will be the Russians, including some of their ruling group, who will be putting the question.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/why-putin-will-never-truly-conquer-ukraine/

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The feminization of Sweden

The Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede is known for his studies of national values. On two occasions he collected extensive data from IBM employees in 53 countries, first in 1968 and again in 1972. He received 116,000 responses to questions about attitudes and preferences. In the 1970s, he organised the material into five themes and summarised them in a “cultural dimension theory”. Hofstede then scored the countries and compared them with each other. His study has attracted a lot of attention, mainly because the conclusions are based on such a large body of material. Hofstede is one of the 100 most-cited social scientists in the world.

On the basis of his vast material, Hofstede established no fewer than 76 criteria for male and female. Japan came first among the masculine countries. Both the United States and Germany are also high on the ranking list. Among the most feminine countries, he placed Sweden in first place, with Norway second.

Note that the data is now a half-century old and that Sweden has since become even more feminised. In most universities and colleges, women are in the majority among teachers and researchers. Six out of eight parliamentary parties have female leaders. We have a female prime minister and there are twelve women and eleven men in the government.

In the media, the imbalance is probably even greater. I have not looked for studies that show this, because it is so obvious both to me and to others who follow Swedish news reporting. Women, women and more women both report and are interviewed on every conceivable subject. This female expertise covers everything from football and ice hockey to advanced and male-dominated high technology to gang crime, which is almost 100% a male activity. We find out how women think, what they find interesting and how they want to solve various social problems.

One of the traditionally most male-dominated professions, policing, is represented in the Police Federation by a woman. This is only right. In 2019, 33% of Sweden’s police officers were women. In total, 44% of all police employees are women. Among civilian employees, women are in the majority, a whopping 67%. When 43% of those admitted to the police training programme in Malmö were women last year, Caroline Mellgren, who oversees the unit for police work and police training at the university, was very happy and hoped that the trend of more and more female police officers would continue.

A couple of years ago, a young, beautiful female police officer explained that when she and other female officers took the metro home from late-night duty in Rinkeby’s new police station, they needed an escort. If there had been only male police officers there, would they have made that demand? Hardly; they would realise it was ridiculous. If they felt unsafe on their own, they would have to arrange to protect each other. But for a graceful and good-looking female police officer, the question of an escort was certainly relevant, and I don’t think she would then feel entirely comfortable being escorted by another young and attractive female officer.

Recruitment films for the Armed Forces are another example. In the American ones, it is crystal clear that the military is a male profession and also a very physically demanding one. In the Swedish ones, either the main characters are women or they are gender-neutral.

Now, war is not just any activity. It’s about killing your opponents, winning. A country that does not recruit optimally efficient soldiers, but deliberately reduces efficiency for ideological reasons, will be responsible in war for more soldiers dying, both men and women. The reason is that these mixed corps of soldiers are likely to fight against opponents who are all men. In that case, it is a question of not really wanting to win, which is the same as losing, and since it is a question of war, it can be said to be a form of social suicide. Nor should it be forgotten that in war people are injured. Women are less able than men to cope with injuries.

In the autumn of 2016, the Swedish Armed Forces released a new handbook for Swedish military personnel. It makes it quite clear that in Sweden the Armed Forces prefer political correctness to efficiency. There are several so-called gender advisors in Swedish units. The goal, according to Jan Thörnqvist, who is responsible for the Swedish Armed Forces, is to be far ahead of other countries. As the book says: “Swedish units can also contribute to raising awareness within multilateral organisations of the importance of the gender perspective. This can be done by developing gender-inclusive reporting formats and proposing gender mainstreaming in meetings and plans.”

OK, we have female police officers in Sweden, we have female firefighters (gender-neutral language: firemen?) and we have female soldiers. Gender equality is a political goal that is close to the heart of left-liberals.

At the same time, the state has a reasonable responsibility to choose the optimum solution for important social services. I think that if the people had a choice, the distribution between male and female police officers would be more clearly skewed in favour of the men.

But if, for reasons I will not go into here, the people also choose women for these posts, then it is the duty of the state in a democracy to make not an ideological but an efficiency-optimal choice. Which means: women in higher positions are welcome, but if physical strength and other male “virtues” are required, then it should be men — and also women who meet the requirements for men. Ultimately, this is about competence. Police officers in Rinkeby should not have to ask for an external escort when they go home from work.

Is this a reactionary perspective? Yes; reactionary means reacting, and it is right to react to stupid decisions. I and many others react to the politicisation of society. At its core, it is totalitarian when politicians neither listen to what citizens want, nor look out for the best interests of citizens.

In a totalitarian state, ideology wins out over both democracy and optimal choices.

https://gatesofvienna.net/2022/05/the-estrogen-revolution/#more-53890

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Australia: The Covid jab data which reveals one VERY surprising detail about pandemic deaths - and it’s certain to spark HUGE debate

Over two thirds of Victorians who died from Covid-19 this year had received at least one vaccination jab - but were still killed by the virus.

Statistics released by the Victorian government showed that 68 per cent of people who died with Covid in 2022 were vaccinated. But less than a third of those who died were unvaccinated.

However medics warn the figures are not quite as they seem.

Just four per cent of the Victorian population aged 16 and over is unvaccinated - which means the 32 per cent dying unvaxxed is eight times higher than it should be.

Between January 1 and May 25 this year, 2022 so far 1,742 Victorians have died from Covid, the Herald Sun reported.

Of those, 558 were unvaccinated (or had an unknown status), about 32 per cent of the total Covid deaths in 2022.

The doubled vaxxed accounted for 41 per cent of deaths (720 people), while 24 per cent has three shots. Three per cent (53 deaths) had just one jab.

A Department of Health spokesman argued that the numbers showed per capita vaccinations save lives because 5.1 million Victorians over 16 years of age were double-dosed, compared to several hundreds of thousands remaining unvaccinated.

Out of the 1,742 deaths, 349 were genomically sequenced to reveal the strain that killed the patients. Omicron was by far the deadliest strain, at least in raw numbers. The Omicron BA.1 sub-variant caused 201 deaths, while Omicron BA.2 strain was responsible for 110.

A third dose gave up to 97 per cent better protection against hospitalisation and death for people over 50 compared two or fewer doses, he claimed UK research showed.

Meanwhile, pathologists are sounding the alarm over the low uptake of coronavirus vaccine boosters as the national immunisation group suggests a fourth dose for some Australians.

The Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia says third doses are particularly low in Queensland and NSW even as COVID-19 cases rise.

'With winter commencing, it is important for everyone that they are fully up to date with all relevant vaccinations,' RCPA fellow Professor William Rawlinson said.

'The RCPA recently highlighted that it is very likely that we will experience far more influenza cases in Australia this winter. This, combined with the current, rising trend of COVID-19 cases, is likely to put an extraordinary strain on the healthcare system.'

Western Australia has the highest uptake of third doses about 80 per cent, while Queensland is the lowest at 58 per cent. Nationally, about two-thirds of eligible Australians have received a booster.

On Wednesday, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation expanded eligibility for a second booster to people with health conditions or a disability.

Leading immunologist Peter Doherty, of the Doherty Institute said it was too early to say for sure how effective third and fourth doses were in protecting people against 'long Covid'.

But he said people could be 'confident' they would help prevent the severest forms of the illness.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10863575/Victorian-Covid-19-vaccination-death-data-2022-produces-surprising-findings.html

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SoCal doctor sentenced for trying to import hydroxychloroquine

A Southern California doctor was sentenced to prison on Friday for trying to smuggle hydroxychloroquine into the US and hawk it as a “miracle cure” COVID-19 treatment, officials said.

Physician Jennings Ryan Staley, 44, admitted to working with a Chinese supplier to illegally import a barrel he believed to contain 26 pounds of the anti-malarial drug mislabeled as “yam extract,” according to court documents.

Staley admitted he wanted to sell hydroxychloroquine powder in capsules as part of his phony business plan.

He peddled COVID-19 “treatment kits” in March and April 2020 as the pandemic began spreading in the US and months before vaccinations were available.

Hydroxychloroquine was once touted by former President Donald Trump as a potential coronavirus treatment.

Staley admitted to writing a prescription for the increasingly hard-to-find drug in his employee’s name and personal information. He answered the pharmacists’ questions to fill the script as if he was the employee without the employees’ consent, court docs show.

The COVID “treatment kits” were sold in and around San Diego at Staley’s Skinny Beach Med Spas locations.

Law enforcement was tipped off on the scam by several citizens concerned by the marketing campaign, federal prosecutors said.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/30/socal-doctor-jennings-ryan-staley-sentenced-for-trying-to-import-drugs-to-hock-his-covid-19-miracle-cure/

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Turkey, Israel Take Tentative Steps Toward Rapprochement

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu visited Israel last week, becoming the first Turkish foreign minister to do so in 15 years. The trip is a sign of budding rapprochement between the two countries whose diplomatic relations have remained in limbo since 2018.

Experts attribute the move to Turkey’s desire to repair frayed relations with influential states in the region and position itself as an energy-transit hub.

“Cavusoglu’s visit to Israel also coincides with efforts to improve ties with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” Turkish political analyst Oytun Orhan told The Epoch Times. “Turkey also wants to secure a role for itself in future pipeline projects linking gas-fields in the Eastern Mediterranean to Europe.”

‘New Chapter’ in Relations

After a May 25 meeting in Jerusalem, Cavusoglu and Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid appeared upbeat on the prospects for reconciliation. Cavusoglu said both countries wanted to “reenergize” ties, while Lapid hailed his Turkish counterpart’s visit as a “new chapter” in bilateral relations.

During the meeting, the pair reportedly discussed the resumption of full diplomatic relations, along with means of enhancing economic cooperation.

Ties between the two countries bottomed out in 2010, when Israeli forces staged a deadly attack on a Turkish aid flotilla off the coast of the Gaza Strip. Attempts to repair relations ended in 2018, when Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Israel—to which Israel responded in kind—amid outbreaks of Israeli-Palestinian violence along the Gaza Strip’s borders.

But in March of this year, a visit to Ankara by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, during which he met Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prompted speculation that rapprochement was imminent.

According to Orhan, who is an expert on the Levant region at Ankara’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the two countries are now “focusing on diplomatic and economic issues in hopes of resolving their longstanding political differences later.”

Changing Regional Paradigm

Many experts believe Turkey’s tilt toward Jerusalem should be viewed within the wider context of ongoing efforts by Ankara to improve ties with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Relations with the three Arab states have been strained since 2011’s “Arab Spring,” when Turkey supported popular uprisings—including a full-fledged revolution in Egypt—across the Middle East and North Africa.

“Turkish normalization efforts don’t only apply to Israel; they actually began with the Gulf States,” Dr. Remzi Cetin, a Turkish academic specialized in Israeli affairs, told The Epoch Times. He believes that 2020’s Abraham Accords ushered in a “new regional paradigm,” one that Turkey “doesn’t want to be left out of.”

Brokered by the Trump administration, the landmark agreement served to normalize ties between Israel and the UAE. It was the first normalization of diplomatic relations between the Jewish state and an Arab country since a 1994 peace agreement between Israel and Jordan.

In February, Erdogan visited the UAE for the first time in nearly a decade. Two months later, he made a similar trip to Saudi Arabia. “Turkey wants to improve its relations with the Gulf States in line with this new Middle Eastern equation,” Cetin said. “And reconciliation with Israel is part of this process.”

Another reason for Turkish rapprochement with Israel, according to experts, concerns the EastMed pipeline project. Still on the drawing board, the 1,900-kilometer pipeline would bring Israeli natural gas to Europe via southern Cyprus and Crete, thus circumventing Turkey altogether.

Ankara would like to see an alternative route that would allow the region’s vast gas reserves to be funneled to Europe through Turkish territory. “But if Turkey wants to displace the EastMed project, it first must normalize relations with Israel,” Orhan said.

According to the analyst, the EastMed project didn’t come up during Cavusoglu’s recent discussions with Israeli officials. “Their main focus now is on diplomatic relations,” he said. “Once they establish a positive atmosphere, they can tackle more difficult issues—like natural gas and the Palestine question.”

The Perennial Issue of Palestine

Immediately prior to his Jerusalem trip, Cavusoglu visited the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he met with Palestinian officials. Speaking to reporters in Ramallah, he insisted that Turkey’s longstanding support for Palestinian national aspirations was “entirely independent” of Ankara’s relations with Israel.

Orhan echoed this sentiment, saying Turkey remained “firmly committed” to the Palestinian cause and an eventual two-state solution to the long-simmering conflict. “Positive Turkey-Israel relations could even benefit the Palestinians by allowing Ankara to mediate between the two sides,” he said.

US-sponsored peace talks between Israel and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority collapsed in 2014. In the same year, Israel launched a six-week assault on the Gaza Strip in which more than 2,000 Palestinians and scores of Israelis were killed.

One potential stumbling block to Turkey-Israel reconciliation is Ankara’s close relationship with Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip since 2006. Israel considers Hamas a terrorist organization, while Ankara views it as a legitimate liberation movement.

“Israel wanted Turkey to limit its relations with Hamas as a precondition to reconciliation, but Turkey hasn’t accepted any preconditions,” Orhan explained. “Until now, there has been no clear change in Ankara’s approach to Hamas.”

“Besides,” he added, “neither side appears to be dwelling on this issue right now.”

According to Orhan, the biggest threat to rapprochement at the current delicate juncture would be a major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, which, he said, “would serve to derail the entire process.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/turkey-israel-take-tentative-steps-toward-rapprochement_4501219.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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