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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The World Health Organisation has lost all credibility

Ross Clark

Let’s be honest: is there anyone out there who has faith in the ability of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to tackle a future pandemic? Any lingering hope that the WHO might be an organisation fit to be trusted with global heath concerns has pretty well evaporated with the election, by acclamation, of China as one of the 12 members of its executive board on Friday.

It is true, of course, that an international body must have representation from all over the world if it is going to win the near-universal cooperation it needs in order to operate. It can’t be led entirely by western democracies and wealthy South Asian countries even if they might have the best skills available; you need members able to tap into every culture and religion on Earth. But ought we really be trusting leadership of the WHO to a government which is not merely a malignant dictatorship, accused of human rights abuses against its own citizens – but which has also obstructed an investigation into the high likelihood that it accidentally caused the last pandemic?

The story of how Covid-19 began has been investigated very thoroughly in Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s excellent book, Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19. If no one has quite pegged down where the virus came from – and probably never will – there is at least a very strong case to answer that it originated in Chinese laboratory experiments aimed at researching how to tackle coronaviruses, and that it entered the population through a laboratory leak. It would hardly be unprecedented for a virus to leak from a laboratory in this way – even if it would make it way and above the world’s most expensive laboratory accident.

What has been China’s response to this possibility? To try to snuff out any investigation into the matter. Bizarrely, a WHO team allowed into China in early 2021, and chaperoned at every turn, tried to dismiss a lab leak, announcing that it would not investigate the matter any further.

It isn’t just China whose presence on the WHO Executive Board will cause alarm. Also on the list is Brazil, whose own parliament has recommended criminal charges against the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, over his handling of the pandemic. Then there is Yemen, which is in the grip of civil war. The only European country on the WHO’s board is Slovakia, which hardly has the greatest political clout and which happens to have had one of the highest deaths rates from Covid-19 anywhere.

In other words, America and Canada apart, it is stuffed with small countries, many with lousy human rights records, which will not dare to challenge China or which will not have the political clout to do so. The prospects for future pandemics do not look goo

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CDC Raises Travel Alert for Monkeypox

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently revised its travel advisory from Level 1 to Level 2 due to the recent monkeypox outbreak around the world.

An update posted to the agency’s website wrote: “Cases of monkeypox have been reported in Europe, North America, and Australia,” adding that cases were reported among homosexual males. “Some cases were also reported in people who live in the same household as an infected person.”

“None of these people reported having recently been in central or west African countries where monkeypox usually occurs, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, among others,” the advisory continues to say.

Travelers should avoid close contact with sick people, namely those with skin lesions. They are advised to avoid contact with dead or living wild animals such as small mammals, rodents, and primates. The CDC also says that people should not eat or prepare meat from wild game in Africa.

“Contact with contaminated materials used by sick people (such as clothing, bedding, or materials used in healthcare settings) or that came into contact with infected animals” is also not recommended, the CDC adds.

The agency concluded that the risk to the general population still remains low, but people should seek immediate medical care if they have developed new and unexplained skin rashes and lesions with or without fever and chills. Those people are urged to avoid contact with others as well.

Officials with the World Health Organization (WHO) have said that there are more than 200 monkeypox cases worldwide, although Sylvie Briand, the WHO’s epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention chief, said on May 27 that “we don’t know if we are just seeing the peak of the iceberg [or] if there are many more cases that are undetected in communities.”

“We are still at the very, very beginning of this event,” Briand added. “We know that we will have more cases in the coming days,” she said, adding: “This is not a disease the general public should be worried about. It is not COVID or other diseases that spread fast.”

Monkeypox, a relative to smallpox, is generally only seen in West and Central African countries. Initial symptoms include swollen lymph nodes, chickenpox-like rash, and a fever. U.S. officials have said that the smallpox vaccine can be effective in preventing the spread and transmission of the virus.

Those pox-like lesions start out as dark spots on the skin before turning into bumps that fill with fluid. They will eventually scab over and fall off, possibly leaving people with scars or skin discoloration.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/cdc-raises-travel-alert-for-monkeypox_4498496.html

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Researcher: ‘We Made a Big Mistake’ on COVID-19 Vaccine

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

* Canadian immunologist and vaccine researcher Byram Bridle, Ph.D., has gained access to Pfizer’s biodistribution study from the Japanese regulatory agency. The research demonstrates a huge problem with all COVID-19 vaccines
The assumption that vaccine developers have been working with is that the mRNA in the vaccines would primarily remain in and around the vaccination site. Pfizer’s data, however, show the mRNA and subsequent spike protein are widely distributed in the body within hours

* This is a serious problem, as the spike protein is a toxin shown to cause cardiovascular and neurological damage. It also has reproductive toxicity, and Pfizer’s biodistribution data show it accumulates in women’s ovaries

* Once in your blood circulation, the spike protein binds to platelet receptors and the cells that line your blood vessels. When that happens, it can cause platelets to clump together, resulting in blood clots, and/or cause abnormal bleeding
Pfizer documents submitted to the European Medicines Agency also show the company failed to follow industry-standard quality management practices during preclinical toxicology studies and that key studies did not meet good laboratory practice standards

The more we learn about the COVID-19 vaccines, the worse they look. In a recent interview[1] with Alex Pierson (above), Canadian immunologist and vaccine researcher Byram Bridle, Ph.D., dropped a shocking truth bomb that immediately went viral, despite being censored by Google.

It also was featured in a “fact” check by The Poynter Institute’s Politifact,[2] which pronounced Bridle’s findings as “false” after interviewing Dr. Drew Weissman,[3] a UPenn scientist who is credited with helping to create the technology that enables the COVID mRNA vaccines to work. But, as you can see below, unlike Bridle, Politifact neglected to go beyond interviewing someone with such a huge stake in the vaccine’s success.

In 2020, Bridle was awarded a $230,000 government grant for research on COVID vaccine development. As part of that research, he and a team of international scientists requested a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) access to Pfizer’s biodistribution study from the Japanese regulatory agency. The research,[4] [5]previously unseen, demonstrates a huge problem with all COVID-19 vaccines.

“We made a big mistake,” Bridle says. “We thought the spike protein was a great target antigen; we never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein. So, by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin.”

Pfizer Omitted Industry-Standard Safety Studies

What’s more, TrialSite News reports[6] that Pfizer documents submitted to the European Medicines Agency [EMA] reveal the company “did not follow industry-standard quality management practices during preclinical toxicology studies … as key studies did not meet good laboratory practice (GLP).”

Neither reproductive toxicity nor genotoxicity (DNA mutation) studies were performed, both of which are considered critical when developing a new drug or vaccine for human use. The problems now surfacing matter greatly, as they significantly alter the risk-benefit analysis underlying the vaccines’ emergency use authorization. As reported by TrialSite News:[7]

“Recently, there has been speculation regarding potential safety signals associated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Many different unusual, prolonged, or delayed reactions have been reported, and often these are more pronounced after the second shot.

Women have reported changes in menstruation after taking mRNA vaccines. Problems with blood clotting (coagulation) — which are also common during COVID-19 disease — are also reported. In the case of the Pfizer COVID mRNA vaccine, these newly revealed documents raise additional questions about both the genotoxicity and reproductive toxicity risks of this product.

Standard studies designed to assess these risks were not performed in compliance with accepted empirical research standards. Furthermore, in key studies designed to test whether the vaccine remains near the injection site or travels throughout the body, Pfizer did not even use the commercial vaccine (BNT162b2) but instead relied on a ‘surrogate’ mRNA producing the luciferase protein.

These new disclosures seem to indicate that the U.S. and other governments are conducting a massive vaccination program with an incompletely characterized experimental vaccine.

It is certainly understandable why the vaccine was rushed into use as an experimental product under emergency use authority, but these new findings suggest that routine quality testing issues were overlooked in the rush to authorize use.

People are now receiving injections with an mRNA gene therapy-based vaccine, which produces the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in their cells, and the vaccine may be also delivering the mRNA and producing spike protein in unintended organs and tissues (which may include ovaries).”

Toxic Spike Protein Enters Blood Circulation
The assumption that vaccine developers have been working with is that the mRNA in the vaccines (or DNA in the case of Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca’s vaccines) would primarily remain in and around the vaccination site, i.e., your deltoid muscle, with a small amount draining into local lymph nodes.[8]

Pfizer’s data, however, show this isn’t the case at all. Using mRNA programmed to produce luciferase protein, as well as mRNA tagged with a radioactive label, Pfizer showed that the majority of the mRNA initially remain near the injection site, but within hours become widely distributed within the body.[9]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/researcher-we-made-a-big-mistake-on-covid-19-vaccine_4469331.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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The GOP will be back at the mid-terms. Will that ascendancy last?

In a piece titled, “Ping-pong Politics Is the New Normal”, Charlie Cook wrote at the appropriately named Cook Political Report:

“The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left and the Republican Party so far right that not only is the center of gravity in each party heading toward the extremes but the parties are each getting narrower; the ideological distance between the most liberal in the Democratic Party and the least liberal is not that great, just as the distance between the most and least conservative elements in the Republican Party continues to shrink. As a result, candidates and policies that were once on the fringes of each party are now squarely in their mainstreams, and what used to be in the mainstream is now the fringe. The parties have each become so self-absorbed, with so little self-awareness, that they seem not to recognize how much they have become caricatures of themselves. Democrats are becoming what Republicans said they were 30 years ago—and vice versa. What were gross exaggerations not that long ago are now appearing more prophetic.

“This game of political ping pong is likely to continue, with policy ricocheting from the left to right and back in two- and four-year intervals, with each party taking turns absorbing the hits until they are thrown out of power. A helluva way to run a country.”

Yes, indeed. It is a helluva way to run a country, but in essence, it’s not necessarily just the voters’ fault. The chronic dissatisfaction that seems to be a permanent fixture of American public opinion is brought about by ideological insanity on the part of one of the two major political parties and a liberal media establishment that is so bent on preventing reform that it lies, cheats, steals and covers for everything Democrats do.

And the Republican establishment usually stands cowardly by and lets them do it.

No wonder the “wrong track” poll number across the administrations never moves a whole lot -- unless you’re talking about Joe Biden’s presidency. The bumbling senile dunce half-century swamp dweller from Delaware has demonstrated a remarkable singular ability to turn people off. It’s gotten so bad that many people who voted for the Democrat ticket have inexorably turned against him. The old crows on ‘The View’ still love the Bidens, but real people plug their noses whenever his mug flashes on TV.

The speculation on whether senile Joe will run for another term continues and shows no sign of abating. And ticked off American voters appear more than ready to kick Nancy Pelosi out of the Speaker’s chair and return ultra-annoying, nasally voiced elitist “Chucky” Schumer to his former perch as chief senate complainer and whiner on Capitol Hill.

But is Cook correct, that this year’s impending electoral correction is just the latest batting of the power ping pong ball across the proverbial net, to last only as long as public opinion allows and inevitably swings the other way and returns Democrats to power as it did in 2006, 2018 and 2020?

Recent political history would suggest this is the case, but there are also a number of signals that point to a more lasting switch in party control. I disagree with Cook that both parties are gravitating towards their polar extremes and becoming more socialist or conservative, respectively. While it’s true that the GOP, under Trump, made strides to throw off the shackles of big business and the country club establishment Republicans, sadly the changeover has been slow and dissatisfying in principled conservatives’ estimation.

Democrats, on the other hand, have almost completed a full conversion to Bernie Sanders’ version of the big government dark side. The party under Biden, Pelosi and Schumer no longer pretends to be “moderate” and for the working man and woman; no, they’re too busy praying at the Al Sharpton/George Floyd altar of “woke” racial extremism where even proposing to punish criminals leads to accusations of disloyalty and threats of violence.

There is no “moderation” in the Democrat party any longer. West Virginia senator Joe Manchin comes as close to the center as Democrats get these days, but ask your typical leftist agitator what he, she, or “it” thinks of Manchin and you’re likely to be harangued with negativity. Democrats managed to pass a $1.9 trillion COVID “relief” bill and tack on a $1.2 trillion phony “infrastructure” package last year, but it’s not enough for the kooks to sit back and count their cash.

Democrats have also designated their cultural hills to die on -- namely, the idea that “birthing humans” have a right to terminate their pregnancies up to the moment of birth (or beyond) and the notion that biological females can declare themselves men and vice versa. One can’t switch TV news channels without seeing some leftist fringe nut vowing defiance and predicting doom for the country if Roe v. Wade is overturned. And if these same people had their way, you’d believe that every other person is gay or bisexual and contemplating transitioning instead of a minutely small percentage of the population claiming the status.

Decent Americans are fed up with the Democrats’ taking over of normally non-partisan institutions and making them “woke”. Think about it; the left owns the bureaucracy, academia, culture (Hollywood and music outside of country music), corporate America (anyone want to buy Coca Cola these days?) and nearly all of the country’s major cities. Even the once semi-conservative medical profession has been infiltrated and taken over by statists.

I believe that the COVID episode changed folks politically. As more facts come out about the virus’s origin and how the government authorities mishandled the matter, ordinary Americans are seeing through the ruse Democrats concocted. Not only did liberals not eradicate COVID, they spent trillions to wipe out something that couldn’t be swept away. And they lied about it. And they’re STILL wearing masks!

Voters don’t want unrealistic pie-in-the-sky promises that can’t ever be accomplished. That’s what Democrats offer. How would anyone “cure” climate change? How do you “lower prices” in a private economy like senile Joe has repeatedly promised? It all smacks of more government control and more subsidies. Republicans, for the most part, guarantee only that they will expand energy production and try to limit taxes in order to inspire economic growth.

Democrats want to “give” it to you, paid by someone else through high taxes. And they’ll be “woke” while they’re doing it, too. Will anyone want to go back to the way things are at present?

American voters have always been fickle and the “ping pong” nature of politics has tended to switch partisan control back-and-forth often. But one can’t help but feel the overzealous Democrats have really done it to themselves this time. We can only hope people grasp the significance.

https://www.conservativehq.org/post/the-right-resistance-is-senile-joe-biden-helping-to-foster-a-permanent-non-democrat-majority

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Not Just China: The US Government, Universities Are Hiding Evidence On The Origin Of COVID-19

An article published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has ignited a new debate over the origin of COVID-19.

Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs and Dr. Neil Harrison, a professor of molecular pharmacology and therapeutics at Columbia University, laid out one of the most comprehensive overviews of the evidence yet that COVID-19 could potentially have emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China. However, unlike most previous analyses, Harrison and Sachs point out that there are troves of untapped evidence potentially available right here in the United States that have not yet been investigated.

Attempts to investigate what was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in the leadup to the COVID-19 pandemic have thus far been stifled by a lack of cooperation from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, the two authors allege that more than a half dozen institutions in the United States have evidence that could prove useful in finding where COVID-19 came from, if only they would make it public.

Most of these institutions are government agencies — the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The authors also name the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and University of California-Davis (UCD) as well as EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), the non-profit which worked directly with the WIV on bat-based coronavirus research.

Neither UCD nor UNC, including Baric specifically, responded to requests for comment for this story. (RELATED: Trump’s CDC Director Was Reportedly Sidelined By Fauci After Urging Him To Investigate Lab Leak)

The article has breathed new life into the search for COVID-19 origins, with many in the scientific community applauding Sachs and Harrison for speaking out. “The authors also show how information has been withheld at every turn, even by US taxpayer-funded agencies, and that the “experts” are no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt. There must be vastly more transparency for trust in science to start to be restored,” Dr. Louis Nemzer, an associate professor researching biophysics at Nova Southeastern University, told the Daily Caller.

The government agencies named were involved in some fashion with funding or overseeing research at the WIV or done by EHA. UNC employs Dr. Ralph Baric, a scientist who developed a groundbreaking method of inserting new genetic code into pathogens without leaving any evidence, and used it to make coronaviruses more dangerous as part of research projects. UCD maintained a substantial database of SARS-like CoV genetic sequences as part of the government-funded PREDICT project, and EHA was the primary intermediary between U.S. government agencies — and their grant money — and Wuhan researchers.

None of these institutions have fully publicized the work they’ve done involving coronavirus research. According to Sachs and Harrison, releasing their internal communications, biological samples and other research findings could prove critical in determining if COVID-19 is in fact naturally occurring, or same from a lab in Wuhan, China.

“DARPA has never funded directly, nor indirectly as a subcontractor, any activity or researcher associated with the EcoHealth Alliance or Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the agency told the Daily Caller. The other government agencies mentioned in the PNAS article did not offer comment when contacted.

Some of the information which could be of use is, for instance, the data removed from an NIH gene database at the request of Chinese researchers in early 2020, or a full accounting of Baric’s research involving enhancing pathogens to make them more dangerous, or details on the fieldwork conducted by EHA with their Chinese colleagues.

Sachs and Harrison call for a full release of this information, and, if necessary, a Congressional inquiry. (RELATED: Chemical Weapons Expert: UK Government Officials Secretly Believe Lab-Leak Caused COVID Pandemic)

“The PNAS article, wonderful as it is, is just an article. What will prompt an investigation of the origins of Covid-19 is when members of Congress from both political parties come together and make it happen. It is regrettable and embarrassing that House and Senate Democrats have been largely unwilling to do so thus far,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director and co-founder of nonprofit public health watchdog U.S. Right To Know. “We need our members of Congress to unearth NIH top to bottom, figure out what went wrong and restore public trust.”

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told the Daily Caller that if Republicans win control of Congress in November, investigations may be in order: “Throughout the pandemic, I’ve repeatedly called for Congress to fully investigate the origins of COVID-19. When Republicans retake the majority in November and I’m chairman of a committee, I will have subpoena power and the ability to thoroughly investigate the origins of this virus that has plagued our nation for far too long.”

This step is particularly notable for Sachs. He was once the chair of The Lancet’s COVID-19 commission, which was formed by the elite scientific journal to investigate the origins of COVID-19. However, in 2021, Sachs dissolved the commission, saying that too many of its members had conflicts of interest with EHA to proceed.

The Lancet itself had a conflict of interest with EcoHealth. Early on in the pandemic, it published a letter spearheaded by Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth, calling the lab-leak theory a conspiracy theory harmful to Chinese researchers.

“The fact that Jeffrey Sachs wrote the article shows that people are tired of making apologies for Peter Daszak’s egregious conflicts of interest,” Nemzer said.

Now, Sachs is singing a different tune. In the PNAS article, he and Harrison point out a number of coincidences that seem too strange to explain away under the natural origin theory. SARS-CoV-2 has a sequence of eight amino acids on its spike protein that are exactly identical to an amino acid sequence vital for human lung function. The closest bats in the wild that carry similar coronaviruses are at least 1,000 miles away from Wuhan, where the first outbreak of the pandemic occurred. In 2014, Baric, EHA and WIV received a grant from NIAID to enhance the infectiousness of bat-based coronaviruses.

“Blanket denials from the NIH are no longer good enough. Although the NIH and USAID have strenuously resisted full disclosure of the details of the EHA-WIV-UNC work program, several documents leaked to the public or released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have raised concerns,” Sachs and Harrison write.

“These research proposals make clear that the EHA-WIV-UNC collaboration was involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented SARS-like viruses and was engaged in their manipulation within biological safety level (BSL)-2 and BSL-3 laboratory facilities, raising concerns that an airborne virus might have infected a laboratory worker.”

There was already one U.S.-led investigation into COVID-19’s origins. In 2021, President Joe Biden ordered an intelligence community investigation which ultimately turned up nothing conclusive. But the methods used and materials reviewed in that investigation, the PNAS article points out, have not been made public.

The momentum for a second look, this time from independent observers, is growing. “EcoHealth Alliance, USAID, DTRA, and the NIH have made it clear that they will not voluntarily release unredacted information to, and will not voluntarily cooperate with, members of Congressional oversight committees. The Perspective by Sachs and Harrison will not change their position.,” Rutgers University microbiologist Dr. Richard Ebright told the Daily Caller.

“The target audiences for the Perspective by Sachs and Harrison are not EcoHealth Alliance, USAID, DTRA, and the NIH. The target audiences are the National Academy of Sciences, the White House, and the majority party in Congress, which, to date, have resisted calls for an investigation with subpoena power and compelled testimony.”

https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/24/wuhan-institute-virology-coronavirus-covid-lab-leak-daszak-baric

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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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World sugar export troubles creates unique opportunity

While I have some sympathy with the thoughts below, I think he is misinformed. I think that subsidies to sugar marketing are a problem, but the big problem remains that the cost of production is much less in the tropics than anywhere in the USA.

Sugarcane is a tropical crop. It is a huge, fast-growing grass that is full of sugar. You just have to crush it and sugary water flows out of it. The American custom of getting sugar out of corn is much harder and more costly.

And there is never likely to be any shortage of sugar. Sugarcane is grown up and down the long East coast of tropical and subtropical Australia and, because sugarcane grows so quickly that could be greatly expanded almost overnight.

There is no doubt that American sugar would vanish overnight without political protection. And unsubsidized sugar from Australia and elsewhere would rapidly fill the gap. Australia did once subsidize its sugar exports but that is long gone. So the economically rational way forward for America would simply be to drop its subsidies and insist that any sugar imported must be unsubsidized.

Sadly, under such a system American sugar production would cease. And the uproar from existing American sugar producers would be huge. Change would therefore almost certainly be politically too difficult


Rick Manning

For years major U.S. domestic sugar users like the candy industry, have pushed for the elimination of the U.S. government sugar price support system with the goal of flooding the market with sugar from around the world.

Now Americans should realize why this was a spectacularly bad idea absent mutual agreements to end subsidies for major producers. India, the second largest exporter of sugar, has just announced that they are capping the amount of sugar they will export partially due to food shortage concerns.

This follows announcements coming out of Brazil, that the world’s largest sugar exporter is cancelling sugar export contracts, diverting their sugar cane to ethanol production. The Brazilian decision is driven by high energy prices, altering the amount of sugar available on the world market.

The good news is that U.S. sugar production remains strong, but the bad news is that in 2020, the U.S. accounted for 8.3 percent of the world’s sugar imports, about one–third of the total consumed in the States.

If not for robust American sugar production, the costs of foodstuffs containing the natural sweetener in our country would be skyrocketing, proving the value of not putting sugar market at the mercy of heavily subsidized foreign sugar exporters.

Interestingly, the limitations and retrenching of some of the world’s largest sugar producers creates a unique opportunity for the Biden administration to restore honesty to the international sugar market.

It is much easier to convince countries to end their sugar subsidies in an environment where they are restricting or ending balance of trade enhancing exports, than in the face of rapidly expanding subsidized export policies, and this provides the opening that many in favor of ending sugar subsidies intelligently have been waiting to occur.

Congressmen Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) and Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) have legislation which, if passed, would trigger a process for the U.S. government to end the domestic sugar program once the president certifies that major sugar exporting trade partners have agreed to end their price distorting subsidies.

Called Zero for Zero, the resolution has never been more pertinent as the choices being made by the top two sugar exporters provide an open door to negotiating away their subsidies.

Every American knows that systems seem to be breaking everywhere without any rational explanation. In the case of this one agriculture program, the global supply chain shock may just provide the foundation for ending it.

Wouldn’t that be refreshing if the calamitous Joe Biden term of office led to achieving one of American conservatives long-held goals – ending the sugar program and creating a level playing field for American farmers to compete.

https://dailytorch.com/2022/05/world-sugar-exports-roiled-creates-unique-opportunity/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=d76f3f7b-1b10-4179-8a0d-ed7a743f077d

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Canadians going hungry?

On the cusp of summer, the cold, hard edge of hunger is hitting North America. At a time when experts are warning about global food shortages, a new report from Canada says individuals living on government benefits are being forced to live with less.

Stephen Jones, 56, told the Toronto Globe and Mail that Canada’s inflation has forced him to change his shopping habits with an eye on price. Sometimes, even that is not enough.

“Sometimes, by the end of the month, before we’re getting to the due date for the money, I’m down to maybe just a very small meal once a day,” he said, according to the newspaper.

“I am almost on the verge of having to skip meals altogether in a day,” he said.

Jones is living on $1,200 a month in disability benefits (about $940 in U.S. currency), which have supported him for the past 15 years after he had to give up his career in finance due to debilitating depression. But times have changed.

Although at 6.8 percent, Canada’s April inflation rate trailed the 8.3 percent rate of the United States under the Biden administration, it was a 31-year high. Grocery prices rose 10 percent year over year; the highest spike since 1981, the Globe and Mail reported.

Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank, had about 160,0000 visits in March, a record high and a 134 percent increase compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to the newspaper.

“People have gotten to the end of their savings, they’re going into debt,” Neil Hetherington, chief executive officer at Daily Bread said, told the Globe and Mail. “And so they’re going to be turning to food banks even more.”

Jones knows his day will come. “I know that these places are very accommodating and non-judgmental, but there’s an element of shame in doing that,” he told the newspaper. “But at some point, yes, I am definitely going to have to go to a food bank,” he said.

Canadian agriculture expert Kim McConnell, of Okotoks, told Edmonton Journal columnist David Staples in April that many other Canadians are likely to find themselves in the same position. “There’s going to be a lot of hungry people,” she said.

Another expert, Valerie Tarasuk, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto, told the Canadian Television Network last week that more and more of the country is likely to face food insecurity.

“As prices of basic commodities rise, it’s very worrisome to think that we have such a large swath of the Canadian population sitting in circumstances are insufficient to come up with the costs,” Tarasuk said.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/canadians-starting-go-hungry-food-prices-soar-barely-able-afford-one-meal-day

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Are the Democrats losing silicon valley?

Barack Obama’s White House hosted so many Google executives that it was seen as a satellite office. The company’s chairman Eric Schmidt campaigned vocally for Obama’s election, and during Obama’s eight years in power, a Google employee visited the White House on average once a week.

Democrat ties to Silicon Valley did not stop at a single company. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s number two, worked for the Clinton administration. Obama’s political strategist David Plouffe went on to work for Uber and Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable foundation. The former president’s press secretary, Jay Carney, is now a senior executive at Amazon.

Elon Musk’s Tesla survived in its early days partly through hundreds of millions of dollars of Obama-era loans.

But in recent months, the once-strong ties between US Democrats and Silicon Valley, the new heart of American corporate power, have broken down. In the last week, the tech industry’s two wealthiest individuals have attacked Joe Biden’s party, while a growing number of senior figures have questioned the administration.

“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”

Earlier this month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launched a rare political intervention, attacking Biden over his record on inflation. In response to Biden calling for higher taxes on corporations to fight price rises, Bezos accused the US president of “misdirection”.

“Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent,” he added.

For years, Silicon Valley and its workers appeared to be natural allies of the US Left. The web’s pioneers boasted of libertarian ideals and the end of censorship, an antidote to conservative fears over violent video games and rap music that paralleled its rise. Its workers were primarily young, university-educated and socially liberal.

Santa Clara County, the home of Apple, Google and Facebook, voted for Republicans Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, but has swung blue in every presidential race since 1988.

It became a mutually beneficial relationship. For Democrats, Silicon Valley was the acceptable face of capitalism, mission-driven, vibrant and diverse, not to mention a huge source of funds. Silicon Valley donations to Obama in 2012 outpaced those to Mitt Romney roughly tenfold. In turn, the Clinton and Obama administrations brought light-touch regulation, such as the Section 230 protections that broadly granted legal immunity to social networks. In 2012, the Obama administration decided not to bring monopoly abuse charges against Google, and waved through acquisitions such as Facebook’s takeover of Instagram.

Tech’s Right-wing only occasionally stuck their head above the parapet. Former eBay boss Meg Whitman unsuccessfully ran for California governor as a Republican in 2010. When Peter Thiel, a PayPal founder and early Facebook investor, spoke in support of Donald Trump at 2016’s Republican National Convention, he became a pariah to much of the tech industry.

The Biden White House has been more hostile to tech companies and their owners, however. Biden has accused companies such as Facebook of “killing people” for not regulating Covid posts more strictly. He has also appointed a string of senior officials who have called for Big Tech to be broken up, such as Tim Wu and Lina Khan, two stars of the antitrust movement.

Biden has also strongly supported unions, putting him in conflict with the likes of Amazon and Tesla. The Tesla billionaire has also grumbled at Biden’s apparent reluctance to credit his company with driving the electric vehicle revolution, while heaping praise on Ford and General Motors.

In contrast, Trump cut taxes on the huge stashes of overseas funds that Apple, Google and Microsoft held, which were returned to grateful shareholders.

But it is Democrats’ tax policies that have caused the biggest stir among Silicon Valley’s wealthiest. Last year, US senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren proposed taxing the richest 700 Americans on their unrealised gains, such as the soaring value of their shares. The plan was scuppered by moderate Democrats but earned Musk’s ire.

“Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you,” he wrote in October. Later, he sold 10 per cent of his Tesla shares, resulting in a tax bill of about $US11 billion. “I’m paying the largest amount of tax of any individual in history,” he said.

Zach Graves, executive director of the Lincoln Network, a technology policy group, says: “There has always been a libertarian kind of flair in Silicon Valley, but sometimes that’s been more underground. They don’t wear it on their sleeve. The convention that Silicon Valley leans pretty strongly to the Left is right. But you do see notable exceptions.

“People have become more successful, maybe they have had their exit [a major payday such as an IPO]. They feel more comfortable in their political views.”

A string of top Silicon Valley investors such as Paul Graham, the Welsh born founder of Y Combinator, and Marc Andreessen, the head of one of Silicon Valley’s top venture firms A16Z, have become more outspoken about Left-wing censorship.

“It used to be that censorship was something the Right did, and free speech was something the Left were in favour of. But over the last few decades, banning ‘problematic’ ideas has become a huge component of Left culture,” Graham wrote last month.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/tech-billionaires-turn-on-biden-and-his-party-of-hate-20220520-p5amyn.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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How are doctors unravelling the mystery of long COVID?

Six months after physiotherapist Scott Willis became one of Australia’s first COVID-19 patients, something strange happened in a swimming pool. One moment he was doing laps, the next he could barely move his arms and legs. “I just ran out of steam. I can pinpoint it to the second,” Willis says. “If I didn’t have the rope to grab on to, if I’d been out in the ocean, what would have happened?”

That bone-deep exhaustion, which can hit suddenly or linger all day, is the most common sign of what has become known as long COVID, in which illness strikes again or drags on months after a COVID-19 infection. But about 200 other symptoms have been linked to it too – sometimes entirely new ones such as confusion and hallucinations, heart palpitations, seizures and sexual dysfunction. So-called long-haulers have likened the condition to “a living death”. Many are too tired to work – or get out of bed.

Millions of people have been affected by long COVID – even many of the clinicians treating it, such as Willis. And that list is only expected to grow. Some researchers expect long COVID cases in Australia to hit 10,000 by the end of the year. Yet, more than two years into the pandemic (and at least 18 months into the condition for Willis), long COVID remains something of a medical mystery.

Is it a new phenomenon or a syndrome like chronic fatigue on a bigger scale? Are some people more at risk of developing the condition than others? What might be going on in the body? And what treatments are being tried?

What is long COVID?

Not long after Willis first fell ill with COVID in Tasmania in early 2020, doctors on the other side of the world, at New York’s Mount Sinai Health Network, noticed something odd. Hospitals had been so overwhelmed during the pandemic’s first wave that Dr David Putrino had set up an app for Mount Sinai doctors to monitor less severe COVID patients remotely, including their oxygen levels. Some were still reporting symptoms months after getting sick.

Putrino says: “People would tell us, ‘Look, I don’t have these acute COVID symptoms any more, but I’m not myself. I’ve got heart palpitations. If I carry my groceries up the stairs, I’m knocked out for two days.’ That was our first inkling long COVID existed.”

Mount Sinai was then setting up a post-COVID recovery hub for patients they expected would need more time to recover – those with lung scarring and other organ damage from a particularly severe infection, or complications from long stays in intensive care. Dr Neha Dangayach, who runs neurological intensive care for Mount Sinai, says: “You can get neurological issues, delirium, or take a long time to bounce back from something like sepsis. But this was something else.”

Most of the patients, particularly those with neurological symptoms, had suffered only mild or moderate cases of COVID-19, and they hadn’t been hospitalised. Often their scans were normal.

Given the virus can affect so much of the body, it is perhaps not surprising that long COVID comes with a strange constellation of symptoms too.

As more cases emerged around the world, experts at Mount Sinai and elsewhere began looking for answers – and patients banded together online to share stories and push back against scepticism about the new condition.

Professor Gail Matthews and her colleagues at the Kirby Institute in Sydney were among the first to set up a long-COVID study, at St Vincent’s Hospital. Some patients, she says, will find themselves struggling with just one persistent COVID-19 symptom – a loss of smell and taste, for example. Others show signs their entire nervous system is affected.

COVID presents as a respiratory illness but samples of the virus behind it (SARS CoV-2) have been discovered all over the body – in the lungs, heart and other organs, including, in rare cases, the brain. It can cause clots and stroke, strange rashes, heart, kidney or liver failure, even inflamed, red “COVID toes”. Among survivors, the risk of cardiovascular disease is likely to remain high for months, even years.

Given the virus can affect so much of the body, Matthews says it is perhaps not surprising that long COVID comes with a strange constellation of symptoms too, “though I have found the neurological ones especially surprising”.

In late 2021, the World Health Organisation defined long COVID as occurring in people with “a history of probable or confirmed SARS CoV-2 infection, usually three months from the onset of COVID-19” with symptoms that last for at least two months and cannot be explained by anything else.

Putrino says that with so little understood about the condition, it is right for long COVID to remain a fairly broad church, ranging from those recovering from severe infections to people with sudden neurological symptoms down the road. (In rarer cases, someone may even be affected by both lingering complications and a flare-up of long COVID.)

“We don’t want anyone to fall through the gaps,” he says. “People need insurance cover, access to care. Of course, it also means people might have different treatment [paths]. Some might spontaneously get better, some might not.”

Who is affected by long COVID?

More than 500 million people have now had COVID-19 but no one knows how many long-haulers are among them (some researchers estimate it’s already more than 100 million). So far, while most COVID-19 patients seem to recover, it’s thought that at least 10 to 30 per cent of cases become ongoing – and the risk is about halved if you’re vaccinated. (Recent British data tracking long COVID suggests that fewer than a third of patients fully recover within a year of catching the virus.)

Mount Sinai’s long-COVID clinic has now treated more than 2000 patients, from the bed-bound to the “milder” cases of people who can still work “but they have to lie on the couch all night to recover from the day”, says Putrino. The average age is 45. “In fact, you’re less likely to show up at the clinic if you’re over 65. We don’t know why. And I think that there are a lot of people out there with long-COVID symptoms who don’t know it because they are, fortunately, mild. Some maybe didn’t even know they had COVID.”

Recently, when the hospital was recruiting patients for a clinical trial of those who had fully recovered from COVID, it hit a snag. “Sixty per cent of people who said they had recovered still had symptoms,” says Putrino. “They were like, ‘Oh yeah, I am fatigued, and my heart does beat fast and that never happened before’, whereas only 1 per cent of the control group who had never had COVID failed the symptom screen.”

Why do some vaccinated people catch COVID and how severe is it?

While you don’t need a severe case of COVID to develop the ongoing condition, one study suggests that having a high viral load (a lot of virus replicating in your system) during your initial infection can push up your risk of long COVID; as can type 2 diabetes, certain “auto-antibodies” that mistakenly attack the body instead of the virus, or a reawakened case of the usually fairly harmless Epstein-Barr virus many people catch in childhood.

There is also a skew towards women in the data. Matthews says: “That could be because women tend to go to the doctor more or because women have different immunology.”

Long COVID can emerge in children too, although as with a regular COVID infection, this is much rarer.

Researchers are not sure if long COVID rates have fluctuated as the virus mutates into different variants, but Putrino says he has found the symptoms fairly consistent between waves. “We’re still getting Delta long COVID into the clinic now. Omicron is only starting.”

Australia, along with many countries, does not track long COVID numbers. But in data released in April by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 42 of the more than 5000 COVID deaths then officially registered since the pandemic began were considered to be due to long COVID.

What might be causing it?

Such a broad spectrum of symptoms and patients makes long COVID a particularly puzzling knot to unpick for scientists. “You do have to be like detectives,” says Matthews.

She and her team have already found one smoking gun of sorts – significant biological markers of inflammation in the blood of people with ongoing symptoms compared with those who have fully recovered from COVID or from other mild coronaviruses that cause colds. These markers are cytokines – proteins that command the immune system’s defences during a viral attack. You might have heard of a cytokine storm where “overzealous” immune cells damage the body as they wage war on an infection, causing inflammation and sometimes serious harm in the fallout.

“We normally see lots of cytokines during acute infection, and then they go away,” says Matthews. “So this finding really validated that these people do still have something going on. And it explains some of the symptoms, the aches and pains, the fatigue.”

When we get sick, a lot of our symptoms are not caused by the virus directly but by the body’s immune system fighting back. (That’s why the aftermath of a COVID vaccine, which also activates the immune system, can sometimes feel like a short bout of the virus.)

Putrino says there has even been evidence of cytokine storms during otherwise mild or “silent” (asymptomatic) infections. “Suddenly, patients will present with blood clots because the [cytokines] were disrupting the usual clotting mechanism in cells.” And in very rare cases, infected children have presented with dangerous hyper-inflammation similar to toxic shock or Kawasaki disease.

Given COVID is a new virus to humanity, scientists say it makes sense that it stirs up such a strong immune reaction. But they are trying to determine why this appears to stay “switched on” or reawaken as it does in long COVID patients – in patterns that look remarkably similar to autoimmune conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Could the virus be lurking in our bodies for longer than usual?

“Am I saying antivirals will cure all long COVID? Probably not. And, really, long COVID could be 10 different things.”

If the virus is still attacking or disrupting the body, perhaps hiding out in tissue or the gut, this could itself explain some symptoms. Researchers have been able to detect SARS-CoV-2 in patients’ faeces seven months after an infection and, at times during autopsy, viral particles in patient brains. Dangayach says one hypothesis is that SARS-CoV-2 could be infiltrating the brain stem (the control centre of the autonomic nervous system), causing inflammation or disrupting regular breathing and heart rhythms. Inflammation in both the brain and spinal cord (such as the kind that affects patients with the autoimmune condition multiple sclerosis) can be difficult to spot on regular scans. Some researchers now want to trial antivirals that attack the virus directly in long-COVID patients.

Of course, any lingering virus could be dead already – and just being misinterpreted by the immune system as a threat. “You could have people who still have spike proteins floating around, perhaps in their connective tissue, which then leads to chronic inflammation,” Putrino says. “Or you could be someone who just has persistent virus in their gut, and if you take an antiviral that virus will clear. But am I saying antivirals will cure all long COVID? Probably not. And, really, long COVID could be 10 different things.”

He points to research from Africa that has found persistent micro-clots in long-COVID patients, missed by regular tests but that appear to respond to medication. Dangayach says that not only can this trap inflammatory molecules, but blood vessel changes of this kind can affect the energy and oxygen levels in our cells.

At Yale University, another leader in long-COVID research, scientists put patients with persistent breathlessness but otherwise normal scans through more intensive testing and found that oxygen was not being extracted by the cells in their muscles properly, leaving them more exhausted. Meanwhile, the Mount Sinai team has noticed that long-COVID patients tend to breathe out less carbon dioxide than usual – generally seen in people hyperventilating.

“We have all these breadcrumbs, and sometimes they come together,” says Putrino. “If the cells can’t produce enough energy, they are producing less carbon dioxide too as a byproduct, so that might explain why it’s low in their expired air.”

Meanwhile, a healthy breath into the diaphragm stimulates the vagus nerve, the backbone of the autonomic nervous system, helping regulate breathing, heart rate, blood pressure and more. “If you do breath work, many people will show improvement, but that’s just treating a symptom,” says Putrino. “All of these signs could be just symptoms. We’re still hunting for the underlying pathology.”

Is it like an autoimmune disease or chronic fatigue?
One concern at the back of Putrino’s mind is that the virus has tipped some people, perhaps with an underlying susceptibility, into an autoimmune condition. These conditions are still being understood by science but often involve the body producing “auto-antibodies” that disrupt the normal functioning of the immune system. Sometimes, they are accompanied by dysautonomia, where the autonomic nervous system is out of whack.

Someone with dysautonomia might get heart palpitations, dizziness and breathlessness after exerting themselves, or even standing up suddenly, as the body’s flight-or-fight response is tripped. This is common among long-COVID patients, including roughly 70 per cent of those at the Mount Sinai clinic.

Some long-haulers speak of an “exertion threshold” beyond which they are engulfed by a storm of symptoms – fatigue, brain fog, breathlessness. Willis hit it in that swimming pool 18 months ago. He now helps train his physiotherapy patients to find their own long-COVID limits and gradually extend or manage them. “Sometimes, I feel like my legs will just give way,” he says. “I can’t walk. I’ve played sport all my life and I’ve never had this before.”

“We could be staring down the barrel of [more widespread] autoimmunity, people who had maybe felt off but always had normal blood work, until now.”

In the absence of clear data, many doctors are trying to learn more by seeing how patients respond to treatment. Putrino says autonomic nervous system rehab has given many of his long-COVID patients at least partial symptomatic relief – not only breathing exercises but wearing compression tights on the lower body to help regulate blood pressure, or sometimes taking salt to increase blood volume. “Still, it’s not a cure. We could be staring down the barrel of [more widespread] autoimmunity, people who had maybe felt off but always had normal blood work, until now.”

Of course, even before COVID-19, an unlucky few were known to develop mysterious conditions, including fatigue, after viral infections – from Ebola to the flu. There are even reports of this kind of “post-viral syndrome” after the world’s last great pandemic, Spanish flu in 1918. In the past year, scientists have found multiple sclerosis is probably caused not just by genetic predisposition but by this kind of rare immune response to a virus too – in this case Epstein-Barr, which most people catch but do not have such a reaction to. In those rare cases of people who do, it morphs into a degenerative autoimmune disease, shredding neurons, but, as long COVID appears to, it can also subside and then flare up again.

Meanwhile, many long COVID symptoms, including dysautonomia, mirror those seen in people with chronic fatigue syndrome, an under-researched area of medicine, according to many in the field. Chronic fatigue, which mostly affects women, is usually thought to be triggered by a viral infection (glandular fever, for example) and is characterised by debilitating fatigue that lasts for at least six months.

Many experts believe unravelling the mystery of long COVID will help unlock the underlying mechanisms behind many of these other disorders – not to mention overhaul our understanding of the immune system itself. Dangayash is not surprised that many chronic-fatigue sufferers feel vindicated by the focus on long COVID – never has a post-viral condition been studied on this scale. “Perhaps there is something going on that makes people susceptible to this kind of [autoimmunity]?”

Or it may be that COVID is especially good at stimulating post-viral conditions, Matthews says. “There may be something about the shape of the virus, the way it’s crumpled up and presents itself to the immune system, that really sets this off.”

Putrino agrees there is probably something about this SARS-CoV-2, whether it is its penchant for binding so well to ACE2 receptors (found throughout the body) or just “because it is so novel”. “But it seems to be affecting the immune system in a way that other viruses don’t necessarily do, or do far less frequently. We keep finding abnormal lab findings in people with long COVID, even if they’re not always the same signs.”

Does long COVID affect the brain?

At the Royal Melbourne Hospital, when COVID patients started returning with fresh neurological complaints – difficulty concentrating, memory concerns, insomnia and headaches – many found themselves at the door of neuropsychologist Associate Professor Charles Malpas. He has long worked with brain inflammation conditions such as MS, and is now among doctors trying to determine whether neurological symptoms of long COVID are caused by physical inflammation or damage in the brain itself or are flow-on effects of the condition elsewhere in the body.

So far, for the patients with milder long COVID who Malpas treats, it doesn’t look like direct damage – those who complain of memory lapses and brain fog can still pass cognitive impairment tests (although in Mount Sinai, Putrino says, many of his more severe cases cannot).

Studies have found inflammation and reduced blood flow in the brain of some long-COVID patients, which has also been seen in cases of chronic fatigue. But Malpas warns that we must be cautious when interpreting some studies published overseas that link COVID-19 to brain damage such as brain mass shrinkage and lower IQ scores, or even anecdotal cases of altered personality. Some patients recovering from severe COVID probably do have a form of brain damage caused by clots, neural inflammation or other complications of the infection, he says. But in most long-COVID patients there seem to be explanations elsewhere. “And we’re not really seeing things like impaired vision or weak limbs,” he says.

Brain fog, which Malpas describes as “the feeling of walking through mud while trying to think through a problem”, is common but can be intermittent, often brought on by exertion. (Willis says: “I find it comes on if I exercise too much; I can’t even tell my wife what I want for dinner.”)

The onset of insomnia or migraines post-COVID may also be to blame. “And when that’s treated, or the fatigue is managed then, typically, brain fog resolves as well,” Malpas says. “Still, that doesn’t mean other symptoms we’re seeing like anxiety don’t need treatment too.”

The brain is usually “the final frontier” for medicine, he says, and neurological symptoms often the hardest to pin to a root cause. “It’s a cognitive act to assess your own cognition. When people are bad, like with Alzheimer’s, they sometimes don’t report them at all. But there is a real danger too of dismissing symptoms as psychosomatic when they’re not.”

If there are structural or chemical changes happening in the brain (and elsewhere), it’s too early to say if they will be permanent. The brain is remarkably resilient in its ability to rewire and heal, after all. But Dangayach says even short-term signs of brain shrinkage underscore the urgent need for more research into long COVID. “Clearly, it’s not all in your head, right? In the 1970s, people thought MS was a psychiatric problem – it took decades to get where we are with treatments today. We shouldn’t make the same mistake.”

What is the treatment outlook?

In the 19th century, patients were expected to take a long time to recover from an illness and strict bed rest was often the tedious prescription of the day. In the modern era, doctors generally encourage us to get active again early into recovery, to ward off any other problems from staying put too long. But, in the case of COVID-19 – and particularly long COVID – exercise can have the opposite effect.

Willis, who is president of the Australian Physiotherapist Association, teaches fellow long-COVID sufferers to manage their energy budget wisely and scale up slowly, “things like vacuuming half a room at a time or not exercising on days you need to do the shopping”. His clients don’t fit one mould, although many were fit, healthy people before long COVID-19 hit. “This isn’t about fitness,” he says. Now, if they push themselves too hard, they’re often wiped out for days with a fresh surge of symptoms. “It can be one step forward, two steps back,” Willis says. “I, at least, can work and exercise. I can now swim 1½ to two kilometres before I hit my wall, [less than half] of what I used to. But I can’t get past that. Every time I think I can, I’m on my arse.”

Vaccination cuts the risk significantly. And some researchers are already testing or planning to test specific medications for long COVID.

Putrino reports only 10 to 15 per cent of his long-COVID patients feel they are now fully recovered but most have at least shown improvement, especially from autonomic nervous system rehabilitation (above). Since long COVID affects so many systems in the body, often in different ways, patients need support across disciplines, he says.

Vaccination cuts the risk significantly. And some researchers are already testing or planning to test specific medications for long COVID, say, to break up microclots, reduce viral reservoirs or inflammation in blood vessels, or to dampen the body’s immune reaction.

“When you don’t have a definitive answer, you treat the symptoms,” says Dangayach.

While the speed at which science developed safe, effective vaccines and treatments for the virus may have been extraordinary, Dangayach and Putrino say this new golden era of research funding has not flowed through into long COVID in the same way. And most countries are not tracking cases or ensuring insurers cover the condition. “It’s going to be a huge economic burden, not just a healthcare one,” Willis says.

“There was so much urgency and collaboration at the start,” Dangayach says. “But now is not the time to say, ‘We’ve had enough.’ Now, we’re in a survivorship crisis and the advances we make will decide health policy and outcomes for so many people hit by long COVID. We can’t step off the gas.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/how-are-doctors-unravelling-the-mystery-of-long-covid-20220420-p5aeux.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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