Sunday, May 15, 2022


Outrageous lie about vaccine from Biden team

The White House is walking back a tweet stating that claimed "there was no vaccine available" when President Biden took office, issuing a follow-up tweet on Friday night saying that it "misstated" the availability of COVID-19 vaccines in January 2021.

On Thursday, the official White House Twitter account tweeted "When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available."

The original tweet drew fierce criticism from other Twitter users, who pointed out that there was a COVID-19 vaccine available when Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021.

On Friday night, the White House tweeted that its original tweet "misstated that vaccines were unavailable in January 2021."

"We previously misstated that vaccines were unavailable in January 2021. We should have said that they were not widely available. Vaccines became available shortly before the President came into office. Since then, he’s responsible for fully vaccinating over 200 million people," the tweet from Friday night states.

While the White House corrected its tweet, the original version which states that there was "no vaccine available" when President Biden took office remains on the social media platform and has not been deleted.

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CDC is winging it again

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says it does not have documents backing its claim that COVID-19 vaccines do not cause variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.

The CDC’s website calls it a myth that the vaccines cause variants.

“FACT: COVID-19 vaccines do not create or cause variants of the virus that causes COVID-19. Instead, COVID-19 vaccines can help prevent new variants from emerging,” the website states.

“New variants of a virus happen because the virus that causes COVID-19 constantly changes through a natural ongoing process of mutation (change). As the virus spreads, it has more opportunities to change. High vaccination coverage in a population reduces the spread of the virus and helps prevent new variants from emerging,” it also says.

The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), a nonprofit, asked the CDC in Freedom of Information Act requests for documentation supporting the claim.

In one request, the group asked for “All documents sufficient to support that COVID-19 vaccines do not create or cause variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.”

Another requested “All documents sufficient to support that the immunity conferred by COVID-19 vaccines does not contribute to virus evolution and the emergence of variants.”

The CDC has now responded to both requests, saying a search “found no records responsive” to them.

The first response came in January (pdf); the second came on May 4 (pdf).

If the CDC is making declaratory statements, the agency should have documents supporting them, Aaron Siri, an attorney representing ICAN, told The Epoch Times.

The responses are “very troubling,” Siri said. “I thought the CDC was a data-driven organization, that they made their decisions based on the studies and the science and the data.”

The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.

ICAN has been one of the more prolific requesters of information from the CDC during the pandemic. Many requests have yielded information. Others have not.

In this case, the CDC should act to ensure continued public trust, Siri says.

“Remove the language or provide the evidence,” he said. “There obviously are going to be instances where recommendations from the CDC might prove helpful or useful. And I think they do a disservice to everybody by hurting their own credibility by making statements that they either don’t have support or won’t produce the support for.”

Scientists outside the CDC have also said that vaccines can help prevent new variants.

“As more people get vaccinated, we expect virus circulation to decrease, which will then lead to fewer mutations,” the World Health Organization says on its site.

But many of the claims relied on the vaccines being able to stop infection from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19. The vaccines are increasingly unable to do so, particularly against the newest dominant strain, Omicron.

Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a virologist, is among those who say that the vaccines themselves are behind new variants.

“All COVID-19 vaccines fail in blocking viral transmission, especially transmission of more infectious variants. This is a huge problem as viral transmission is now increasingly taking place among healthy people in general and vaccinees in particular (as their S-specific Abs do not sufficiently neutralize S variants),” Vanden Bossche says on his website. “The resulting suboptimal S-directed immune pressure serves as a breeding ground for even more infectious variants.”

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Biden promises to boost U.S. wheat production to combat loss of Ukrainian, Russian wheat exports, but production here is down 15 percent since 2019

President Joe Biden is promising to boost U.S. production of wheat to offset the loss of Ukrainian and Russian exports from the Black Sea thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that has shut down the ports there, stating at a farm in Illinois on May 11 that he would extend crop insurance for farmers who double crop in a bid to get more wheat to market this year.

But will Biden’s plan even work? U.S. wheat production is down 15 percent since 2019, from 1.93 billion bushels in 2019 to 1.64 billion in 2021, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Overall, the U.S. produces a little more than half of what it did in 1981, when it produced more than 75 million metric tons. That was down to 44.8 million in 2021.

The domestic wheat shortfall last year was thanks to major drought conditions that severely impacted production in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota, another hit to global food production that could not come at a worse time.

The biggest part of the problem is not enough has been planted. According to a March Department of Agriculture release on prospective plantings, 2022 will be the fifth lowest area planted since 1919: “All wheat planted area for 2022 is estimated at 47.4 million acres, up 1 percent from 2021. If realized, this represents the fifth lowest all wheat planted area since records began in 1919.”

Is Biden’s crop insurance program enough to avert potential starvation in the third world and beyond?

Given current conditions — Biden also complained in his speech that the spring had been very cool this year and that there was less time to plant more wheat this year — it appears unlikely the U.S. will be able to boost production to even get back to 2019 levels, let alone to offset drops in Ukrainian and Russian exports. Meaning, the worst may be yet to come.

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The United Nations is a paper tiger

Like the League of Nations before it. Internationalism is a foolish dream

“Where is the peace that the United Nations was created to guarantee?” That’s the pointed question Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the U.N. Security Council during a video speech on April 5 in response to Russia’s war on his country

The urgency of his questions needs no explanation. Vladimir Putin has decided Ukraine belongs to Russia, and there are no boundaries, treaties, or warnings that will prevent him from waging war to make it so. At this point, why should Ukraine’s President, or anyone else, have much confidence that the “international community” will stop this war?

More broadly, loss of faith in governing authorities is the defining story of our era. The U.S., the only nation that can project military power into every region of the world, has become its most politically dysfunctional major power. A third of Americans say Joe Biden is not a legitimately elected President. Europeans have lost faith too. In 2016, Britain voted its way out of the E.U., and antiestablishment, xenophobic parties of the far right shifted the politics inside many European states.

In fact, the entire international system is increasingly in question. China has advanced from impoverished to powerhouse over four decades and increasingly rejects the right of Westernled institutions to make and enforce international rules. Strongmen have emerged in Russia, India, Turkey, and even E.U. members Hungary and Poland to challenge principles of freedom of the press, democratic checks and balances, and minority rights. Few in any country have faith the U.N. can do much more than help care for and feed the refugees fleeing conflicts no one can resolve.

There’s a lot to be said for the idea that crises create opportunities that mustn’t be wasted. It’s true that our world has faced a stream of shocks in recent years: the 2008 global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the 2015–2016 tidal wave of migrants into Europe, Brexit, the rise of angry populists in Europe and America, and then the worst pandemic in 100 years. None of these events has created a new sense of unity and purpose.

Now Russia has invaded Ukraine. War is killing civilians by the thousands, more than 5 million refugees have headed west in more than two months of fighting, NATO and Russia have moved to high alert, and fuel and food prices around the world are surging.

It’s no one’s fault the system is failing. Order and disorder are cyclical forces. The U.N. and institutions like the World Bank and IMF were built atop the ashes of a war that ended 77 years ago. That’s why Germany and Japan, wealthy and dynamic free- market democracies committed to multilateralism and the rule of law, had no seats at the table for Zelensky’s speech to the Security Council—and why Russia did.

The international system is broken. To fix it, the world needs a crisis. It was the crisis of World War II that created institutions and alliances that helped keep the peace and invest in global development for decades after. Putin’s war on Ukraine has created the biggest geopolitical emergency since the Cold War’s end. The Russian government has even threatened the use of nuclear weapons and warned of World War III.

Can this crisis bolster dying institutions and create new ones?

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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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