New COVID variants BA.4 and BA.5 now make up over HALF of US cases as experts fear strains will fuel another summer surge

New COVID-19 variants are starting to rise in the United States, with the highly feared BA.4 and BA.5 strains now making up around half of active cases in the nation - according to most recently available sequencing data.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed Tuesday that the strains combine for 52 percent of sequenced cases during the week that ended on June 25 - combining to overtake the previously dominant BA 2.12.1 strain.

Both strains are believed to have originated in South Africa, where the original Omicron strain was first spotted as well. Unlike previous sub-variants of the highly infectious strains, they are believed to be capable of evading natural immunity provided by previous Omicron infection.

This presents a great challenge for health officials, as many that should be safe from infection for months into the future may suddenly get unexpectedly re-infected and spark another surge.

These variants' rise have not made much of an impact on case figures yet, though. Daily infections have increased 10 percent to 109,384 per day, a range it has remained in for the last month. The U.S. is also recorded 398 deaths per day, a 14 percent week-over-week increase.

The BA.5 variant now makes up 36.6 percent of sequenced cases, according to the CDC, only trailing BA 2.12.1 (42 percent of sequenced cases) as the nation's most prevalent strain. BA.4, which shares many of the same traits as BA.5, makes up 15.7 percent of cases.

Every single sequenced cases in the U.S. is a form of the Omicron variant as the highly infectious strain that emerged in late 2021 has snuffed out other versions of the virus.

The once-dominant BA.2 'stealth' variant now makes up less than six percent of Covid cases in the U.S. The original BA.1 Omicron strain is no longer being detected.

The strains have alarmed health officials after early data from South Africa showed that natural immunity a person has from a previous infection is not as effective against them as it is other strains.

While their rise has not yet impacted national case figures, some experts are warning that more localized outbreaks are on the way.

In New York City, Dr Jay Varma, former public health advisor to Mayor Bill de Blasio, warns that BA.5 could the reason case figures in the nation's largest city are no longer declining.

'The decline of reported [COVID-19] cases in NYC has stopped. Reported cases are at a high plateau, which means actual transmission is very high when you account for the >20x under-counting. This is likely the beginning of a BA.5 wave,' he said in a tweet.

According to CDC data, BA.5 makes up nearly one-in-three cases in the New York and New Jersey region. BA.4 makes up nearly 12 percent of cases while BA 2.12.1 remains dominant.

Unlike usual Covid strains, which take root along the east coast before spreading west over time, these two strains have taken root on the other side of the country first.

BA.5 makes up 36 percent of sequenced cases along the west coast and 38 percent in the Pacific Northwest. It is most prevalent in in the Dust Bowl, where it makes up 41 percent of sequenced cases and the southwest, where it is at 40 percent.

New strains that break the general rules of the pandemic - that once a person is infected they can not catch the virus again for some time - change the calculus of the virus response.

Fearing the new strains, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to roll out newly formulated COVID-19 vaccines that specifically target the Omicron variant.

By a 19-2 vote, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) approved plans to rollout newly formulated vaccines this fall - citing the vaccine resistant traits of the Omicron variant.

All currently available versions of the COVID-19 vaccines are formulated to the original Wuhan strain that emerged two years ago.

While they are still effective at preventing severe infection or death in a majority of cases, the Omicron variant has mutated in a way to avoid front end protection from infection.

This change allows for both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to begin distribution of newly formulated shots that should be able to prevent infection from the Omicron variant - along with previous versions of the virus.

The FDA is expected to follow the lead of its advisors and issue emergency use authorization to the new jabs at some point this week.

After the FDA, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will also likely authorize the shots.

Dr Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the FDA's top regulatory body for vaccines, said Tuesday morning he hoped to make the new shots available as early as this October.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10965617/COVID-19-BA-4-BA-5-variants-make-HALF-cases.html

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The CDC is deceiving us again — this time covering up for unsafe hospitals

If you have to go to the hospital, you don’t want to end up in a dangerous one. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention knows which hospitals are riskiest, but it’s hiding that information from you — your safety be damned. The feds seem to think they work for the hospital industry, not for you.

Whenever a hospital has a superbug outbreak, the CDC conceals its identity, referring only to “Hospital A.” A lot of good that does patients looking for safe care, especially patients with compromised immune systems, cancer or HIV.

It’s no joke to find out, after you’re already in the hospital, that a superbug is raging room to room or has invaded the nursery where your newborn will be placed. That’s what happens when the CDC hides outbreaks.

Now the CDC is playing statistical tricks to hide how many people have caught COVID in hospitals and to block the public from seeing which hospitals have had the biggest problems — “partly on fears of embarrassing hospitals,” Politico reports.

The stakes are high; 21% of patients who catch COVID in the hospital never make it out, Kaiser Health News found — triple the death rate for patients who don’t catch COVID.

Though the pandemic may be fading, vulnerable patients need to know which hospitals proved proficient at preventing the spread of COVID inside their walls. It’s a safety measure.

Over the course of the pandemic, tens of thousands of patients went into the hospital for other reasons — such as hip surgery, kidney disease or a heart attack — and got infected with COVID.

The CDC is rigging the definition of hospital-acquired COVID to hide this problem.

The agency says only patients who test positive after being hospitalized at least 14 days are considered infected by the hospital. That eliminates almost everyone. The average patient stays only 4.6 days.

The CDC definition also excludes any patient who left the hospital and then developed symptoms or picked up the virus in the emergency room.

It’s a coverup. The United Kingdom and many European countries count COVID infections diagnosed seven or eight days after patients enter as hospital-acquired.

At some hospitals, more than 5% of patients caught COVID there, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of state data and Medicare billing data. The CDC refuses to name these hospitals, defying Freedom of Information Act requests from the media.

When a plane crashes, the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t conceal the identity of the airline. Why does the CDC cover up for a hospital?

To be fair, the pandemic hit some regions and some hospitals harder than others. But it’s also true that some hospitals took precautions to stop the virus from spreading and succeeded in providing safer care than others.

Some hospitals tested all incoming patients for the virus and retested days later to be sure. Testing proved critical, because most patients who contracted COVID in the hospitals got it from another patient. At Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, eight out of nine patients who became infected caught COVID from the patient sharing their room, per the Annals of Internal Medicine.

In January, during the Omicron surge, rates of hospital-acquired COVID were higher in New York than the national average, though lower than in Washington, DC, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of unpublished federal data. Trouble is, citywide averages don’t tell you what you need to know — the adequacy of infection prevention in your hospital.

It’s time to end the CDC’s secrecy in the service of hospitals. The CDC’s ploy to hide hospital-acquired COVID is a red flag.

Call the CDC the Centers for Deception and Coverups. The nation should be demanding a health agency that deals honestly with the public. If you have health problems, your life could depend on it.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/28/the-cdc-is-deceiving-us-again-by-covering-up-for-unsafe-hospitals/

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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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Doctors urge CDC to revise stringent COVID-19 measures for kids: They 'have been steamrolled'

During presidential remarks on COVID-19 vaccines for children under five-years-old, President Joe Biden alarmed folks on Twitter when he spoke of the government preparing for the 'second pandemic.'

Trying to help people who one signer said had been "steamrolled" by draconian COVID-19 guidelines, a letter from prominent medical professionals this week called on the Biden administration to strongly revise its mitigation guidelines for children.

"The most defenseless people in America have been steamrolled by many COVID policies," Dr. Marty Makary told Fox News Digital. "The last people in America to be forced to wear masks were waiters, waitresses and children… At this point, we need to stop the excessive restrictions that continue to harm children. And that's why I signed on."

Makary was one of the 29 doctors and scientists to sign the letter from Urgency of Normal, which was formed over concerns that continued COVID-19 measures for U.S. children are doing more harm than good and rejecting a holistic approach to pediatric health. Addressing White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha and Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, they declared the emergency phase of coronavirus is over and said it's time to restore "equitable and maximal access to education, sports, and social connectedness for all children. Their health and well-being depend on it."

"We strongly urge you to revise the CDC’s COVID-19 guidelines with regards to testing, isolation, and vaccine recommendations for children to ensure that public health policies are not doing more harm than good," their letter stated, led by Dr. Vinay Prasad and Dr. Lucy McBride. It was co-signed by dozens of parent organizations, many of them formed to urge school re-openings during the pandemic.

"Many European countries, U.S. states and Canadian provinces have already updated their COVID-19 policies to reflect that vaccines and infection-acquired immunity have reduced the risk of a severe COVID-19 outcome for youth, and to acknowledge that all mitigation measures have unintended consequences. Massachusetts, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, British Columbia and elsewhere have recommended an end to routine screening testing and mandatory isolation periods for children. Most have also eliminated any COVID-19 vaccine requirements for children to fully participate in public life."

Dr. Nicole Saphier, a Fox News contributor, also signed onto the letter.

"I would say the majority of Americans feel that COVID is in the rearview mirror for us. Our policies are not reflecting that," she told Fox News Digital.

Between widespread vaccinations, milder variants and protective natural immunity, coronavirus has become more of a bad cold for most people than anything truly severe, she said. Yet, there are still elementary schools sending children home for five days if they're positive for COVID-19, regardless of symptoms, and college students who can't stay on campus if they haven't been boosted.

"We have to get back to where we've always been with kids. Meaning, if your kid's sick, keep them home from school. If they're not, send them to school," Saphier said.

The letter harped on the ruinous consequences of prolonged school closures, which have included learning loss, widening achievement gaps between high- and low-income students, as well as rising mental health issues and long-term educational disruptions. Children have also been statistically at a scant risk of severe outcomes from the virus throughout the pandemic; according to the CDC, those aged 0-17 make up about 22.3 percent of the U.S. population but have accounted for about 0.1 percent of all COVID-19 deaths.

It's well past time for the Biden administration to get with the rest of the world and relax the stringent measures, the letter argued.

"We have never systematically screened and isolated children, nor forcibly excluded them from school or other activities, for other respiratory viruses," the letter stated. "Instead, affected individuals have been able to return to work or school as soon as they are fever-free for 24 hours and symptoms are improving, without testing. At this point, the CDC should recommend these same common-sense policies for COVID-19, as other nations have done, protecting high risk groups while facilitating unrestricted return to work and school."

Among their recommendations were to replace asymptomatic testing with a "test-to-treat" approach that focuses on treating vulnerable and immunocompromised youngsters, and rescind the CDC recommendation against vaccinating and boosting healthy, young people. The CDC continues to recommend "universal" indoor mask use in areas of high COVID transmission, "screening testing for high-risk activities such as indoor sports and extracurricular activities," and isolating for at least five days if unvaccinated and exposed to COVID-19.

The letter came the same week as the Biden administration scaled up efforts to vaccinate children under 5 years old, the last age group that has not been inoculated. Makary, a Johns Hopkins health policy expert and surgeon, questioned why there is a "disproportionate enthusiasm" around vaccinating kids under five years old.

"We see this lockstep, sort of toeing the party line that simply violates the very nature of a scientific forum," the Fox News contributor said. "There appears to be this agenda-driven series of policies that go against a large body of scientific data… Why are we immunizing children who are already immune? That's never made sense medically."

"Many medical COVID policies at institutions are being written by general counsels, lawyers who perceive that they cannot be out of step with CDC guidelines," he added. "One of the goals of the letter is to make it known that a large chorus of physicians, of respected physicians, have, just in perspective, looked at the comprehensive health and not just transmission of one virus. And the cure cannot be worse than the disease. We shut kids out of school, ignited a mental health crisis, all in the name of burning a village in order to save it. It's time for kids to get back to normal life. Population immunity is impeccably high."

"A lot of places are hiding behind the safety net of the CDC," Saphier said. "Well, if they do anything that goes against what the CDC says, and then something actually happens, they're concerned about liability, but this shouldn't be about liability. What about the liability of the harm that we have done to these children and people in general with these COVID policies?"

Makary and Saphier see media responsibility for the U.S. still being an "outlier" in its COVID mitigation measures. A study found last year that U.S. media coverage had been far more negative than its counterparts in the rest of the world, with drastic consequences, particularly for more liberal readers. HBO late-night host Bill Maher scolded the liberal press for "scaring the s--t" out of people and leading them to believe a COVID diagnosis was likely to land them in the hospital.

"There continues to be a blind parroting by the mainstream media of government doctors putting out dogmatic COVID policies," Makary said.

Saphier, whose book "Panic Attack" delved into what she called playing politics with science around COVID-19, said the media promulgated fear throughout the pandemic.

"As soon as more data became evident, it should have been, protect the vulnerable while the remaining country goes on," she said. "But again, they were very delayed in acknowledging this, and even in some places they are still not, as we are seeing the mandates in colleges and even the children, you still have children in preschool in New York City wearing masks when there's not one shred of evidence demonstrating a benefit. But there certainly is evidence demonstrating harm."

"At this point, it's clear that children are going to be most healthy if they are allowed to live their lives," Makary said.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/doctors-urge-cdc-revise-stringent-covid-19-measures-kids-they-have-been-steamrolled

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More Than 1M Voters Switch to GOP in Warning for Dems

A political shift is beginning to take hold across the U.S. as tens of thousands of suburban swing voters who helped fuel the Democratic Party’s gains in recent years are becoming Republicans.

More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year, according to voter registration data analyzed by The Associated Press. The previously unreported number reflects a phenomenon that is playing out in virtually every region of the country — Democratic and Republican states along with cities and small towns — in the period since President Joe Biden replaced former President Donald Trump.

But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa.

Ben Smith, who lives in suburban Larimer County, Colorado, north of Denver, said he reluctantly registered as a Republican earlier in the year after becoming increasingly concerned about the Democrats’ support in some localities for mandatory COVID-19 vaccines, the party’s inability to quell violent crime and its frequent focus on racial justice.

“It’s more so a rejection of the left than embracing the right,” said Smith, a 37-year-old professional counselor whose transition away from the Democratic Party began five or six years ago when he registered as a libertarian.

The AP examined nearly 1.7 million voters who had likely switched affiliations across 42 states for which there is data over the last 12 months, according to L2, a political data firm. L2 uses a combination of state voter records and statistical modeling to determine party affiliation. While party switching is not uncommon, the data shows a definite reversal from the period while Trump was in office, when Democrats enjoyed a slight edge in the number of party switchers nationwide.

But over the last year, roughly two-thirds of the 1.7 million voters who changed their party affiliation shifted to the Republican Party. In all, more than 1 million people became Republicans compared to about 630,000 who became Democrats.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/06/27/more_than_1m_voters_switch_to_gop_in_warning_for_dems_147806.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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Thank Trump for abortion decision

“This was not an easy thing to do, but I am very proud to have done it. Likewise, few would have had the courage to write about it.”

That was former President Donald Trump, responding on Truth Social to a piece by Breitbart.com’s John Nolte entitled, “Only the MAGA movement could have ended the atrocity of Roe v. Wade,” wherein Nolte makes the case that but for the election of Trump in 2016, and the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision Roe v. Wade would have never been overturned by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24.

In it, Nolte bluntly put it: “If you consider yourself a pro-life Republican and weren’t on the Trump Train in 2016, sit your pansy-ass down. Had you and your precious ‘principles’ won the day, Hillary Clinton would have appointed those three Supreme Court justices instead of Donald Trump, and the moral atrocity known as Roe v. Wade would still be a ‘constitutional right.’”

Nolte is right. If former President Trump had never been elected — particularly, if the Never Trump movement in the Republican Party had had its way as it sought to ensure Hillary Clinton would be elected — and this day would have never come.

Never forget.

Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were all appointed by Trump as Justices to the Supreme Court in 2017, 2018, and 2020, respectively, replacing Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginbsurg, reshaping the nation’s highest court and setting the stage for it to now, in the words of Marbury v. Madison, “to say what the law is.”

For that is all the philosophy of a judicial constitutionalist, either textualists or originalists, essentially entails. The Constitution enumerates certain powers to the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and protects other specifically enumerated rights, like the freedom of speech and of the press and of the right to peaceably assemble, the right to bear arms, the right to not be deprived of life, liberty or property in a criminal or civil context without due process of law, the right against cruel and inhumane punishment and others.

Abortion on the other hand was never an enumerated right in the Constitution. It was read into it as an implicit right by the Court in Roe and a string of decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut overturning a state law banning contraceptives — the so-called right to privacy cases — that created a jenga tower of precedents, all depending on a majority of liberal, activist judges to preserve, and beginning to fall as soon there wasn’t.

Griswold and Roe gave birth to the modern constitutionalist movement, a countervailing force that Ronald Reagan arguably institutionalized when he won the presidential election in 1980.

Since Reagan, Republican presidents have all contributed to the current majority on the Court that ruled to overturn Roe.

George H.W. Bush gave us Clarence Thomas. George W. Bush gave us John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the latter of whom penned the majority opinion in Dobbs. And Trump, with the leadership of then-Judiciary Committee Chairmen Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) first kept the Antonin Scalia seat vacant throughout 2016, and then brought on Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, who now combine for the current, solid 6-3 constitutionalist majority that overturned Roe.

That makes 2016 the critical moment. The tipping point where the work Reagan began was completed by Trump. And yet, in 2016, there was a political movement in the GOP that sought to ensure that former President Trump would never get the Republican Party nomination, and if he did, that he would never be elected.

They knew what they were doing, and what it would mean for the Supreme Court, and particularly any rulings on abortion, the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause, etc. if Clinton had won. Judicial activism would have reigned supreme.

https://dailytorch.com/2022/06/if-never-trump-had-had-its-way-roe-v-wade-would-have-never-been-overturned/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=2704c2d8-5ae2-426e-aa94-391bb96a5919

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Why the Left will cut Biden loose

Unlike the Trump administration’s successful four years, Mr. Biden’s tenure has been an utter disaster. There are no policy offsets to the personal liabilities and unpopularity of Mr. Biden himself.

Mr. Biden’s liabilities transcend his physical infirmities, his advanced age and his seeming geometric rather than an arithmetic rate of mental decline.

Mr. Biden, moreover, proves daily that he is not a nice guy. His excesses, past and present, are precisely those the left considers mortal sins.

Walking back Mr. Biden’s absurdities has become the nonstop, tiresome task of many on the left. As it faces a midterm disaster in November, many no longer see any compensating reasons not to drop Mr. Biden.

When the Republicans take the House of Representatives in 2022 there will be nonstop investigations of Hunter Biden’s alleged tax avoidances, his possibly illegal work as an unregistered foreign agent, and Mr. Biden’s untaxed compensation he received from the Biden lobbying consortium.

Consider also Mr. Biden’s nastiness.

During the 2020 campaign he personally attacked a young co-ed as a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” and a stocky questioner was reduced to “fat.”

Unlike former President Donald Trump’s art of the deal, exaggerations and distortions, Mr. Biden says things that are not simply untrue, but abjectly preposterous — such as the United States currently has a lower inflation rate than major European industrial powers.

In Mr. Biden’s world, there were no COVID-19 vaccinations until he took the oath of office. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the oil companies, the refiners or Mr. Trump is responsible for the historic crippling gasoline price hikes he caused by canceling drilling and pipeline projects.

Mr. Biden claims his negative-growth, hyperinflating economy is not disastrous but strong.

He serially lies that he drove a semi-truck. He has not been to the Middle East 38 times. He never received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Nor was he a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The MAGA movement is not the “most extreme political organization in American history.”

In other words, Mr. Biden reveals the same fantasies and plagiarism that ended his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

On matters of race and sexuality, Mr. Biden is the epitome of that for which the left, supposedly, has zero tolerance. Mr. Biden was infamous for damning with praise then-candidate Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” African American presidential candidate.

In a fake patois, Mr. Biden once warned an audience of Black professionals that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden derided a Black journalist as a “junkie” and lambasted a radio host and his audience with the claim “you ain’t Black” if they didn’t support his candidacy.

Spinning racialist fables like Mr. Biden’s “Corn Pop” stories would brand any conservative politician as a racist. As president, Mr. Biden still uses the term “negro,” and he called an African American adviser “boy.”

On disturbing matters of sexuality, Mr. Biden is even more coarse.

After the Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh hearings, the nation was lectured that “women must be believed.” But it was the left who attacked former Biden aide Tara Reade who surfaced in 2016 to accuse then-Sen. Biden, her former boss, of sexually assaulting her.

Mr. Biden himself had a creepy history of invading the private space of young women — inappropriately kissing them, hugging and squeezing them, and smelling and blowing into their hair and ears.

Finally, Mr. Biden was forced to apologize — sort of — by claiming he belonged to an earlier generation when such aggression was simply normal behavior. It was not then or now.

The latest controversies whirl around the British tabloid Daily Mail’s publication of the diary of Mr. Biden’s own daughter.

From the Mail’s lurid reporting, Ashley Biden seems to suggest that she showered with her father at an age when “showers w/my dad (probably [were] not appropriate).” And she seemed to connect Mr. Biden familial inappropriateness with her regret over being “hyper-sexualized (at) a young age.”

When Mr. Trump was accused by porn star Stormy Daniels of a consensual tryst or was caught on old Access Hollywood tape crudely boasting about inappropriately touching female admirers, the resulting uproar nearly derailed the Trump 2016 campaign.

The point is not just the asymmetrical treatment that has shielded Mr. Biden’s cognitive decline, rude outbursts, outrageous racialist slurs and bizarre sexual aggressiveness.

Instead, the left now fears Mr. Biden’s terrible polls and a worse record — and the resulting damage he is doing to the Democratic Party.

In such a losing political context, Democrats will soon find no further reason to cover for Mr. Biden’s own serial abhorrent personal behavior on matters of financial probity, sex, race and truthfulness.

No wonder they are growing desperate to find ways to cut him loose — without making Vice President Kamala Harris his successor.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/23/why-the-left-will-cut-biden-loose-for-2024/

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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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Lockdown’s impact on young children: a look at the data

Michael Simmons

How much damage did lockdown inflict on children’s development? This could be one of the least-explored scandals in public life given that neither Tory nor Labour (who both backed lockdown) are keen to look at the aftermath. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies is branching out from its normal financial remit and has published a report on early years inequality, and it has found serious grounds for concern.

The report, Early childhood inequalities (part of the Deaton review) looked at educational and developmental inequality in very young children: especially those aged two. This was a demographic that was considered by no one during lockdown, but other literature shows these two years are crucial in a child’s development. What effect might the lockdown have had on these infants?

The IFS gave scores for five ‘domains of development’ for two-year-old children. Falls were particularly steep in social and communication skills, with the proportion of children at the expected level declining by three percentage points during the pandemic. One in eight two-year-olds are unable to communicate at the level normally expected. The report’s authors said: ‘The Covid-19 pandemic is a further setback, with all signs pointing to the fact that it will have exacerbated early inequalities’.

The falls came despite ‘unprecedented’ investment in early-years education, development and care. Funding for free pre-school and early years childcare increased from £1 billion at the start of the Blair government to just under £4 billion by the end of 2019 – due to a wider understanding of just how important these first few years of life are. The funding, of course, wouldn’t have been much use when facilities were closed: some lessons just can’t be taught on Zoom.

Inequality data can be sparse. However, the study pointed to figures that suggest the inequality gap in childhood development among five-year-olds had been narrowing until the mid-2010s. It then began to widen and the authors say Covid may have ‘exacerbated’ the gap. The report goes no further than that.

The report comes after a study from Sweden found that ‘no learning loss’ had occurred in the country during its pandemic. Sweden of course kept its schools open – and as Matthew Parris argued in the magazine, ended up with a far lower death count than Britain. The study of 97,100 Swedish primary school children not only found no learning loss but also no specific disadvantage for poorer kids. The same can’t be said for England. The IFS highlights how any developmental declines were worse for the most disadvantaged parts of society. But then again, in Australia some studies have also suggested there was no learning loss there, despite school closures. Further research is urgently needed.

Data on absences is concerning too. Some 105,000 English school children are ‘severely absent’ meaning they miss more school days than they attend. Teachers report the same thing: anxiety up, attention down. ‘The ones that can’t cope don’t turn up’, one teacher is quoted as saying. More than 1,000 schools had an entire classroom full of children absent last Autumn – a 53 per cent increase on 2020.

The picture is the same across the country. In Scotland, the attainment gap – which Nicola Sturgeon calls her ‘defining mission’ – widened. Previously it has been narrowing at a snail’s pace. Concerningly not only did the gap grow but scores fell for the well-off as well as the most deprived.

With Baroness Hallett’s Covid public inquiry beginning its private evidence gathering, this could be the only real hope for an official look at the effect of lockdown in all of its dimensions. The IFS report offers a glimpse into what could be a far bigger story.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/lockdowns-impact-on-young-children-a-look-at-the-data

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Australia: Vaccines on trial

When a two-year-old boy died in South Australia last week, Chief Public Health Officer Professor Nicola Spurrier was quick to link the death to Covid adding, ‘I know that parents who have heard this news will be pretty worried… that something may happen to their young child if they catch Covid,’ and advising that ‘the best thing families can do, because we’re not vaccinating that age group, is make sure everyone else in the family is vaccinated.’

One family that didn’t take kindly to Spurrier’s announcement were the grieving parents of the deceased child. The infuriated father wrote on the SA Health Facebook page, ‘How dare you lie about my son! He did not die of Covid, you lying witch!’ The mother was equally incensed accusing Spurrier of using her son’s death ‘to push an agenda’ when the cause of death had not even been established.

The agenda is the vaccination against Covid of children aged six months to four years. It was a new low for Spurrier but she is not alone in distorting facts in the rush to vaccinate babies and toddlers.

Dr Clare Craig, a diagnostic pathologist was shocked by the shoddy data Pfizer presented to the FDA in support of its application. Craig is co-chair of the HART Group, highly qualified UK doctors, scientists, economists and other experts who came together over shared concerns about policy relating to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Craig noted, that the trial recruited 4,526 children yet only 1,526 children made it to the end of the trial, a staggering rate of attrition. She called on Pfizer to explain why two-thirds of the participants dropped out and said without an explanation the trial should be deemed ‘null and void’.

The results of the trial are even more disturbing. There were no cases approximating severe Covid, so Pfizer cooked up its own definition of children experiencing a slightly raised heart rate or a few more breaths per minute. On this basis, there were six children aged two to four in the vaccine group who had ‘severe Covid’ but only one in the placebo group, which suggests the vaccine might actually be causing the children to get ‘severe Covid’. Even more damning, one child had to be hospitalised because they had a fever and suffered a seizure and that child had been vaccinated.

Yet it was when it came to counting cases of Covid, that Pfizer got really creative. In the three weeks after the children had their first shot, 34 vaccinated children got Covid and only 13 in the placebo group, a 30 per cent increase in the risk of getting Covid among the vaccinated, so Pfizer simply ignored that data. There was an eight-week period between the second and third dose during which, once again, more children got Covid in the vaccinated group, and this trend persisted after the third dose. Indeed, to get a positive result, Pfizer had to ignore 97 per cent of all Covid cases that occurred during the trial and only counted ten cases that occurred right at the end, three in the vaccine arm and seven in the placebo arm, declaring that this proved the vaccine was effective.

But that’s not all. In the two-month follow-up period, 12 children got Covid twice and all bar one of them were vaccinated, mostly triple dosed.

On Friday, on the basis of this dodgy data, Pfizer was granted an Emergency Use Authorisation by the FDA, approval that is meant to be granted only when the treatment group faces serious injury or death. Yet as the trial demonstrated, Pfizer was forced to invent a bogus definition of ‘severe Covid’ because Covid is so mild in children in this age group. Moderna’s two-shot vaccine was also approved based on a study which showed efficacy of just 37 per cent, far below the minimum level set at 50 per cent. On Saturday, a panel at the US Centers for Disease Control voted unanimously to recommend approval of the vaccines guaranteeing that they will be rolled out in the US and almost certainly be approved for use in Australia too.

How it can be ethical to give a vaccine to infants who are at so little risk, when there is no long-term safety data is a mystery, especially when so many studies raise safety concerns. Bio-distribution studies that Pfizer conducted but tried to keep secret show that the the lipid nanoparticles that contain the mRNA do not stay in the arm but travel to every organ including the testes and ovaries, where they have unknown impact on reproductive health. The journal Andrology published a peer-reviewed paper last Friday showing large decreases in sperm counts in men after the second Pfizer jab. Transfected cells expressing the spike protein can cause autoimmune diseases including myocarditis.

They also seem to attack key parts of the immune system that suppress viruses and cancers, perhaps explaining why so many vaccinated people suffer the reactivation of latent viruses. mRNA and transfected spike protein can also remain for extended periods in the lymph node germinal centres damaging the immune system by causing T-cell exhaustion. The latest nightmare is that the vaccines appear to trigger a new aggressive form of Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease in some people and amyloidosis in others.

Why does the FDA seem so indifferent to the dangers posed by the vaccine? It’s impossible to say but a trial about to get underway in the US may throw light on the matter. Robert Barnes is the attorney for Brook Jackson, a whistleblower who worked on the Pfizer vaccine trials. Barnes alleges that Jackson reported to the FDA that the Pfizer trials were ‘riddled not only with error but with fraudulent and false certifications to the US government’.

What is fascinating is that Barnes says that Pfizer has moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that it doesn’t matter if they submitted fraudulent certifications or false statements under penalty of perjury to the government, or lied about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine because the government knew what was going on and was their co-conspirator.

It sounds incredible, but it would explain why the FDA tried to suppress the Pfizer trial data for 75 years. And why it seems to pay so little heed to the harm it might do to little children.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/06/vaccines-on-trial/

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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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Doctors’ Group Urges Biden Administration to End Quarantine, Vaccine Recommendations for Children

A group of doctors is urging top government officials to quickly reverse recommendations that have left children in isolation for days and advice that virtually every child get a COVID-19 vaccine.

“We strongly urge you to revise the CDC’s COVID-19 guidelines with regards to testing, isolation, and vaccine recommendations for children to ensure that public health policies are not doing more harm than good,” the group, Urgency of Normal, wrote in a June 21 open letter to Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC’s guidelines say that people, including children, who are exposed to COVID-19 should quarantine for at least five days, and encourage widespread COVID-19 testing.

The agency also recommends that all children 6 months of age or older get a COVID-19 vaccine, following the recent authorization of the Moderna and Pfizer shots for kids under 5.

The doctors noted that many European countries, U.S. states, and other areas have updated COVID-19 policies to greatly reduce periods of quarantine, COVID-19 testing frequency, and forced vaccination.

They’re asking U.S. officials to adapt to a “test-to-treat” approach, which would focus on recommending vaccination and treatments to those at the highest risk from COVID-19, which are primarily the elderly and others with serious underlying health conditions.

The CDC should also change its vaccine recommendations, which have led to vaccination mandates at colleges and even some lower-level schools, to state that children getting a vaccine should be discussed between the individual and their doctor.

“The emergency phase of COVID-19 is over. We call upon the CDC to update current guidelines to reflect the era of endemic management in which COVID-19 infections are treated similarly to other seasonal respiratory viruses, which do not require routine testing or isolation. It is time to join our peer countries in recognizing the importance of restoring equitable and maximal access to education, sports, and social connectedness for all children. Their health and well-being depend on it,” the group said.

The White House and the CDC did not return requests for comment.

Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the doctors, told The Epoch Times in an email that the group has not yet heard back from the White House or the CDC.

“The timing of this letter is to push for normalization of children’s social and extracurricular activities over the summer, so that our highest need students can benefit from unfettered access to summer enrichment programs and that all kids enjoy summer camps and sports without exclusion based on testing and vaccination requirements,” Noble said.

“It is our hope that moving beyond pandemic policies over the summer will further pave the way for a full return to a normal school year in the fall, free of COVID-specific restrictions.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/doctors-group-urges-biden-administration-to-end-quarantine-vaccine-recommendations-for-children_4551074.html

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COVID-19 Vaccination Reactivates Highly Contagious Virus: Studies

Doctors and scientists are seeing an increase in the reactivation of the chickenpox virus, known as varicella-zoster virus (VZV), following the COVID-19 injections.

The chickenpox virus is one of the eight herpes viruses known to infect humans. After a person contracts and recovers from chickenpox, the virus never leaves the body but lies dormant in the nervous system for life.

The chickenpox virus will show up as shingles, or herpes zoster (HZ) when it gets reactivated.

Federal health authorities claim that there’s no correlation between COVID-19 injections and shingles, but studies show that there is a higher incidence of shingles in people who’ve received the vaccine.

Israel was one of the earlier countries to publish a case series of six women (out of 491 participants) with an autoimmune disorder who developed shingles 3 to 14 days after receiving the first or second dose of Pfizer COVID-19 shot. None of the 99 participants in the control group developed shingles. The study was published in the journal Rheumatology in April 2021.

“To our knowledge, there were no reports of varicella-like skin rash or HZ in the mRNA-based vaccines COVID-19 clinical trials and our case series is the first one to report this observation in patients within a relatively young age range: 36–61, average age 49 ± 11 years,” the authors wrote.

They hoped that publishing the case series would “raise awareness to a potential causal link between COVID-19 vaccination as a trigger of HZ reactivation in relatively young patients with stable AIIRD [autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases].”

In a different case study from Taiwan, researchers reported three healthy men ages 71, 46, and 42 who developed shingles two to seven days following the first dose of the Moderna or AstraZeneca COVID-19 injection.

“HZ does not often appear after the administration of other kinds of vaccinations,” the researchers wrote. “But we believed that there might be a link between COVID-19 vaccine and HZ emergence.”

“One of the reasons is the short delay of onset after vaccination. The other reason is that these three patients were immunocompetent,” they added.

The largest study to date, based on real-world data (pdf) of more than two million patients, found that there was a higher incidence of shingles among the vaccinated (who received a COVID-19 shot within 60 days) than in the unvaccinated cohort, who were diagnosed with shingles within 60 days of visiting a healthcare office for any other reason.

According to the researchers, the risk of developing shingles was calculated as 0.20 percent for the vaccinated group and 0.11 percent for the unvaccinated, and the “difference was statistically highly significant.”

“Reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus appears to be a potential ADR [adverse drug reaction] to COVID-19 vaccines, at least for mRNA LNP-based formulations,” the authors wrote, adding that “vaccination against COVID-19 seems to potentially raise the risk of precipitating HZ [herpes zoster].”

Dr. Richard Urso, an ophthalmologist, and drug design and treatment specialist, told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program in April 2022 that of the three to five patients he sees a week with long COVID or problems after receiving the COVID-19 shot, “a huge number of them have reactivated Epstein-Barr, herpes simplex, herpes zoster, CMV.”

Regardless of the rise in reports of shingles after the rollout of the COVID-19 shots, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claims that it has not detected any safety signal between the two.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/reactivation-of-chickenpox-virus-following-covid-19-injections-on-the-rise_4549574.html

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Little-Known Inflation Bonds Gain Huge Popularity as Inflation Worsens

Inflation-protected bonds issued by the Treasury Department have exploded in popularity in recent months as Americans seek safe investments after being battered by the stock and bond markets.

I bonds, inflation-linked savings bonds, currently offer an annual interest rate of 9.62 percent. Investors can purchase these bonds at the current rate through October 2022 by creating a TreasuryDirect account. The rate is valid for six months after the purchase.

Due to high inflation, I bonds have emerged as one of the hottest investment assets of the year. Although these bonds have been around since 1998, interest in them has exploded over the past couple of months, according to Joseph Hogue, an investment analyst and creator of the YouTube channel Let’s Talk Money.

This is because no safe bond investment, especially savings bonds, has ever offered such a high-interest rate, Hogue told The Epoch Times.

Google search trends and the popularity of YouTube videos discussing I bonds, he added, have been good indicators of their rising popularity.

The Treasury has issued about 10 times more I bonds this year compared to 2021. The rates for I bonds are adjusted twice a year on May 1 and Nov. 1. Interest is accrued monthly and compounded semiannually. If inflation goes higher, so will the yield.

Mel Lindauer, founder and former president of the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy has been a proponent of I bonds since they were first launched 24 years ago.

“I thought they were a no brainer, but people didn’t seem to be as excited as they are today,” he told The Epoch Times. “I was kind of a lone voice in the wilderness.”

There is no incentive for intermediaries to sell I bonds, so they are not frequently advertised.

“Financial advisors don’t want to sell them because they don’t make any money. There’s no commission on them,” Lindauer explained, adding that neither banks nor the Treasury Department advertise them.

So, I-bonds have been poorly understood throughout the years. Recently, thanks to social media, online forums, and press attention, people have begun to learn about them, he said.

One disadvantage of I bonds is that investors can only purchase a maximum of $10,000 a year. And this is because they are primarily intended for small savers and investors.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/little-known-inflation-bonds-gain-huge-popularity-as-inflation-worsens_4547276.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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Abortion: Judicial tyranny overturned

Thanks largely to Trump nominees, SCOTUS  has returned to its proper role as a judicial body.  It is a great weakness of the American constitution that the court can be  suborned by Leftist  judges who replace law by their own opinions.  And Leftist judges are shameless in their arrogance.  In Roe v Wade they "discovered" in the constitution a "right" to abortion despite the word abortion being nowhere mentioned in that document.  It was a plain abuse of authority.  It invented law rather than enforcing it, something it was nowhere authorized to do

It is fortunate that the USA is basically a conservative country. Only that prevents Leftist hatred of their own country from causing the USA to degenerate into a Soviet-style tyranny. Americans are just not angry enough for Leftist anger to move a majority of them

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement responding to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that returns the question of abortion law to the states:

“In 1973, Roe v Wade was wrongly decided by the Court, as the right to an abortion wholly contrived by activist judges. The Dobbs decisions rightfully returns this question to the states. Interestingly, with Democrats holding a 60-vote majority in the Senate and a substantial majority in the House in 2010, they never attempted to codify Roe into federal law, leaving the Court with no other choice but to return the issue to the states. If the left wants to blame anyone for today’s, they should look to Speaker Nancy Pelosi squarely in the eye, ‘Why didn’t you try to put it into federal law?’ The only thing for the Court to consider were state laws, and what the limit to those are. In this case, with a solid 6-3 ruling, the Court ruled that’s states is where the issue will remain for the next generation. Suddenly state legislature and gubernatorial races just became a lot more interesting as abortion laws will be decided in State Capitols.”

Excerpt from the new judgment: 

“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. The Court overrules those decisions and returns that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

Source

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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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Biden's claims on the economy are pure malarkey

By Rich Lowry

When President Joe Biden says something isn’t inevitable, it is time to count on it as a dead-lock guarantee.

The president’s handling of events has been poor and the same with his policies. But nothing has been quite so bad as his snakebit, maladroit, poorly informed, dishonest attempts to spin away the miserable results of his governance, especially on the economy.

If he says the border is not a crisis, there must be people crossing the Rio Grande en masse and getting admitted into the United States and bussed to locales around the country in shocking numbers.

If he says the Afghanistan withdrawal was an “extraordinary success,” it must have been a shambolic embarrassment that left Americans behind, despite Biden’s assurance that would never happen.

If he says the pandemic is effectively over, as he did last July, it must mean a new wave of the virus is about to send case counts soaring.

Even if none of these things had happened and Biden never said a word about them, he would have torched his credibility on the economy alone. He’s produced a steady, ongoing farrago of false assurances and blame-shifting that has amounted to a master class in not convincing anyone of anything, except to tune out whatever he says.

According to Biden, things are never as bad as they seem, and by the way, even if they are, they are definitely not his fault.

The mantra from the president and his team now is that a recession is not inevitable, which, on its own terms, is not the most reassuring message. Something may not be inevitable and still be possible or even much more likely than not.

The rule-of-thumb definition of a recession is two quarters of negative GDP growth. In the first quarter, GDP contracted 1.4%, and an Atlanta Federal Reserve forecast pegs second-quarter growth at around 0, or on the knife’s edge of a second negative quarter in a row.

In other words, what Biden insists is “the fastest economy in the world” may be hardly growing at all.

If the United States does dip into a recession, we can be sure that Biden will be among the last to acknowledge it, just as he and his team pooh-poohed rising inflation as long as they could. It may be that “not inevitable” ends up being the new “transitory,” a wishful claim that says more about the people making it than underlying conditions.

Biden is serving up large helpings of what he famously called “malarkey” in his 2012 vice-presidential debate.

He likes to maintain that he cut the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars when, in reality, the deficit had already been forecast to come down after the surge of pandemic spending — and his COVID relief bill added substantially more deficit spending than there would have been otherwise.

He’s called the idea that his COVID bill fueled inflation “bizarre” (while conceding that you could perhaps argue that it had a “marginal, minor” impact). Yet former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers famously predicted that the massive bill could stoke inflation, and Biden himself name-checks Summers as an economic authority.

Walking on a Delaware beach while on vacation, Biden upbraided a reporter for saying, truthfully, that economists are saying that a recession is more likely than ever. The president joked that she sounded like a Republican before lapsing into his rote line that a downturn isn’t inevitable.

Biden likes to insist that Americans can “handle the truth.” Yes, they can, and the truth is that poor Biden policy choices have worsened economic conditions, as shortages disrupt the workings of the economy and inflation eats away at paychecks. Americans can acknowledge all this — indeed, feel it every day — while not liking it or being willing to tolerate it.

All indications are that Biden himself is the one who can’t handle the truth.

Source

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Infection Without Vaccination Gives Immunity: Study

Having two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine has been linked with negative protection against symptomatic infection with the disease, scientists say, while a previous infection without vaccination offers around 50 percent immunity, according to a study analyzing the Omicron wave in Qatar.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on June 15, examined the Omicron wave in Qatar that occurred from around December 2021 to February 2022, comparing vaccination rates and immunity among more than 100,000 Omicron infected and non-infected individuals.

The authors of the study found that those who had a prior infection but no vaccination had a 46.1 and 50 percent immunity against the two subvariants of the Omicron variant, even at an interval of more than 300 days since the previous infection.

However, individuals who received two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine but had no previous infection, were found with negative immunity against both BA.1 and BA.2 Omicron subvariants, indicating an increased risk of contracting COVID-19 than an average person.

Over six months after getting two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, immunity against any Omicron infection dropped to -3.4 percent.

But for two doses of the Moderna vaccine, immunity against any Omicron infection dropped to -10.3 percent after more than six months since the last injection.

Though the authors reported that three doses of the Pfizer vaccine increased immunity to over 50 percent, this was measured just over 40 days after the third vaccination, which is a very short interval. In comparison, natural immunity persisted at around 50 percent when measured over 300 days after the previous infection, while immunity levels fell to negative figures 270 days after the second dose of vaccine.

These figures indicate a risk of waning immunity for the third vaccine dose as time progresses.

The findings are supported by another recent study from Israel that also found natural immunity waned significantly more slowly compared to artificial, or vaccinated, immunity.

The study found that both natural and artificial immunity waned over time.

Individuals that were previously infected but not vaccinated had half the risks of reinfection as compared to those that were vaccinated with two doses but not infected.

“Natural immunity wins again,” Dr. Martin Adel Makary, a public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Twitter, referring to the Israeli study.

“Among persons who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2, protection against reinfection decreased as the time increased,” the authors concluded, “however, this protection was higher” than protection conferred in the same time interval through two doses of the vaccine.

Source

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Australia: Alarming warning over new Omicron sub-variants on the rise across the country with fears infections will rise - and no one is safe

Health authorities have issued a warning over a new Omicron subvariants on the rise across the country as experts expect they will soon become the dominant strains.

Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 have been both detected in Queensland and NSW, with cases rising in recent months.

On Thursday, authorities from both states on issued an alert amid concerns the variants could result in a wave of new Covid cases.

'It is expected the Covid-19 sub-lineages BA.4 and BA.5 will become the dominant strains in coming weeks,' NSW Health tweeted.

'This is likely to result in an increase in infections, including in people who have previously had Covid-19.'

In a similar warning, QLD Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerrard estimated the variants would become the main strain within 'two weeks'.

However, he stressed that intensive care admissions remains low for all strains of the virus, which was a testament to the efficacy of vaccines.

'We must stress that all Covid-19 variants can cause severe illness, especially in vulnerable people,' Dr Gerrard said.

'We strongly encourage Queenslanders to remain up to date with their boosters, particularly those over 65 years of age and those with impaired immunity,' he said.

'This virus will continue to mutate so we all need to remain vigilant and responsive by staying home when sick, washing your hands regularly, keeping your distance from others where possible and wearing a face mask when you can’t.'

Source

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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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I have been in hospital for most of today so no blogging today

COVID Exposed the Medical-Pharmaceutical-Government Complex

In college, I took a Latin American Politics and Development class. When discussing Latin American medical care, Professor Eldon Kenworthy presented a deeply countercultural idea. Echoing a journal article by the scholar, Robert Ayres, Kenworthy maintained that building hospitals there costs lives. If, instead of erecting, equipping, and staffing gleaming medical centers, this same money and human effort were devoted to providing clean water, good food, and sanitation, the public health yield would be much greater.

United States medical history bears out Ayres’s paradox. The biggest increases in U.S. life expectancy occurred early in the Twentieth Century, when people had increasing access to calories and protein, better water and sanitation. Lives lengthened sharply decades before vaccines, antibiotics, or nearly any drugs were available, and a century before hospitals merged into corporate systems.

Incremental American life span increases during the past fifty years reflect far less smoking, safer cars and jobs, cleaner air and less lethal wars more than they reflect medical advances. Books like Ivan Illich’s “Medical Nemesis” and Daniel Callahan’s “Taming the Beloved Beast” echo Ayres’s critique. But PBS, CNN, B&N, the NYT, et al. censor such views.

The American medical landscape has changed radically in the forty years since I learned of Ayres’ observation. America spends three times as much, as a percentage of GDP, on medical treatments as it did in the 1960s.

By 2020, America devoted 18 percent of its GDP to medicine. (By comparison, about 5 percent goes to the military.) Adding the mega-costs of mass testing and vaccines etc., medical expenditures might now approach 20 percent. Although the United States spends more than twice per capita what any other nation spends on medical care, American ranks 46th in life expectancy. U.S. life expectancy has flatlined, despite growing medical spending and broadened medical access via the vaunted Affordable Care Act.

Though medicine’s high-cost and relatively low yield are right in front of anyone who thinks about their medical experiences and those of people they know, most never connect the dots; more medical treatments and spending are continually advocated and applauded. There’s a regressive “if it saves—or even slightly extends—one life” medical zeitgeist/ethic.

As most medical insurance is employer-based, most people don’t notice annual premium increases. Nor do they see the growing slice of tax revenues used to subsidize Med/Pharma. Thus, they continually demand more stuff, like IVF, extremely high-cost drugs, sex changes, or psychotherapy, as if these were their right, and free. To say nothing of these treatments’ limited effectiveness.

As all are required to medically insure and to pay taxes, one can’t simply opt out or buy only those medical services that one thinks justify their costs. With massive, guaranteed funding sources, aggregate medical revenues will continue to climb.

Thus, the Medical-Industrial-Government Complex has become a Black Hole for today’s wealth. With great money comes great power. The Med/Pharma juggernaut rules the airwaves. Nonexistent until the 1990s, hospital system and drug ads now dominate advertising. By being such big advertisers, Med/Pharma dictates news content. Analysts who point out that lavish medical expenditures don’t yield commensurate public health benefit have small audiences. Med/Pharma critics can’t afford ads.

Medicine has fed Coronamania. The TV news I’ve seen during the past 27 months painted a very skewed picture of reality. The virus has been misrepresented—by the media and government, and by M.D.s, like Fauci, often posing in white jackets—as a runaway train that’s indiscriminately decimating the American populace. Instead of putting into perspective the virus’s clear demographic risk profile and the very favorable survival odds—even without treatment, at all ages, or promoting various forms of contra-COVID self-care, including weight loss—the media and medical establishment incited universal panic, and promoted counterproductive mass isolation, mass masking, mass testing, and treatment with ventilators and expensive, often harmful anti-virals.

Later, mass injections were added to the “COVID-crushing” armamentarium. While the shots created many billionaires, and greatly enriched other Pfizer and Moderna stockholders, they failed, as Biden and many others had promised, to stop either infection or the spread. All of the many whom I know who have been infected in the past six months were vaxxed.

Many—whose voices are suppressed by mainstream media—observe that the shots have worsened outcomes, by driving the development of variants, weakening or confusing immune systems, and causing serious near-term injuries.

Further, people blindly, ardently believed in the shots simply because they were marketed as “vaccines” by bureaucrats wearing medical garb. Despite the shots’ failure and the failure of other “mitigation” measures like lockdowns, masking, and testing, many refuse to concede that Med/Pharma has had much—overwhelmingly negative—influence over the society and economy and public health during Coronamania. Nonetheless, many billions of dollars have been—and are still being—spent to advertise shots that most people don’t want.

The COVID overreaction has to some extent also piggy-backed on TV programs that have, for decades, glorified medicine in TV shows like Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby, M.D., Medical Center, MASH, Gray’s Anatomy, and House. Wearing white coats connotes virtue, just as did wearing white hats in Western movies.

Given the cumulative PR onslaught of the ads and shows, medicine is widely seen as more effective than it is in real life. A few years ago, I heard some woman-in-the-street say, during a TV news clip, “If they make me change my doctor, it will be like losing my right arm.”

Many hold such polar views. Medicine is the new American religion. Given such fervent belief in medicine’s importance and the sense of entitlement regarding expanding medical treatments, government and insurance money is relentlessly overallocated to medicine.

Do these expenditures improve human outcomes? During the first Scrubs episode, resident J.D. complains to his mentor that being a doctor was different than he had envisioned; most of his patients were “old and kind of checked out.” His mentor responds, “That’s Modern Medicine: advances that keep people alive who should have died a long time ago, back when they lost what made them human.”

This largely describes those said to have died with COVID. Most people have disregarded that nearly all who died during the pandemic were old and/or in poor health. Most deaths have always occurred among the old and ill. Occasionally, sitcoms keep it realer than real people do.

Aside from not helping much and misspending resources, and extending misery, medicine can be iatrogenic, i.e., it can cause illness or death. Hospital errors are said to cause from 250,000 to 400,000 American deaths annually. Perhaps medical personnel try to do a good job, but when the bodies of old, sick people are cut open or dosed with strong medicine, stuff happens. Even well-executed surgeries and many medications can worsen health.

Further, though few know it, a brew of excreted medications and diagnostic radionuclides daily pours down drains across the United States and world and ends up in streams and rivers. For example, the hormones in widely-prescribed birth control pills feminize and disrupt aquatic creatures’ reproduction. There are books about all of this, too, though such authors never appear on Good Morning America.

Faith in medical interventions also lessens individual and institutional efforts to maintain or improve health. If people didn’t abuse substances, ate better, and moved their bodies more, there would be much less demand for medical interventions. And if people spent less time working to pay for medical insurance, they could spend more time taking care of themselves and others. Overall, America could spend a fraction of what it spends on allopathic medicine and yet, be much healthier. There are also plenty of books about this.

Given its place at the center of American life for 27 months, and counting, COVID has been—and will be—used to further intensify the medicalization of individual lives, the economy, and society. By exploiting and building an irrational fear of death, the Medical Industrial Complex will promote the notion that we should double—or triple—down on medical and social interventions and investments that might marginally extend the lives of a small slice of the population. Or, in many instances, shorten lives.

But most people who live sensibly are intrinsically healthy for many years. Given enough nutritious food, clean water, and a decent place to sleep, most people will live a long time, with little or no medical treatment. While intensive medical interventions can marginally extend the lives of some old, sick people, medicine can’t reverse aging and it seldom restores vitality.

If the media were honest brokers, the COVID mania would never have taken hold. The media should have repeatedly pointed out that the virus only threatened a small, identifiable segment of a very large population. Instead, captive to its Med/Pharma sponsors, the media went full-frontal fearmonger and promoted intensive, society-wide intervention. Social, psychological, and economic catastrophe ensued.

Additionally, many doctors who could have spoken against the COVID craziness stayed silent so as not to jeopardize their licenses, hospital privileges, or favored status with Pharma, or just because they were schooled in allopathic orthodoxy and hold fast to that faith. Props to those courageous few who broke ranks.

The Med/Pharma/Gov establishment, including the NIH and CDC, hasn’t saved America during 2020–22. To the contrary, COVID interventions have worsened overall societal outcomes. These net harms should have inflicted—and, depending on longer-term vaxx effects, may yet inflict—a big black eye on the Medical Industrial Complex.

If so, Med/Pharma will spend tens of billions of PR money to distort what’s happened for the past 27 months, and to portray well-paid medical personnel, administrators, and bureaucrats as selfless heroes. Many gullible Americans will buy this slick revisionism, including its portrayals of healthy-looking people walking in slow motion on beaches or across meadows in golden light, accompanied by a contemplative solo piano soundtrack.

Source

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

<a href="https://edwatch.blogspot.com">http://edwatch.blogspot.com</a> (EDUCATION WATCH)

<a href="https://antigreen.blogspot.com">http://antigreen.blogspot.com</a> (GREENIE WATCH)

<a href="https://pcwatch.blogspot.com">http://pcwatch.blogspot.com</a> (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

<a href="https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/">http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/</a> (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

<a href="https://snorphty.blogspot.com/">http://snorphty.blogspot.com/</a> (TONGUE-TIED)

<a href="https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/">https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/</a> <b>(IMMIGRATION WATCH)</b>

<a href="https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/">https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/</a> (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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Covid encore performance for Justin Trudeau

Multi-jabbed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has Covid for the second time this year. Trudeau announced his latest helping of Covid on Tuesday, saying:

‘I’ve tested positive for COVID-19. I’ll be following public health guidelines and isolating. I feel okay, but that’s because I got my shots. So, if you haven’t, get vaccinated – and if you can, get boosted. Let’s protect our healthcare system, each other, and ourselves.’

How unlucky can a jabbed, re-jabbed, and double-boosted guy get? It was only five months ago that Trudeau announced:

‘This morning, I tested positive for COVID-19. I’m feeling fine – and I’ll continue to work remotely this week while following public health guidelines. Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted.’

Covid likes Trudeau like Canadian truckers like their freedom.

Trudeau, you may remember, is the West’s jabber-in-chief who slammed the unvaccinated as racist, misogynistic, science deniers who should be shunned. He told Quebec television back in December 2021:

‘We are going to end this pandemic by proceeding with the vaccination. ‘We all know people who are deciding whether or not they are willing to get vaccinated, and we will do our very best to try to convince them. However, there is still a part of the population (that) is fiercely against it.

‘They don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist. It’s a very small group of people, but that doesn’t shy away from the fact that they take up some space.

‘This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?’

That was before Trudeau proved the efficacy of the vaccine by going and getting Covid. And then getting it again, just to underscore the point.

Someone needs to ask the Canadian Prime Minister how the pandemic is supposed to end when feministic, anti-racists who believe in science/progress keep getting infected? Do we tolerate these people?

Imagine getting four polio vaccines and still getting polio. Twice. In five months. You’d start to ask questions, wouldn’t you?

Not Prime Minister Trudeau. No sir. Sticking to the Covid script like a day-old face mask sticks to your chin, the PM insisted he felt okay ‘but that’s because I got my booster shots’.

Ah. Of course.

‘I have contracted the virus I was supposed to be vaccinated against, but I am glad I received the vaccination that didn’t work because imagine how bad I would be if I had not!’

I love how Justin Trudeau has a parallel universe with which to compare things. How does he know his symptoms would have been worse were it not for all the jibby-jabs?

Thanking the vaccine that didn’t stop you from getting sick under the belief you’d have been worse had you had not had the injection – once, twice, three, four times – is delusional.

And this was an encore performance!

I got Covid without ever having been on the end of a government-sponsored needle, and I felt fine.

I know, I know. Just imagine how much finer I would have felt if Pfizer’s mRNA technology had been coursing through my veins!

Trudeau doesn’t miss a chance to use the vaccine’s failure to prevent him from getting Covid to urge people to get the vaccine to prevent them from getting Covid. ‘Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted,’ he wrote after getting Covid on Tuesday.

He wrote the same thing after getting Covid on February 1. ‘Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted,’ he tweeted at the time.

In other words…

‘I got jabbed and still got Covid. Everyone, please get jabbed.’ And, ‘Hey guys, you know how I got jabbed and still got Covid? Well, I got even more jabbed and got even more Covid! Everyone, please get jabbed.’ (Probably.)

If you’re not laughing, you’re not thinking.

Except for the millions of Canadians whose lives have been impacted by draconian restrictions and mandated vaccinations, this is no laughing matter.

At the time of writing, it was still illegal for unvaccinated Canadians to board a train or a plane. They might catch or spread Covid, you see.

And yet here is the heavily vaccinated Mr Trudeau catching Covid spread by heavily vaccinated leaders at the Summit of the Americas in California last week.

Meanwhile, Canada’s other vaccinated Justin (Bieber) has been diagnosed with Ramsey Hunt Syndrome – a disease most common in men aged 60 or over. His video set social media into a fit with #vaccineinjuries trending for days while ‘Justin Bieber face’ is the top Google suggested search.

(Calm down Fact-Checkers. We’re not saying the vaccine caused it – the Twitter mob is. For those wondering why we put this warning in, the Fact Checkers have been so active on the Bieber vibe that they even added a warning to this obviously satirical article in the VancouverTimes.)

Don’t panic. If you want to avoid getting Covid, just do what Trudeau says. ‘Everyone, please get vaccinated and get boosted.’

It’ll definitely work. Maybe.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/covid-encore-performance-for-justin-trudeau/

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Right masks boost virus protection: study

Healthcare departments across Australia need to more selectively procure respirator masks to encourage stronger compliance among frontline workers, researchers say.

The finding follows the federal government signing off on an extra $760 million to help states and territories in the ongoing fight against COVID-19.

Existing commonwealth-state funding arrangements were set to expire in September but were extended on Friday by three months.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the pandemic “clearly isn’t over yet and it would be very brave to suggest that you can make that projection”.

Study author Irene Ng, a consultant anaesthetist at Royal Melbourne Hospital, said healthcare workers often do not comply with recommendations for using respirators, particularly N95 respirators.

“Explanations for non-compliance include the lack of standardisation of donning and doffing techniques, and design features of respirators that reduce comfort and usability,” Dr Ng said.

Some 378 health workers completed a comfort and usability survey, which formed the basis for the study.

The overall fit test pass rates were 65 per cent for semi-rigid cup respirators, 32 per cent for the flat-fold models, 59 per cent for the duckbill respirators and 96 per cent for three-panel flat-fold designs.

The latter was therefore the obvious choice for administrators and state and federal health departments when considering how to maximise respiratory protection.

Australia’s coronavirus-related death toll continues to rise, with more than 100 fatalities announced over the weekend including 48 in Victoria.

Source

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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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WHO chief 'believes Covid DID leak from Wuhan lab' after a 'catastrophic accident' in 2019 despite publicly maintaining 'all hypotheses remain on the table'

The head of the World Health Organisation privately believes the Covid pandemic started following a leak from a Chinese laboratory, a senior Government source claims.

While publicly the group maintains that ‘all hypotheses remain on the table’ about the origins of Covid, the source said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread during late 2019.

The Mail on Sunday first revealed concerns within Western intelligence services about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were manipulating coronaviruses sampled from bats in caves nearly 1,000 miles away – the same caves where Covid-19 is suspected to have originated – in April 2020. The worldwide death toll from the Covid pandemic is now estimated to have hit more than 18 million.

The WHO was initially criticised for its deferential approach to China over the pandemic, as well as a willingness to accept Beijing’s protestations that claims of a laboratory leak were just a ‘conspiracy theory’.

However, in the absence of any compelling evidence of ‘zoonotic’ spread – the process by which a virus leaps from animals to humans – it is now adopting a more neutral public stance.

Dr Tedros updated member states on the pandemic this month, admitting: ‘We do not yet have the answers as to where it came from or how it entered the human population.

‘Understanding the origins of the virus is very important scientifically to prevent future epidemics and pandemics.

‘But morally, we also owe it to all those who have suffered and died and their families. The longer it takes, the harder it becomes. We need to speed up and act with a sense of urgency.

‘All hypotheses must remain on the table until we have evidence that enables us to rule certain hypotheses in or out.

This makes it all the more urgent that this scientific work be kept separate from politics. The way to prevent politicisation is for countries to share data and samples with transparency and without interference from any government. The only way this scientific work can progress successfully is with full collaboration from all countries, including China, where the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 were reported.’

Last year, the WHO established the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (Sago) to outline which studies would be needed to identify the origins of SARS-CoV-2 – as Covid is scientifically known – and to ‘create a global framework for studying the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens’.

An original probe into the outbreak by the WHO was resisted fiercely by China, leading to a report that concluded the SARS-CoV-2 virus probably passed to humans from a bat via another unidentified species.

But after 14 nations including the UK, US and Australia criticised its findings as being heavily compromised, Dr Tedros admitted the report’s flaws and ordered the new process.

The Government has taken a cautious approach to apportioning blame for Covid – something that China-sceptics attribute to a fear of offending Beijing.

However, American intelligence has placed the secretive Wuhan laboratory at the centre of its analysis.

Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that workers at the institute had fallen ill with Covid-like symptoms in autumn 2019 – weeks before the alarm was raised, and said that as part of military projects its scientists were experimenting with a bat coronavirus very similar to the one that causes Covid.

A WHO spokesman said: ‘Dr Tedros has been consistently saying all hypotheses remain on the table as scientists pursue their work.’

Source

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FDA study understimates risk of heart problems from Covid

“Severely flawed” is a cardiologist’s verdict on a peer-reviewed study funded by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggesting possible risks of developing myocarditis and pericarditis after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.

The recent FDA study published on June 11, 2022, used health insurance databases to identify myocarditis or pericarditis hospitalizations occurring in people aged 18 to 64 years, 1 to 7 days after a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

The authors found that though only 12 to 14 percent of the studied cohort were 18- to 25-year-olds, 33 to 42 percent of the myocarditis or pericarditis events occurred in people of this age group, suggesting that this age group may be linked with these vaccine adverse events.

“These results do not indicate a statistically significant risk difference between mRNA-1273 (the Moderna vaccine) and BNT162b2 (the Pfizer vaccine), but it should not be ruled out that a difference might exist,” the authors wrote in the study.

However, cardiologist Dr. Sanjay Verma told The Epoch Times that the study “using a 7-day limit for clinical endpoints” for myocarditis or pericarditis events after vaccination was “severely flawed.”

Verma, who practices in Coachella Valley, California, has been seeing many more heart problems since the vaccines rolled out.

“Continued increased risk [of myocarditis or pericarditis]” was found by the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC)’s Reports (MMWR) “even at 21 days after vaccination,” Verma wrote in an email.

Explaining that spike proteins have been found in blood circulation even four months after injection, “there is no medical justification for a 7- or 21-day cutoff,” he said.

Further, a British pre-print led by researchers from the University of Oxford found “continued increased risk of myocarditis after the booster,” which was not assessed by the FDA study.

Verma pointed out further issues in the study, stating that it does not include 12- to 17-year-olds, “who are the highest risk cohort.”

The same CDC MMWR report also found that the 12- to 17-year-old cohort has “2 to 3 times increased incidence compared to the 18- to 29-year-old cohort,” the doctor explained.

After the second dose, males aged 12 to 17 years had an incidence of 22.0 to 35.9 myocarditis or pericarditis cases out of 100,000 as compared to males aged 18 to 29 years who had an incidence of 6.5 to 15 cases out of 100,000, demonstrating that teens have a higher risk than adults.

Verma also added that “the study does not account for those who may have died before hospitalization,” who would not be “included in insurance claims database.”

Nonetheless, the cardiologist noted a “tremendous improvement” in the study for using health insurance databases as compared to prior FDA studies that exclusively relied on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which would most likely result in a lower incidence of cases.

“Overall, the findings of the study are interesting, but the above limitations likely yield significant underestimation of the true risk of myocarditis or pericarditis after COVID vaccination.”

“Public safety and ethical post market pharmacovigilance warrants more robust active longitudinal follow-up to ensure informed consent and appropriate risk stratification counseling,” Verma concluded.

Source

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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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