I have no doubt that there are those tired of me posting about this guy, Tony Fauci. And to tell you the truth, I’m getting a bit tired of it myself. But that said, it’s every time I turn around that he’s saying something more outrageous than the last and, quite frankly, I just can’t help myself. I mean, again he’s talking about forcing people to get vaccinated. How dare he talk about forcing people to be injected with anything, but especially with a substance that, with each injection, money goes into his personal bank account. How ethical is that? And yet those in our ‘fake news’ media continue to provide him with a platform from which to spew his insanity.
And it was on Wednesday, that Fauci was again welcomed onto MSDNC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” where, during a discussion on the extreme COVID lockdowns in Communist China, he said…
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FILE – In this Friday, June 12, 2020 file photo, a nurse uses a swab to perform a coronavirus test in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
GLYNIS KAZANJIAN | 7News Staff 2 – 3 minutes
WASHINGTON (WJLA) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning about two COVID-19 tests manufactured by Empowered Diagnostics because the tests are not authorized or approved by the FDA, despite labeling that indicates they are.
CovClear COVID-19 Rapid Antigen and ImmunoPass COVID-19 Neutralizing Antibody Rapid tests have been recalled by Empowered Diagnostics, the FDA said.
The FDA is concerned about the potential for false test results.
SEE ALSO | Is your mask real or fake? CDC issues warnings on counterfeit N95, KN95 masks
The recall is listed as a Class 1 recall, which the FDA says is the most serious type.
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning people to stop using the Empowered Diagnostics CovClear COVID-19 Rapid Antigen Test and ImmunoPass COVID-19 Neutralizing Antibody Rapid Test. These tests were distributed with labeling indicating they are authorized by the FDA, but neither test has been authorized, cleared, or approved by the FDA for distribution or use in the United States,” the statement said.
RELATED | FDA curbs use of antibody drugs sidelined by omicron
The FDA said people who have tested with the recalled Empowered Diagnostic COVID-19 products should talk to their physician if they are concerned about recent results.
Health care providers should consider retesting patients using FDA-authorized COVID-19 testing kits if patients tested with the recalled products within the last two weeks.
ALSO SEE | Omicron amps up concerns about long COVID and its causes
Problems with the CovClear COVID-19 Rapid Antigen test and the ImmunoPass COIVID-19 Neutralizing Antibody Rapid test may be reported to the FDA.
For more information on the recalls, go here.
The French parliament just voted for requiring vaccine passports – no longer allowing testing, as in the case of the health pass. The government of Austria plans to do forced vaccination from February. However, the UK Prime Minister is canceling the NHS Covid pass, and the mask mandates. It’s a bit late for the 90% over 60 who got a booster. Nonetheless, it’s better than endless boosters. It will be interesting to see if Boris gets thrown out and the mandates reinstated, or if the mandates are really over in the UK. Based on the speech, this may not apply for Scotland but for England and apparently Northern Ireland. For Wales, we don’t know.
“An NHS COVID Pass shows your coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccination details or test results.” https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/covid-pass/
“Northern Ireland publicans hail removal of vaccine passports and other Covid restrictions as ‘fantastic news“ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus/northern-ireland-publicans-hail-removal-of-vaccine-passports-and-other-covid-restrictions-as-fantastic-news-41262216.html
“Oral…
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Liz Gunn was simply calling out MSM for their failure to act as true journalists. Right on cue MS skews the intent.
READ & WATCH AT THE LINK:
According to an Associated Press (AP) report on Monday, President Joe Biden’s administration will require United States insurers to cover at-home tests for COVID-19 beginning on January 15.
The AP report also said that the new requirement will require up to eight tests per month for each individual, meaning a family of four would qualify to receive 32 tests each month, covered by their carrier.
The new Biden policy will allow Americans to either acquire free testing kits through their insurers, or present receipts for tests to their insurers for reimbursement.
In a statement on Monday, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra said, “This is all part of our overall strategy to ramp up access to easy-to-use, at-home tests at no cost. By requiring private health plans to cover people’s at-home tests, we are further expanding Americans’ ability to get tests for free when they need them.”
The Biden Administration has been criticized for the nationwide shortage of testing kits for the Omicron COVID-19 variant. The variant has caused a surge in cases where people want and need the testing kits across the country.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked by numerous reporters’ why the administration has taken so long to ramp up testing during a Monday briefing.
Psaki answered, “There has been a massive surge in cases, there has been an unprecedented demand for test. So, what we have done over the course of the last few weeks, even before that, is the president quadrupled our testing capacity since this summer, we opened 20,000 sites across the country, and we have also opened additional federal sites, including one in D.C. only recently.”
Psaki continued, “If you look to a year ago, there were no tests, or maybe one depending on the timeline, that was available on the market. Now we have nine. If you look to about a year ago, there was about 900,000 or maybe slightly higher tests that were being issued every day. Now we’re at about 10 or 11 million. 300 million tests are done in this country every month. So, there’s enormous progress being made.”
President Biden admitted on December 28 that there is “clearly not enough” COVID-19 testing available in the United States. Residents in states across the country have resorted to waiting in hours-long line to acquire tests.
Biden said, “We went from no over-the counter tests in January to 36 million in October, 100 million in November and almost 200 million in December. But it’s not enough. It’s clearly not enough.” “If I had — we had known, we would have gone harder, quicker if we could have,” he added.
Photo of a person using the BinaxNOW COVID-19 Antigen Card Home Test kits. (Abbott)
Ida Domingo 2 – 3 minutes
WASHINGTON (7News) — With Omicron surging, you may be looking for COVID-19 tests, however, at-home test kits are in short supply in the U.S. and scammers are taking advantage of this.
According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), fake or unauthorized at-home testing kits are being sold online to desperate customers.
“It’s not a surprise that, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, fake and unauthorized at-home testing kits are popping up online as opportunistic scammers take advantage of the spike in demand. Using these fake products isn’t just a waste of money, it increases your risk of unknowingly spreading COVID-19 or not getting the appropriate treatment,” the FTC said in a press release.
SEE ALSO | President Biden sending more COVID-19 tests to schools to keep them open
The FTC says if you are buying a COVID-19 test ket online, here’s what to look for:
You can report a scam seller or a fake test to the FTC here and here are other COVID-related scams officials are warning about.
by DAVID KOENIG AP Airlines Writer
Tuesday, January 11th 2022
FILE – Passengers wearing face masks to help protect against the coronavirus take a rest at Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, China, on July 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)
U.S. airlines say China has blocked more than a dozen recent and future flights from entering the country, which has been tightening already-strict COVID-19 travel restrictions.
China ordered the cancellations after some passengers tested positive for COVID-19 on flights that arrived in China in late December, according to industry officials.
American Airlines said Tuesday that six of its flights from Dallas-Fort Worth to Shanghai in late January and early February have been canceled. United Airlines said it was forced to cancel six flights from San Francisco to Shanghai later this month. Delta Air Lines said it canceled one flight last week and another this Friday to Shanghai.
Airlines for America, which represents the largest U.S. passenger and cargo carriers, said it was discussing the matter with U.S. and Chinese government officials to find ways to minimize the impact on travelers.
The Biden administration had no immediate comment.
The blocking of flights is the latest development in a dispute between the two countries over international flights and rules designed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
China has been ratcheting up travel restrictions after recent outbreaks of COVID-19 as it prepares to host the Winter Olympics in early February. China limits capacity on inbound flights — currently to 75% — and requires passengers to be tested before departure and after arriving in the country.
If passengers test positive, the airline that carried them can be forced to cancel two to four flights, depending on the number of positive cases.
Last month, Delta said new requirements for cleaning planes between flights caused a plane bound for Shanghai to return to Seattle. The airline said the new rules extended the time planes would need to sit on the ground in Shanghai, and weren’t workable. The Chinese consulate in San Francisco lodged a protest over Delta’s decision.
In 2020, the Trump administration backed down from a threat to block four Chinese airlines after China agreed to let United and Delta resume limited operations that were shuttered earlier in the pandemic.
Last August, the U.S. Transportation Department limited the number of passengers on four Chinese airlines’ flights to the U.S. after China imposed similar limits on United Airlines. The U.S. said China was putting an unreasonable burden on U.S. airlines for travelers who test positive after arriving in China.
https://local21news.com/news/coronavirus/chicago-mayor-tests-positive-for-covid-19
Hank Berrien
Asked on ABC’s “Good Morning America” about a study showing that vaccines targeting COVID-19 and its variants have successfully prevented serious illness, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), said the “overwhelming” number of deaths in vaccinated people occurred in those who had at least four comorbidities.
Walensky started by answering a question about the new CDC guidelines that suggest that people who have contracted the virus should isolate for only five days, reduced from the previous numbers, and then reintegrate into society wearing a mask. She replied:
Isolation, we talk about isolation in the context of people who’ve had a positive test, who know that they are infected. And we now have dozens of studies referenced on the CDC website that have demonstrated that you are most infectious in the one to two days before your symptoms and the two to three days after your symptoms. So by five days after your symptoms, the vast majority of your contagiousness is really behind you.
“And what we say at day five, then, is: Are your symptoms gone? Are you feeling better? Is your cough gone? Sore throat gone?” she continued. “And if so, then it is safe to go out if you are wearing a mask all the time. And that means not going out to restaurants; not going out to gyms, not going out in visiting grandma, but really conscientiously wearing your mask for those last five days.”
“Now, some have said they are interested in using an antigen or a home test at the end of those five days, and if people are interested and have access then they may choose to take that extra step and do that antigen test,” she stated, adding, “And that means that if that test is positive, you should stay home for five days but if that test is negative, you should go out and continue to wear your mask.”
Asked about a new study showing how successful vaccines have been in preventing serious illness and whether that should provoke rethinking about how to live with the virus in perpetuity, Walensky appealed to a study that shows that 78% of vaccinated persons who died had more than four comorbidities.
“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So, really, these are people who were unwell to begin with. And yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron; this means not only just to get your primary series but to get your booster series. And yes, we’re really encouraged by these results.”
The study, from the CDC, says: “Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.”
On Sunday, Walensky was asked by Fox News anchor Bret Baier how many of the 800k+ covid deaths in America were “with covid” as opposed to “from covid.” He inquired, “Do you know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID or how many are withCOVID but they had other comorbidities? Do you have that breakdown?”
“Yes, of course with Omicron we’re following that very carefully,” Walensky dodged. “Our death registry, of course, takes a few weeks to — and is a — takes a few weeks to collect, and of course, Omicron has just been with us for a few weeks, but those data will be forthcoming.”
This article has been updated to include the context of Walensky’s remarks, which was about deaths in the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated. The study has been added as well.
World|A U.S. Navy combat ship is stranded in Guantánamo Bay with a virus outbreak.
Carol Rosenberg, Aishvarya Kavi 3 – 4 minutes
A Navy combat ship deployed to intercept drug trafficking in the Caribbean and East Pacific is stuck in the port at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with a coronavirus outbreak among its fully vaccinated crew.
Only some of those infected onboard the ship, the U.S.S. Milwaukee, were experiencing mild symptoms, said Commander Kate Meadows, a Navy spokeswoman. It was not clear how many infections involved the Omicron variant, which continues to gain dominance rapidly around the world.
The crew held an open-air Christmas service on the pier on Saturday, which allowed the sailors to remain socially distanced and to follow public health guidelines, according to Commander Meadows.
“They are using the open space and fresh air for as many safe activities as they can,” she said. “The chefs onboard are making a special Christmas meal today for everyone.”
The Milwaukee had more than 100 sailors plus a helicopter combat crew and Coast Guard law enforcement unit on board when it left its home port in Jacksonville, Fla., on Dec. 14 as part of the U.S. Southern Command’s efforts to fight drug trafficking. The ship made a refueling and resupply stop at Guantánamo Bay on Monday and extended its stay there because of the outbreak.
Commander Meadows added that the sailors had been confined to the pier and had not entered the base since arriving, sparing the small community at Guantánamo Bay the possibility of being exposed.
In a statement on Friday, the Navy said that “the ship is following an aggressive mitigation strategy” and that “the vaccine continues to demonstrate effectiveness against serious illness” among the crew.
Before the Milwaukee left Florida, Brian A. Forster, the ship’s commanding officer, said in a Navy news release that many of the crew members were on their first deployment and “eager to see the world and accomplish missions.”
In March 2020, one of the military’s first encounters with the virus occurred aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. The ship docked in Guam, in the South Pacific, and ended up stranded there for months after dozens of sailors were infected and one died. The ship’s commander at the time sent a letter to Navy officials pleading for help tackling the outbreak and criticizing the Navy’s failure to provide the proper resources. He was removed from command of the ship after the episode.
Active-duty troops in the Army and Navy were fired this month over their refusal to get vaccinated after President Biden mandated vaccination for the armed services in August. But there were only a small group of holdouts last week, with the Navy reporting that more than 98 percent of its members had been vaccinated.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/world/navy-ship-covid-guantanamo-bay.html
December 16, 20215:33 AM ESTLast Updated an hour ago 11 – 14 minutes
BRUSSELS/BANGKOK, Dec 16 (Reuters) – Tens of millions of migrants may be denied COVID-19 vaccines from a global programme because some major manufacturers are worried about legal risks from harmful side effects, according to officials and internal documents from Gavi, the charity operating the programme, reviewed by Reuters.
Nearly two years into a pandemic that has already killed more than 5 million people, only about 7% of people in low-income countries have received a dose. Vaccine deliveries worldwide have been delayed by production problems, hoarding by rich countries, export restrictions and red tape. Many programmes have also been hampered by hesitancy among the public read more .
The legal concerns are an additional hurdle for public health officials tackling the coronavirus – even as officials say unvaccinated people offer an ideal environment for it to mutate into new variants that threaten hard-won immunity around the world. Many COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers have required that countries indemnify them for any adverse events suffered by individuals as a result of the vaccines, the United Nations says.
Where governments are not in control, that is not possible.
The concerns affect people, such as those displaced by the Myanmar, Afghanistan and Ethiopian crises, who are beyond the reach of national governments’ vaccination schemes.
For refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers, as well as people afflicted by natural disasters or other events that put them out of reach of government help, the global programme known as COVAX created a Humanitarian Buffer – a last-resort reserve of shots to be administered by humanitarian groups. Gavi, the vaccine alliance, is a public-private partnership set up in 2000 to promote vaccination around the world.
But that buffer does not have any mechanism to offer compensation. Gavi, which operates COVAX with the World Health Organization (WHO), says that where those applying for doses, mainly NGOs, can’t bear legal risks, deliveries from that stockpile can only be made if vaccine-makers accept liability.
The companies that are willing to do so under these circumstances provide only a minority of the programme’s vaccines, according to people familiar with the matter and the documents, written by Gavi staff for a board meeting starting at the end of November.
More than two-thirds of COVAX doses have come from Pfizer Inc. (PFE.N) and its partner BioNTech SE (22UAy.DE), AstraZeneca PLC (AZN.L) and Moderna Inc. (MRNA.O), Gavi says. Moderna declined to comment. AstraZeneca and Pfizer said they were in talks with Gavi but declined to comment further. All three said they are committed to making doses available to poorer nations at relatively low prices. Pfizer said it was collaborating directly with governments in Jordan and Lebanon to donate doses for refugees.
Mainly because of the legal concerns, less than 2 million doses have so far been sent from the buffer, Gavi says. About 167 million people risk being excluded from national programmes, according to United Nations data cited in the documents.
Unless all the firms accept legal liability, “access to vaccines for some populations will remain a challenge,” the Gavi documents say, adding that new crises will generate additional demand to cover displaced populations.
The vaccine makers’ reluctance to take on the legal risks is “a major hurdle” in attempts to provide vaccines for the buffer, a spokesperson for Gavi told Reuters. Gavi did not comment on the details in the documents, but said applications for vaccines are confidential until the doses are delivered. In September, Gavi’s CEO, Seth Berkley, tweeted an appeal to drugmakers to waive their requirements for legal indemnity.
Three Chinese drugmakers have agreed to shoulder legal risks when their shots are delivered through the buffer: SinoVac Biotech Ltd (SVA.O), Sinopharm Group Co. Ltd (1099.HK), and Clover Biopharmaceuticals Co. Ltd, according to the Gavi document. The drugmakers did not respond to requests for comment.
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) of the United States confirmed it would waive a requirement for indemnity for deliveries from the buffer: “We are proud to be part of this effort to protect the world’s most vulnerable people,” said Paul Stoffels, Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Scientific Officer. He did not elaborate.
However, less than one-third of COVAX supplies have come from these four firms, COVAX data shows: Clover’s shot has not yet been approved so is not in use.
The global industry association, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), said “no company has refused to consider” taking on the legal risk. However, in the case of shots delivered from the buffer, it said some firms felt they could not do so without full knowledge of where and how vaccines would be used.
It would be hard to continuously monitor vaccines for safety in refugee camps, and delivery is logistically very challenging and not suitable for all types, said the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), which represents large pharmaceutical companies in Europe.
People may blame vaccines for problems that emerge afterwards even if they are unrelated, it said.
“This could then lead to an increased number of litigation cases … during which the safety and efficacy of the vaccine would be publicly questioned,” it said in a statement to Reuters. That might lead to increased vaccine hesitancy and a slower recovery from the pandemic, it said.
So far there is scant information on COVID vaccine litigation, but claims made to out-of-court compensation programmes are one measure of the risk. A programme in the United States has so far not paid out anything, public data show; neither has one set up by the WHO for lower income countries, the WHO said. In Europe, a handful of compensation awards have been granted for undisclosed amounts of money, official data from Denmark, Germany, Norway and Switzerland show read more .
Globally there have been few reported COVID infections among refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers – testing is not always systematic and infections can generate only mild symptoms especially in younger people.
But cramped conditions and weak healthcare expose them to high infection risk. This, combined with low levels of vaccination in a mobile population could favour the emergence of new variants and be a vector for infection, said Mireille Lembwadio, Global Vaccination Coordinator at the International Organization of Migration (IOM), a U.N.-related body that advises governments and migrants.
“Leaving them unvaccinated could help spread the virus and its variants across the world,” she said.
WAITING FOR DOSES
Francois Nosten, a French professor who helps coordinate healthcare for people from Myanmar living on the border with Thailand, is one of those waiting for vaccines. In June, he put in a request from the Humanitarian Buffer for 70,000 doses – some for some of the 90,000 or so who are sheltering in camps along the border, but most for unregistered migrants in the border town of Mae Sot and nearby villages.
Nosten, whose main work is researching malaria, is expecting the doses – a fraction of the more than 8 billion administered worldwide – this month. He has been told they will come from Sinopharm, and he hopes they can help inoculate key at-risk groups in Thailand’s Tak province. Gavi said delivery arrangements are still being finalised.
About 20,000 doses will be given to people in the camps by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a humanitarian group working with Nosten.
“At this point whatever vaccine we can secure we are grateful for,” said its Thailand Director, Darren Hertz. He added that the IRC believed the likelihood that a member of the refugee population would attempt to take legal action in case of side-effects was “extremely low.”
Hertz said the IRC has received a handful of ad hoc vaccine donations from the Thai government and is currently tackling significant outbreaks in five of nine camps on the border, where about 3,000 cases have been confirmed, including at least 26 deaths. A Thai foreign ministry spokesperson confirmed the government was working with the IRC on providing vaccinations in shelters along the border.
Nosten’s charity, Border Health Foundation (BHF), is one of eight organisations worldwide that have applied to distribute the shots from the Humanitarian Buffer and one of three to be approved, Gavi said.
Ann Burton, Chief of Public Health at the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, said the liability issue was one reason agencies have been slow to apply. The programme has also been delayed by the general shortage of vaccines and administrative hurdles read more .
Organisations applying for supplies from the buffer may not choose which vaccines they receive. Working with displaced people, Nosten said it would be more convenient to give them Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which offers protection after a single dose instead of the two doses needed for Sinopharm’s.
But the Sinopharm version will be “better than nothing,” he said.
More than 100 national governments have promised to offer vaccines where possible to all the displaced people on their soil, according to the IOM. However, the U.N. group says migrants and refugees are often effectively excluded from such schemes because of administrative or cultural hurdles.
In cases where governments aren’t in charge or have not agreed to vaccinate migrants, COVAX’s Humanitarian Buffer is the only option. At least 40 countries have yet to include unauthorised migrants in their vaccination programmes, according to the IOM – it and the UNHCR declined to name the countries.
Gavi set up the buffer in March 2021, planning to reserve up to 5% of vaccine doses as they become available to COVAX, which would amount to roughly 70 million doses so far.
The only shots delivered from the buffer so far – just over 1.6 million Sinopharm doses – landed in Iran in November, where high numbers of displaced Afghans have arrived, UNICEF Iran said. That’s enough to inoculate about 800,000 people; more will likely be needed, UNICEF said.
NEED FOR SPEED
The vaccine makers’ legal concern is rooted in the unprecedented speed of the effort to develop the COVID shots, the EFPIA said.
In normal circumstances, drugmakers buy insurance to cover liability for vaccines’ potential adverse effects. But COVID forced them to develop drugs so quickly that some side effects – for instance, a rare blood-clotting condition in some of those who took the AstraZeneca vaccine – are emerging as shots go into people’s arms.
Many governments and international agencies have set up compensation schemes to reimburse victims and avoid lengthy litigation. An emergency law invoked by the U.S. government provides legal immunity for drug companies for side effects from their COVID-19 vaccines used in the country. The only exception is for instances of “wilful misconduct.”
For drug companies, accepting potential liability runs counter to standard practice.
“Vaccine manufacturers try to minimize legal risks in almost every setting,” said John T. Monahan, Professor at Georgetown University. “The gold standard is full immunity from lawsuits. If they accept carve-outs, it may become more difficult to reach that goal.”
Edited by Josephine Mason and Sara Ledwith
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
New York Post December 14, 2021
By Carl Campanile December 14, 2021 1:04pm Updated
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo on his last day in office, Aug. 10, 2021. REUTERS
New York’s ethics watchdog panel ordered disgraced ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to return the $5.1 million in profits from his pandemic book deal to the state next month.
The extraordinary resolution was approved Tuesday by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics in a 12-1 vote — coming a month after the ethics agency voted to revoke its prior approval allowing Cuomo to earn outside income from his book “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic” while he was still governor and New York was still battling the deadly viral bug.
JCOPE rescinded its approval after concluding that Cuomo violated pledges not to use state resources or government staffers to prepare the book.
The resolution, drafted by commissioner David McNamara, a Senate Republican appointee, said Cuomo now “lacked the legal authority to engage in outside activity and receive compensation in regard to the book” since JCOPE rescinded its approval. The disgraced ex-governor’s pandemic book “American Crisis.”AP
“Gov. Cuomo is not legally entitled to retain compensation … for any form of outside activity related to the book,” McNamara said.
The panel found Cuomo’s book proceeds should be turned over to state Attorney General Letitia James — whose office’s investigative report forced the three-term Democrat’s resignation after substantiating a slew of accusations of mistreatment and harassment leveled against the disgraced ex-governor by current and former staffers.
Chris Cuomo’s book canceled by HarperCollins
“It is ordered that by no later than 30 days from the date of this resolution, Gov. Cuomo pay over to the attorney general of the State of New York an amount equal to the compensation paid to him for his outside activities related to the book,” the resolution says.
James would determine to whom the profits would be distributed — the state, the book publisher, or others.
Cuomo’s book deal also is being investigated by James, the FBI, and the Brooklyn US Attorney’s Office. The state Assembly Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report found that Cuomo used staffers extensively to help prepare the book — though he insisted the work was done voluntarily and legally.
Cuomo’s team was also accused of low-balling coronavirus-related nursing home deaths while he negotiated the book deal, leading to accusations he was trying to look better to make a quick buck off the tragedy. Cuomo’s book deal is being investigated by James, the FBI, and the Brooklyn US Attorney’s Office. Above, copies of the hardcover on display in 2020.
Cuomo’s lawyer claimed JCOPE’s action was illegal and would challenge it in court.
“JCOPE’s actions today are unconstitutional, exceed its own authority and appear to be driven by political interests rather than the facts and the law,” said Cuomo attorney Jim McGuire.
“Should they seek to enforce this action, we’ll see them in court.”
hettps://nypost.com/2021/12/14/andrew-cuomo-ordered-to-return-pandemic-book-profits-to-state/
Dr. Robert Moynihan 50 – 64 minutes
“I’ve become convinced that we do have a situation that is essentially the growth and expansion of global tyranny that is harmonized, that is managed, that is aligned across nation states, and it appears to be aligned with the economic interests of a small cluster of investment funds that represents the bulk of global western capital.” —American scientist and researcher Dr. Robert Malone, 61, in a November 27 interview (full text published below)
In the debate over the present Covid health emergency and what would be the most effective and wise policies toward the greatest common good in response to the emergency, one voice has been notably calm, steady, and measured in assessing the evidence.
That voice belongs to Dr. Robert Malone.
Malone is the scientist who two decades ago did much of the breakthrough fundamental work connected with developing a technology called “mRNA technology” — the technology used in developing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. (See this article, but see also this more skeptical article published by the liberal Atlantic magazine, link).
So Malone is a scientist with the needed credentials to discuss the pros and cons of the mRNA vaccines which have prompted such controversy in recent months — perhaps even the pre-eminent scientist in this regard.
That is, someone who ought to be heard on the same platform with, or even before listening to, the other doctors, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who have been publicly calling for various, and sometimes seemingly unwise, public health measures in the past two years.
***
Malone went to Rome in September to give a talk before the Italian Senate, and took time out to visit in the Vatican with Cardinal Peter Turkson, 73, a native of Ghana in West Africa, and the head since August 31, 2016, of the Vatican’s new Department for the Service of the Integral Human Development, created by Pope Francis to handle issues of social justice and peace around the world.
Malone and Turkson two met for about one hour and discussed both traditional and recently developed medicines for confronting epidemics and diseases, but it is not known whether Turkson reported some of the concerns Malone expressed about the new vaccines to Pope Francis.
Malone, who is not a Catholic, did relate to me that he had traveled to Rome hoping to find in the leadership of the Catholic Church that moral voice which might help concerned doctors to speak out on behalf of policies that do not over-step certain bounds of morality in the course of responding to the present health crisis.
***
At the end of November, Maike Hickson of Lifesitenews, who lives in the Shenandoah Valley, visited Malone and interviewed him.
Malone urged caution in dealing with a virus which is repeatedly mutating, and prudence in mandating experimental vaccines.
A report on that interview, and then the entire raw interview text, is published below.
***
I myself visited with Malone two days ago in his home. I spoke with him, and his wife, for several hours. I then summarized the essence of what Malone said to me to my own contacts in the Catholic world, as a group of us continues the delicate but essential process of gathering sufficient, accurate data to enable us to evaluate and then counter the evidently totalitarian measures now increasingly being implemented worldwide as the best and necessary response to this crisis.
***
The Resistance
This group is presently engaged in prayer to seek guidance from above in forming a type of pro-life, pro-children, from human dignity alternative program to the presently dominant global order, which is presenting increasingly worrisome proposals that seem to go against all previous religious and secular counsels for the wise and free ordering of human life.
This program will be based, of course, in the Catholic faith, but those preparing the program are fully open to collaboration with all men and women of good will.
One spur to the formation of this program is the evident willingness shown in recent governmental decisions around the world to set aside all traditional conceptions of human dignity and human rights.
We believe this is a tragic regression for human dignity and human freedom which must be engaged in faith and reason in order to head off great sorrows.
For example, see this article and this article which discuss the recent startling declaration of the head of the European Union, Ursula von Der Leyen, shortly after Austria became the first country in the world to make COVID vaccines compulsory, a declaration in which von Der Leyen called for de facto dispensing with the 1947 Nuremberg Code by making vaccination mandatory across Europe.
The Nuremburg Code, of course, agreed upon by all the nations of the world after the end of the Second World War, in 1947, said that it would be a crime against humanity to inject untested substances into human beings against their will.
Here is how one article sums up this situation: “The Code of Nuremburg laws explicitly state that ‘the voluntary consent of a person is absolutely essential,’ which means that a person can ‘exercise the free right of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deception, coercion, abuse or luring, other latent forms of coercion’ – for example, deprivation of your right to work if you are not vaccinated. The main reason for creating the Code was the nauseating Nazis performing medical experiments on objects without their consent. These procedures, usually performed under the direction of high-ranking officials such as Dr. Josef Mengele, were some of the worst and most abnormal procedures ever documented. Since then, full and proactive ongoing consent to any medical procedure is required by law in Western countries that recognize the Nuremberg Laws. The only way EU countries can avoid compulsory vaccinations against this mild virus, which is an extremely unethical and gruesome violation of human rights, is to repeal the Nuremberg laws or simply ignore them completely.” (link)
Dr. Robert Malone. He lives with his wife, Jill, in Virginia, not far from the Shenandoah Valley where I have been staying. I was able to speak with Dr. Malone for several hours in his home on the day before yesterday
Here is Maike Hickson‘s report on her late November talks with Dr. Malone, published yesterday, December 9, by Lifesitenews.
At the bottom is the entire 52-minute long raw transcript of the interview.
Mask mandates, vaccine mandates and COVID lockdowns are part of a global totalitarianism, Dr. Robert Malone warned
By Maike Hickson
Thu Dec 9, 2021 – 7:01 pm EST
(LifeSiteNews) — Dr. Robert Malone, the original inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology, told LifeSite in a recent interview that he believes the Austrian and German governments – both of whom are pushing for a universal vaccine mandate — “have gone mad.”
He made it clear that the measures being implemented again this winter in the two countries – lockdowns, mask mandates and, in Austria, vaccine mandates – are not effective and on the contrary have grave negative effects on people. He is speaking of a “globalist totalitarianism,” undermining our democracies.
The full transcript of this interview can be viewed as a 52-minute video interview here.
Dr. Malone clearly rejected the idea or universal vaccination – calling it “insane” – and showed much sympathy for the Austrian people as well as the Germans: “So those people and also the Australians,” he told LifeSite on November 27, “are facing an intolerable situation where their governments are literally, in my opinion, have gone mad.”
Catholic activist Alexander Tschugguel has been calling for international help in his home country of Austria, with the impending vaccine mandates that are to start in the first months of 2022. He made it clear in a recent LifeSite interview that he will resist the COVID tyranny in Austria, and in a November 30 statement Kazakh Bishop Athanasius Schneider strongly encouraged Austrians to resist these unjust measures that are being implemented now.
There are many reasons for resisting, for example, the vaccine mandate.
Speaking about vaccine mandates, Dr. Malone stated that he believes in the “fundamental principle, in the logic, that people have freedom to choose and particularly over their own body in medical procedures,” and in this case, we are dealing with the question of “mandating individuals receiving a medical intervention with an unlicensed medical product that they may or may not wish to accept.”
Along with virologist Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, Dr. Malone fears that universal vaccination would promote the increase of vaccine resistant mutations of the corona virus. “My impression is with the Delta variant and now the Omicron variant that we are seeing evidence that’s consistent (…) We’re seeing data that are consistent with the hypotheses of Geert Vanden Bossche and others.” “It does appear,” Dr. Malone expounded, “that the pattern of mutations [such as with the Delta and Omicron variant] that we’re observing are entirely consistent with what Geert has predicted.”
In light of the current Austrian vaccine mandate, Dr. Malone also expressed concern about the possibility that these vaccines actually might enhance disease. “And the worry is that as you know, the worry, the chronic worry that many of us have had that think about these things and try to look carefully at the data and are aware of the prior data in coronavirus vaccine development in humans [that] has repeatedly encountered the problem of vaccine enhanced disease,” he stated, and wondered whether certain data are “an initial indicator of some deeper phenomena having to do with vaccine enhanced injury?”
Also, the other measures of the Austrian (and German) governments did not find Dr. Malone’s approval.
Asked by LifeSite about the mask mandates and whether they are efficient and helpful in fighting the coronavirus, the virologist answered that “there’s a number of papers that look at the effectiveness of masks.” Those studies, he continued, “show that the effectiveness of the masks that we’re using in general in the population at best is about 10 percent in terms of reducing the spread. And that’s consistent with what the CDC had in their calculations.”
Dr. Malone also stressed that there are many negative side effects of using masks. He explained that while wearing masks, “we have additional bacterial flora, and potentially viral, that we are repeatedly re-breathing. So it’s not just the effects on CO2 levels and those kinds of things. There’s also some infectious components to it.” Next to the health aspect, there is, in Dr. Malone’s eyes, also a psychological one, especially for children. “As you know,” he added, “children need to see faces. And this, the use of the mask, particularly in the context of schools – children interacting with other children – is really counterproductive.”
The immunologist also rejected the idea of lockdowns. Dr. Malone made it clear that the virus cannot be stopped by the lockdowns, that they are little effective but cause much harm:
“There are multiple reports out now and deep studies, economic studies, comprehensive studies that show that the overall impact of lockdowns is not to reduce deaths,” he said. “In many cases, you can show an increase in death that – whether or not it’s due to the virus itself – there’s a number of other things that these lockdowns impact on, including mental health of people. So suicide rates go up. People aren’t being fed as well.”
The overall impact in multiple assessments of the lockdowns, according to Dr. Malone, “is damaging. It’s worse than if they never impose that at all, in terms of the economy, people’s employment, people’s mental health, the rate of suicide.”
Dr. Malone added that many people also do not get their illnesses “detected as easily,” since they stay at home. There is a “whole cascade of other things.” “It’s this overly simplistic thought that with this simple intervention, we can have a beneficial effect on the spread of the virus. As you know, the truth is the virus will move through the population,” he concluded.
These policies are “kind of mindless,” Dr. Malone said, adding, “we have an epidemic of a virus. We have an epidemic of irrational fear and we have an epidemic of poor public policy. And I think that, unfortunately, the Austrian people are about to be getting a lesson in this. And I guess perhaps the German people, too.”
LifeSite asked Dr. Malone to comment on a recent statement by Bavarian Minister-President Markus Soeder, according to whom one can only can get rid of the coronavirus by mandatory vaccination. “Only vaccination can free us from the continuous loop of the coronavirus,” he said November 26.
“I would respond,” Dr. Malone answered, “that it’s grossly naive. How many times do we have to say: these vaccines are poorly effective at preventing infection, replication and spread? They are partially protective against disease. Natural immunity is significantly more protective against disease.”
He bemoaned the “logic” that is “driving so many of us to distraction: It’s not based in science.” And if it’s so obviously not based in science, Dr. Malone added, then what is driving this policy?
The physician explained that one of the reasons might be “that the leadership in the European Union and throughout the West, including the United States, has been captured functionally by the economic interests of some financial entity, of which the pharmaceutical industry is a component.”
Further describing the power of international financial groups that seems to be able to influence the world’s common response to the current corona crisis — to include the “insane push for universal vaccination” — Dr. Malone said:
“I’ve become convinced that we do have a situation that is essentially the growth and expansion of global tyranny that is harmonized, that is managed, that is aligned across nation states, and it appears to be aligned with the economic interests of a small cluster of investment funds that represents the bulk of global western capital,” he said. “And what I’m particularly alarmed about — me and many others, and apparently also the archbishop [Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò] — is that this pool of capital is so large now that it has more power than individual nation states do.” This capital has become so powerful that “it can dictate policy, economic policy and national policy in different nation states. And that capital has acquired all of the main media, all of the Big Tech and all of the major vaccine and pharmaceutical companies. And it’s all this is why it’s acting globally in an integrated fashion.”
It is because of this concern that Dr. Malone then explicitly endorsed Archbishop Viganò’s recent November 18 call for an anti-globalist alliance.
The full video of this interview can be viewed here.
Here is the raw transcript of the interview:
Fri Dec 10, 2021 – 9:21 am EST
(LifeSiteNews) — LifeSiteNews is pleased to publish below the full transcript of the recent interview between Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Maike Hickson. Dr. Hickson’s questions appear in bold, followed by Dr. Malone’s responses. This transcript includes additional important topics not mentioned in previous LifeSite articles on this interview.
MASK MANDATES
Dr. Malone, thank you so much for this short interview that we are conducting today on behalf of the truth in general about the corona crisis, but also for our Austrian friends that have asked for your advice, especially in their situation right now. And so I’m just going to ask you a couple of general questions, and in the end, we can go into the Austrian situation. Your recent interview mentioned a document that was leaked from the CDC that mentioned that masks might be actually not as effective as one thought in the beginning. Could you explain that to our audience?
Dr. Robert Malone: What I was referring to was the leaked documents to The Washington Post from about a month and a half ago when we first heard about Delta, it might have been two months ago now. And in those documents, it was quite clear there were projections, if you’ll recall, there were panels with colored lines that showed the projections of potential effectiveness in reducing spread should we have more vaccine uptake up to 100 percent, and whether or not we could stop the spread of coronavirus, with that, with or without masks. And in that, there were a series of assumptions about the effectiveness of masks, and it was clear that even if we had very good mask compliance, by the CDC own calculations, together with literally 100 percent uptake of vaccines, we still could only slow the spread of Delta — we could not stop it.
Then there’s a separate paper. There’s a number of papers that look at the effectiveness of masks, separate from that disclosure or leak, or whatever you want to call it. And those, in general, show that the effectiveness of the masks that we’re using, in general in the population, at best is about 10 percent in terms of reducing the spread. And that’s consistent with what the CDC had in their calculations. So the effectiveness… you’re probably referring to my quote from the Bannon show, where Steve asked me: “What’s your advice for people as they come together over Thanksgiving?” And I said: “Well, the most effective thing is to know each other and know whether or not you have symptoms and if a member of your family is starting to have symptoms they shouldn’t come to the table and spend time with each other. And there’s no real logic for using masks in this situation because their effectiveness is at the most, about 10 percent.
I’m very grateful for this because of our German and Austrian audience. I know from Germany they literally are forced in every place and every public space to wear masks, and we never really talk about the negative side effects of wearing these masks and reducing your own, you know, quality of what you breathe in.
Dr. Malone: Right, well, it’s not just that, it’s also that the normal bacterial flora that we all carry in our mouth and our pharynx and lungs is now getting filtered onto that mask and then we’re breathing it. So we’re basically setting up a situation where we have additional bacterial flora, and potentially viral, that we’re repeatedly breathing. So it’s not just the effects on CO2 levels and those kinds of things, there’s also some infectious components to it. And then, as you know with children, children need to see faces. And the use of the mask, particularly in the context of schools in children interacting with other children, is really counterproductive. So there’s there’s just a lot of things, like your Austrian friends are also very aware of the lockdown policies.
LOCKDOWNS
That would have been my second question: do lockdowns work?
Dr. Malone: So they’re there, and I used to have pinned a report from a high-quality think-tank that I put up there so that my Australian colleagues could access it. So there are multiple reports out now and deep studies, economic studies, comprehensive studies, that show that the overall impact of the lockdowns is not to reduce deaths. In many cases, you can show an increase in death, whether or not it’s due to the virus itself. There’s a number of other things that these lockdowns impact on, including the mental health of people. So suicide rates go up, people aren’t being fed as well. If they do have significant disease or need to get hospitalized, they’re not being detected as easily.
There’s a whole cascade of other things. It’s this overly simplistic thought that with this simple intervention, we can have a beneficial effect on the spread of the virus. As you know, the truth is the virus will move through the population. And you know, you can have some short-term impact on that in terms of public health behavior through lockdowns in terms of flattening the initial curve and not overloading your hospitals, et cetera. But the overall impact in multiple assessments is damaging, is worse than if they never impose that at all in terms of the economy, people’s employment, people’s mental health, the rate of suicide.
There’s a lot of other factors, and then, of course, the children that all go into that, and it seems kind of mindless. But what we’re suffering, I mean, we have an epidemic of a virus, we have an epidemic of irrational fear and we have an epidemic of poor public policy. And I think that unfortunately, the Austrian people are about to be getting a lesson in this. And I guess perhaps the German people.
FREEDOM AND GLOBAL TYRANNY
Exactly, one of the greatest side effects, so to speak of lockdowns, is the attack on freedoms. The idea that the state can just limit human traffic and just anything outside your own home to such an extent that you are literally a prisoner in your own home and, you know, the damage of that part of the lockdown. You recently also talked about the danger of global tyranny.
Dr. Malone: Yes, this is the “camel’s nose: is the metaphor that’s often used: once the camel’s nose gets in the tent, pretty soon the whole camel’s in the tent. We have this tendency in Western democracies. Frankly, I think Great Britain is particularly susceptible to this. The idea that we’re doing it for the common good, that we can do social engineering, we can have these interventions if it’s limited. It’s just for this thing, it’s just for that thing. And then we get this incrementalism. Well, if it was good for that, then it’s good for this. So that, you know, the obvious example is this Trusted News Initiative. That is a clear case where it started off for a noble cause, that is resisting incursion into our political system from offshore political interests. You know, they spoke about the Russians as the threat, but really any. And then that’s been weaponized against vaccine dissent.
Really, it comes down to dissent about the interpretation of facts and information. And now it’s we’re going to do the same thing with climate change, and who knows what the next social engineering objective is going to be? It just seems to be this chronic erosion of civil rights and liberties in the logic that countries and governments — that it’s OK to do social engineering through these various interventions. And I think that that is really worrisome.
FUSION OF STATE, CORPORATE INTERESTS INTO EVIL GLOBAL FASCISM; VIGANÒ; VATICAN
You recently also retweeted a statement from Archbishop Viganò where he spoke about the need for an anti-globalist alliance. Could you explain to us why you supported the statement from Archbishop Viganò?
Dr. Malone: So I’ve become convinced, as he has, that there’s something here that goes beyond just vaccines and public health, and I have not wanted to go there intellectually. And yet it is impossible to make sense out of what is transpiring in the world right now, just as an explanation of public health and vaccine policy, or antiviral policy. And I have become convinced that we’re in a situation in which we’re all having our rights eroded and that there is a larger force beyond this. I have colleagues who speak at length about evil. There is a growing sense by many people that there’s something fundamentally evil going on here.
I’ve become convinced that we do have a situation that is essentially the growth and expansion of global tyranny, there is harmonized that is managed, that is aligned across nation-states. And it appears to be aligned with the economic interests of a small cluster of investment funds that represents the bulk of global western capital. And what I’m particularly alarmed about, me and many others and apparently also the archbishop, is that this pool of capital is so large now that it has more power than individual nation states do. We’ve been warned about this for a long time. I used to be a political science student also, and I read about the rise of transnationalism in the New World Order back two decades ago. We now seem to be seeing it play out.
And personally, I’ve become convinced that one of the fundamental problems that have resulted in this disassociation within our society is fragmentation of our society. The sense that things don’t make sense, that we are no longer connected, is that we have elected to use the language of economics to describe the human condition. We, by our very language — language matters — by our very language we have reduced the human condition down to economic units, and that makes us all basically economic pawns in a process of growing wealth. We use that language. We’ve substituted the language of good and bad, and evil, and good works — in this kind of thinking — for the language of profit. And what I think I see is a growing world in which there is a large block of capital, which is decoupled from nation-states.
It used to be that the capital would stay connected to the geography and the people from whence it was derived, even if it was pooled in the top one percent, at least it was still linked to that nation-state. That’s no longer the case. The capital is decoupled, it will move wherever it wants to go, and it moves in response to one primary driver, which is return on investment. It has no moral compass, it has no moral component. It only responds to the opportunity to seek additional return on investment. And so we’re all reduced to economic units that can be exploited to generate more return on investment wherever that capital seeks to move. And the capital is now so large that it can dictate policy, economic policy and national policy in different nation-states. And that capital has acquired all of the main media, all of the Big Tech and all of the major vaccine and pharmaceutical companies. And it’s all acting globally in an integrated fashion.
So what do we call this? We have language for these things. And the language that we have chosen to use in the past to describe this fusion of the state and corporate interests, the word that we have chosen to describe that is fascism. But this is more than fascism because fascism is linked to a given nation-state. This is something bigger. This is something in which this fusion has occurred at a level that is decoupled from the nation-state. It is global. So when we talk about global totalitarianism, this is a descriptor. This isn’t just a political concept. This is trying to be technically precise in describing what’s being observed.
What’s observed is that we now have a situation in which it’s not just a fusion of the interests of corporatists and the nation-state. It’s a fusion of corporatists and this large pool of transnational capital that roams around looking for a return on investment. And it will act in whatever ways it needs to act in order to improve that return on investment in an amoral sense because it has no intrinsic morality.
This is why I originally tried, with your assistance, to reach out to the Vatican, because if there is one — in my space, I don’t have connections with the Muslim community — but at least I have some grounding in Christianity, that’s my core culture. And in my view, in the western world, if there is a remaining moral authority in the world, it is the Catholic Church as the dominant moral authority. And I was hoping that the Catholic Church would take a principled stand here and take a position that this is wrong, that this is fundamentally contrary to humanity, what we have believed as humanity. And this is why I supported the Archbishop because the Archbishop seems to also believe in these core concepts and uses extraordinarily strong language. I was very struck by the bravery of the Archbishop to speak so freely about these things. And also, I felt it a little bit validating that here’s somebody coming independently from a different discipline, in a different frame of reference, a different tradition, and yet had come to the same conclusions that I was coming to.
VACCINE MANDATES
And in this manner of depriving us of our freedoms, you would also include the vaccine mandates, right? And forcing of vaccines on people who have different reasons to object to them?
Dr. Malone: Absolutely, and by the way, one of the most potent legally in the United States is the religious objection. Now that apparently is going to be very difficult to overcome legally, one hopes. But I feel fundamentally, I believe there’s a fundamental principle in the logic that people have freedom to choose, and particularly over their own body in medical procedures. And what we’re talking about is mandating individuals receiving a medical intervention with an unlicensed medical product that they may or may not wish to accept it. In my opinion, if people wish to accept vaccine and they are well-informed about the risks and benefits of that vaccine, then they should have access to it. We shouldn’t forbid them from taking it. But we also shouldn’t mandate that they accept it, if they have objections
INFORMED CONSENT
And we shouldn’t suppress literature or studies coming out that are critical about the vaccines, either, because then we don’t give informed consent.
Dr. Malone: Absolutely. And this is fundamental, if there is an underlying fundamental logic behind what I’m trying to do with Twitter and social media in interviews like this, it’s to provide some access to information so that people can make their own decisions. I don’t want to tell people, “take the vaccine”, or “don’t take the vaccine.” Let me express my position as a physician as to whether or not there’s merit to taking the vaccine, but I believe strongly, fundamentally, it is against the principles that I’ve been taught for 30 years of bioethics that you should impose a medical procedure on an unwilling patient. [00:19:41][42.3]
VARIANTS, SUPPORT FOR GEERT VANDEN BOSSCHE PREDICTIONS
One of your early arguments against this mass vaccination was also that it would promote and provoke the increase of variants of the virus, as you have explained on numerous occasions, do you see this now coming? Do you see that there’s evidence, that compared to the, let’s say, first 18 months of the corona outbreak and what’s happening now under the massive vaccination programs?
Dr. Malone: From what I’m seeing, and it’s not my core competency to be carefully examining the evolutionary course in the specific point mutations of these different viruses, I could do that, [but] it’s not what I’ve been doing, other people are doing it very well. My impression is with the Delta variant and now the Omicron variant that we are seeing evidence that’s consistent. So I’m going to use scientific terminology.
We’re seeing data that are consistent with the hypotheses of Geert Vanden Bossche and others. I’ve been very influenced by his thinking, but I want to give him credit for his contribution. I didn’t come up with this, I was an early adopter and very influenced by it. But it does appear that the pattern of mutations that we’re observing is entirely consistent with what Geert has predicted. And here’s the one nuance, what Geert has been alerting us to is the risks of Merrick’s disease in chickens, which is a cancer DNA virus that, if you vaccinate against you will end up with worse disease than you get if you don’t vaccinate into an ongoing infection. And so his alarm has been not only that we would develop vaccine resistant mutants, but that they would be increasingly pathogenic. I think that the data are now really compelling.
We are selecting for vaccine-resistant mutants. Now what is not yet clear is are these mutants more pathogenic? And that is a difficult thing to sort out because the viruses as they move as a population, it’s not that we just flip a switch and everybody was on Beta and then suddenly became on Delta. And so you could see an abrupt transition, but rather it’s a blending of information. And now we’re going to probably see a blending from Delta into Omicron, or we won’t. But if the experience in Africa holds true, that’s what we might see.
And so what we’ll see is a gradual gradient of evidence that the vaccines are being less and less effective. And so the metaphor everybody keeps using is the one of the frog put into the pot of water, and then the heat is slowly turned on and it slowly comes to a boil and the frog never realizes and jumps out when it could outright. It just boils because it’s this incrementalism, and it is likely that what we will see is an incrementally increasing signal indicating a reduction in vaccine effectiveness, which is what we’ve seen with Delta. I mean, if you recall back in time, you’re a journalist you’re following these things, we had people saying “well, the vaccines are losing their efficacy,” and then we had all of this tussle over whether that’s true or not true. Now it’s widely accepted, you have even Bill Gates and Tony Fauci admitting it. But there’s been this period of time where we were all tussling over whether this is true or not. And then the data became more and more and more and more compelling as Delta moved into the population. This is what we’re likely to see with Omicron if it successfully competes with Delta.
INADEQUACY OF BOOSTER SHOTS
So we would need constant booster shots to adjust the vaccines the new variants?
Dr. Malone: So this is Ryan Cole, I think is of the people that I interact with, the one that really first made this very stark. The vaccines that we would be boosted with are designed against the initial strain, the Alpha strain. They are now grossly mismatched. He makes the appropriate point of the analogy to influenza vaccination. So with our influenza vaccines, we have seasonally adjusted in vaccine mixtures because of the drift and shift in influenza vaccines that occur globally. So this is the norm in vaccinating.
Remember, influenza is an RNA virus that causes upper respiratory disease. The parallels are fairly strong. Both of these RNA viruses mutate at high levels because their polymerases generate mutants. They are not able to air check like DNA viruses. Polymerase is able to do so. So we’re seeing the drifting in the genetics of the circulating strain, just like we do with flu. And what we would normally do with flu is we would adjust our vaccine formulation on an annual basis. And we’re not doing that. And for whatever reason now, the vaccine developers are saying, “Oh, well, good heavens, with Omicron if that really turns out to be that severe, then we can make our adjustments.”
Here’s the thing about that, when you make those sequence adjustments in the case of influenza, we have years and years and years of experience to say which ones of those adjustments are going to be OK and which ones do we need to do. Additional studies for the vaccine manufacturers seem to be saying that we want the latitude to deploy new vaccines in the same way that we do for seasonal influenza, without going through that period of learning. So once again, they want to rush the whole thing, and shortcut the safety assessment. So far, that hasn’t worked out so good.
POSSIBLE REASONS FOR CONTINUING TO DO WRONG THINGS ON VACCINES
Yeah, exactly. So one minister in Germany, from Bavaria, has now argued that only if we get the whole population vaccinated – so he argues that Germany should start by January 1st with a vaccine mandate – that only this way could we get rid of Coronavirus. How would you respond to the statement?
Dr. Malone: I would respond that it’s grossly naive. How many times do we have to say, these vaccines are poorly effective at preventing infection, replication and spread? They are partially protective against disease; natural immunity is significantly more protective against disease, that means hospitalization, for example. Both natural immunity and these vaccines currently are very protective against death. The vaccines are partially protective against severe disease compared to the unvaccinated.
The problem with that logic [proposing vaccine mandates] is the unvaccinated are an increasingly tiny population, not just because of vaccination, but because of natural infection. And they’re not really monitoring the fraction of the population that have been naturally infected and recovered. A lot of estimates show that certainly in the United States, while we have less than 60 percent vaccine uptake, we probably have 80 plus percent in the total population that have either been infected or vaccinated. OK, so this logic from the German minister, this is what is driving so many of us to distraction as it’s not based on science. And if it’s so obviously not based on science, what is driving that policy? There’s kind of two explanations that I’m comfortable with, well let’s say three.
One is that they’re just locked into a belief system, and they are so deep in it now that they can’t admit their failure and their flaws, and they feel like they just have to keep doing it. This is the ‘give a three-year-old a hammer and everything becomes a nail logic,’ right? They have a very powerful system. They think they can keep administering it and getting a response. But you know, there’s that quote from Einstein, I believe it’s attributed to. ‘If you keep doing the same thing and expect [different] results, this is the definition of madness,’ right? So that’s one answer: that they’re just so dug in, they feel they have no other options and they have to keep doing this because they can’t admit their prior failures and flaws.
Another one is [to do with] the economic or other external forces, which basically argues that the leadership in the European Union and throughout the West, including the United States, has been captured functionally by the economic interests of some financial entity, of which the pharmaceutical industry is a component. So there’s that argument.
‘MASS FORMATIONS PSYCHOSIS’ ARGUMENT OF MATTIAS DESMET GHENT
I personally really like the argument of Mattias Desmet, which is this mass formation psychosis argument, that fundamentally a significant fraction of the population [has] been hypnotized. It’s not [something] that they are conscious of. So the ‘they’re so dug in that they can’t back out argument,’ is founded on the belief that they’re actually aware, that they’re not experiencing cognitive dissonance because they’re aware that they’ve made a mistake.
But many wouldn’t.
Dr. Malone: Right? The mass formations psychosis argument of Mattias Desmet of Ghent argues that they are truly hypnotized, that a large fraction of the population has become hypnotized, much as happened to the German people during the 1930s and 1920s. And it has similar psychological roots in a lot of us, including myself. I’m just one of many who find the arguments of Dr Desmet very compelling. They seem to explain a lot of behaviors that are otherwise inexplicable, like this extreme level of aggression and venom that is vented against anyone who’s expressing anything such as you do at LifeSiteNews. Anything that is contrary to the dominant narrative they attack this in the most personal terms. It is their venomous, aggressive attacks that are not based in any data or information.
Exactly. For example, in Germany, since we just talked about Germany, the official data just came out which showed that in the age group, about 60-year-olds, 71 percent of the hospitalized are now fully vaccinated and 52 percent of those who died were fully vaccinated. So these data actually should be taken in, showing at least that the vaccines, as you always say, seem to be leaky. But at some point one also has to worry about why it’s little more than half who die are dying with the vaccines, whether the vaccines are truly doing what they are supposed to do.
Dr. Malone: And the worry is, as you know, the worry, the chronic worry that many of us have had – those of us that think about these things, and try to look carefully at the data, and are aware of the prior data in coronavirus vaccine development in humans which [have] repeatedly encountered the problem of vaccine enhanced disease – is this: Is this paradoxical signal that we’re seeing an initial indicator of some deeper phenomena having to do with vaccine enhanced injury?
This is coming out more and more in the data, in the press. What the infectious disease community and World Health Community and European Medicines Agency and U.S. CDC and Canadian National Health Service, et cetera, we could go on and on, have focused on is what they classify as vaccine-related injuries, which are things that are narrowly defined as meeting their preset criteria for what they consider to be a vaccine-related injury.
And the problem with that is that it’s all subject to various forms of biases, having to do with the reporting and the classification of the information is very subjective. It is subjective. That’s the best way to put it. That type of data analysis results in data that is contaminated with all kinds of confounding variables and subjectivity. So what can you do? Well, you have to start looking at all-cause mortality. When somebody dies, that’s a very clear signal. We kept good records on how often people die, and we can argue about whether or not this heart attack death was associated with vaccine or not associated with vaccine. But when we see all cause mortality going up..
Excess death…
Dr. Malone: Then that’s something to worry about. The problem is, how do you disambiguate all-cause mortality due increase due to vaccine, versus increase due to circulating virus? And that gets really hard. That’s the basis for the argument that many people make when they say, I’m part of the control group. That used to confuse me when people would say ‘I’m part of the control group,’ I’d say ‘what clinical trial?’ What they’re talking about is the idea that unless there’s some cohort that has not accepted the vaccine, then we can never disambiguate what is due to the vaccine, and what’s due to the virus. So without some really sophisticated and expensive immunology testing to figure out –because we can test and see whether or not you’ve just had the jab or whether you’ve been infected – it may be possible to see whether you’ve got both going on right now because of some immunologic characteristics. So they argue that they’re part of the control group, because if we lose that, if everybody is universally jabbed, then we can never do any comparison and sort out what’s due to the jab and what’s due to the infection. This is one of the arguments that’s made about why this insane push to universal vaccination is a way of covering your tracks if you happen to be a global biopharmaceutical company.
But I’m worried, as I know you are, about this push that seems irrational.
Just as a last question, what would be your message to the Austrians who are going to hear your message in translation? What is your message to the Austrians that are now essentially locked down and facing mandated vaccination within the next half a year, as well as to the Germans, where it’s lurking already around in the discussion? What is your message to these countries?
Dr. Malone: That’s a hard one. I try to always conclude my interviews with something positive. So those people, and also the Australians, are facing an intolerable situation, where their governments literally, in my opinion, have gone mad. And I think they’ve probably gone mad because of this mass formation psychosis of the desperate. But time will tell maybe, or maybe it will just get hidden.
I believe that the only recourse now that most of us have, is this idea of building local community. I really believe that we’re now in a situation, and again, I’m very influenced by Mattias Desmet’s analysis. He’s of the opinion, it’s quite dark, that this period of global totalitarianism will sweep over us. It’s now gained enough momentum and enough buy-in from enough nation states and political organizations, that it has a momentum of its own. And we are going to have to come to terms with that, while we also come to terms with the fact that the virus will have its way with us.
So to my mind, whether it’s Omicron, or Delta, or Delta Plus, or fill-in-the-blank variant, we are likely to have another wave this winter. I think it’s already kicking in pretty hard in Europe, and we may end up with kind of a bimodal wave. We may end up with a Delta wave with an Omicron wave superimposed on it later. OK, so in the face of a dysfunctional government and public health response, what can you do? I think there’s three things.
One is build connections within your local community. This is the fundamental sickness in our society that has given rise to the mass formation, if you listen to Mattias’ argument. So try to rebuild those connections, and that means in part, building contact lists, particularly for the elderly within your community. Whether your community is a church or a town hall, whatever your political and social structure is, try to build community, try to build contact list call lists, stay in touch with each other and in particular, try to stay in touch with the high risk groups, the elders, etc. They represent your wisdom and they’re at highest risk. And the biggest crime I think that’s going on is the feeble elder who encounters the virus, goes to the hospital, was taken to the hospital, gets told, ‘No, you’re not sick enough. Go home. Here’s an aspirin. Call us when you’re sick enough,’ and they go home. And there’s some complex physiology about blood oxygen levels that makes it so that the pulse oximeter appears to be underestimating your oxygenation problem. And so they go home and they die, and they die alone, and it is completely unnecessary because early treatment can help them. So number one, build community, stay in touch with people, watch over each other because the state isn’t going to do it for you. OK, the unfortunate situation is that our pharmaceutical hospital industrial complex is not helping us, right? It’s become incredibly dysfunctional, so we’re going to have to kind of do it ourselves. So build those lists, stay in touch with people, find physicians, if you can, who will administer early treatment.
What we’ve seen in multiple examples, particularly with the elderly that do not have access to internet or often or are challenged in getting access to digital media – we all think that we’ve all got laptops. That’s not true for a large cohort of the population, particularly the feeble and the elderly, – those people really appreciate having a document. There are a variety of sources of information and documents in English –the FLCCC’s protocol is one where they formatted these treatment protocols as PDFs, and you can just print them. Getting information into the hands of the feeble and the elderly and the disadvantaged has two advantages. Number one, it reassures them that it’s not hopeless. It reassures them that you can survive this virus. That it is not a death sentence if you get infected, and it shows them graphically that there are things, tangible things that can be done, OK? Those two things alone provide enormous relief. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in people’s faces. The people, particularly the people that are in this zone where they are subject to the mass formation psychosis, but their minds are a little bit open, and when you give them a document saying, ‘Hey, this is not a death sentence, if you get this, there is hope,’ you can see the change in their expression and the relief that they get just from that one thing.
The release of stress, just from having a document, in your hands. So that’s number two, to get information out to people. There’s a variety of sources of information: help them know that this is not a death sentence.
The third thing is in building communities and identifying doctors. Over time, we’re going to start building clinics and treatment associations, et cetera. I mean, what I’ve seen, for instance, in Hawaii with Kirk and Kim Malone, Kirk is a pediatric cardiologist with expertize in vascular inflammation. Kim is a pediatric anesthesiologist. They’ve worked together. They’ve been kicked out of the only hospital in Oahu because they have been administering early treatment to patients. This is shocking when you think about it. Kirk is also a minister at a local congregation. Jill and I have been there to their meetings, there are a couple hundred people that come to his congregation, and he runs a food bank. This is a deeply, spiritually committed individual. Not from your denomination, but it doesn’t matter. He is fundamentally committed to good works, and he is setting up a clinic where he is treating people with these life saving drugs early on. Kim and Kurt together. So eventually, that’s going to grow into a community clinic.
Eventually, those community clinics are going to provide an alternative to this industrialized medicine model that we’re in the middle of right now. And that, I think, is the long range hope. How long is it going to take? How many decades? I have no idea. But it all starts with the idea of being globally aware of what’s going on, but acting locally within your community to start to build capabilities. And I think that is the way we break free of the mass psychosis. But this is Mattias’s point, is that if we can get people to realize that global totalitarianism is a bigger threat than the virus, and get them to break away from this mass psychosis, then they create a new kind of mass psychosis, which is their fear of global totalitarianism, fuzed to their anxiety and social disassociation. And so we still haven’t cured the underlying problem. The underlying problem is the sickness in our society, and we all know it’s there. We can all feel it. We’re aware that there’s something fundamentally wrong. Until we give humans as a community, a sense of belonging and responsibility for each other, and break free of this idea that we’re just economic units and whoever dies with the most toys wins, and instead we move to a space that is fundamentally a more spiritual space. It’s a space in which we acknowledge our interdependency with each other and our need for social connectivity. This is a fundamental.
And the antidote against the lie, against propaganda is human connectivity and exchange of reality, of things that happen and that undercuts propaganda. It is putting people together.
Dr. Malone: It’s the cure. Yeah, it is the real cure. It’s the cure of the disease that Mattias Desmet has diagnosed for us, which is this mass formation, psychosis, the madness of crowds.
And so we would in a literal sense and philosophically form an anti-globalist alliance, as Archbishop Viganò proposed.
Dr. Malone: I think he nailed it right on the head. I think he called it correctly now, and I think it showed great bravery and foresight. But you’ve taught me that he is a person who, for whatever reason, has had the courage to speak truth to power in the past. And I honor him for that.
And we honor you for doing the same in your field.
Dr. Malone: I’m trying! I’m going to share one of the other things that happened to me today. I received something in the mail, and it was a cease and desist letter from the lawyer representing a family. They were upset because I had retweeted a video montage of young athletes dying or having heart attacks. That video montage included a clip of their son who had died, but his death occurred before the outbreak, and whoever created that video montage had manipulated the information about his death and included him in the montage. And then I was being accused of having been the person that did this because I retweeted it, and it was very upsetting to get this.
A ‘nico,’ a threat.
Dr. Malone: Yeah, it was. But then I stepped back, and I mean, this goes to turn the other cheek and try to empathize, and I realized these are parents that are in pain. And they accused me of exploiting this to support an anti-vaccine agenda, which they were clearly very upset by, exploiting their son’s death. I have to say to myself, I empathize with their pain, and I can understand why they were upset, and I went and took that post down. But what it underscores… I have a colleague that I won’t name, who is a prolific writer about these things, you would recognize him, who made the case the other day that the other side is lying all the time and we have to be willing to lie too, and to make our point because it is a global fight. And I objected. I said, No, we can’t do that.
The end does not justify the means.
Dr. Malone: Right! But I think that when we’re in the thick of this confrontation, this truly epic battle, I think that’s not overstating it. We are in a truly epic battle. And I think that we have to try really hard to maintain our integrity and not follow into the behavior and the ethics of it.
Exactly.
Dr. Malone:Because, you know, if we want to talk about soul, that’s how we lose our soul. That’s how we become perverted ,and brought into that darkness that we seem to see our opponent as fallen into.
Exactly. And what really comes to me just in this whole conversation, when you speak about the economic powers today, when we talk in biblical terms, you know, our Lord always said, you cannot serve Mammon and God at the same time. So in a sense, you cannot in fighting Mammon, you shouldn’t adapt the methods of Mammon. You still should keep that ethical approach because finally, we stand before God and not before man.
Dr. Malone: I think that is a fundamental truth that transcends all theology. I believe there are universal ethical truths, which are the foundation for Western culture. I can’t speak to eastern culture as I don’t know it, but in my world there are fundamental, transcendent ethical truths. A lot of them stem from the idea that we have, as thinking beings, we have responsibility to each other and to the world around us and the animals around us. And you saw that today as we went out and saw the horses, et cetera. I think that if we lose that ability to empathize and our commitment to our fellow beings…
Then we lose our soul.
Dr. Malone:Completely.
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Malone, for this wonderful interview. And we hope we can do that again, and we can keep listening to your wisdom and good guidance in this very, very difficult time. Thank you so much.
Dr. Malone:Oh, it’s my pleasure.
https://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/letter-172-2021-fri-dec-10-austria-and-germany/
Ryan Saavedra
A federal judge in Louisiana blocked Democrat President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers on Tuesday, issuing a nationwide injunction on Biden’s order.
The Daily Advertiser reported:
Louisiana Western District U.S. Judge Terry Doughty’s decision follows an identical ruling Monday from Missouri U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp, but Schelp’s decision only covered 10 states.
Doughty ruled on the lawsuit led by Republican Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and joined by 13 other states, but Doughty added a nationwide injunction in his ruling.
“If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands,” Doughty wrote. “If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry praised the ruling and slammed Biden for “villainiz[ing] our healthcare heroes with his ‘jab or job’ edicts.”
“While our fight is far from over, I am pleased the Court granted preliminary relief against the President’s unconstitutional and immoral attack on not only our healthcare workers but also the access to healthcare services for our poor and elderly,” Landry said. “I will see this case through to the end – fighting every step of the way to prevent the federal government from imposing medical tyranny on our citizens and turning last year’s healthcare heroes into this year’s unemployed.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) responded to an attack from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the president, on Sunday by doubling down on his call for the Department of Justice to investigate Fauci for alleged false statements that he made while testifying to Congress.
“Anybody who spins lies and threatens and all that theater that goes on with some of the investigations and the congressional committees and the Rand Pauls and all that other nonsense, that’s noise, Margaret, that’s noise,” Fauci said during an interview with CBS News’ Margaret Brennan.
Later, when asked about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) saying that Fauci should be prosecuted by the Department of Justice, Fauci responded: “Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?”
Fauci claimed that Republicans were trying to scapegoat him to protect former President Donald Trump and that Republicans who are attacking him are “lying.”
Cruz responded to Fauci’s remarks in a series of tweets late on Sunday afternoon, calling Fauci “an unelected technocrat who has distorted science and facts in order to exercise authoritarian control over millions of Americans.”
“He lives in a liberal world where his smug ‘I REPRESENT science’ attitude is praised,” Cruz said.
Cruz then laid out four “facts” related to his call for the DOJ to investigate Fauci:
“No amount of ad hominem insults parroting Democrat talking points will get Fauci out of this contradiction,” Cruz concluded. “Fauci either needs to address the substance—in detail, with specific factual corroboration—or DOJ should consider prosecuting him for making false statements to Congress.”
Fauci faced additional backlash on Sunday from various officials and commentators:
Peter Aitken
The South African doctor who first alerted authorities to the presence of the COVID-19 omicron variant reported that it presents “unusual but mild” symptoms.
Dr. Angelique Coetzee, a board member of the South African Medical Association, first noticed otherwise healthy patients demonstrating unusual symptoms on Nov. 18.
“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” Coetzee told The Telegraph.
FILE PHOTO: A child reacts while receiving a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine at Smoketown Family Wellness Center in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S., November 8, 2021. REUTERS/Jon Cherry/File Photo
“It presents mild disease with symptoms being sore muscles and tiredness for a day or two not feeling well,” Coetzee explained. “So far, we have detected that those infected do not suffer the loss of taste or smell. They might have a slight cough. There are no prominent symptoms. Of those infected some are currently being treated at home.”
BIDEN PROMISED TO ‘SHUT DOWN’ COVID, BUT OMICRON VARIANT POSES NEW CHALLENGE FOR ADMIN
Coetzee reported around two dozen of her patients that tested positive for the coronavirus and displayed these new symptoms. She alerted officials to the possibility of a new variant, which the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday designated the omicron variant.
People lineup to get on an overseas flight at OR Tambo’s airport in Johannesburg, South Africa’, Friday Nov. 26, 2021. A slew of nations moved to stop air travel from southern Africa on Friday in reaction to news of a new, potentially more transmissible COVID-19 variant that has been detected in South Africa. Scientists say it is a concern because of its high number of mutations and rapid spread among young people in Gauteng, the country’s most populous province. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
Most of the patients were men who reported “feeling so tired,” and half of them were unvaccinated. The patients comprised a range of ages and ethnicities.
COVID-19 OMICRON VARIANT: HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW
Coetzee started briefing other African medical associations on Saturday, discussing the variety of symptoms, such as “one very interesting case” of a six-year-old child with a fever and “very high pulse rate.”
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” Coetzee said.
NO CASES OF COVID-19 OMICRON VARIANT IDENTIFIED YET IN US, CDC SAYS
So far, the hospitals are not yet overburdened.
Coetzee’s advisement follows a report by Tulio de Oliveira, the director of South Africa’s Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation.
Oliveira told reporters the virus has a “very unusual constellation of mutations,” most notably 10 variants on a key protein that helps the virus infect humans compared to the delta variant’s two mutations and the beta variant’s three mutations.
He criticized several countries – including the U.S., U.K., South Korea and various countries in Europe – for enacting travel restrictions on South Africa and several other African nations.
“The world should provide support to South Africa and Africa and not discriminate or isolate it!” Oliveira tweeted. “By protecting and supporting it, we will protect the world!”
https://www.foxnews.com/health/south-african-doctor-omicron-variant-symptoms-unusual-mild
ANI / Nov 27, 2021, 16:41 IST 2 – 3 minutes
JOHANNESBURG: The new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease, without prominent syndromes, Angelique Coetzee, the chairwoman of the South African Medical Association, told Sputnik on Saturday.
The World Health Organization (WHO) identified on Friday the new South African strain as one of concern, as it is reported to carry a high number of mutations — 32 — which possibly makes it more transmissible and dangerous. The WHO has dubbed it Omicron, the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.
“It presents mild disease with symptoms being sore muscles and tiredness for a day or two not feeling well. So far, we have detected that those infected do not suffer loss of taste or smell. They might have a slight cough. There are no prominent symptoms. Of those infected some are currently being treated at home,” Coetzee said
The official noted that hospitals have not been overburdened by Omicron patients and that the new strain is not been detected in vaccinated persons. At the same time, the situation might be different for the unvaccinated.
“We will only know this after two weeks. Yes, it is transmissible, but for now, as medical practitioners, we do not know why so much hype is being driven as we are still looking into it. We will only know after two to three weeks as there are some patients admitted and these are young people aged 40 and younger,” Coetzee added.
The chairwoman also criticized the decision by some countries to ban flights from South Africa is premature as there is not enough information on how dangerous it is.
Following the reports about the new variant, the United States, the European Union, Canada, Israel, Australia and other countries have restricted travel from several southern African nations over the health concerns.
Chris Pandolfo
The Food and Drug Administration is asking a federal court to allow it to take nearly 55 years to release data on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to the public.
The agency said in a court filing Monday that in order to complete a Freedom of Information Act request for data and information on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, it will need to process 329,000 pages of documents and can only do so at a rate of 500 pages per month. At that rate, the information requested will not be fully released until the year 2076.
The FOIA request was submitted to the FDA in August by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, a group of more than 30 international public health professionals, medical professionals, scientists, and journalists that “exist solely to obtain and disseminate the data relied upon by the FDA to license COVID-19 vaccines.” The group includes academics and medical experts from Yale, Harvard Medical School, and UCLA; alumni from the Trump administration; and prominent health experts from around the world.
PHMPT is being represented by Siri & Glimstad, a New York-based law firm that has performed millions of dollars of legal work on behalf of groups opposed to vaccine mandates.
The medical transparency group had requested “all data and information for the Pfizer vaccine” including safety and effectiveness data; a protocol for a test or study; adverse reaction reports, product experience reports, consumer complaints, and other similar data and information; a list of all active ingredients and any inactive ingredients; an assay method or other analytical method; all correspondence and written summaries of oral discussions relating to the vaccine; all records showing Pfizer and BioNTech’s testing of a particular lot; and all records showing the testing of and action on a particular lot by the FDA.
PHMPT also made a request for expedited processing of its FOIA submission, arguing there is a “compelling need” for the FDA to speedily release Pfizer vaccine data “because a lack of transparency erodes the confidence the medical and scientific community and the public have in the conclusions reached by the FDA.”
“During a time when COVID-19 vaccine mandates are being implemented over the objection of those that have questions about the data and information supporting the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer Vaccine, and individuals with these questions are being expelled from employment, school, transportation, and the military, the public has an urgent and immediate need to have access to this data,” PHMPT said in its FOIA request.
The group filed a lawsuit in September after the FDA denied their request to expedite the release of its records. In Monday’s court filing, the plaintiff and the defendant are seeking a decision from a judge to resolve a dispute over the disclosure schedule for the requested documents.
“The FDA’s promise of transparency is, to put it mildly, a pile of illusions,” attorney Aaron Siri wrote Wednesday in a blog post about the case.
“It took the FDA precisely 108 days from when Pfizer started producing the records for licensure (on May 7, 2021) to when the FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine (on August 23, 2021). Taking the FDA at its word, it conducted an intense, robust, thorough, and complete review and analysis of those documents in order to assure that the Pfizer vaccine was safe and effective for licensure,” he wrote.
“While it can conduct that intense review of Pfizer’s documents in 108 days, it now asks for over 20,000 days to make these documents available to the public.”
The FDA argued in the court filing that to comply with federal law it must redact certain information that is exempt from the records request filed by the plaintiff. Information about Pfizer-BioNTech’s confidential business and trade secrets and personal privacy data on patients who participated in clinical trials are examples of documents the FDA is prohibited by law from releasing.
“Reviewing and redacting records for exempt information is a time-consuming process that often requires government information specialists to review each page line-by-line,” the FDA told the court. “When a party requests a large amount of records, like Plaintiff did here, courts typically set a schedule whereby the processing and production of the non-exempt portions of records is made on a rolling basis.”
The FDA said that court precedent has determined a rate of 500 pages per month to be an efficient response to a large request like the one filed by PHMPT. The agency also said it’s FOIA response office does not have enough funding or staff to answer the request at a quicker pace and that if the plaintiff wishes to hurry the process along, the group can do so by narrowing the scope of their document request.
The plaintiff argues the FDA should complete the FOIA request no later than March 3, 2022. “This 108-day period is the same amount of time it took the FDA to review the responsive documents for the far more intricate task of licensing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine,” the plaintiff told the court.
“The ability of a majority of Americans to participate in civil society, and even exercise basic liberty rights, are now contingent on receiving this product,” PHMPT’s lawyers wrote, noting that President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates have made vaccination a condition of employment for millions of Americans.
“There are few whose livelihood, education, service, and participation in civil society are not contingent on a government requirement to receive this product. On this basis alone, basic liberty and government transparency demand that the documents and data submitted by Pfizer to license this product be made available to Plaintiff and the public forthwith, precisely as contemplated by federal regulations,” the plaintiff said.
“The entire purpose of the FOIA is to assure government transparency,” the plaintiff told the judge. “It is difficult to imagine a greater need for transparency than immediate disclosure of the documents relied upon by the FDA to license a product that is now being mandated to over 100 million Americans under penalty of losing their careers, their income, their military service status, and far worse.”
The FDA granted full approval for Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine on August 23, 2021, under the label Comirnaty.
Earlier this month, a now-former employee of Ventavia Research Group, one of the companies contracted with Pfizer to run its Phase III vaccine clinical trials, made allegations that raised questions about the data submitted before Comirnaty received FDA approval.
Brook Jackson, a former regional director for Ventavia, told the British Medical Journal that her company “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.”
After Jackson notified Ventavia of these issues, she emailed a complaint to the FDA and was fired within hours.
According to investigative reporter Paul Thacker, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites even though it was alerted to the issues.
Ventavia has since said it is investigating the allegations.
In a statement to the Epoch Times, the FDA declined to comment on the Ventavia matter but said it “has full confidence in the data that were used to support the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine authorization and the Comirnaty approval.”
As of Nov. 17, more than 258,642,454 doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States.
Mary Bowden, who is an ear, nose and throat doctor at Houston Methodist Hospital, shared opinions on social media on the subject of COVID-19 vaccine mandates and COVID-19 treatments. According to a hospital spokesperson who spoke with The Washington Post, “Bowden, who recently joined the hospital’s medical staff, has been suspended for ‘spreading dangerous misinformation’ and sharing ‘harmful’ personal and political opinions about the coronavirus vaccine and treatments.”
“The physician’s privileges at Houston Methodist have been suspended,” Patti Muck said in an email, adding that the hospital granted Bowden privileges within the last year.
According to The Post, Bowden’s attorney, Steve Mitby, said his client has treated more than 2,000 COVID-19 patients and is “not anti-vaccine.”
“Like many Americans, Dr. Bowden believes that people should have a choice and believes that all people, regardless of vaccine status, should have access to the same high quality health care,” Mitby said.
As The Post notes, “Earlier this year, more than 150 health-care workers with the Houston Methodist resigned or were terminated for not complying with its vaccine mandate. The Houston-based hospital system said Bowden, who is vaccinated against the coronavirus, has never admitted a patient at the medical center, which has treated more than 25,000 covid patients. The hospital was one of the country’s first to require proof of vaccination.”
“The Houston doctor is the latest medical professional suspended for promoting coronavirus misinformation and the consumption of ivermectin, an unproven treatment the Food and Drug Administration has said can be “dangerous” and potentially fatal,” the Post noted.
The tweets referenced by media reports include “Ivermectin might not be as deadly as everyone said it was,” which Bowden tweeted on Nov. 10. “Speak up!”
Bowden also tweeted that “Vaccine mandates are wrong,” alongside an image which read, “What the government is doing to its citizens in the United States is incomprehensible. Thank you for what you do for your patients. God bless you and your staff.”
Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) nor the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recommended the use of Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, and the FDA has explicitly said not to use it to treat or prevent COVID-19.
“The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals. Ivermectin is approved for human use to treat infections caused by some parasitic worms and head lice and skin conditions like rosacea,” says the FDA. “Currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19. Clinical trials assessing ivermectin tablets for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 in people are ongoing.”
“Talk to your health care provider about available COVID-19 vaccines and treatment options. Your provider can help determine the best option for you, based on your health history,” says the FDA.
By Omar MoslehEdmonton BureauSat., Nov. 13, 2021timer3 min. readupdateArticle was updated 1 hr ago 5 – 6 minutes
The emergence of two sublineages of the COVID-19 Delta variant in Western Canada holds important lessons for the rest of the country on the consequences of allowing a virus to spread unchecked, infectious disease experts say.
But it’s yet to be known if the sublineages, called AY.25 and AY.27, are more effective at replicating or a greater threat to Canadians.
Dr. Jessica Minion, a medical microbiologist with the Saskatchewan Health authority, highlighted her concerns with the Delta variant sublineages in a town hall last Thursday.
The Delta variant is the dominant variant in Saskatchewan, making up nearly 100 per cent of cases. Minion said the AY lineage cases are “exploding” in number, from only 12 on Oct. 9 to nearly 125 as of Nov. 5.
“It is very difficult from an epidemiologic perspective to sort out whether those expansions of the AY lineages are due to advantageous mutations that are making them more transmissible … (or) maybe this particular lineage got into a population that was largely unvaccinated, got into a super-spreader event and is expanding exponentially due to pure chance,” she said.
Alberta and Saskatchewan have grappled with the highest rates of infection and the lowest rates of vaccination among the provinces in the fourth wave. Dr. Ilan Schwartz, an infectious diseases expert and assistant professor at the University of Alberta, said the more opportunities a virus has to replicate the more likely genetic mutations will occur.
“It’s unsurprising in a climate where the virus has basically been given free reign over the summer and fall months specifically in Alberta and Saskatchewan,” Schwartz said.
“The question is to what extent these random mutations are going to confer a fitness or survival advantage that is going to allow the one particular mutant or variant to be able to out-compete other random mutants or variants?”
That still remains to be seen. The earliest detection of the AY.25 and AY.27 sublineages were in Western Canada, specifically Alberta and B.C., but that doesn’t mean they originated here, said Dr. Jeffrey Joy, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s faculty of medicine and an expert in genomic epidemiology.
“I was able to see that there’s actually an identical sequence detected in India at around the same time. So I think the jury is still out a little bit on whether it actually evolved here or whether it came here,” Joy said, noting there is a lot of interchange between Canada and India.
“We were doing a lot more surveillance here than they were doing in India at that time,” he added.
What it does show is that the virus will continue to mutate and evolve, something that is expected, but especially in areas where there are large populations of people unvaccinated.
“It highlights for everybody that evolution is happening right here in Canada, potentially, and every new infection is an opportunity for the virus to evolve,” Joy said.
Caroline Colijn, an epidemiologist, mathematician and professor at Simon Fraser University, said AY.25 was circulating in other parts of the world whereas AY.27 is an almost exclusively a Western Canadian phenomenon.
“That doesn’t mean it’s only here, because of course people in the world are not sequencing all of the cases,” she said.
What does it mean for Canadians? The sublineages are already on the move and could become the dominant strain in Canada. Thus far, there is some indication the new sublineages are slightly more effective at spreading.
But they don’t seem to pose a much greater threat than the baseline Delta variant.
“It looks like they are expanding and have a slight transmission advantage. (But) it’s not to Delta the way Delta was to Alpha or the way Alpha was to the original COVID,” Colijn said.
While experts are cautious to ring alarm bells over the discovery, Schwartz said they offer a cautionary tale to the rest of the country.
“It doesn’t really change what we do clinically, but it does sort of reinforce what scientists have been saying for many months, which is it’s bad idea to allow unhindered replication of this,” he said.
“This is something we’re paying for now in terms of increased cases, but then we may ultimately see consequences down the road in terms of giving this virus the opportunity to generate new variants that may potentially create some difficulty for us.”
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