Tag: coronavirus

Judge rules against firefighter injured by COVID shot after employer rejected medical exemption

Former New York City firefighter O’Brian Pastrana, who was forced to retire after he was diagnosed with permanent heart damage following the mandated COVID-19 shot, is not entitled to financial compensation for his losses, a federal judge ruled last week.

U.S. District Judge Brian M. Cogan ruled that none of Pastrana’s fundamental rights were violated when he was denied a medical exemption – even though he experienced a severe reaction to the first shot – and compelled to either get fully vaccinated or be fired by the New York City Fire Department (FDNY).

Cogan said the vaccine mandate wasn’t to blame for Pastrana’s injury, as he claimed. “In this case, Pastrana always had a choice between receiving the vaccine and keeping his job.”

Pastrana also “was free to decide between taking the vaccine or seeking different employment” in another department or a neighboring state, Cogan ruled. And he was “free not to receive the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, potentially sacrificing his career.” As a result, the city can’t be held accountable for his injuries, Cogan ruled.

Based on the facts presented, Cogan granted the city’s motion for summary judgment, ruling in the city’s favor without a trial.

Christina Martinez, one of Pastrana’s attorneys, said the court sidestepped the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, which prohibits the government from conditioning a public benefit, like employment, on the waiver of a constitutional right.

Keep reading

Waste of the Day: No Effort to Claw Back Improper Covid Grants

Topline: The Small Business Administration’s Shuttered Venue Operators grant program made $544 million of improper payments during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the SBA has not even tried to recover most of the funds, a new audit from the agency’s inspector general found.

Key facts: The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program gave $16.3 billion in grants to movie theaters, concert halls and other performance venues that had to close during the pandemic.

The SBA realized in 2024 that $544 million was paid to 579 businesses that may have been ineligible for the grants or did not fill out their paperwork properly. Federal law requires agencies to “promptly” send demand letters asking businesses to return the improper payments, but the SBA has only sent one demand letter.

SBA officials wrote a policy for sending demand letters in August 2023, but the policy had still not been approved as of November 2024. Some officials wanted the SBA’s Office of Hearing and Appeals to mediate disputes over improper payments, but the Office claims it does not have the authority to do so.

No demand letters can be mailed until the SBA figures out its policy. The longer it takes, “there is an increased risk that the government will not be able to collect improperly paid funds. The ability of an agency to collect delinquent debts generally decreases as debts get older,” according to the inspector general.

There were 220 grant recipients who voluntarily returned a total of $44 million without a demand letter.

The federal government lost $161.5 billion to improper payments in 2024.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Keep reading

Make Vaccine Injury Compensation Fair Again

We’ve known for years that the Covid-19 vaccines left many Americans seriously injured. Yet despite this common knowledge, the federal government’s surveillance to ensure vaccine safety has been substandard, to put it charitably. Worse, its performance in compensating those injured by the vaccine has been pathetic.

Now, Congress is finally paying attention to America’s vaccine woes.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., recently conducted a major hearing on general vaccine injuries, including childhood vaccines, taking sworn testimony on conditions from cardiovascular damage to neurodevelopmental disabilities. House investigators have also demonstrated the inadequacy of existing systems in tracking adverse events from the Covid-19 vaccines.

Such investigations have focused especially on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Under that system, doctors and patients are supposed to report Covid-19 vaccine injuries.

The sheer number of reported adverse events from the Covid-19 vaccine (over 1.8 million) dwarfs all previously reported vaccine injuries. But because it is a “passive” reporting system, largely based on patient self-reporting, VAERS is unable to show a causal relationship between a specific vaccine injection and a particular adverse reaction.

Keep reading

California Hospital Concealed Evidence Linking ‘Catastrophic Surge’ in Stillbirths to COVID Vaccine, Lawsuit Alleges

A California hospital concealed data linking a “catastrophic surge” in stillbirths among women who received COVID-19 vaccines, according to a lawsuit filed last week in the Superior Court of California, Fresno County.

Michelle Spencer, a nurse at Community Medical Centers’ (CMC) Community Regional Medical Center, said the hospital “deliberately and selectively” concealed from staff, patients and regulators a spike in unborn baby deaths that began in spring 2021, and retaliated against her when she publicized the information.

The lawsuit also says the hospital concealed medical data related to the fetal deaths that showed a link to COVID-19 vaccination of pregnant mothers.

The data include hospital-wide medical records documenting the number of stillbirths and the vaccination histories of those babies’ mothers. One managing nurse at the hospital told a staff member that nearly all of the stillbirths occurred among vaccinated mothers.

According to the complaint, Spencer “witnessed firsthand the exponential increase in unborn baby deaths directly correlating with pregnant women who received a Covid vaccine and then would deliver a dead baby a close number of days or weeks following their injection.”

Keep reading

Operation Warp Speed: The Good, the Bad, and the Deadly

Ihave been a strong supporter of Donald Trump since the first Super Tuesday primary in February 2016, when he trounced the competition in races held in the heart of the ‘Bible Belt.’ Those results convinced me that if any Republican had a prayer (excuse the pun) of winning the White House, he was the only game in town.

One of the key elements of the Trump administration’s response to the Covid pandemic was Operation Warp Speed (OWS). A unique feature of OWS was that it was used, respectively, by Trump’s supporters and detractors to laud or denigrate the initiative, depending almost solely on political party affiliation. This bifurcation even extended to the healthcare establishment, a clear indication that medical science had been eclipsed by political science. In so doing, the physician’s creed, “First, do no harm” was shredded. The impact on patient outcomes, not surprisingly, was devastating.

In an attempt to move the discussion away from political slogans and bumper stickers, and towards a more nuanced assessment, I will examine six major OWS initiatives:

  • Ventilators
  • Masks 
  • Disinfectants
  • Hospital Beds for NYC and Los Angeles
  • Repurposed Therapeutics: Hydroxychloroquine
  • mRNA Vaccine Development, Production, and Distribution

Ventilators

In preparing for airborne pandemics, it had been the consensus for several years that the number of ventilators available would be woefully inadequate. To meet this challenge, Trump pulled every emergency lever at his disposal in order to direct the nation’s manufacturing capabilities towards producing the number of ventilators required. This effort succeeded to the degree that the metrics for ventilator production were quickly exceeded, and a more than sufficient number was produced and distributed. 

Clearly, this was a logistical triumph…but there’s the rub. It was determined early on that almost all patients with Covid-induced respiratory failure who were placed on a ventilator succumbed. You’d think that someone in authority would have made the observation that ventilators caused harm whenever used, and use of this modality would have ceased. Well, if you thought that, you’d be mistaken. Ventilators were used for months after it was clear that they caused harm. So where does responsibility for this debacle reside? Was it with OWS for supplying too many ventilators or with the healthcare providers who, under cover of perverse incentives, continued to use them? 

Masks 

As with ventilators, there was great concern that supplies of masks would be inadequate. Given the fact that more than 100 years of public health policy and practice had demonstrated that mask use outside of healthcare settings was a useless exercise, pulling the trigger on OWS should never have been done. However, when it came to Covid, deliberately fanning the flames of fear overcame sound public health policy, and the trigger was pulled. Sadly, all of the predicted collateral damage that universal masking could cause came to pass (as has been well-documented elsewhere), with none of the purported benefits. An additional adverse consequence that has not been mentioned is to the environment. Between the masks and the plastic straws, I’m surprised there are any sea turtles left! 

Once again, where does responsibility for this debacle reside? Is it with OWS for supplying a huge number of masks or with the public health agencies that continued to push, and, in many cases, mandated a useless modality that could and did cause harm? 

Keep reading

THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH

The Department of Health and Human Services just admitted that mRNA injections are not safe and they do not work.

Yet, these biological weapons remain on the market and are still being injected into people.

“As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.”

“The vaccine paradoxically encourages new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effects of the vaccine.”

“After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses.

“Going forward, BARDA will focus on platforms with stronger safety records and transparent clinical and manufacturing data practices.”

“BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”

“Some final-stage contracts (e.g., Arcturus and Amplitude) will be allowed to run their course to preserve prior taxpayer investment.”

Keep reading

Masking Our Schoolchildren Was Child Abuse – A Rare Chance To Stop It Returning

While more and more people are becoming aware that masking healthy people is both ineffective and harmful – as illustrated by the current rarity of face coverings in community settings – pockets of pro-mask zealotry remain smouldering in certain sections of our society, constituting an ongoing risk of re-ignition in the future.

Health and social care is one such example – a hazard addressed in Smile Free’s recent film, Masking Humanity.

Another is our education system, where, for prolonged periods during the Covid event, headmasters and teachers cruelly muzzled our kids in schools.

Now, as a result of the sterling endeavours of the ‘Declaration of Dumfries’ (DoD) team – a fellowship of people promoting common law principles of truth, rights and sovereignty – a rare opportunity has arisen to land a telling blow against those in authority and thereby deter any future imposition of masks on our schoolchildren.

In brief, what the ‘Declaration of Dumfries’ (DoD) people have accomplished is to force a local council to explicitly admit that they never had the authority to mask children, nor to punish pupils for non-compliance. 

By doing so, there is now an opening for parents of children who were victims of the unlawful mask impositions during the Covid event to sue their local councils and, by doing so, land a blow that will ensure that those in positions of power within our education system think twice before ever pulling such a stunt on our nation’s children again. 

To achieve this victory required 17 months of dogged determination and persistence.

The sequence of events is detailed in a DoD flowchart.

Keep reading

SHOCKING: FDA Commissioner Dr. Makary Says NIH ‘Brewed Up a Virus That Killed 20 Million People Worldwide’

Newly appointed FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary pulled no punches as he directly accused the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of funding the lab responsible for creating the virus that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic and claimed the lives of over 20 million people globally.

Speaking to NewsNation’s Connell McShane, Dr. Makary blasted the former NIH leadership for pouring taxpayer dollars into unaccountable pet projects, including the now-infamous lab that engineered the virus that triggered a global pandemic.

Dr. Makary:
The way it used to be. We’re planning to change our health agencies for a generation or longer. Look at the NIH. When J. Bhattacharya came in there, it was a mess. Fourteen percent of the grants were descriptive studies on health equity.

And the NIH had just funded a lab that brewed up a virus that killed 20 million people worldwide. So they’re getting back to studying root causes, a cure for cancer, debilitating neurodegenerative diseases, and they’re going to do good work.

Connell McShane:
Right, but you have to do it with fewer people. Is that a challenge with the cuts, or is that not really what it’s made out to be either?

Dr. Makary:
The FDA is strong, and it’s going to continue to be strong. The cuts were consolidations. There were no layoffs to scientific reviewers or inspectors at the FDA.

There was consolidation of the twelve travel offices at the FDA. And so we’re going to institute teamwork and break up the fiefdom culture within the agency. It’s an interesting conversation.

Keep reading

Hospitals Turned Into Killing Centers During Pandemic — Will We Learn From the Mistakes?

When historians one day sift through the wreckage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central question won’t be how many lives the virus claimed. It will be: how many were lost to a system that collapsed into fear, censorship and fatal conformity?

At TrialSite News, we chronicled the crisis as it unfolded. We reported — early, relentlessly, and despite immense pushback — that the majority of COVID-19 infections were mild to moderate.

Peer-reviewed research later affirmed what we knew by spring 2020: roughly 90–95% of infections did not require hospitalization, and those at real risk were predominantly the elderly or chronically ill.

Even Bill Gates eventually admitted the fatality rate was relatively low and the disease pattern was akin to the flu. Just think of the implications.

But public health leaders didn’t follow the data — they followed panic and centralized narrative control promulgated by a confluence of government, industry and academia. And the price was paid in hospital wards across America.

A misdiagnosed disease met with misguided protocols

Ventilators became the instrument of tragedy. Early guidance — mirroring protocols from China — promoted rapid intubation. In New York’s spring 2020 surge, nearly nine out of 10 intubated patients died.

Though that number softened as more data emerged, the damage was done. Hospitals, misreading COVID pneumonia as typical ARDS, deployed invasive mechanical ventilation far too aggressively.

Patients with “silent hypoxia” — low oxygen but no distress — were sedated and intubated when non-invasive oxygen support might have sufficed.

What followed was a cascade of preventable deaths: ventilator-associated pneumonia, sedation complications, ICU delirium and multi-organ failure. We heard the stories. We saw the data. Too many walked in with breathlessness and left in body bags. It was a tragic disaster.

This wasn’t just clinical failure; it was bureaucratic blindness and potential criminality. Across hospital systems, the practice of “homogenized care” erased the art of medicine in favor of algorithmic treatment pathways.

Individual patient context vanished. And families — banned from the bedside — couldn’t intervene.

The forgotten treatments — cheap, effective, ignored

As thousands perished under sedation, treatments that could have helped were either dismissed or demonized. The RECOVERY trial in June 2020 showed that dexamethasone — a low-cost steroid — cut deaths by one-third in ventilated patients.

But months had already passed. Why didn’t we try anti-inflammatory therapies sooner?

Remember the ICAM protocol TrialSite reported on? Early on in the pandemic, a pharmacist for a southern health system was saving lives with a combination of steroids, blood thinners and the like. Yet this was shut down, we were told to due to a Pfizer contract with the health system.

Meanwhile, the government rushed emergency use approval for remdesivir, a drug that shortened hospital stays but did not reduce mortality — and carried notable toxicity risks. The opportunity cost was tragic. Time and attention were stolen from better solutions.

Frontline doctors proposing repurposed drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, in carefully designed early protocols, were silenced or sanctioned.

TrialSite News, remember, scooped ivermectin itself, then gave these doctors a platform — from Peter McCullough to Pierre Kory-publishing observational data, real-world insights and field-tested regimens.

But the Dr. Anthony Fauci-led National Institutes of Health dismissed outpatient care entirely. Americans were told to stay home, take nothing and seek help only once they couldn’t breathe. For many, that was too late.

Keep reading

Into the Abyss: How Bad Can the Covid Vaccine Story Get?

All Brownstone readers know that the Covid vaccines should never have been mandatory and should never have been prescribed to children or pregnant women, groups for which they were not tested. All of us have been alarmed to see stories of surprisingly many sudden heart failures, turbo cancers, and failed pregnancies in the days and months following the rollout of these shots.

How bad can it be? What is the worst estimate of the impact of the Covid vaccines on the count of living humans for which there is both some degree of empirical evidence and biological plausibility? Let us look into the heart of darkness and consider the worst.

Domain 1: Worldwide Excess Deaths

The principal source for global mortality data is the United Nations World Population Prospects, which at the time of writing had not been updated with a definitive number for 2024. We therefore only use data through 2023. Below we plot the total number of deaths in the world since 1950, and add to that a projection of the 10-year trend before 2020 through to 2023 (shown in the graph below as a red line). The numbers reveal that yearly death counts change fairly smoothly over time, except when humans do something stupid like the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962, which corresponds to the previous big spike in world deaths evident on the graph and which has been estimated to have cost the lives of around 45 million people.

Keep reading