Tag: coronavirus

‘Potentially a death sentence’: White House goes off on vaccine fearmongers

Beyond Fauci, press secretary Jen Psaki has pushed back on Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — a lawmaker she once said she’d not mention from the podium — who compared the administration’s vaccine campaign to Nazis. Jeff Zients, the White House’s Covid response director, rebuked Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who contended falsely in a tweet that government “agents” were going door-to-door to “compel vaccination.”

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

“We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover,” White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. “When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country’s public health and will not shy away from calling that out.”

The pushback is a change of tone and approach from earlier this year, when the White House often chose to ignore its most vocal conservative critics out of a desire not to elevate them. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the July 4 goal of 70 percent vaccination nationwide was overly optimistic, if not naive. And it underscores that two realities are setting in: It’s becoming more difficult to convince vaccine-skeptics to get their shots (of the 10 least vaccinated states, all were won by Donald Trump in 2020) and the anti-vaccine voices, already vocal in the country, are becoming more mainstreamed by Republicans eager to oppose Biden-led initiatives.

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There Were More COVID-19 Vaccine Deaths Last Week in US than COVID-19 Deaths

There are now 9,125 reported deaths from the COVID-19 vaccinations across the United States this year.

The number of deaths linked to vaccines this year has absolutely skyrocketed. According to the CDC’s own data, in 2021 n the first 3 months, the VAERS website recorded over 1,750 deaths due to vaccines in the US.

Last week they were reporting 6,985 deaths, and this week that number jumped up 2,043 to 9,048.

That number is now at 9,195

“The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database contains information on unverified reports of adverse events (illnesses, health problems and/or symptoms) following immunization with US-licensed vaccines. Reports are accepted from anyone and can be submitted electronically at www.vaers.hhs.gov.”

There have been 411,931 adverse reactions reported to the vaccine.

Also, last week there were 1,505 COVID-19 deaths in the United States.

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YouTube reverses censorship of journalist Alison Morrow who highlighted YouTube pro-corporate media bias

YouTube censored and suspended the channel of independent journalist Alison Morrow after she posted a video highlighting several examples of the mainstream media violating the “medical misinformation” rules that are regularly used by the tech giant to punish independent creators on the platform.

After facing mounting backlash over the decision, YouTube reinstated the video.

In the now reinstated video, which is titled “Corporate news can break YouTube’s rules” and features Matt Orfalea (an independent video producer who was recently censored by YouTube for highlighting YouTube censorship), Morrow highlighted two examples of corporate news channels violating YouTube’s medical misinformation policy.

The first example showed a February 2020 clip from the NBC News YouTube channel where one of the presenters states: “Experts caution, masks are not always the answer.” Another presenter states: “If you’re sick or somebody in the family’s sick, then doctors say the mask is an effective way to prevent that virus from spreading, but in a public place, not so much.”

The second example showed a March 2020 clip from the CNN YouTube channel where its Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta discusses the coronavirus and says “there’s some solace in this idea that the vast majority of people aren’t going to get sick from this” and “this is reminding people, I think a little bit, of, of, just flu in general.”

Morrow noted that both of these corporate news clips violate YouTube’s current medical “misinformation” policy but have not been removed with the first clip violating the rule that prohibits claims “claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19” and the second clip violating the rule that prohibits “claims that the symptoms, death rates, or contagiousness of COVID-19 are less severe or equally as severe as the common cold or seasonal flu.”

She also emphasized that YouTube’s medical misinformation policy is antithetical to the purpose of both science and journalism:

“How is science not always going to be medical misinformation, if science is the very practice of discovering new things? It’s just impossible to do science on YouTube or journalism for that matter. You can’t really do journalism on YouTube unless you’re a corporate entity because obviously journalism is also about questioning narratives and proposing new ideas and you can’t do that if the community guidelines are all about protecting the status quo.”

Morrow then suggested that the purpose of YouTube’s medical misinformation policy is to create “a cast of safe characters that are basically part of the same corporate class as YouTube” and notes that “you could even be saying the exact same thing the corporate news is saying” and still “face the consequences that they are not going to face.”

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FDA is set to announce new warning on J&J vaccine after 100 reports of it being linked to rare autoimmune disease Guillain-Barré syndrome

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is set to announce a new warning that the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine is linked to a rare autoimmune disease.

Four people familiar with the situation told The Washington Post that the shot has caused instances of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks the peripheral nervous system, temporarily paralyzing parts of the body.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is said to have received about 100 preliminary reports of Guillain-Barré following the one-dose vaccine   

Most the cases have occurred about two weeks after vaccination and mostly in men aged 50 and older. 

With just 100 cases reported out of 12.8 million doses administered, this means the condition is very rare occurring in just 0.000781 percent of cases.

The warning is yet another setback for J&J’s vaccine, which has plagued by pauses, ingredient mix-ups and doses needing to be thrown out.

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“Ignore No Soliciting Signs, Use Your Script”: Vaccine Door-Knocking Documents Revealed

As the Biden administration peddles its plan to send door-knocking missionaries across America to spread ‘vaccine awareness’ (and keep track of who’s vaccinated and who’s not), White House-coordinated FEMA “surge teams” are being assembled to reinforce local efforts on the ground.

In preparation for the coming campaign, Lake County, Illinois has published ‘Helpful Hints’ for volunteers taking part in their “Community Health Ambassador Outreach Door Knocking Project to Increase COVID Vaccine Acceptance.”

The ‘Helpful Hints!’ include:

  • If you’re nervous, that’s ok! We all still get nervous, even if we’ve done this before.
  • You don’t need to have all the answers. If you are unsure of an answer, be honest. Tell the person asking that you are a volunteer, and you will take down their question so that a health department staff person can get them the correct answer.
  • Inform, don’t convince. Your job is to equip the person at the door with the information/resources they need to make an informed decision about their health. You are not trying to convince anyone to do something they don’t want to do.
  • Ignore no soliciting signs. You’re not soliciting! You’re offering critical information and resources. What you are doing is not illegal.

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CNN Medical Analyst Wen: Life ‘Needs to Be Hard’ for Unvaccinated Americans

CNN medical contributor Dr. Leana Wen said Friday that life needs to be “hard” for Americans who have not received a coronavirus vaccine with “twice weekly testings.”

Wen, the former Planned Parenthood president, said, “So now we have this delta variant that is much more contagious. Because it’s more contagious, it’s going to be even harder for us to reach herd immunity. We’re going to have to vaccinate an even higher proportion of people to get there. What happens, then, if we end up having another variant developing that’s even more contagious, that could cause more disease, that could evade the protection of our immune system?”

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