Tag: covid-19

Rand Paul Warns Overclassification Being Used To Cover Up COVID Lab Leak

Senator Rand Paul warned Wednesday that over classification of information is being used to avoid oversight and institute cover ups, such as regarding the origins of COVID.

Appearing on Newsmax TV’s “Eric Bolling The Balance,” Paul explained “I think there’s an overclassification problem here. Everything’s classified. And in all likelihood, what we’ll find is this is not some sort of organized scheme to have the secrets to the nuclear weapon in [Biden’s] Corvette. I think it’s more likely than not that we’ve classified so many documents that it’s hard to find documents that are not classified.”

He continued, “The one problem with classifying so much is that there is, right now, to my knowledge, pretty good information out there in the intelligence community about the virus originating from the lab in China, and yet they classify it to try to prohibit people [like] me giving you the information that we already know that this came from a lab. And so this is a real problem.”

“We need to allow less classification so the American people can understand more about what’s going on with their government,” Paul urged.

He added, “I go to classified hearings, and I haven’t actually been to a classified hearing where I actually thought I heard a secret, to tell you the truth.”

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Massive spike in excess deaths sparks calls for an ‘urgent investigation’: NHS crisis is blamed for nearly 3,000 more Brits than usual dying each week

MPs have called for an urgent investigation into Britain’s soaring death rates as thousands more people than usual are dying each week.

Some 17,381 deaths were registered in England and Wales in the seven days to January 13 – 2,837 above average for the time of year.

This is the highest number of excess deaths since 3,429 in the week to February 12, 2021, when the UK was experiencing its second wave of Covid-19 infections and vaccination had only just begun.

On that occasion, deaths involving coronavirus accounted for 37 per cent of all those registered, according to the Office for National Statistics.

But in the most recent week, Covid-19 accounted for just 5 per cent of the total – meaning other factors are likely to be driving the high level of mortality.

Health experts say this could include ambulance delays, long waits in A&E, unmet need during the pandemic and major backlogs for routine NHS care.

Excess deaths, sometimes known as extra deaths, are the number of deaths that are above the average for the same period in previous years.

This winter has seen a sharp spike in the figures, with deaths 21 per cent and 20 per cent above average in the last two weeks of December, followed by 14 per cent and 20 per cent in the first two weeks of January.

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WSJ Shreds Vaccine Makers, Biden Admin Over “Deceptive” Booster Campaign

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley has taken a flamethrower to vaccine makers over their “deceptive” campaign for bivalent Covid boosters, and slams several federal agencies for taking “the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.”

You might have heard a radio advertisement warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. The message, sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, claims that updated bivalent vaccines will improve your protection.

This is deceptive advertising. But the public-health establishment’s praise for the bivalent shots shouldn’t come as a surprise. -WSJ

The narrative behind the campaign was simple; mRNA Covid shots could simply be ‘tweaked’ to to target new variants – in this case, the jabs were claimed to confer protection against BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants, along with the original Wuhan strain.

To call this wishful thinking would be extremely generous.

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CDC Officials Who Spread Misinformation Apologized to Source of False Data but Not to Public

U.S. health officials who spread inflated COVID-19 child death data in public meetings apologized to the source of the false data but not to the public, newly obtained emails show.

Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered the false data in 2022 while U.S. officials weighed granting emergency authorization to COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months.

The study they cited for the data was published ahead of peer review by a group comprised primarily of British authors. The study was corrected after the public meetings.

Emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed that Fleming-Dutra and Oliver were alerted that they had spread misinformation. Neither the officials nor the CDC have informed the public of the false information. Newly obtained emails showed the officials apologized to Seth Flaxman, one of the study’s authors, and even offered to see whether the study could be published in the CDC’s quasi-journal.

“I feel … that we owe you an apology,” Oliver wrote to Flaxman on June 27, about 10 days after she and Fleming-Dutra falsely said there had been at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 in America among those 19 and younger. “We draw the attention of a variety of individuals with the ACIP meetings, and apologize that you got caught in it this time.”

“I am also sorry that you got pulled into the attention around the VRBPAC and ACIP meetings,” Fleming-Dutra added. She had presented the data to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which advises the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC.

Fleming-Dutra, Oliver, and Flaxman did not respond to requests for comment.

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Doctors in USA admit they killed Patients during the Pandemic by putting them on Ventilators

In a jaw-dropping article published by The Wall Street Journal – ‘Hospitals Retreat From Early Covid Treatment and Return to Basics’ – physicians admit to ventilating patients who did not need it as a step in their protocol – get this – not as a treatment that was likely to benefit the patient, but rather as a fruitless and callous way of attempting to stop the spread of covid-19.

Last spring, with less known about the disease, doctors often pre-emptively put patients on ventilators or gave powerful sedatives largely abandoned in recent years. The aim was to save the seriously ill and protect hospital staff from Covid-19.

Now hospital treatment for the most critically ill looks more like it did before the pandemic. Doctors hold off longer before placing patients on ventilators. Patients get less powerful sedatives, with doctors checking more frequently to see if they can halt the drugs entirely and dialling back how much air ventilators push into patients’ lungs with each breath.

“We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patient’s benefit, but to control the epidemic and to save other patients,” Dr. Iwashyna said “That felt awful.”

Yes, euthanising humans is illegal. Especially for the benefit of other patients. It should feel awful.

Last spring, doctors put patients on ventilators partly to limit contagion at a time when it was less clear how the virus spread when protective masks and gowns were in short supply. Doctors could have employed other kinds of breathing support devices that don’t require risky sedation, but early reports suggested patients using them could spray dangerous amounts of virus into the air, said Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at University of Michigan and Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Subsequent research found the alternative devices to ventilators, such as delivering oxygen through nasal tubes, weren’t as risky to caretakers as believed. Doctors also gained experience with covid-19 patients, learning to spot signs of who might suddenly turn seriously ill, some said.

The WSJ article describes a study conducted that now allows doctors to predict who needs a ventilator and who does not:

It found more doctors now follow the pre-pandemic protocols, which have reduced the number of deaths and shortened the time patients spend on ventilators, HCA’s chief medical officer said.

Before the pandemic, between about 30% to more than 40% of ventilator patients died, according to research. Numbers were sharply higher in the pandemic’s early hot spot in Wuhan, China. As the pandemic grew, hospitals in the US reported death rates in some cases of about 50% for ventilated covid-19 patients.

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Vatican investigating ‘sex party’ in cathedral

The Catholic Church is investigating allegations of a “sex party” that took place at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Newcastle while the rest of the UK was under strict lockdown rules, the Sunday Times reported. The probe is part of a wider Vatican inquiry into the diocese, involving multiple cases of sexual abuse.

In a letter reported by the newspaper on Sunday, the Archbishop of Liverpool said that he had been asked by the Pope’s advisers to compile “an in-depth report” into events leading up to the resignation of Robert Byrne as the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle in December.

Byrne was made bishop in 2019, and immediately appointed Father Michael McCoy as the Dean of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Newcastle. 

When the UK was placed under strict lockdown rules the following year, McCoy allegedly approached several parishoners and asked them to attend “a party” at the cathedral, a source told the Times. This event was described by the source as “a sex party taking place in the priests’ living quarters attached to Newcastle cathedral.”

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WSJ Shreds Vaccine Makers, Biden Admin Over “Deceptive” Booster Campaign

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley has taken a flamethrower to vaccine makers over their “deceptive” campaign for bivalent Covid boosters, and slams several federal agencies for taking “the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.“

You might have heard a radio advertisement warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. The message, sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, claims that updated bivalent vaccines will improve your protection.

This is deceptive advertising. But the public-health establishment’s praise for the bivalent shots shouldn’t come as a surprise. -WSJ

The narrative behind the campaign was simple; mRNA Covid shots could simply be ‘tweaked’ to to target new variants – in this case, the jabs were claimed to confer protection against BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants, along with the original Wuhan strain.

To call this wishful thinking would be extremely generous.

As Finley writes, three scientific problems have arisen.

  1. The virus is mutating much faster than vaccines can be updated.
  2. Vaccines have ‘hard wired’ our immune systems to respond to the original Wuhan strain, “so we churn out fewer antibodies that neutralize variants targeted by updated vaccines.”
  3. Antibody protection wanes after just a few months.

Finley has brought receipts too…

Two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine this month showed that bivalent boosters increase neutralizing antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, but not significantly more than the original boosters. In one study, antibody levels after the bivalent boosters were 11 times as high against the Wuhan variant as BA.5.

The authors posit that immune imprinting “may pose a greater challenge than is currently appreciated for inducing robust immunity against SARS-CoV-2 variants.” This isn’t unique to Covid or mRNA vaccines, though boosters may amplify the effect. Our first exposure as children to the flu—whether by infection or vaccination—affects our future response to different strains. -WSJ

Here’s what happened

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Time Shows That The ‘Paranoid’ People Were Correct About COVID

We are now three years after the COVID-19 apocalypse began, and the CDC and WHO still refuse to acknowledge that the virus was created in and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). But they, along with all our institutions, have lied so often and so egregiously that 72% of the public doesn’t believe them. If nothing else, that is a very positive sign.

The evidence for the lab leak is as overwhelming as the evidence for a zoonotic origin is non-existent. For anyone trained in the art of biology to deny the lab origin betrays either deceit or, worse, willful ignorance.

Here I examine just three facts that together, if not singularly, prove dispositively that SARS-CoV-2 was a man-made lab creation. Not least of which is that they told us exactly what they were going to do.

Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites composed of genetic material—codons that specify the specific amino acids (there are 20) used to construct proteins—that hijack the machinery of the cell to produce more viruses.

This is no easy task and, to do so, viruses are extremely specialized and highly specific to their host. Viruses can and do randomly mutate; that is, they undergo random changes to their genetic code that can give them fitness in another host, albeit infrequently. Once they get a foothold in a new host, they continue to evolve by natural selection, making themselves better adapted to reproduce in their new host.

One key factor for a virus to be successful in a new host is to have a highly tuned receptor binding domain (RBD). The RBD allows the virus to recognize the host cell, bind to it, and get inside. In SARS, the RBD is 201 codons long. Jesse Bloom of Caltech analyzed the RBD codon sequence to determine what sequence would maximize binding to human cells. Of the 4000 possible combinations, SARS-CoV-2 showed up on day one over 99% optimized—only 21 codons short of perfection. As a verification of the validity of Bloom’s work, one of those 21 codons was later found in the more contagious Omicron variant to have mutated to Bloom’s prediction.

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Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police Covid “misinfo”

The mask is slipping (pun fully intended), all over the place – regarding the Big Tech/Big Government collusion. Now it’s time to pay close attention to the role played by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We’ve already been awed – just by the magnitude of the whole thing – if not exactly “shocked” by the Twitter Files.

After all, while it was happening, a whole lot of observers surmised that something of the sort had to be behind the unprecedented and, seemingly inexplicable levels of censorship on the platform.

But – what in the world was happening at Facebook, around the same time? After all, Facebook is an almost orders of magnitude bigger and more influential social network than Twitter.

For the time being, we don’t have the same “direct line” to internal documents as is the case with Twitter, which was made possible by the dedication to transparency by the new owner himself.

However, what could be dubbed as the “Facebook Files” are based on credible sources, too – Reason is coming out with a story based on confidential emails that emerged thanks to a court case – the state of Missouri suing the Biden administration.

The emails show that Facebook (and by extension Instagram) representatives and the CDC not only kept in touch at all times, but that the tech giant also “routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.”

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Lockdowns Were Counterterrorism, Not Public Health 

As previously reported, in the United States, the Covid pandemic response was designed and led by the national security branches of government, not by any public health agency or official. 

Furthermore, we do not have a public record of what the national security pandemic plan actually stated. 

So what? You might ask. Why should we care if Covid policy was determined by the National Security Council (NSC) instead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)? What’s so bad about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) taking over as lead federal agency for pandemic response, replacing Health and Human Services (HHS)?

National security is about protecting us from threats of war and terrorism

The answer to these questions is, in short, that the national security pandemic response plans, devised under the rubric of biodefense, are aimed at countering bioterrorism attacks. They focus on preventing hostile actors from obtaining bioweapons, surveilling for potential bioweapons use, and developing medical countermeasures. 

According to the World Health Organization, “biological and toxin weapons are either microorganisms like virus, bacteria or fungi, or toxic substances produced by living organisms that are produced and released deliberately to cause disease and death in humans, animals or plants.” 

In the rare event of an actual bioweapons attack – the biodefense strategy can be summarized as quarantine-until-vaccine: keep individuals as isolated from the bioweapon as possible, for as long as necessary, until you have an effective medical countermeasure (medicine/vaccine). 

Bioterrorism response plans – under the broader umbrella of counterterrorism – are not designed to incorporate the complicated nuances of public health principles, which balance the need to protect individuals from a pathogen with the need to keep society as functional as possible to maintain overall well-being. 

If counterterrorism measures are deployed against a public health threat, it is thus not surprising to witness massive disruptions to society, and harms to public health – as we have seen with the Covid-19 pandemic response.

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