Tag: covid-19

Michelle Obama slips up, says COVID is an opportunity to change ‘how wealth is distributed’

During Wednesday’s episode of her new podcast, former First Lady Michelle Obama slipped up and appeared to reveal the Left’s true agenda behind the coronavirus pandemic. While talking to journalist Michele Norris, Obama said that the coronavirus pandemic was actually an opportunity to think about “how wealth is distributed” to lower-income essential workers.

“There’s kind of a new COVID vocabulary, isn’t it,” Norris said to start off the conversation. “There are also words that have always had some meaning, but that take on different meaning now, the word hero, the word essential.”

“I think we will forever think about the word ‘essential’ in a different way,” she added. “And, when we were told to stay home, they got up, got dressed, and went out into the world, risking their lives, to drive garbage trucks, to work in warehouses, to work in grocery stores, to work in hospitals. Often doing invisible, but yes, essential work, and I struggle with it because I’m not sure that we treat them like they’re essential.”

Obama immediately took this and ran with it with her response, showing once again that Democrats have no intention of letting this crisis go to waste.

“And that’s something that we need to, that’s a part of that reflection, that we need to do, you know. With ourselves, and, and as a community,” the former First Lady said. “And we have to think about that, in terms of how wealth is distributed.”

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‘Morality pills’ may be the US’s best shot at ending the coronavirus pandemic, according to one ethicist

It seems that the U.S. is not currently equipped to cooperatively lower the risk confronting us. Many are instead pinning their hopes on the rapid development and distribution of an enhancement to the immune system – a vaccine.

But I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight off disease but the brain’s ability to cooperate with others. What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer?

Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative.

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New York’s true nursing home death toll cloaked in secrecy

Riverdale Nursing Home in the Bronx appears, on paper, to have escaped the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, with an official state count of just four deaths in its 146-bed facility.

The truth, according to the home, is far worse: 21 dead, most transported to hospitals before they succumbed.

“It was a cascading effect,” administrator Emil Fuzayov recalled. “One after the other.”

New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes, already among the highest in the nation, could actually be a significant undercount. Unlike every other state with major outbreaks, New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.

That statistic could add thousands to the state’s official care home death toll of just over 6,600. But so far the administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has refused to divulge the number, leading to speculation the state is manipulating the figures to make it appear it is doing better than other states and to make a tragic situation less dire.

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Americans will wear masks for ‘several years’ due to coronavirus: expert

“I think that mask wearing and some degree of social distancing, we will be living with — hopefully living with happily — for several years,” he said. “It’s actually pretty straightforward. If we cover our faces, and both you and anyone you’re interacting with are wearing a mask, the risk of transmission goes way down.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top official handling the US COVID-19 response, said recently he was cautiously optimistic that there could be a vaccine for the virus by 2021.

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Democrat calls for treating non-mask-wearers as murderers, while actual murderers are released from jail

I pine for a day when we will make Orwell fiction again. What we are seeing today with the COVID cult in this county is not just a disagreement over science and the role of government, but over basic morality. Democrats now believe that a man breathing free air without a mask is tantamount to murder, yet they are using the same virus as a pretext to release real murderers throughout the country. Breathing is now murder and murder is an act of grace?

During an August 5 committee hearing of the Nashville Metro Council, Councilwoman Sharon Hurt compared those who decline to wear masks to attempted murderers and suggested legislation treating them on that level.

So COVID-19 poses such a threat to human life that we must ban uncovered human lungs as murder, but because these very same leftists are concerned their chosen criminals will catch the virus, they are released. Here are a couple of stories you might have missed from the national news that demonstrate how far they are willing to go…

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Invasion of the New Normals

They’re here! No, not the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We’re not being colonized by giant alien fruit. I’m afraid it is a little more serious than that. People’s minds are being taken over by a much more destructive and less otherworldly force … a force that transforms them overnight into aggressively paranoid, order-following, propaganda-parroting totalitarians.

You know the people I’m talking about. Some of them are probably your friends and family, people you have known for years, and who had always seemed completely rational, but who are now convinced that we need to radically alter the fabric of human society to protect ourselves from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or absolutely no symptoms at all) in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99.6% survive, which, it goes without saying, is totally insane.

I’ve been calling them “corona-totalitarians,” but I’m going to call them the “New Normals” from now on, as that more accurately evokes the pathologized-totalitarian ideology they are systematically spreading. At this point, I think it is important to do that, because, clearly, their ideological program has nothing to do with any actual virus, or any other actual public health threat. As is glaringly obvious to anyone whose mind has not been taken over yet, the “apocalyptic coronavirus pandemic” was always just a Trojan horse, a means of introducing the “New Normal,” which they’ve been doing since the very beginning.

The official propaganda started in March, and it reached full intensity in early April. Suddenly, references to the “New Normal” were everywhere, not only in the leading corporate media (e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, et al.), the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC (and the list goes on), but also on the blogs of athletic organizations, global management consulting firms, charter school websites, and random YouTube videos.

The slogan has been relentlessly repeated (in a textbook totalitarian “big lie” fashion) for going on the past six months. We have heard it repeated so many times that many of us have forgotten how insane it is, the idea that the fundamental structure of society needs to be drastically and irrevocably altered on account of a virus that poses no threat to the vast majority of the human species.

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States have authority to fine or jail people who refuse coronavirus vaccine, attorney says

 As drugmakers race to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus, several legal questions are emerging: could the government require people to get it? Could people who refuse to roll up their sleeves get banned from stores or lose their jobs?

The short answer is yes, according to Dov Fox, a law professor and the director of the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics at the University of San Diego.

“States can compel vaccinations in more or less intrusive ways,” he said in an interview. “They can limit access to schools or services or jobs if people don’t get vaccinated. They could force them to pay a fine or even lock them up in jail.”

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Nashville Councilwoman: People Who Don’t Wear Masks Should Be Charged With Murder

A Nashville, Tennessee, councilwoman suggested last week that people who refuse to wear masks in public be charged with murder.

During a Wednesday virtual meeting of committees of the Nashville Metro Council, at-large member Sharon Hurt addressed some remarks to Mike Jameson, Nashville Mayor John Cooper’s director of legislative affairs, who was also in attendance.

“I work for an organization, that if they pass a virus, then they are tried for murder, or attempted murder, if they are not told,” said Hurt, “and this person who may very well pass this virus that’s out in the air because they’re not wearing a mask is basically doing the same thing to someone who contracts it and dies from it.”

Presumably Hurt was referring to her employment as executive director of Street Works, a Nashville HIV/AIDS nonprofit. But knowingly passing HIV on to another person is considerably different from passing the coronavirus. For one thing, the number of Americans with HIV is relatively small, and the disease is transmitted in very specific ways, primarily homosexual intercourse and intravenous drug use. One can easily avoid both getting and transmitting HIV by refraining from those activities. The coronavirus, by contrast, affects a large swath of the population, many of whom do not even know they have it, and we are still not entirely certain how it is transmitted or what measures will best prevent transmission. Masks, especially when used by amateurs, are almost certainly ineffective in preventing it.

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Without ‘Much More Aggressive Shutdowns,’ The New York Times Warns, COVID-19 Could Kill ‘Well Over a Million’ Americans

Without “much more aggressive shutdowns,” a New York Times editorial warns, “well over a million” Americans “may ultimately die” from COVID-19. The paper does not cite a source for that estimate, which seems highly implausible based on the death toll so far, projections for the next few months, the gap between total infections and confirmed cases, and a crude case fatality rate that continues to fall.

Independent data scientist Youyang Gu, who has a good track record of predicting COVID-19 fatalities, is currently projecting about 231,000 deaths in the United States by November 1. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects 295,000 deaths by December 1. Assuming those projections prove to be about right, the Times is predicting that the death toll will quadruple during the months before an effective vaccine can be deployed, which might happen early next year.

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Abortion opponents protest COVID-19 vaccines’ use of fetal cells

Senior Catholic leaders in the United States and Canada, along with other antiabortion groups, are raising ethical objections to promising COVID-19 vaccine candidates that are manufactured using cells derived from human fetuses electively aborted decades ago. They have not sought to block government funding for the vaccines, which include two candidate vaccines that the Trump administration plans to support with an investment of up to $1.7 billion, as well as a third candidate made by a Chinese company in collaboration with Canada’s National Research Council (NRC). But they are urging funders and policymakers to ensure that companies develop other vaccines that do not rely on such human fetal cell lines and, in the United States, asking the government to “incentivize” firms to only make vaccines that don’t rely on fetal cells.

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