Tag: pandemic

The Student Loan Pause Has Made Borrowers Worse Off

The over three-year-long moratorium on federal student-loan repayment has long been hailed as a godsend for student loan borrowers. While announcing yet another extension of the moratorium in December 2021, President Biden praised it as “badly needed breathing room during the economic upheaval caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic.”

However, a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that borrowers whose loans were frozen by the moratorium actually ended up in a worse position than they started in—and have even accrued more student loan debt.

In March 2020, the Trump administration announced a moratorium on federal student loan payments for 60 days, citing the financial hardship faced by borrowers in the early days of the pandemic. In the three years since, the pause has been extended eight times with a variety of legal justifications. Payments are still currently paused, though the recently signed debt ceiling bill sets a hard expiration date for the moratorium on August 30.

The total cost of the pause is estimated to be as high as $5 billion per month, or almost $200 billion by the time repayment starts in September. And all that spending might not have even helped those whom the moratorium was supposed to benefit. According to the paper, those whose loans were frozen by the moratorium actually took on more debt—borrowing more on credit cards and mortgages and even accruing more student loan debt rather than working to pay off other debt they owe. 

The paper compared those whose student loans were frozen by the moratorium because their loans were held federally to those whose student loans were not frozen because their loans were private. There were stark differences between the two groups. For those whose loan payments were paused, they did reap some benefits, like increased credit scores and a decrease in delinquency on student loan debt. However, by other metrics, they actually became worse off. By the end of 2021, borrowers who saw their student loan payments paused increased their credit card, mortgage, and car-loan debt by $1,800 on average and even took on an additional $1,500 in student loan debt compared to those whose loan payments were not paused by the moratorium. Rather than being the “badly needed breathing room” that Biden suggested, the student loan payment pause has actually resulted in borrowers ending up financially worse off than they were before.

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Biden Censorship Lawyers Say Questioning Masks And Vaccines “Often Won’t Be” Protected By First Amendment

The judge presiding over the lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana, alleging collusion between the federal government and social media companies to censor certain viewpoints, is said to have asked if the Biden administration has ever read George Orwell’s 1984.

The transcript of the hearing is not yet available. However, Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey shared some of the statements made by Judge Terry A. Doughty.

“The federal government had a hard time convincing a judge last week that it hasn’t been working with and coercing social media companies to censor free speech,” Bailey tweeted.

“The judge asked the feds if they had ever read George Orwell’s 1984, pointing out the similarities between the case and the book,” he added.

Bailey also tweeted that Doughty asked the federal government about their views on protected speech.

“He asked if an American citizen questioning the safety or efficacy of masks or a vaccine was protected under the First Amendment,” Bailey recalled. “The feds’ answer? ‘It COULD be,’ but often won’t be.”

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Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study

Repeated COVID-19 vaccination weakens the immune system, potentially making people susceptible to life-threatening conditions such as cancer, according to a new study.

Multiple doses of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines lead to higher levels of antibodies called IgG4, which can provide a protective effect. But a growing body of evidence indicates that the “abnormally high levels” of the immunoglobulin subclass actually make the immune system more susceptible to the COVID-19 spike protein in the vaccines, researchers said in the paper.

They pointed to experiments performed on mice that found multiple boosters on top of the initial COVID-19 vaccination “significantly decreased” protection against both the Delta and Omicron virus variants and testing that found a spike in IgG4 levels after repeat Pfizer vaccination, suggesting immune exhaustion.

Studies have detected higher levels of IgG4 in people who died with COVID-19 when compared to those who recovered and linked the levels with another known determinant of COVID-19-related mortality, the researchers also noted.

A review of the literature also showed that vaccines against HIV, malaria, and pertussis also induce the production of IgG4.

“In sum, COVID-19 epidemiological studies cited in our work plus the failure of HIV, Malaria, and Pertussis vaccines constitute irrefutable evidence demonstrating that an increase in IgG4 levels impairs immune responses,” Alberto Rubio Casillas, a researcher with the biology laboratory at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and one of the authors of the new paper, told The Epoch Times via email.

The paper was published by the journal Vaccines in May.

Pfizer and Moderna officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Both companies utilize messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in their vaccines.

Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the technology, said the paper illustrates why he’s been warning about the negative effects of repeated vaccination.

“I warned that more jabs can result in what’s called high zone tolerance, of which the switch to IgG4 is one of the mechanisms. And now we have data that clearly demonstrate that’s occurring in the case of this as well as some other vaccines,” Malone, who wasn’t involved with the study, told The Epoch Times.

“So it’s basically validating that this rush to administer and re-administer without having solid data to back those decisions was highly counterproductive and appears to have resulted in a cohort of people that are actually more susceptible to the disease.”

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More vaccines, more infections: Devastating Cleveland study passes peer review

The devastating Cleveland study that found the more COVID vaccines individuals receive, the more likely they are to be infected with COVID — has passed peer review. 

Researchers included over 50,000 participants in their study, all who were employees at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

“The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses in our study, was unexpected,” researchers stated.

In January, prior to the study passing peer review, several vaccine skeptics disseminated the alarming “pre-print” study. Twitter tagged posts about the pre-print with “Community Notes” to inform social media users that it hadn’t yet passed peer review.

But now that the study has been peer reviewed, it’s officially a scientific finding that vaccines not only don’t help prevent infection, but they make getting infected more likely — an astonishing hit to the so-called effective vaccines that’s known as “negative efficacy.” 

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Try Not to Laugh: A Covid Outbreak Happened at a CDC Conference With 99.4% of Attendees “Vaccinated”

This shouldn’t be funny, but for some reason I literally chuckled when I saw it. The reason is obvious: The CDC and other “experts” have hammered the unvaxxed for over two years about how safe and effective the jabs were. And now, with Pandemic Panic Theater finally fading, a CDC conference with nearly 100% vaccination rate gets hit by a massive outbreak.

By no means should I find any humor in the suffering of others. But as someone who has been targeted for being unvaccinated, who has gone through financial challenges as a result of my unjabbed status, I still get a perverse hint of joy when stories like this pop up.

Yes, that makes me a bad person, but everyone’s bad in some way. With that said, here are the details by Zachary Stieber from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times:

Most Infected in COVID Outbreak at CDC Conference Were Vaccinated, Agency Confirms

A COVID-19 outbreak unfolded at a conference held by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) despite most attendees being vaccinated.

About 1,800 CDC staffers and others gathered in April in a hotel in Atlanta, where the CDC is headquartered, for a conference focused on epidemiological investigations and strategies.

On April 27, the last day of the conference, several people notified organizers that they had tested positive for COVID-19. The CDC and the Georgia Department of Public Health worked together to survey attendees to try to figure out how many people had tested positive.

“The goals were to learn more about transmission that occurred and add to our understanding as we transition to the next phase of COVID-19 surveillance and response,” the CDC said in a May 26 statement.

Approximately 80 percent of attendees filled out the survey. Among those, 181 said they tested positive for COVID-19.

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COVID Vaccine-Injured Sue Biden Administration Over Censorship

A woman who suffered severe nerve damage after receiving a COVID-19 vaccination and four others with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 vaccine injuries launched a lawsuit against President Joe Biden and his administration on May 22.

Top government officials violated the plaintiffs’ rights to free speech and peaceful assembly when they pressured Big Tech companies to crack down on people sharing their experience after receiving the COVID-19 vaccines, Brianne Dressen, the woman, and the other plaintiffs say.

“Through threats, pressure, inducement, and coercion, Defendants now work in concert with social media companies to censor content the government deems ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’—a feat that the government could never lawfully accomplish alone,” the 124-page suit, filed in U.S. court in southern Texas, states.

In addition to Biden, defendants include Rob Flaherty, a top adviser to Biden; White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre; the Department of Homeland Security; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

Defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment, or could not be reached.

Dressen hailed the lawsuit as a major development for those reporting to be suffering from vaccine injuries.

“People injured by the COVID vaccines in the United States have not been able to file suit anywhere, under any circumstance,” she told The Epoch Times. “So this is a landmark case for Americans injured by the COVID vaccine.”

COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers are largely immune from litigation in the United States due to the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act declaration entered by the Trump administration in early 2020. Most other vaccine manufacturers are also shielded from liability under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.

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Covid conspiracy doctor claimed he was ‘poisoned after interview’ just days before death

A notorious conspiracy theorist doctor, known for his wild takes on the Coronavirus pandemic, claimed he had been poisoned just a few days before he died.

Dr Rashid Buttar, who was part of the group nicknamed the “Disinformation dozen”, died suddenly yesterday (Saturday, May 20) at the age of 57.

He was known for being a huge anti-vaxxer and became a cult figure during the pandemic.

He went on record to claim that the Covid pandemic was made “planned” and “politically motivated”.

The British-born doctor, who spent most of his adult life in the United States, also claimed that “everyone who has had the vaccine would be dead by 2025.”

His theories and misinformation were so well-known that the Centre for Countering Digital Hate named him one of the top 12 people responsible for producing around 65% of all anti-vaccine content between 2020 and 2023.

However, he has now died just days after claiming he had been given a “poison” containing “200 times of what was in the vaccine.”

His cause of death has not been made public, nor has the reason he recently spent time in intensive care.

However, speaking to Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson earlier this month, a very skinny-looking Dr Buttar said: “I went through a very difficult personal health challenge a few months ago.

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COVID emergency orders are among `greatest intrusions on civil liberties,′ Justice Gorsuch says

The Supreme Court got rid of a pandemic-related immigration case with a single sentence.

Justice Neil Gorsuch had a lot more to say, leveling harsh criticism of how governments, from small towns to the nation’s capital, responded to the gravest public health threat in a century.

The justice, a 55-year-old conservative who was President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

He pointed to orders closing schools, restricting church services, mandating vaccines and prohibiting evictions. His broadside was aimed at local, state and federal officials — even his colleagues.

“Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale,” Gorsuch wrote in an eight-page statement Thursday that accompanied an expected Supreme Court order formally dismissing a case involving the use of the Title 42 policy to prevent asylum seekers from entering the United States.

The policy was ended last week with the expiration of the public health emergency first declared more than three years ago because of the coronavirus pandemic.

From the start of his Supreme Court tenure in 2017, Gorsuch, a Colorado native who loves to ski and bicycle, has been more willing than most justices to part company with his colleagues, both left and right.

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A Colossal Failure Around The World

Let’s summarize what we now know of the negative efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, and why vaccinated people—not the unvaxxed—suffer frequent bouts of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 vaccines—and the new bivalents, of which they are a part—are alarmingly and irredeemably unsafe, as well as ineffective for the advertised purposes. It is increasingly recognized by laypeople, physicians, and scientists throughout the world that the COVID-19 vaccines are neither safe, nor effective, nor reversible.

In this article, I show irrefutable proof that the COVID-19 vaccines are irredeemably ineffective. (See many dozens of my other Substack articles, and my book, “Neither Safe Nor Effective,” on how dangerous these vaccines are.)

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FBI Contractor Created Fake Online IDs to Join Chatrooms Run by Groups Organizing Against Vaccine Mandates

An FBI surveillance contractor infiltrated the chatrooms of two airline industry groups opposed to vaccine mandates to collect intelligence on the groups’ organizing activities, investigative journalist Lee Fang reported.

The contractor, Flashpoint, which in the past infiltrated Islamic terror groups, now focuses on “anti-vaccine” groups and other domestic political organizations, according to Fang.

In a webinar presentation for clients last year, which Fang analyzed on his Substack, Flashpoint analyst Vlad Cuiujuclu demonstrated his company’s methods for identifying and entering encrypted Telegram chat groups.

He explained how the company attempted to join chatrooms of transportation workers resisting the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Fang described the presentation:

“‘In this case, we’re searching for a closed channel of U.S. Freedom Flyers,’ said Cuiujuclu. ‘It’s basically a group that opposed vaccination and masks.’

“As he clicked through a database, Cuiujuclu showed a chat group on Telegram sponsored by Airline Professionals For Justice, another group formed by airline industry workers opposed to the mandate. The forum, he added, provided useful insights, including Zoom links for meetings of the grassroots organization.

“‘Private chats,’ said Cuiujuclu, ‘require for you to have an invite link,’ which he noted can often either be found by scrolling through public forums or by ‘engag[ing] the admin of that channel.’”

Flashpoint also offers clients artificial intelligence and internet scraping tools.

According to Fang, the firm is a leader in the “threat intelligence industry,” a growing number of security and surveillance firms that create fake online identities to infiltrate Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums and dark web message boards to gather information for clients, including corporations and the FBI, to monitor potential threats.

Joshua Yoder, president of US Freedom Flyers, said he is aware that Flashpoint infiltrated private chat groups associated with his organization.

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