Tag: pandemic

Metro Atlanta Mayor Sentenced for Stealing $650K in COVID Relief Funds

Stonecrest, Ga. is one of metro Atlanta’s newest cities. Sitting just east of Atlanta in DeKalb County, voters agreed to charter the new city in 2016. It’s home to a popular 2,500 nature preserve and a mall, from which the city took its name.

One of the men who spearheaded the efforts to create the city of Stonecrest and who served as the city’s first mayor is going to prison for 57 months. A court sentenced Jason Lary on Wednesday for stealing $650,000 in COVID-19 relief funds.

WSB Radio reports that Lary used COVID relief money to pay off his personal debts, and he gave grants to churches and small businesses with the stipulation that they would give some of the funds back to companies connected to him. For example, he gave his church $150,000 and asked the church to give $50,000 of it to one of his companies.

“Lary betrayed the trust placed in him by the citizens of Stonecrest by stealing the very funds meant to help his constituents weather the COVID-19 pandemic,” U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan said. “The people of Stonecrest deserved better, and corrupt officials can expect severe consequences for using their offices to commit crimes.”

As a grand jury and local television outlet Fox 5 began to investigate what was happening in Stonecrest, Lary denied any wrongdoing.

“Quite frankly folks, now it’s turned ugly,” he told reporters in April 2021. “There was never an interest on anybody’s part to kick back or filter money back or any of that nonsense.”

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Laval University Professor Suspended for Questioning Covid Vaccines for Children

A professor at Laval University (Université Laval) in  Quebec City has  been suspended without pay for two months for questioning the benefits of COVID vaccines for children. Microbiology and immunology Professor Patrick Provost sent out an email soliciting a discussion on the issue and raising his concerns. He has now been disciplined for merely raising such issues by a university that has discarded any semblance of academic integrity and free speech. According to The Suburban, the controversy began as a conference of Réinfo COVID, “a collective of nurses, physicians, scientists, and citizens seeking to generate debate about how the pandemic has been handled by the government.”Provost asked his colleagues “to share their views with the public” on these issues. Provost also wrote in a June Quebecor Media piece that the COVID-19 “was very real” but asked “was it as significant as reported?” He argued that there was evidence of only five individuals under age 40 dying of the disease and challenged the need for the Canadian government’s vaccine mandates and passports.

As with the university, Quebecor Media quickly yielded to a mob of critics and removed Provost’s remarks. Journal de Québec Editor-in-Chief Sébastien Ménard said that Provost’s points “were inaccurate or could mislead the public.” Notably, Ménard did not seem compelled to address the alleged inaccuracies in the comments or Provost’s basis for raising his concerns.

Ménard did not seem to entertain the possibility that the media can be a place for the exchange of such ideas, including a rigorous debate challenging Provost’s assertions. Instead, the solution, once again, was censorship.

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Emails Confirm Why CDC Changed Definitions of Vaccine, Vaccinated

Newly obtained emails confirm that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed its definition for both “vaccine” and “vaccinated” because people were pointing out that definitions didn’t seem to apply to the COVID-19 vaccines.

“The definition of vaccine we have posted is problematic and people are using it to claim the COVID-19 vaccine is not a vaccine based on our own definition,” Alycia Downs, a CDC official, wrote in an email on Aug. 25, 2021, to a colleague.

The definition is located on a page titled Immunization Basics.

“Vaccine” was defined since at least 2011 by the CDC as a product that triggers immunity, while “vaccination” was described as an injection that prevents a disease, according to archived versions of the page. However, a flood of inquiries on the definitions was triggered by the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines have been increasingly ineffective against infection by the virus that causes COVID-19, the emails show.

“Our question is how is the CDC and the rest of the world allowed to call the shot a vaccination when it doesn’t even meet your own definition,” one person wrote to the CDC.

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How Much Did the US Government Pressure Twitter to Ban Alex Berenson?

Nearly a year ago, former New York Times Journalist Alex Berenson was permanently banned from Twitter for writing the following lines about the Covid shot: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it—at best—as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

From the beginning of the Covid hysteria, we followed and cited Berenson many times on the Ron Paul Liberty Report. Berenson took government and mainstream media rhetoric about the pandemic the way journalists used to take it: with a heavy dose of skepticism. And not long after he was banned for saying so, even the CDC Director admitted what he wrote is true.

But at the time, he was a danger to the government narrative on Covid, and the “private” social media company Twitter silenced him. They did not only silence one reporter who was a thorn in their side, however. They preemptively silenced anyone else who might might question the narrative. The message was clear to all the would-be Alex Berensons out there: do you want to follow him to the digital gulag?

So not only was Berenson’s free speech under attack—free speech itself was under attack.

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FDA will not require clinical trial data to authorize redesigned COVID boosters -official

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will not require companies to submit clinical trial data on COVID-19 vaccines modified to protect against the BA.4 and BA.5 versions of Omicron in order to authorize those shots, a top FDA official said on Thursday.

Dr. Peter Marks, head of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told Reuters the agency will rely on data from clinical trials vaccine makers have run on shots designed to combat the BA.1 lineage, as well as manufacturing data, for emergency use authorization submissions before the fall.

Preclinical data from animal studies and safety data could also be available, he said.

The FDA on Thursday recommended COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers change the design of their booster shots beginning this fall to include components tailored to combat the currently dominant Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 sublineages.

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New Jersey Bill Would Require College Students to Receive Coronavirus Vaccine

A proposed bill in New Jersey would require college students and staff at higher education institutions to receive the coronavirus vaccine.

Proposed by Democratic Assemblyman Herb Conaway Jr. and co-sponsored by Democratic Assemblyman Ralph Caputo, Bill A4334 would essentially require that all in-person students and staff be fully vaccinated while exempting only those who would work virtually.

“If the bill becomes law, it would go into effect in the 2022-2023 school year,” noted News12.

The bill will now be reviewed by the Assembly Health Committee and will have to pass the state Senate before it becomes law. A similar bill in the New Jersey Senate has not yet received a vote.

Colleges and universities have adopted their own vaccination policies without government mandates up until now. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, no other state in the union has required coronavirus vaccinations for students in higher education.

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Fed report finds 75% of $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program didn’t reach employees

Taxpayers paid $4 for every $1 in wages and benefits received by workers in jobs saved by the federal government’s pandemic Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), according to a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The Fed study also found PPP didn’t support jobs at risk of disappearing, and money flowed disproportionately to wealthier households.

“The PPP was a very large and very timely fiscal-policy intervention, saving about 3 million jobs at its peak in the second quarter of 2020 and distributing $800 billion well within two years of the onset of the COVID-19 crisis,” authors William Emmons and Drew Dahl concluded in their study, “Was the Paycheck Protection Program Effective?”

“But it was poorly targeted, as almost three-quarters of its benefits went to unintended recipients, including business owners, creditors and suppliers, rather than to workers. Due to differences in the typical incomes of those varied constituencies, it also ended up being quite regressive compared with other major COVID-19 relief programs, as it benefited high-income households much more.”

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This State Lost HALF Its Pandemic “Stimulus” Benefits to Fraud and Scammers

The federal government’s multi-trillion-dollar “stimulus” efforts during the pandemic may go down as the biggest legislative failure in modern American history. Congress spent an astounding $42,000 per federal taxpayer (do you know anyone who received anywhere near that much in benefits?) and only successfully “stimulated” inflation. What’s more, evidence continues to mount that the biggest beneficiaries of this binge were criminals and fraudsters.

A new analysis from the American Enterprise Institute’s Matt Weingarten reports that the state of Illinois lost half of the money it sent out in expanded pandemic unemployment benefits to scammers.

Illinois’s inspector general reports that the level of fraud it experienced was “unprecedented” and amounted to more than $1.8 billion lost.

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Pfizer Trial Found Vaxxed Toddlers ‘Were More Likely to Get Severely Ill With Covid’

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that toddlers vaccinated during Pfizer’s trial were “more likely to get severely ill with Covid than those who received a placebo” and “most kids who developed multiple infections during the trial were vaccinated.”

From WSJ, “Why the Rush for Toddler Vaccines?”:

“This is a very historic milestone, a monumental step forward,” President Biden declared last week after the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for toddlers. “The United States is now the first country in the world to offer safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old.”

In fact, we don’t know if the vaccines are safe and effective. The rushed FDA action was based on extremely weak evidence. […]

More troubling, vaccinated toddlers in Pfizer’s trial were more likely to get severely ill with Covid than those who received a placebo. Pfizer claimed most severe cases weren’t “clinically significant,” whatever that means, but this was all the more reason that the FDA should have required a longer follow-up before authorizing the vaccine.

Also worrisome: Most kids who developed multiple infections during the trial were vaccinated. This warranted more investigation, since experimental vaccines for other diseases sometimes increase susceptibility to infection.

Scientists are also discovering that triple-vaccinated adults who were previously infected with the Wuhan variant have a weaker immune response to Omicron, leaving them more susceptible to reinfection. This phenomenon, called “immunological imprinting,” could explain why children who received three Pfizer shots were more likely to get reinfected.

The FDA brushed aside the risk that inoculating infants against a variant no longer circulating could blunt their immune responses to Omicron and its offshoots. There’s a reason vaccine trials usually take a decade. Some steps can be accelerated, but an extended follow-up is often necessary to ensure potential side effects aren’t overlooked.

The FDA standard for approving vaccines in otherwise healthy people, especially children, is supposed to be higher than for drugs that treat the sick. But the FDA conspicuously lowered its standards to approve Covid vaccines for toddlers. Why?

An NIH study of adults who took part in Moderna’s trial (which ran through March 2021) found those with shots had fewer N antibodies after COVID infection when compared with the unvaccinated, suggesting they’re more likely to get reinfected with the virus.

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Woke National Teachers Union Agenda Includes Mandatory Masks, Vaccines and Banning the Words Mother and Father

The National Education Association’s (NEA) annual conference is underway in Chicago, and the group is calling for a national policy of mandatory masking, mandatory vaccinations, and rejecting the words “mother” and “father.”

The NEA is the largest labor group in the U.S., with more than three million members, including Jill Biden. Its president is Becky Pringle.

The Chicago conference is chock-full of woke agenda items called New Business Initiatives (NBI). They include progressive language involving issues that seem to have little to do with proper education. NBIs are proposals that delegates must vote on in order to pass. 

Terry Stoops, a conservative education expert in North Carolina, exposed this year’s NBIs in a lengthy post on Twitter.

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