- A third of all military personnel are refusing the COVID-19 vaccine
- Some are citing the rushed rollout of the anthrax vaccine in the 1990s as the reason why they do not want to receive the new COVID jab
- In 1997, the military made it mandatory for service personnel to receive the anthrax shot; thousands subsequently complained of debilitating side effects
- A lengthy legal battle ensued, before the courts determined that the FDA hadn’t ‘adequately studied’ how effective the shot was against the inhalation anthrax
- Commanders concede they need to do a better job of messaging and allaying fears among military members that they are being used as ‘testers’ for the jab
- Other personnel are citing wild conspiracy theories about the vaccine, including one who refused the shot for fear it was implanting a tracking device
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In considering this subject, we must be clear about the distinction between the political objective and military objective.
The two are different but not separate. For nations do not wage war for war’s sake, but in the pursuance of policy. The military objective is only the means to a political end.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45104543
http://archive.today/2022.02.23-164110/https://www.jstor.org/stable/45104543
ive years ago, Ukraine’s Maidan uprising ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, to the cheers and support of the West. Politicians and analysts in the United States and Europe not only celebrated the uprising as a triumph of democracy, but denied reports of Maidan’s ultranationalism, smearing those who warned about the dark side of the uprising as Moscow puppets and useful idiots. Freedom was on the march in Ukraine.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?
In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.
…explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731
Published 4th Feb 2015
This may come as a shock to those of us who still associate homeschooling with fundamentalists eager to shelter their kids from the evils of the secular state. But it turns out that homeschooling has grown more mainstream over the last few years. According to the most recent statistics, the share of school-age kids who were homeschooled doubled between 1999 and 2012, from 1.7 to 3.4 percent.
And many of those new homeschoolers come from the tech community. When homeschooling expert Diane Flynn Keith held a sold-out workshop in Redwood City, California, last month, fully half of the parents worked in the tech industry. Jens Peter de Pedro, an app designer in Brooklyn, says that five of the 10 fathers in his homeschooling group work in tech, as do two of the eight mothers. And Samantha Cook says that her local hackerspace is often filled with tech-savvy homeschoolers.
http://archive.today/2015.02.04-185234/http://www.wired.com/2015/02/silicon-valley-home-schooling/
Categories
Pharmaceutical fraud – Wikipedia
$3 billion GSK settlement. On 2 July 2012, GlaxoSmithKline pleaded guilty to criminal charges and agreed to a $3 billion settlement of the largest health-care fraud case in the U.S. and the largest payment by a drug company. The settlement is related to the company’s illegal promotion of prescription drugs, its failure to report safety data, bribing doctors, and promoting medicines for uses for which they were not licensed. The drugs involved were Paxil, Wellbutrin, Advair, Lamictal, and Zofran for off-label, non-covered uses. Those and the drugs Imitrex, Lotronex, Flovent, and Valtrex were involved in the kickback scheme. The government investigation of GSK was launched largely on the basis of information provided by four whistleblowers who filed two qui tam (whistleblower) lawsuits against the company under the False Claims Act. GSK settled the whistleblowers’ lawsuits for a total of $1.017 billion out of the $3 billion settlement, the largest civil False Claims Act settlement to date.
Pfizer $2.3 billion settlement: Pfizer settled multiple civil and criminal allegations for $2.3 billion in the largest case of pharmaceutical and health care fraud in US history. The drugs involved were Bextra (an anti-inflammatory drug), Geodon (an anti-psychotic drug), Lipitor (a cholesterol drug), Norvasc (anti-hypertensive drug), Viagra (erectile dysfunction), Zithromax (antibiotic), Zyrtec (antihistamine), Zyvox (an antibiotic), Lyrica (an anti-epileptic drug), Relpax (anti-migraine drug), Celebrex (anti-inflammatory drug), and Depo-provera (birth control).
Merck $650 million settlement: Merck settled a nominal pricing fraud case in which the company was accused of taking kickbacks and violating Medicaid best price regulations for various drugs.
United States et al., ex rel. Jim Conrad and Constance Conrad v. Forest Pharmaceuticals, Inc, et al. involved a drug manufacturer selling a drug, Levothroid, that had never been approved by the FDA. These allegations settled for $42.5 million due to multiple whistleblowers stepping forward to provide detailed information on the alleged fraud. The collective reward to the relators in this case was over $14.6 million.
Wikipedia snapshot from 28 January 2021:
Since inception, the program has transferred over $7.6 Billion worth of equipment (based on the items Original Acquisition Value [OAV]). In Fiscal Year 2022, $160 Million (based on OAV) worth of equipment was conditionally transferred to participating law enforcement agencies.
California health officials are asking vaccine providers to stop administering a batch of Moderna’s Covid-19 jab, after an unusually high number of adverse reactions were linked to the drug.
Doses from Moderna Lot 041L20A are suspected of causing a “higher-than-usual number of adverse events” and should be shelved until a proper investigation can be conducted, the California Department of Public Health said on Sunday.
Bill Gates, the fourth richest person in the world and a self-described nerd who is known for his early programming skills rather than his love of the outdoors, has been quietly snatching up 242,000 acres of farmland across the U.S. — enough to make him the top private farmland owner in America
A study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world found that mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic may not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures, such as social distancing or travel reduction.
In the first half of 2020, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to steep declines in global petroleum demand and to volatile crude oil markets. The second half of the year was characterized by relatively stable prices as demand began to recover. As petroleum demand fell and U.S. crude oil inventories increased, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil traded at negative prices on April 20, the first time the price for the WTI futures contract fell to less than zero since trading began in 1983. The next day, Brent crude oil, another global crude oil price benchmark, fell to $9.12 per barrel (b), its lowest daily price in decades.
In this year of lockdown, it is not just our movements, social lives and work that have been restricted. Big Tech has also stepped up its efforts at closing down what we can say and read. Two issues in particular have been central to Silicon Valley’s escalating war on wrongthink: the Covid-19 pandemic and the US presidential elections.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/28/the-year-big-tech-became-the-ministry-of-truth/
Around one-third of hospital deaths during the initial COVID-19 peak were due to inappropriate treatment.
“We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patients’ benefit, but in order to control the epidemic & to save other patients,” Dr. Iwashyna said “That felt awful.”
…As a safety precaution, doctors and hospitals limited the access of health-care workers to coronavirus patients on ventilators, giving them fewer opportunities to check on them. That meant patients required more powerful sedatives to keep them from pulling out throat tubes.
…Overall, survival for Covid-19 patients increased 28% from April to September at HCA hospitals.
…Before the pandemic, between about 30% to more than 40% of ventilator patients died, according to research. Numbers were sharply higher in Wuhan, China. As the pandemic grew, hospitals in the U.S. reported death rates in some cases of about 50% for ventilated Covid-19 patients.
Hospital pharmacists discovered Dec. 16 that some vials of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines that are supposed to hold five doses actually contain six or seven, The New York Times reported.
The discovery may mean the U.S. supply of the vaccine is more robust than previously thought, but it has also caused confusion over whether to use the extra doses or throw them out, since the extra doses weren’t part of Pfizer’s guidance.
Federal officials have to carefully track the number of vaccine doses to make sure there’s enough for everyone who received an initial dose to receive a second dose three weeks later. The extra vials may complicate that effort, The Hill reported.
A hospital worker with no history of allergies was admitted to intensive care over a severe reaction she suffered 10 minutes after having Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. The unidentified female worker suffered an anaphylactic reaction shortly after receiving the injection at a hospital in Juneau, Alaska, on Tuesday.
Two healthcare workers in the UK suffered an anaphylactic reaction to the Pfizer injection after being given it last week, although the vaccine has been widely tested and analysed, with government experts in both the US and Great Britain deeming it safe.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told the head of the Food and Drug Administration on Friday to either sign off on Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine by the end of the day or hand in his resignation, the Washington Post reported, another push by the White House to approve the vaccine as quickly as possible after a panel of scientists ruled it safe this week.
Results While model 1 found that lockdown was the most effective measure in the original 11 countries, model 2 showed that lockdown had little or no benefit as it was typically introduced at a point when the time-varying reproductive number was already very low. Model 3 found that the simple banning of public events was beneficial, while lockdown had no consistent impact. Based on Bayesian metrics, model 2 was better supported by the data than either model 1 or model 3 for both time horizons.
Conclusions Inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.20160341v3
- Blood samples unveiled this week show people in California, Oregon and Washington infected in December
- Further tests on blood taken in mid-to-late December and into early January found virus in six more states
- Italy, Brazil and France have all since found traces of the virus before China even acknowledged it existed
- Evidence has emerged in Spain and the UK suggesting that Covid-19 was around before testing was possible
- Claims the virus emerged in a market in Wuhan last winter have crumbled in the face of scientific evidence
Among Marine Corps recruits, approximately 2% who had previously had negative results for SARS-CoV-2 at the beginning of supervised quarantine, and less than 2% of recruits with unknown previous status, tested positive by day 14. Most recruits who tested positive were asymptomatic, and no infections were detected through daily symptom monitoring. Transmission clusters occurred within platoons.
The harmful consequences of public health choices should be explicitly considered and transparently reported to limit their damage, say Itai Bavli and colleagues
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge for governments. Questions regarding the most effective interventions to reduce the spread of the virus—for example, more testing, requirements to wear face masks, and stricter and longer lockdowns—become widely discussed in the popular and scientific press, informed largely by models that aimed to predict the health benefits of proposed interventions. Central to all these studies is recognition that inaction, or delayed action, will put millions of people unnecessarily at risk of serious illness or death.
However, interventions to limit the spread of the coronavirus also carry negative health effects, which have yet to be considered systematically. Despite increasing evidence on the unintended, adverse effects of public health interventions such as social distancing and lockdown measures, there are few signs that policy decisions are being informed by a serious assessment and weighing of their harms on health. Instead, much of the discussion has become politicised, especially in the US, where President Trump’s provocative statements sparked debates along party lines about the necessity for policies to control covid-19. This politicisation, often fuelled by misinformation, has distracted from a much needed dispassionate discussion on the harms and benefits of potential public health measures against covid-19.