Tag: covid

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general freedom international affairs public opinion

Point Blank Protest

blank sheet of paper, Chinese protest

“Protests spread to cities and college campuses around China on Saturday night,” reports The New York Times, “reflecting rising public anger at the country’s draconian Covid controls, with some in a crowd in Shanghai directing their fury at the Communist Party and its top leader, Xi Jinping.”

Reuters informs that this “wave of anger was triggered by an apartment fire that killed 10 people on Thursday in Urumqi, a far western city where some people had been locked down for as long as 100 days, fueling speculation that COVID lockdown measures may have impeded residents’ escape.”

Demonstrations are rare in China; “room for dissent has been all-​but eliminated under President Xi Jinping,” reminds Reuters. Yet, a month ago, a lone “Bridge Man” in Beijing unfurled anti-​government banners in a crowded intersection.

“Go on strike at school and work, remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping!” the man, now in CCP custody, yelled through a loudspeaker. “We want to eat, we want freedom, we want to vote!” 

Yes, vote. Xi Jinping was just elected to a term-​limit busting third term, but by the Communist Party — not the Chinese people.

In a numberof videos, students hold “up blank sheets of paper in silent protest, a tactic used in part to evade censorship or arrest.” In 2020, Hong Kong activists did this to avoid prosecution under the national security law imposed by Beijing. 

Across social media, people have been posting pictures of themselves with blank pieces of paper in solidarity. “By Sunday morning, the hashtag ‘white paper exercise’ was blocked on Weibo,” notes Reuters.

“If you fear a blank sheet of paper,” posited a Weibo user, “you are weak inside.”

A blank page, on the other hand, displays surprising strength, as well as meaning — for people to one day freely write their own stories.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Minority Medical Opinion Squelched

covid, censorship, wrong think

The Bill of Rights was originally understood as curbing the power only of the federal government.

This began to change with the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from depriving persons “of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Thanks to the “incorporation doctrine” interpretation of this amendment, provisions like the First Amendment now apply as much to state and local governments as to the federal government.

Except that many officials, disdaining these protections, simply ignore them.

So although obliged to make no law “abridging the freedom of speech,” California’s government is abridging the freedom of speech of doctors. A new law authorizes state medical boards to penalize doctors who utter speech contradicting “contemporary scientific consensus” about COVID-19.

Doctors are suing the Newsom administration to block the law from taking effect. According to their complaint, this anti-“misinformation” law would impede their ability to communicate with patients.

The doctors argue that the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech applies to expression of minority views as well as majority views; indeed, that minority views “particularly need protection from government censorship.”

Also that nobody can ever know “the ‘consensus’ of doctors and scientists on various matters related to prevention and treatment of COVID-19.”

Of course, free speech rights should protect even persons who say the moon is made of green cheese, let alone of those who disagree with official pronouncements about a vexing new virus and what to do about it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Doctor Dead End

Anthony Fauci, covid, vaccines, masks

Dr. Anthony Fauci not only holds a smoking gun, he’s standing over the corpse and sniffing the barrel, grinning like a cartoon villain.

Last week we considered the gross indecency of this director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force funding Peter Daszak and the Wuhan lab to do more research on bat coronaviruses — to the tune of “Six Million Dimes.”

And now that a Boston group has publicized its gain-​of-​function research, we should ask ourselves: is Fauci involved in this, too? The answer is: YES — to the tune of $2.5 million!

This group of researchers, jiggering with a bat virus and the Omicron variant’s version of the infamous spiked protein, made a new iteration that killed 80 percent of infected mice. Success? What?!? 

We had been told that gain-​of-​function was against policy.

But that wise policy is no match for Fauci’s mania.

Wait, you cry, at least they developed the vaccines! 

Well, to what purpose?

A few weeks ago, in a European Parliament hearing, a Pfizer bigwig admitted that when the multinational introduced its anti-​COVID mRNA “vaccine,” it had not even researched the ability of the jab to reduce transmissibility of the virus. 

“We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what was taking place in the market,” Pfizer senior executive Janine Small explained. “And from that point of view we had to do everything at risk.” 

Clear? As mud?

This is a scandal … except … not according to FactCheck​.org, which states that “nobody claimed the vaccines — Pfizer’s nor Moderna’s — were tested for transmission prevention before they hit the market.”

But even the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s fact checkers admit that “some officials have overstated the transmission protection provided by the vaccines.”

Chiefest of these is Fauci, who said last year that by getting vaccinated we “contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. In other words, you become a dead end to the virus.”

Fauci, at the top of the Big Gov/​Big Pharma dung heap, is himself a dead end — to responsible medicine.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency insider corruption

Six Million Dimes

Covid, Wuhan, bats, money

“EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak should not be getting a dime of taxpayer funds,” declared Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R‑Wash.), “until they are completely transparent. Period.”

Nevertheless, “despite losing a previous award for failing to provide records essential to an investigation into that origin,” Daszak’s group is now slated to receive $600,000, The Intercept informs us.

While regular readers are well aware of what Rep. Rodgers calls “madness,” at Unherd.com’s The Post, Ashley Rindsberg refreshes our memories:

  • “EcoHealth Alliance is … responsible for funneling … US government grants to the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, considered by many to be the likely source of the pandemic.”
  • Still, “[Daszak] was the go-​to source for the American media as they sought to ‘prove’ that the lab leak theory was little more than a Right-​wing conspiracy. He also surreptitiously organised a letter in The Lancet, attempting to shut down the debate by labelling this potential origin as a ‘conspiracy theory.’”
  • “Most alarmingly,” Daszak “submitted a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that called for scientists to insert a furin cleavage site — a key distinguishing and extremely rare feature of SARS-​Cov‑2 — into SARS-​like viruses. In other words: a blueprint for making SARS‑2 in a lab.”

Instead of throwing money at EcoHealth Alliance (which would merely funnel it to a Chinese lab), invest in a thorough congressional investigation into how Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, and co-​conspirator Dr. Anthony Fauci purposely obstructed the inquiry into the origin of a pandemic that has killed more than a million Americans and nearly seven million worldwide.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Method to the Current Madness

fact checking, fake news, social media, censorship, Covid, public health

The safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines has been disputed from the beginning.

What this usually means is that those of a skeptical mind challenge the confidence of the pro-​vax mantra — “safe and effective” ad nauseam — and, when they find stats that run counter to this official position, they publicize those stats. Then, major media outfits make a few carping criticisms of the new studies and quickly proceed to assuredly re-​state as fact the original and now more-​dubious propaganda. 

Meanwhile, social media censors dissidents. And when more studies come out casting grave doubt on either the safety or the efficacy of the new drugs, those receive little public attention.

How Alex Berenson was treated is a good example of the methods of the orthodoxy. Take Wikipedia’s judgment: “During the coronavirus pandemic, Berenson appeared frequently in American right-​wing media, spreading false claims about COVID-​19 and its vaccines,” the article confidently runs. “He spent much of the pandemic arguing that its seriousness was overblown; once COVID-​19 vaccines were rolled out, he made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”

False claims! In olden times — why, it seems like just a few years ago — a major news and history resource would not baldly call some contentious matter “false” or “true.” It would state the claims and then let the counter-​claims carry their own weight.

In the case of “the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines,” though, it has become clear: their efficacy wanes, diminishing quicker with each dose, leaving the unvaccinated with proportionally fewer infection and spreading events than the “boosted.”

And as excess deaths and inexplicable demises increase around the world we are “not allowed” to state this in many public forums.

No way to run a health crisis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

The Natural Immunity We Need

CDC guidelines

“This is two years too late,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, “but it’s a good step.”

Interviewed by The Epoch Times, Dr. Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, is talking about new official COVID-​19 guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control.

The CDC no longer recommends

  • the six-​foot “social distancing” rule, which led to maximum comfort for paranoiacs, introverts, and Scandinavians in supermarkets and other public spaces;
  • that the unvaccinated quarantine after exposure;
  • testing for the asymptomatic; and
  • contact tracing outside of hospitals and places like nursing homes.

Bhattacharya’s interpretation of all this is that the “CDC is admitting it was wrong here, although they won’t put it in those words.”

Much of the new regimen is the result of understanding that natural immunity is a huge factor in the epidemiology of the disease. Bhattacharya’s complaint is that this has always been the case, and that the CDC and government lockdowners should have recognized this early on.

While the expert class has inflicted much damage, the CDC continues to whistle past the graveyard. “We’re in a stronger place today as a nation,” the author of the new guidelines insists, “with more tools — like vaccination, boosters, and treatments — to protect ourselves, and our communities, from severe illness from COVID-​19.” 

But to get those mediocre-​at-​best vaccines past regulatory hurdles, government-​directed medicine suppressed information about (and public discussion of) the most basic tools we have to treat new diseases. Governments at many levels, along with social media companies and CNN and many doctoring outfits, actively suppressed a number of treatments that could have saved lives, with HCQ and Ivermectin being only the most infamous.

The natural immunity we need to encourage most is skepticism toward government bureaucrats and Big Pharma flacks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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