Tag: covid

government transparency international affairs

No Reason?

“Are we ever going to find out the truth of where COVID-19 came from?” Sophie Raworth, host of the BBC’s Sunday Morning, asked Dr. Anthony Fauci recently.

“Given the fact that there are such restrictions on ability to really investigate it,” the chief medical adviser to the president admitted, “I’m not sure.” Still, Fauci argued, “the data are accumulating over the last few months much more heavily weighted that this was a natural occurrence from an animal species.”

“However,” he added, “we must keep an open mind.”

Is Fauci’s mind open? His “data” argument is ridiculous bull.

Raworth then pointed out that World Health Organization “investigators” who traveled to Wuhan “were prevented from seeing key details and from speaking to key people. Why do you think the Chinese government did that?”

“You know,” replied Fauci, “I don’t want to create any or mention any disparaging remarks about that.”

No?

“But the Chinese are very closed, in a way of being very reluctant, particularly when you have a disease that evolves in their country,” he went on, “they become extremely secretive — even though there is no reason to be secretive.”

No reason? How does Dr. Fauci know that the genocidal totalitarian Chinese Communist Party has no motive behind their opaque response to the origin of COVID-19 (about which, remember, he has a completely open mind)?

“So, when they see something evolving in their own country,” Fauci explained, “they tend to have a natural reflex of not necessarily covering things up but of not being very open and transparent.”

Get that? A completely innate thing, totally unavoidable.

Fauci himself has long seemed “closed, in a way very reluctant” on the subject. Why? Not because “the disease” “evolved” in his labs, but because he and his colleagues outsourced work on bat coronaviruses to China.

Both parties have every reason to be … less than transparent.

With no Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags China, covid, Dr. Fauci, transparency

general freedom government transparency too much government

The Allure of the Mask

Early on in the pandemic, I promoted mask-wearing as something we could do to protect ourselves, loved ones, and our communities.

But as the pandemic progressed, we learned some things.

Over time, I became more skeptical of much good coming from mask-wearing.

Now that the panic portion of the pandemic is mostly over — and what a long panic it was! — we should be able to more calmly review.

Two months ago, Vinay Prasad, an actual epidemiologist, looked carefully at the CDC’s study allegedly showing a high medical efficacy in universal mask-wearing during a major contagion. The study, he argued, was plagued with “very poor quality data, insufficient to support community masking, particularly for years on end. Cloth masks had especially bad data. Data to support masking kids was absolutely absent.” And the CDC’s own reporting of what its study actually found was unreliable and … well, dishonest.

Take the case of Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Pre-pandemic, community masking was discouraged because the pre-existing evidence was negative,” explained Prasad. “This is why Fauci was critical of it in early March 2020 on 60 minutes.”

But many of us were perhaps unduly pro-mask because Fauci appeared to be protecting the supply of masks used by medical professionals, thus, lying for a strategic reason. It was hard not to learn a … dubious … lesson: Fauci lied to protect professional mask use, so masks for the masses likely worked well.

Then he changed tune. And went off the deep end, ignoring his previous statements and advocating double- and triple-masking!

Still, the most ominous issue about mask mandates is how it became “a marker of politics. Good liberals wear them and bad conservatives don’t.”

Prasad does not go where Matthias Desmet and others have: showing how mask mandates became a means to induce panic and the politicization of medicine.

Voluntary masking without mandates — as has been commonly the case in Japan, for example — provides important signals about infection rates, and allows people to negotiate their own physical distancing. Universal mask mandates spoil the informative aspect and instead serve tyrants and mass hysteria.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags covid, Dr. Fauci, masks, pandemic, panic

Accountability deficits and debt national politics & policies subsidy

What a Relief

Based on a quick look at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate’s splash page, I wasn’t immediately sure what, precisely, the institute’s raison d’être might be. On the top menu bar there’s a slogan: “Just Vote.” Big clue?

On the About page, though, we are told its mission: “educating the public about the important role of the Senate in our government, encouraging participatory democracy, invigorating civil discourse, and inspiring the next generation of citizens and leaders to engage in the civic life of their communities.”

As for the vision thing, that’s supplied by its namesake, Ted “I Survived Chappaquiddick” Kennedy: “To preserve our vibrant democracy for future generations, I believe it is critical to have a place where citizens can go to learn first-hand about the Senate’s important role in our system of government.”

I guess that explains why the institute’s Boston location sports a replica room of the U.S. Senate chambers.

Which costs serious money, of course.

Paid for entirely by the ultra-rich Kennedys?

Fact check: no.

Some of it is paid for by you and me — courtesy of Congress and COVID!

You see, part of last year’s $350 billion in pandemic relief went to Boston’s memorial outfit for its once-favored now-deceased multi-millionaire politician. Five million bucks, it turns out, was used (the AP tell us) to pay off the institute’s debt.

But don’t worry: the Kennedy Institute wasn’t singled out. Relief funds — which you might think would focus on struggling local libraries, community centers, and the like — also went to building a posh hotel and a minor league baseball stadium. And much, much more.

While politicians are good at spending money, especially for “emergencies,” they aren’t good at spending it well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Congress, covid, graft, subsidy, taxes

Accountability government transparency international affairs

Lab Leak Not Disproved

A Wuhan wet market is ground zero of the pandemic;
COVID-19 could not have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

At least, so say many “science reporters” commenting on recent research about the origin of the virus. Former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade begs to differ.

Wade (whom we’ve cited before) says it’s possible that the virus jumped from an animal host or that it originated in a Wuhan lab. Although both can’t be true, “so far, no direct evidence exists for either.”*

He expounds:

The cited research papers, still un-peer-reviewed, do not contradict circumstantial evidence of a lab origin.
Nor do they show that the virus originated in the wet market. Even if the earliest known case were of a person attending the market, one can’t know whether he got infected there or brought the infection with him from a lab.
One paper looks only at data from December 2019 and later. Yet the epidemic had been underway for weeks.
The same paper claims that the distribution of cases with no overt connection to the wet market is so similar to that of the market-related cases that the former cases must also be connected to the market.

But the outside-the-market cases selected for study by Chinese authorities — by Xi Jinping himself for all we know — were not randomly selected. One criterion was proximity to the wet market.

So: massive selection bias.

And a pandemic of unscientific reporting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Wade does not consider some of the smoking-gun type evidence for gain-of-function we’ve mentioned in the past, like the Moderna patent.

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bat!

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Tags covid, virus, Wuhan

Internet controversy media and media people

This Is Just Huge

“Why isn’t this in the newspapers?”

That’s what Dr. John Campbell asked on his YouTube channel yesterday, reviewing several studies of ivermectin as an agent in the fight against COVID-19 — but directly regarding the results of research out of Brazil. It was an impressive large-number study, in which the researchers invited the whole population of Itajaí to participate, with 159,561 included in the analysis: 113,845 regular users of ivermectin and 45,716 non-users.

“Seventy percent reduction in mortality in this study” of those who took a very “tiny dosage of ivermectin every fortnight, acting as a prophylaxis” over those did not. “I mean, this is just huge!”

Dr. Campbell, who has been a voice of calm science during the pandemic, goes on to say that “It’s almost as if information has been deliberately suppressed throughout the pandemic, to be quite honest.” With a wry look, he went on to say “No one’s saying that’s true, of course, but it’s almost like that.”

Droll.

But non-ironically, he insists the evidence is “powerful, present, and overwhelming.”

“Seventy percent,” he marvels, “how do you argue with a number like that? It’s a very, very high number.”

And the decrease in hospitalization was 67 percent.

All in all, the study found less infection, fewer hospitalizations, and an astoundingly lower death rate in the ivermectin group.

Earlier in the video, the doctor considered another study, comparing the cheap anti-parasitic to the far more expensive remdesivir, a Fauci-pushed Gilead Sciences anti-viral, with similar results.

It’s “almost as if” the expert class that spurned ivermectin doesn’t care if people die.

No one’s saying that, but.…

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The studies:

Kerr L, Cadegiani F A, Baldi F, et al. (January 15, 2022) “Ivermectin Prophylaxis Used for COVID-19: A Citywide, Prospective, Observational Study of 223,128 Subjects Using Propensity Score Matching.” Cureus 14(1): e21272. doi:10.7759/cureus.21272.

I. Efimenko, S. Nackeeran, S. Jabori, J.A. Gonzalez Zamora, S. Danker, D.Singh, “Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database.” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 116 (2022) S1 – S130.

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Tags corruption, covid, medicine

government transparency international affairs

U.S. Patent 9,587,003 B2

“Study finds genetic code in Covid’s spike protein linked to Moderna patent,” reads the headline in the Daily Mail. The story is another in a long chain of revelations linking American researchers and funding to the laboratory in Wuhan, China, that likely created the novel coronavirus.

But wait! some readers will shout. Isn’t the big COVID Origin story right now the new studies strongly pushing the Bat Soup (wet market) origin?

No. Those studies are slapdash — perhaps designed to balance against the continuing scientific revelations pointing to SARS-CoV‑2 as a gain-of-function job funded in part by American taxpayers.

The far more important story tells us that an “international team of researchers” discovered a tell-tale string of genetic code “in SARS-CoV‑2’s unique furin cleavage site, the part that makes it so good at infecting people and separates it from other coronaviruses.” It’s a key part of the infamous “spiked protein.” The Daily Mail piece by Connor Boyd explains that this “structure has been one of the focal points of debate about the virus’s origin, with some scientists claiming it could not have been acquired naturally.”

The research team claims that “there is a one-in-three-trillion chance Moderna’s sequence randomly appeared through natural evolution.”

And by “Moderna’s sequence” the scientists mean a genetic product that the company patented in its cancer research projects.

This is all still controversial, of course, but it is worth noting that much of past controversy consisted of desperate attempts by the Dr. Fauci/Peter Daszak faction to avoid any responsibility for what may be history’s greatest medical malpractice case.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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