A group of House Republicans are demanding answers from all 93 U.S. attorneys about what steps they have taken since the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo directing them to potentially crack down on parental protests.
“We are continuing to investigate the troubling attempts by the Department of Justice and the White House to use the heavy hand of federal law enforcement to target concerned parents at local school board meetings and chill their protected First Amendment activity,” the Republicans said in a letter (pdf) sent on Monday to every U.S. attorney in all 50 states and territories.
The DOJ memo, which sparked much controversy since its Oct. 4 release, directs the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to “convene meetings” with state and local governments to address an alleged “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against teachers and school leaders.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garlandlater revealed at a congressional hearing that his department issued the memo after communicating with the White House about a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). The NSBA letter characterized disruptions at school board meetings as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime,” and urged the Biden administration to invoke counter-terrorism laws to handle “angry mobs” of parents seeking to hold school officials accountable for teaching the Marxist-inspired critical race theory and for imposing COVID-19 restrictions on their children.
“Concerned parents voicing their strong opposition to controversial curricula at local schools are not domestic terrorists,” the Republicans said, adding that state and local authorities are already equipped with legal tools in case any parent actually crosses the line to commit a violent act.
Although the NSBA has apologized for the letter which the DOJ memo was based on, Garland has yet to rescind the order, meaning that his directives to U.S. Attorneys are still in effect, the Republicans said.
They further noted that during Garland’s testimony before the House, “he appeared to have no idea whether the U.S. Attorney meetings he ordered were actually taking place.”
Specifically, the Republicans demand that the U.S. attorneys provide a trove of information, including all documents and communications related to convening meetings in their respective judicial districts in response to Garland’s memo, and the names of all individual employees involved and organizations that were invited to or attended such meetings.
The U.S. attorneys will have until Nov. 15 to hand in those materials.
The letter was co-signed by 19 Republican members of Congress, including Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
Amid debates over the ability of COVID-19 vaccines to prevent transmission of the virus comes a report from Germany that a vaccinated man died aboard a plane and was later found to be infected with COVID-19.
The virus has not been confirmed as the cause of death, according to the National.
The 51-year-old man, whose name was not disclosed, was flying from Istanbul to Hamburg, Germany, on Oct. 25 aboard Pegasus Airlines.
He was found motionless in his seat after the other passengers had disembarked the plane.
The German-language publication der Spiegel speculated that other passengers may have believed the man was sleeping.
A police spokesman said he was traveling alone and had a window seat on the plane.
In order to enter Germany from Turkey, the traveler had to provide either proof of vaccination or a negative test.
“In full compliance with the Covid-19 regulations between Germany and Turkey, the passenger was allowed to take the flight from Istanbul to Hamburg after providing evidence of his or her complete vaccination status,” Pegasus Airlines said in a statement.
“We extend our condolences to the family and neighbours of the passenger,” the airline added, according to the National.
A doctor found that the deceased man had COVID-19 during a preliminary examination of his body.
According to der Spiegel, another German newspaper reported that the man had previously suffered from severe illnesses, but no details were provided.
A study published last month in the medical journal The Lancet indicated that individuals who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus as those who have not been vaccinated.
“The proportion of infected contacts was similar regardless of the index cases’ vaccination status. We observed transmission of the delta variant between fully vaccinated index cases and their fully vaccinated contacts in several households,” the researchers said.
“Although vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe disease and deaths from COVID-19, our findings suggest that vaccination is not sufficient to prevent transmission of the delta variant in household settings with prolonged exposures,” the study concluded.
“Our findings show that vaccination alone is not enough to prevent people from being infected with the delta variant and spreading it in household settings,” said Ajit Lalvani, a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London who helped lead the study, according to Bloomberg.
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that go largely unreported by the establishment media. In the same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 7,439 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 20 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 652,480 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 16,101 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision to receive a COVID-19 vaccine is a personal one, and it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note (edited)
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa wants to make sure that never again will the American people hear a tangled tale of American dollars funding research in China while officials dance around the truth.
Ernst is introducing the FAUCI Act — or the Fairness and Accountability in Underwriting Chinese Institutions Act — according to a statement on her website.
The act would ban the federal government from misusing taxpayers’ dollars to fund what’s known as gain-of-function research in China. This research takes place when a laboratory experiment transforms a naturally occurring virus into a more powerful disease.
Research conducted by American taxpayers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has taken on new importance amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The NIH has funded what some experts say amounted to gain-of-function research in China, which undercuts assertions from Dr. Anthony Fauci and others that the federally funded agency did no such thing, according to one expert.
Fauci heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH.
“For years, American tax dollars were funneled into Communist China, funding dangerous experiments on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Lab, while the head of the division funding those activities, Dr. Fauci, failed to tell the truth to Congress,” Ernst said.
“We need a full accounting of how and where our tax dollars are being spent—enough is enough. The FAUCI Act will put an end to U.S. funding of gain-of-function research in Communist China, go after government officials who intentionally mislead Congress, and bring about badly needed transparency and accountability.”
The act would require “a full accounting” of how NIH funding is spent and ban gain-of-function research.
Should everyone who has supported this research be fired?
In light of multiple allegations that Fauci has misled Congress, Ernst’s bill would punish any employee, official, or grantee of NIH who intentionally misleads Congress, or the Inspector General, by banning them from any federal funding or federal jobs.
The proposal drew praise from Justin Goodman, vice president of the government watchdog White Coat Waste Project.
“Shipping U.S. tax dollars to a notorious Chinese Communist Party-run bioagent lab in Wuhan for treacherous gain-of-function animal experiments was a recipe for disaster. We applaud Senator Ernst for introducing the FAUCI Act to protect taxpayers and public health from dangerous and wasteful spending in China and to hold NIH officials and grantees accountable for not being forthright with Congress,” Goodman said in Ernst’s statement.
Ernst has tried to rein in spending that supports dangerous research before. In June she proposed a law that would cut funding to groups such as EcoHealth Alliance, a grantee of NIH that conducted what appears to be gain-of-function research in China and dragged its feet admitting what it had done and how it spent federal grants.
“Despite skirting federal law and refusing to disclose how much U.S. taxpayer money was funneled to Communist China’s Wuhan Institute and the details about the coronavirus research the funding supported, EcoHealth Alliance was rewarded with another $7.5 million,” Ernst said then.
“Iowa taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to foot the bill for any organization that fails to comply with federal law. My bill would prevent federal funding from going to organizations, like EcoHealth, until they provide answers on how and where taxpayer dollars are being spent.”
One expert has denounced claims that no gain-of-function research was ever funded.
“Collins and Fauci lied to Congress, lied to the press, and lied to the public,” said Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, according to the Washington Examiner, referring to NIH Director Francis Collins. “Knowingly, willfully and brazenly.”
NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak last week admitted that the agency funded gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in China after over a year of denials from the agency’s leadership.
Tabak said its grantee, EcoHealth Alliance, first notified the NIH in August that it conducted the gain-of-function experiments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China between June 2018 and May 2019.
Tabak said EcoHealth failed to immediately notify the agency that it created coronaviruses that were 10 times more powerful.
Ernst also has called for an end to any U.S. funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab some fear might have been the origin of the coronavirus.
A good friend who owns a major auto dealership in the Dallas area recently told me he typically has about 500 to 1,000 cars and trucks on his lot. Now, he has 15. That’s how severe the supply chain problem has become.
He said people are buying cars over the sticker price. You usually haggle down the price for a new car. Now, you haggle up the price! Welcome to Bidenflation.
But now, the Commerce Department has reported that the high-flying U.S. economy with a 6.5 percent growth rate for the first half of this year has crash-landed in the third quarter with an anemic rate of just 2 percent growth. Those lousy numbers predate the supply chain crisis that emerged in October.
At the start of the year, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank predicted 7 percent growth. So, that’s quite a downgrade we are seeing.
Car sales, for example, are way down because of microchip shortages. The carmakers also don’t have the metals they need to make the cars. Don’t try to buy a used car either. Those prices in many parts of the country are up by more than 20 percent—even for clunkers. Many grocery stores now have empty shelves of produce and vegetables.
It means we have slow growth while inflation has hit its highest level in more than a decade at 5.6 percent. In addition, consumer confidence in the economy has tumbled.
All of this is a bit reminiscent of the economy of the 1970s. Does anyone remember the term stagflation? Those under the age of 40 probably don’t even know what that is, and they’ve certainly never experienced it upfront and personally.
Here’s the definition from Investopedia: “Stagflation is characterized by slow economic growth while at the same time accompanied by rising prices (i.e., inflation).”
Under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, years of persistently high inflation triggered a surge in unemployment. That then led to the term “misery index.” The sum of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate. It exceeded 18 percent in Carter’s last year in office.
And then it was, “So long, Jimmy.” With the economy sagging, Carter lost a landslide election to Ronald Reagan.
The lesson here is straightforward: The witches’ brew of slow growth and higher prices is the ultimate curse for politicians.
Inflation, which had been relatively tame for 40 years, has been a cascading problem in President Joe Biden’s first 10 months in office. The consumer price index suddenly galloped from less than 2 percent in the Trump years to 5 percent and 6 percent in the past four months. The cross-your-fingers hope by the Federal Reserve Board and the White House that the sticker-price rises at the grocery store, the restaurant and the gas station were only “transitory” have melted away like an ice cream cone on an August afternoon. Inflation is accelerating, and Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, predicts hyperinflation.
Let’s hope he’s wrong, but there is no plan in Washington or by the Fed to slow it down.
In fairness to Biden, some of the steep rises in prices were bound to happen due to the depressed prices in 2020. As consumer spending popped like a cork from a champagne bottle when lockdowns ended and the economy returned to normal, there was a natural demand response to reopening.
But nearly every Biden policy has made inflation and the economic slowdown worse. The absurd $1.9 trillion blue-state bailout bill passed in March marinated the economy with $100 bills as if dropping like confetti from helicopters. According to Casey Mulligan at the University of Chicago, the expansion of welfare programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits (not tied to working) is paying people up to $75,000 for not working a single hour in many states.
Big surprise that the labor force participation rate had shrunk and companies had 11 million jobs they couldn’t fill. Last month, nearly 200,000 people dropped out of the job market.
No wonder that the Job Creators Network says that small-business optimism has seldom been lower than today. When you treat profitable companies like villains, the owners go into protection mode.
Why invest when the politicians in Washington are threatening to tax away your earnings in the name of paying your “fair share”? Businesses that make profits are now demonized as enemies of the people in this new liberal anti-growth crusade. They keep forgetting that without employers, there are no jobs.
The income redistributionists who seem to be driving the Democratic Party agenda will soon learn that their pixie dust economic doctrine called modern monetary theory, which posits that Congress can spend and borrow ad infinitum, is a giant hoax. When the political class begins to plunder company profits indiscriminately in the name of “fairness,” the profits and the businesses start to disappear.
So, if Congress and the White House are afraid of the forces of stagflation, as they should be, what should they do?
The first and most urgent step to contain stagnation is to defeat Biden’s $4 trillion spend, tax, borrow, and print money scheme.
This week’s GDP report is a five-alarm siren warning that the Biden debt binge has to stop now. Hopefully, temporary stagflation doesn’t turn into runaway stagflation.
The annual “trick-or-treat” ritual is over. Not so the “tricks” perpetuated by congressional Democrats about their tax-and-spend ritual, and their phony numbers.
Consider the latest spending measure cobbled together by the House Democratic leadership, or more accurately their staffs. It is 2,400 pages long, much longer than the longest book I ever read. I doubt most members have read much if any of it. It, combined with the coming social spending bill, is a Democrat wish list that addresses problems that don’t exist (climate change), the supposed inability of parents to care for their own children (“free” daycare), and creation of new entitlements that will addict voters to their party in perpetuity, which seems their goal.
The language is foreign to most English speakers and was likely poll-tested along with false promises it will not cost a dime. Forget pennies from Heaven. These are borrowed and printed dollars from Washington.
You’ve heard of the kitchen sink. This is that, the bathroom sink, and the tub. If it becomes law, the country will sink deeper in debt from which we are unlikely to recover. Even worse is yet to come with the massive social spending measure.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on CNN that the administration’s proposed tax hike on billionaires is “… not a wealth tax, but a tax on unrealized capital gains of exceptionally wealthy individuals.” Word games.
Christian Mysliwiec, commentary editor for The Daily Signal, a publication of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has written an analysis of the $1.75 trillion bill. Here are three of his lowlights:
“Childcare and Pre-K: Actual 10-year cost is likely more than twice the reported cost of $400 billion.
“Obamacare Tax Credit: Actual 10-year cost is likely much more than three times the reported cost of $130 billion.
“Child and Earned Income Tax Credits: Actual 10-year cost is likely more than 10 times the reported cost of $200 billion.
“In total, these programs would likely cost well over $2.3 trillion above the estimate in this framework over 10 years. This excess would be more than $18,700 of new spending per American household.”
This is, to recall a phrase, “voodoo economics.”
Aside from the monetary cost, there would also be a sociological price to pay. Children will be raised with the values of paid daycare workers and without parental love. The measure would discourage work, as we have seen with checks going to people during the pandemic, who have been reluctant to return to their jobs.
Mysliwiec also notes the bill will “subsidize single parenthood, including among teens, thereby weakening the probability that children will be raised by a married mother and father … fewer children will experience social success and upward mobility, and low-income Americans will be left behind.”
This advances the liberal (aka progressive) “soft bigotry of low expectations,” because it tells especially minorities they have little to no chance of succeeding without federal help. We have heard this for decades. If government alone, or even government mainly, could cause people to make decisions that are good for themselves and the country, would it not have by now? Trillions of dollars have been spent on programs that have not fulfilled the promises of those who created them. What about the numerous people who have succeeded on their own by making right decisions? Forget them, because they don’t help the Democrats’ narrative.
I am not a pessimist, but if these spending bills become law, which is still in doubt given the opposition of some Democrats, it will only advance our decline, massive debt being one of the contributing factors to the demise of other nations that engaged in profligate spending.
Our enemies, which now include domestic enemies, as well as foreign, are eager to reach their goal of “fundamentally transforming America.”
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) announced on Oct. 28 that he has issued an executive order to protect the individual rights of his state’s citizens against “overreaching” COVID-19 vaccine mandates from the Biden administration.
“As the Governor of the State of Missouri, I stand with concerned Missourians and will do all I can to stop federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates,” Parson said in a statement.
“When President Biden announced his initial plans to force unconstitutional vaccine mandates, we immediately began aligning state resources for legal action. While we hoped the Biden Administration would recognize these mandates as the abuse of authority that they are, they have not, and we must now use every tool we have available to fight this federal intrusion,” he said.
Parson argued that the federal government does not hold the authority to require that people receive a COVID-19 vaccine. He called the Biden administration’s attempt to do so a “power grab.”
“The Constitution and its historical interpretations clearly leave public health decisions to the states. The federal government has no authority to issue COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The Biden Administration acting alone to dictate and mandate health requirements represents the kind of federal power grab the founding fathers warned us against,” Parson said.
Executive Order 21-10 includes three specific areas of attention, according to the governor:
All agencies, boards, commissions, and other entities within the executive branch of state government are directed to cooperate fully and timely with the Attorney General of the State of Missouri in litigation on behalf of the State of Missouri against any federally imposed COVID-19 vaccine mandate or requirement.
No agency, board, commission, or other entity within the executive branch of state government shall compel any individual to receive the COVID-19 vaccine according to federal vaccine mandates if the individual objects for religious or medical reasons.
No agency, board, commission, or other entity within the executive branch of state government shall penalize individuals or businesses for non-compliance with federally imposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates if the individual objects for religious or medical reasons.
Parson’s executive order adds to a growing number of governors seeking to stop the enforcement of COVID-19 vaccine mandates through executive order.
Last week, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) issued her own executive order against the mandates.
Ivey’s written statement released with the Oct. 25 order declared that the vaccine mandates were “outrageous overreach.”
“The federal government’s outrageous overreach has simply given us no other option, but to begin taking action, which is why I am issuing this executive order to fight these egregious COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Alabamians—and Americans alike—should and must have the choice to roll up their sleeves to get this shot and certainly not forced by government,” Ivey wrote.
“While President Biden laughs at the idea of protecting your freedoms, I will continue fighting for Alabama businesses and their employees,” the governor added.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) also signed an executive order banning “any entity” in Texas from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Florida’s Ron DeSantis is also among the Republican governors who are joining efforts to oppose the vaccine mandates in their state. DeSantis has called a special session of state lawmakers to consider a bill to oppose mandates in Florida.
Nearly 1000 U.S. funded grants from Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins have landed in the laps of collaborators of the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Over 20 American scientists who have received taxpayer funds from 637 grants by Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have also served as visiting lecturers and researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.
The unearthed affiliation between the nearly two-dozen Fauci-funded researchers at the controversial lab – believed to be at the heart of COVID-19’s origins – follows the National Institutes of Health (NIH) admitting that Fauci’s agency funded “gain-of-function” research at the institute in partnership with the American non-profit group EcoHealth Alliance.
In addition to EcoHealth Alliance researchers such as Peter Daszak working with the lab on “killer” viruses, several American professors and researchers who’ve received grants worth millions from Fauci have also collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Unearthed annual reports from 2011, 2012, and 2013 reveal a section titled “Visiting Scientists and Scientific Lectures,” which lists the names of various non-Chinese researchers who’ve taught at or worked with the Chinese Communist Party-run lab. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Chinese language website also reveals the identities of several researchers from additional years.
Among the 21 researchers is Stuart Le Grice, who works at the NIH’S National Cancer Institute (NCI) and has received 16 grants from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who lectured on “Extending Small Molecule Therapeutics to Cellular and Viral RNAs” in 2018. “At the meeting, Professor Stuart Le Grice first briefly introduced the important impact and application prospects of small molecule drugs that bind to cell or viral RNA in the development of new therapeutic strategies,” explains the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s summary.
Another Wuhan Institute of Virology Visiting Lecturer, Professor Anne Simon, addressed the lab on the “Non-Template Functions of an RNA Virus Genome,” according to an unearthed annual report from 2012. Several visiting scientists have also taught the lab about vaccine development: Tian Wang, who has received 25 NIAID grants, lectured on “Flavivirus: Disease Mechanism and Vaccine Development” and Michael McVoy, who has received 26 NIAID grants, lectured on “Cell Culture Models of Cytomegalovirus Infection: Pitfalls and Epiphanies for Vaccine Development.”
In some cases, Chinese Communist Party officials were in attendance at the Fauci-funded researchers’ lectures, as revealed on the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website.
Galveston National Laboratory Director James Leduc, who “discussed the prevention and control of new infectious diseases” and “research and cooperation in the field of biosafety management” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2014, had a “cordial talk” with the lab’s Chinese Communist Party Committee Secretary:
Researcher Yuan Zhiming, Dean of the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Secretary of the Party Committee and Deputy Director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, on behalf of the leaders of the Institute welcomed Professor James Leduc’s visit and had a cordial talk with him.
“Through this exchange, the two parties hope to jointly build a good contract platform, establish an efficient cooperation mechanism, further strengthen communication and exchanges, integrate resources, expand channels, and carry out extensive development in the field of new infectious disease prevention and biosafety management and training. Cooperation and exchanges will make positive contributions to the global fight against emerging infectious diseases,” notes the lab.
In addition to Fauci-funded researchers affiliating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, six additional researchers counting funding from separate National Institutes of Health (NIH) agencies have also taught at the lab.
Former National Cancer Institute Senior Investigator DimiterDimitrov and current NIH Senior Investigator Zheng Zhiming are among the NIH scientists who’ve shared their taxpayer-funded expertise with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
NIH RESEARCHER ZHENG ZHIMING AT WUHAN LAB IN 2016.2012 ANNUAL REPORT.2013 ANNUAL REPORT.2011 ANNUAL REPORT.
Despite the establishment media’s attempts to push the COVID-19 vaccine on every American, there are legitimate risks of side effects that need to be reported. In particular, a new study found the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine increases the risk of blood clots.
The study was conducted by Mayo Clinic researchers in Rochester, Minnesota. They were specifically looking for cases of a type of blood cot called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis in Olmstead County, Minnesota, and they published their findings in JAMA Internal Medicine.
First, the researchers studied cases of CVST from 2001 to 2015 in Olmstead County. According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, the county has a population of about 158,000.
Over that 14-year span, the researchers found 39 patients who had developed acute incident CVST. Adjusted for population, that translated to about 2.34 cases per 100,000 person-years.
Of those 39 patients, 29 of them had a pre-existing risk factor within 92 days before developing the blood clot, according to the study. The Daily Mail said those risk factors include things like cancer or infection.
Next, the researchers studied CVST cases from the J&J vaccine’s approval in late February to May 7, 2021. The Daily Mail reported about 8.7 million doses of the vaccine had been given around the country during that time period.
In Olmstead County, the researchers found 46 CVST cases were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System within 92 days of receiving the vaccine. Eight of those were disregarded for various reasons, bringing the total to 38 “objectively diagnosed cases” of CVST.
At 15 days after vaccination, the researchers found 8.65 cases per 100,000 person-years. That rate is 3.7 times higher than the rate researchers found during their 14-year analysis of the general population.
In female patients, in particular, the rate was 13.01 cases per 100,000 person-years. The study said the CVST case rate was 5.1 times higher after vaccination among just female individuals compared to the pre-pandemic rate.
Does this study change your opinion of the J&J vaccine?
Overall, the researchers said their study found the CVST incidence rate within 15 days of receiving the J&J vaccine was “significantly higher than the prepandemic rate.”
To the average American, that should be concerning. While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, it certainly appears that the J&J vaccine may increase the risk of blood clots.
“[T]he higher rate of this rare adverse effect must be considered in the context of the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing COVID-19,” the researchers said in the discussion portion of the study.
That may very well be true, but it does not change the fact that a higher risk of CVST does appear to be present post-vaccination. Americans have a right to choose for themselves which risk they want to take, and deserve to have the full information presented to them.
If a person is not vaccinated, they run the risk of getting COVID-19 and possibly more severe symptoms. If they are vaccinated, they face the risk of adverse effects like blood clots.
Even if the risk of side effects from the vaccine is relatively low, it still exists. That is yet another reason vaccine mandates are so blatantly unconstitutional.
President Joe Biden may feel the risk of severe COVID-19 in an unvaccinated person is much higher than the risk of vaccine side effects, and he may be correct in that assumption. But that does not give him the right to make that decision for every American.
A cornerstone of a free country is that citizens ought to be able to make choices for themselves, especially when it comes to risk factors. As the Biden administration attempts to enforce medical tyranny, that right is more important than ever.
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that go largely unreported by the establishment media. In the same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 9,143 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 22 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 740,348 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 19,483 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision to receive a COVID-19 vaccine is a personal one, and it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note
As the Biden White House and Congress’ radical progressives continue their efforts to reach an agreement with Capitol Hill moderates and conservatives on their proposed $1.75 trillion social spending bill, it’s becoming more apparent than ever that their pie-in-the-sky agenda is anything but fiscally responsible.
And that’s putting it very gently, believe you me.
On Thursday, the White House released its final version of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” spending plan, which includes billions in funding for universal preschool, child care, public housing and climate initiatives and pins it all on the wealthy to — say it with me now — “pay their fair share.”
Of course, for this to even begin to make sense, one would certainly hope that the wealthy are made to payenough of their “fair share” to make the ends of the trillion-dollar-plus spending package meet, right?
According to an analysis from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the White House has overshot its estimate for how much the plan’s tax increases will offset the ambitious spending initiatives by about $468 billion.
“At 9AM this morning, the White House released a set of revenue options for budget reconciliation that the White House estimated to total $1,995 billion over 10 years,” a summary of the school’s budget model released on Thursday reads.
“PWBM’s estimate of the same package is $1,527 billion, a difference of $468 billion,” it states.
The White House’s preliminary estimated revenue effects of selected provisions in its budget reconciliation package estimate a total of $1,995B over 10 years. This is $468B more than our #PWBM‘s estimate of revenues, which amount to $1,527B.
(2/2) Notable differences in revenue estimates include the 15% minimum tax on book income and increased IRS funding by $80B over the next 10 years. The White House estimated $325B and $400B, respectively, while $PWBM only estimates $195B and 190B in revenues, respectively. pic.twitter.com/8eXL3jHJe9
The most substantial discrepancy between the White House’s plan and the Penn Wharton Budget Model’s projection is the revenue that would be brought in by increasing funding to the Internal Revenue Service. While the Biden administration projected this would bring in $400 billion, PWBM estimated $190 billion.
A 15 percent minimum corporate tax on companies that report earnings of over $1 billion, meanwhile, was estimated to bring in only $195 billion, although the White House’s figure projected $325 billion.
This is exactly the kind of thing that Dave Ramsey is always warning us regular folks about doing with our own budgets — yet we’ve gotten so used to our own federal government’s wildly excessive and irresponsible funding that when we see these facts and figures, our eyes glaze over.
It’s likely not a coincidence that as our culture has moved so far away from any cohesive sense of personal responsibility, we’re lost most of our interest in fiscal responsibility on both a personal and state level.
Our nation is sinking into crippling debt, and yet younger Americans still clamor for high-priced social spending with the misguided assumption that because our nation is the wealthiest in history, surely money is growing on trees that are kept in some massive proverbial orchard, access to which has been cruelly cut off to more deserving and sympathetic people.
“Tax the rich” looks great when it’s pithily conveyed in tweets — or on the back of high-dollar Met gala gowns — but even if such a scheme were so simple, the figures still have to line up on paper.
Do Democratic politicians behave as if money grows on trees?
Yet we live in a world where large-scale riots that destroy millions of dollars of private property, often owned by minorities, is seen as racial justice, being forgiven for debt you agreed to pay to go to a fancy university is seen as a human right, and forcing taxpayers of conscious to pay for abortions is seen as a matter of women’s health.
Is it any wonder that it is so controversial to pass legislation that simply lines up with mathematical reality in such a twisted world?
We are terrible stewards of the material blessings our nation has generated, just as we are terrible stewards of the reasoning and philosophy that led to the foundation of our nation in the first place.
A federal judge temporarily blocked an Illinois hospital system from allegedly putting workers with religious exemptions on unpaid leave.
In late October, several employees at the Chicago-area NorthShore filed a legal complaint against the company, arguing that the firm’s vaccine mandate discriminated against them by forcing them to decide between a vaccine and their jobs.
Liberty Counsel, which is representing the 14 health care workers, said in an emailed statement last week that the “plaintiffs have shared these religious beliefs, and others, with NorthShore, and have asked NorthShore for exemption and reasonable accommodation for these beliefs, but NorthShore has unlawfully and callously refused.”
U.S. District Judge John Kness on Friday issued a temporary restraining order against the hospital system.
“They can’t be fired and they can’t be placed on what is effectively, in my mind, unpaid leave,” Kness said during a hearing on the lawsuit, reported the Chicago Tribune.
NorthShore is “going to have to keep paying them. If you wish to require them to show up to work and use [personal protective equipment] and go through testing because you need the help and you don’t want to pay them to be off site, that’s up to the hospital,” he added.
Liberty Counsel said that more than a week ago, “NorthShore had already started purging those employees with sincere religious objections to its ‘Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination Policy’” and removed many employees with religious exemptions from its November work schedule. That included staff members with appeals that were pending, Liberty Counsel said.
Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines say that employees may ask to be exempted from vaccine requirements due to religious or medical reasons. However, workplaces do not necessarily have to grant the exemptions under certain circumstances, the agency’s guidance adds.
Horatio Mihet, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told the Chicago Tribune that unvaccinated workers can still work there while wearing personal protective equipment and getting weekly testing.
NorthShore previously told The Epoch Times that it understands “that getting vaccinated may be a difficult decision for some of our team members” and values “their committed service and respect their beliefs.” On Monday, NorthShore didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We must prioritize the safety of our patients and team members in support of our broader mission,” the hospital system said.
NorthShore, in a statement to local media last week, disputed several claims in the lawsuit and had “considered each request based on multiple criteria” on exemptions.
The vaccine mandate recently implemented by the Biden administration is costing jobs and affecting the U.S. economy, said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) in an interview with NTD.
President Joe Biden on Sept. 9 announced sweeping COVID-19 vaccine mandates for federal workers and contractors, and set a Dec. 8 deadline. Federal workers and contractors under the mandate won’t have the option to submit weekly COVID-19 tests and instead have to get vaccinated or seek a religious or medical exemption.
Norman said the mandate is creating a “huge issue” in South Carolina where essential workers such as engineers have walked off jobs and military families have come under pressure.
“It affects their livelihood, food on the table, not to mention their retirement,” said Norman. “This is a man-made crisis.”
Norman also cited “millions” of illegal immigrants entering the United States without needing proof of COVID-19 vaccination or having received a negative test.
“If it’s so important that Americans get vaccinated and to cause people to lose jobs again, how is it not important for the millions coming into this country?” said Norman.
President Joe Biden has presided over what is on track to be the worst border crisis in U.S. history in terms of the number of illegal immigrants that U.S. agents and officers have encountered. The number topped 200,000 in both July and August.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki in September had defended the Biden administration’s decision not to require negative COVID-19 test results or proof of vaccination from people illegally crossing the U.S.–Mexico border.
Psaki, responding to a question from a reporter on whether border patrol officials ask to see proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or negative test results “if somebody walks into the country, right across the river,” said illegal immigration is not comparable to foreign nationals who arrive by airplane to the United States.
In August, 40 percent of illegal immigrants released in Texas city had tested positive for COVID-19.
Regarding the Biden administration’s enforcement of the vaccine mandate for employers with 100 or more employees, Norman said private companies are “being held hostage” while postal unions were exempt from the mandate.
“It’s been a pick and choose, it’s been a sham show that this administration continues to do,” stated Norman. “They say one thing and do opposite.”
A U.S. Postal Service (USPS) spokesman told The Epoch Times in September that the USPS is not one of the agencies compelled to require COVID-19 vaccination.
The USPS, with more than 630,000 employees, is an independent agency of the Executive Branch.
Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spends public money to warn of attacks by hordes of zombies? Really. The program is designed to make some demographic groups more receptive to CDC propaganda—or rather, “messaging.”
But spending our tax dollars on zombie posters, a zombie novel, and zombie history are among the lesser problems at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Both of these federal agencies are overgrown, unnecessary, arrogant, infused with leftist politics, and unconstitutional. And both should be abolished.
Recent Revelations: Fauci and Walensky
This past week, Americans were stunned to learn that a long-standing charge was actually true: The NIH funded coronavirus “gain of function” research at the Wuhan lab in communist China. This revelation directly contradicted repeated reassurances by NIH official Anthony Fauci that such funding didn’t happen.
Apart from the issue of misinforming the public (although that’s serious enough), why would a federal agency spend nearly $600,000 in taxpayer money to make a virus more dangerous? Why would it fund anything in communist China—except, perhaps, resistance to that country’s tyrannical government?
Earlier this year, CDC Director Rochelle Paula Walensky issued a decree rewriting every residential landlord-tenant lease in the country. This was outside her statutory authority and in defiance of both the Constitution and the Supreme Court (pdf).
Legal issues aside, consider the sheer hubris: There’s nothing in Walensky’s background to suggest she has any expertise on landlord-tenant law or management. What made her think she knows anything about the subject? What drove her to impose her will on millions of other people?
Fortunately, the Supreme Court promptly voided her order (pdf).
The Constitutional Issue
Every federal elected office holder promises to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Outside of the capital district and the federal territories, that Constitution assigns no powers to the central government over civilian health care. Further, the Constitution limits the permissible size of the capital district to 10 miles square, so as to prevent federal institutions from metastasizing into state territory and unduly influencing state policy.
The great Chief Justice John Marshall—an advocate of a strong federal government—summarized the Constitution’s position on health care in his famous decision in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824): Reserved exclusively for the states, he wrote, are “health laws of every description”.
Nevertheless, enabled by rogue Supreme Court rulings issued in panic circumstances during the Great Depression, Congress continues to fund both the CDC and the NIH.
Bureaucracy Run Wild
Over the years, these two agencies have grown into massive bureaucracies. The CDC has nearly 11,000 employees and recently enjoyed a budget of $11.1 billion. That budget is now almost certainly higher. Rather than being located in the capital district, the CDC occupies a campus in Atlanta, Georgia. Except for a museum on the grounds, that campus is closed to the public.
The NIH is not located in the capital district, either. It occupies a lavish main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The campus is a federal enclave, which means that although it’s within a state, it’s under direct federal control. It’s large enough to house several fitness centers and its own fire department. According to its official directory, the NIH contains 27 separate institutes and centers and a National Library of Medicine. It has 20,000 employees, and in 2020 enjoyed a budget of $42 billion.
The publicity and—for lack of a better word—conceit surrounding these two entities might make you think they’re the only health agencies in the country. Wikipedia, for example, describes the CDC as “the national public health agency of the United States.” This makes it sound as if the United States didn’t have 50 state public health departments and thousands of local public health departments.
Similarly, the NIH Clinical Center identifies itself as “America’s research hospital”—as if America didn’t contain hundreds of other research hospitals funded by state and local governments and by private philanthropy. In addition, the United States has 4,000 degree-granting institutions of higher learning, many of which are involved in health care research, and the pharmaceutical companies also operate a huge health care research sector.
Constitutional issues aside, therefore, an objective observer must ask why, at a time when the federal government is essentially bankrupt, are the feds duplicating state, local, and private efforts? After all, with modern telecommunications, research can be coordinated among different entities nationwide. Moreover, to the extent the CDC and NIH are not duplicating other efforts, why is Congress allowing federal agencies to crowd out programs that might otherwise flourish?
Politicization: Critical Race Theory and Other Leftist Notions
But duplication and waste are not the biggest dangers posed by federal involvement in health care. The biggest danger is politicization. When politics infiltrate science, science becomes corrupted and its application inefficient. Corrupted and inefficient medical science can lead to the death of millions who might have been saved and prolong the misery of millions who might have been cured.
One long-standing example of politicization is the CDC’s efforts to become involved in the issue of gun violence. Traditionally, this is an issue for law enforcement and criminologists rather than for public health agencies. The CDC’s intrusion into the area is a classic example of “mission creep.”
The reason for this mission creep is politics. The CDC started meddling with the “gun violence” issue during the administration of President Bill Clinton. A major agenda item for Clinton was more regulation of owners and users of firearms. The CDC apparently was to supply the supposedly neutral “science” to promote that agenda. Congress had to enact legislation to stop it.
Now Joe Biden is president and he also wants draconian control of firearms. So CDC Director Walensky has announced that she wants to renew CDC gun-violence research.
Another example of politicized mission creep is how the NIH and the CDC have become invested in the left’s poisonous racial politics—including “structural racism” (translation: “You’re a racist even if you’re not”) and the misnamed critical race “theory.”
Like gun control, race relations are outside the traditional scope of public health agencies. Walensky, however, claims that “racism is a serious threat to the public’s health.” So the CDC now spends your tax dollars on both a “Health Equity Matters newsletter” and an “Office of Minority Health and Health Equity (OMHHE).”
The latter office recently named a certain Chandra Ford as “the Health Equity Champion for Spring 2021.” The reason was that Ford and another person “originated … the Public Health Critical Race Praxis, which is a framework for applying Critical Race Theory empirically.”
Just as the CDC is on the lookout for zombies, the NIH is deeply into racial witch hunting. The agency has assigned nearly 100 highly paid witch-hunters to its UNITE program with the assignment of exorcizing “structural racism.” The NIH website virtue-signals by affirming that “ending structural racism in biomedical research starts now.”
The CDC and NIH are also attuned to the wider “woke” cause. The CDC’s celebration of Ford, for example, was a “two-fer” because she also works on LGBTQ issues. The NIH (like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services generally), grants federal funding—that’s our money—to writers committed to the leftist agenda. Recent “funding opportunities” include “New investigators to promote workforce diversity in genomics, bioinformatics, or bioengineering and biomedical imaging research” and “Understanding and addressing the impact of structural racism and discrimination on minority health and health disparities.”
All of these are easily accessible examples of CDC and NIH politicization. My long experience in government taught me that for every easily accessible example, there are many hidden ones. Only whistleblowers can reveal the full extent of the rot within.
A Message to Republicans: Abolish Both Agencies
How can we clean up this mess?
It’s not by writing a letter to the president. It’s by insisting that the next time Republicans control Congress they permanently defund the CDC and NIH, thereby eradicating them root and branch.
Radical? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. History tells us why:
Conservatives and “progressives” have one thing in common: Conservatives use their own money to fund their political activities, and “progressives” use the same source—conservatives’ money—to fund theirs. Without constant forced subsidies from hardworking taxpayers (overwhelmingly conservative and moderate), the far left would be an insignificant force in this country.
When Democrats obtain majorities in Congress and the state legislatures, they use public money to create and fund social programs that become (1) mechanisms for social control and (2) bases for leftist political activity. When Republicans regain legislative control, they may trim the programs and reform them. But those changes don’t last long, because when Democrats recover their majority, they expand funding, lift restrictions, and render the programs even larger and more powerful than they were before.
If the Republican Party wants to continue as a viable force, it must fully defund these programs and the agencies that administer them. This will eliminate their lobbying power and make it harder for subsequent Democratic majorities to re-create them.
Permanent defunding is, I recognize, a difficult task. Once accomplished, however, the agency and its lobbyists have vanished, its abuses are over, and a reliable Democrat base has vanished. This is because for all their talk about “public service,” once the money has dried up, bureaucrats don’t hang around. As the late California state senator and humorist H.L. (“Bill”) Richardson often remarked, “I never knew a bureaucrat who worked for nothing.”
What will happen to the CDC and NIH staff once the funding has stopped? Some will retire on their government pensions. Some will get jobs in state and local health agencies, where their potential to inflict damage is more limited and they may actually do some good.
But most will switch to the private sector where they no longer have incentives to be nuisances, and will become productive and useful members of society.
Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor and historian, is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at Colorado’s Independence Institute. He is the author of “The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant” (3rd ed., 2015). He comes from a medical family and, unlike CDC director Walensky, has an extensive background in landlord tenant issues.
State lawmakers, unlike their federal counterparts, don’t rake in the big bucks.
In two states, they make six-figure salaries — but those states, according to Ballotpedia, are California and New York, where legislators take home $114,877 and $110,000 a year, respectively. And sure, that’ll get you a studio apartment in California, but what about utilities?
In Maryland, the number is roughly half that: $50,330 a year. Thus, many lawmakers not only come from the private sector but stay there after they get elected, particularly if they have high-paying jobs — like, say, being a doctor.
I get that. However, if Maryland state Del. Terri Hill cares about her constituents as much as she cares about her patients, perhaps she should have neither gig.
According to The Associated Press, Hill, a Democrat, was fined $15,000 and hit with a reprimand by the Maryland Board of Physicians for participating in two separate virtual legislative meetings, including a voting session, while she was in the operating room.
Like many states, Maryland’s legislative committee meetings were held via videoconferencing software this year because of COVID-19 protocols. On two occasions, Hill — a board-certified plastic surgeon — left patients on the operating table while she dealt with legislative business.
Earlier this month, Hill signed a consent order which found her guilty of “unprofessional conduct in the practice of medicine.”
The first report of Hill’s, um, multitasking came in a March 23 article in the Baltimore Sun. During a February committee meeting of the House Environment and Transportation Committee, she stepped away from a patient to present a bill via Zoom.
During a March 12 meeting of the Maryland House of Delegates Health and Government Operations Committee, which lasted about an hour, Hill’s feed “showed multiple gowned and masked figures moving about, with sets of operating room lights visible on the screen,” the Sun reported. The hearings were being broadcast on both YouTube and the General Assembly’s website as they happened.
Should there be heavier repercussions for Hill’s poor judgment?
“She was positioned under the surgical lights, focused downward, and would occasionally shift, reach for surgical instruments, or adjust the lights,” the report read, adding Hill and her staff “occasionally moved surgical equipment and blood-stained towels so that they were briefly visible on the video feed.”
According to The Hill, the doctor acknowledged to the board her participation wasn’t required in either of the sessions.
Hill, whose district covers areas of Baltimore and Howard counties, insisted this was entirely safe when the Sun first reported on it.
“Had there been any safety or privacy concerns, then I wouldn’t have done it,” Hill told the Sun in March, although she declined to say what the surgeries being performed at the time were.
“I’m a little surprised that this is becoming a big deal because there are no privacy issues. There are no attention-to-duty issues and there’s no dereliction-of-duty issues,” she said.
“So, the only issue is people’s perception of what could or could not or must or must not have been going on.”
The perception of the people on the Maryland Board of Physicians — which I trust to be a bit more educated in the matter — begged to differ.
During an April disciplinary panel hearing, she said that both patients “gave permission” for her to attend the hearings, according to the AP. However, in both cases, the surgery was major, in one case there was no record of consent and in the other, she asked for consent only minutes before surgery started.
“In its findings of fact published on its website, the board cited records that show Hill performed major abdominal surgery on one of the patients in February — and that the patient’s preoperative consent forms do not document consent or notice about Hill participating in a legislative committee during surgery,” the AP reported. “The patient did not recall being asked about participating in a legislative committee meeting by videoconference, according to the board’s report.”
Hill would tell the board’s staff during a May interview that she may have just informed the patient of the possibility she’d have to “take a call” during the procedure and, when asked about the fact the patient couldn’t recall the conversation, said “there was a lot going on, getting the patient to the hospital, getting them to the OR. I’m sure she was nervous.”
“Patient 1 also said that it was a little discomforting that attention was taken away from her during the surgery,” the board’s report read.
The March case involved major abdominal and back surgery. Again, the preoperative forms have no mention of Hill stepping away from legislative meetings. This time, the AP reported, “the patient reported to the board’s disciplinary panel that Hill told her about the committee meeting 10 minutes before surgery started and that she consented to Hill’s participation.”
Furthermore, the fact Hill was presenting legislation from the operating room was noted by committee chairman Del. Kumar Barve during the Feb. 12 incident, given Hill was wearing surgical gear at the time.
“Before we start the timer, are you at work? What’s going on here?” Barve asked.
“I’m at work, yes,” Hill said. “You’re at work, I’m at work.”
“All right, cool,” Barve said. “Go for it.”
The Maryland Board of Physicians was less cool, as indicated by the consent order.
“In a statement Friday night, Hill said she has worked hard to fulfill her professional obligations to both her patients and her constituents during the pandemic — a balance that has been challenging at times,” the AP reported.
“I accept the Board’s decision that I could have done better,” Hill said via text message.
It’s worth noting that while there has been an uptick in demand for plastic surgery in 2021, according to an April media release by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Hill didn’t have to take on more patients than she could handle. It’s also worth noting that, given the fact legislative sessions were virtual in 2021, that meant it was easier than ever for her to attend.
Hill apparently lacks the necessary bandwidth to give her patients and her constituents the attention they need to solve their issues, in other words. Ordinarily, this would mean she’d be the perfect Democratic politician, but the job doesn’t pay as well as plastic surgery.
On one hand, I’m tempted to say perhaps she should leave not caring about the people who elected her to the experts and focus on medicine, instead. On the other hand, though, patients undergoing surgery expect competence and results, something we’ve given up on when it comes to our legislators.
If Hill is the kind of doctor to step away from the operating table to attend committee hearings, maybe politics really is her calling, after all.
Attorneys, medical doctors, and family members of COVID-19 victims have described and offered recordings of what the Truth for Health Foundation calls “horrific hospital violations of human rights,” including denial of intravenous fluids to patients, denial of access to patients by families, attorneys, and others, and imposition of remdesivir on patients despite risks of kidney and liver damage from that drug and the availability of possibly safer alternatives, such as ivermectin.
“Prisoners in America’s jails do have more rights right now than COVID patients in America’s hospitals—it’s unheard of,” Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, the president and chief executive of the foundation, said at an Oct. 27 press conference that she moderated. According to its website, the mission of the physician-founded charity foundation is “to provide truthful, balanced, medically sound, research-based information and cutting-edge updates on prevention and treatment of common medical conditions, including COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, that affect health, quality of life, and longevity.”
“‘I’m doing my job’ has never been a defense to crimes against humanity,” said Ali Shultz, legal director for America’s Frontline Doctors, whose mother-in-law died of COVID-19 and whose father-in-law allegedly suffered severe harm as a COVID-19 patient at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona.
Shultz said that despite her medical power of attorney, she was prevented from learning basic information about the status of her father-in-law, Chuck, while he was in the hospital.
“I tried everything,” Shultz said. “I wrote every letter possible. I sent every email possible to advocate for them. I was literally carried out in handcuffs under color of law. I was assaulted under color of law. I was deprived access to their health records, I was deprived access to them, and I was lied to. But that’s absolutely nothing compared to what happened to Chuck.”
Shultz said that the Mayo Clinic kept Chuck from any hydration or nourishment over six days, “except one bag of D5 [dextrose 5 percent] water.”
She also stated that the clinic secretly experimented on Chuck with the repurposed rheumatoid arthritis drug baricitinib. They also secluded him for over three weeks more than the Arizona Department of Public Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend, according to Shultz.
Shultz played a recording of someone who identified himself as a hospital administrator; this recording and others by Shultz were legal, as Arizona is a one-party consent state for recordings. The administrator stated that the choice to deprive Chuck of food and water was the standard of care in metropolitan Phoenix, due to concerns about the aspiration of objects into his lungs.
“Yes, of course, we don’t want him to aspirate, but maybe he could get some IV hydration—something at all—or, I don’t know, just an assessment?” Shultz asked in the recording.
In another recording, an unidentified hospital employee stated, “As far as visitation in our hospital, we are not going to allow you to visit him in our hospital as long as he is here.”
A third recording referred to meetings among hospital executives that concluded patients who test positive for COVID-19 wouldn’t be permitted to receive visitors.
“So, they’re meeting and they’re all deciding on this together. So, either this is becoming the standard of care, or this is the same modus operandi, which actually criminally makes it easier to prove,” Shultz commented after playing the recording.
She urged listeners to prevent COVID-19 patients from being secluded.
“Get in there—it is in the Patient Bill of Rights,” Shultz said. “Just because they’re using the word ‘isolation’ doesn’t mean it makes it any better what they’re doing.”
“When an American is isolated from others, what is this considered? Unlawful imprisonment—torture.”
Holding up a document she identified as a police report on the Mayo Clinic, which she said included felony charges of vulnerable adult abuse, Shultz stressed that prosecutors have considerable discretion to decide whether doctors should be charged.
She also highlighted a template for a private criminal complaint individuals can file online with their state’s attorney general, which she said can be accessed through the Truth for Health Foundation’s website.
Other speakers at the press conference included Dr. Bryan Ardis, who highlighted what he described as the hazards of remdesivir, as well as an unprecedented climate of fear and retribution for medical doctors who dissent from the enforced consensus on its use.
“Now they are punishing those who want to practice medicine and they are continuing to reward and allow doctors to maintain their licenses to practice in hospitals if they just follow the mandated protocol,” he said.
Ardis pointed out that a randomized, controlled trial of remdesivir and other therapies for Ebola, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and touted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical adviser to the president, actually showed the dangers of remdesivir, as the scientists stopped administering it during the study because it was leading to a mortality rate above 50 percent—higher than any of the other drugs they tested.
He also stated that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is “bribing hospitals” to choose remdesivir with a 20 percent bonus. CMS’s website does, in fact, refer to a “20% add-on payment” for claims coding for COVID-19 and for treatment by remdesivir or several other drugs.
In a pre-recorded interview with Vliet, another speaker, identified only as Mary Ann, spoke about her Marine Corps veteran father’s deterioration and death at a Bozeman, Montana, hospital. She said she was prevented from being with her father and holding his hand as he died, allowed only to view him from behind glass as he convulsed in his bed, a mask concealing his face.
“There’s something about when you’re able to be with your loved one and talk to them and hold their hand, there’s something extremely powerful in that—and there’s a reason they don’t want us in the hospital,” said Mary Ann. “They want us apart from each other.”
Thomas Renz, legal counsel for the foundation, shared what he called “the most shocking statistic I have seen probably since this has started”: in Texas, 84.8 percent of people who were mechanically ventilated for 96 consecutive hours died.
The Epoch Times could not independently verify this statistic before press time.
“It’s a death sentence,” said Renz.
Vliet concluded the press conference by recommending patients seek early treatment rather than waiting for symptoms to worsen. She also urged patients to think strategically and plan ahead if they do end up going into a hospital.
“You have the right to refuse treatment, you have the right to request treatment, you have the right to have an advocate when you are in the hospital. When those rights are denied, your civil rights, human rights, and constitutional rights are being overridden—and you will need an advocate,” she added.
The Mayo Clinic did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Shultz’s allegations. In addition, CMS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ardis’s claim that it is bribing hospitals to choose remdesivir.
A remark made by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) adviser is “the most dangerous statement I’ve ever heard in medicine,” the only active practicing physician in Congress said in a new interview.
Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and an associate physician specializing in infectious disease at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, sits on the administration’s vaccine advisory panel.
Before the panel voted this week to advise the FDA to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 jab for kids 5 to 11, Rubin said, in part: “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine.”You May Also Like
“That is literally the most dangerous statement I’ve ever heard in medicine,” Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a doctor, said on NTD’s “Capitol Report.”
“How’s that going to sit with the average mom, the average parent that cares about their child? That they want their child experimented on?” he added.
Rubin’s remarks were clipped by various people and widely circulated on social media, with some users saying it showed that the vaccine should not be given to children.
Asked about the criticism, Rubin told The Epoch Times in an email: “The clinical trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children showed no adverse events. All data to date indicate that it is safe. It will prevent the hospitalization of children with severe disease, as it does with adults. The vaccine works, and saves lives.”
The claim the trial showed no adverse events is false, as the FDA did discover 13 cases of lymph node swelling. However, none of the trial participants experienced heart inflammation (myocarditis or pericarditis)—a serious side effect that has been seen at higher than expected rates among youth, particularly males.
The panel pondered the potential benefits and risks of giving young children the vaccine but ultimately decided the benefits outweighed the risks. The FDA accepted the recommendation on Friday.
Rubin said after the vote that surveillance systems would be crucial in learning “how safe” the Pfizer jab is for children.
“We decided to go for it with a lot of heavy conscience. But I’m hoping that this is the start of learning more about it,” he said.
Murphy and Rubin did agree on one point, that COVID-19 vaccines should not be mandated for young children at this point due to the lack of safety data. Several other FDA advisers also said this week they are opposed to mandating the vaccine for young kids at this time.
Murphy, speaking to NTD, noted a key difference between COVID-19 and diseases that children routinely receive vaccines for early in their life.
“The vaccines that we have for children are measles, mumps, rubella, those things that we give kids, we have to have them before they go to school. And I agree with that, that’s fine. But the problem is, those are childhood diseases. COVID is not a childhood disease. It can affect children, but its lethality rate is infinitesimal compared to what it is in adults,” said Murphy, who practices at the Vidant Medical Center, a 1,000-bed level 1 trauma center.
“I just don’t understand why it’s being pushed on kids so much,” he added, predicting a federal mandate for kids soon just to go to school. “We don’t mandate that kids get the flu vaccine to go to school. We don’t mandate that kids have the HPV vaccine. So I just don’t understand the biology and the virology for this.”
Does your child have issues with gender dysphoria? Are they identifying as a different gender at school and asking teachers to use their preferred pronouns? Do you think this is something you, as their mother or father, should have some control over?
Check your parental privilege, say school administrators in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
In a letter to parents on Oct. 22, the Oshkosh Area School District — saying it was “committed to doing what is best for students and fostering a safe, supportive and inclusive learning environment for all” as well as “partnering with families to support the unique needs of every student” — announced it would no longer ask for parental consent if their child changed their gender pronouns or name in the classroom environment.
“The District recently changed a section of administrative guideline 2260E that required parental consent in order for district staff to use a student’s preferred name or gender pronouns if they differed from the student’s biological sex assigned at birth,” read the letter from Matthew Kaemmerer, the district’s director of pupil services.
“District staff members are no longer required to seek parental consent prior to honoring student requests to be called by their preferred name and/or pronouns.”
“While we understand that there are varying perspectives related to gender identity, we know that in order to put students first we must acknowledge and support each student’s unique needs,” the letter continued.
“In making this change our goal is to empower students to advocate for themselves, while ensuring that our classrooms and schools are places where all students are able to be their true selves. It is our hope that by providing students with the support they need at school they will be able to have those same conversations at home and with those around them if they haven’t already.”
Three days earlier, Kaemmerer sent a similar letter to district employees regarding the new transgender student policies.
Notice that just went out to all school district employees in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Parents are an afterthought, even for issues as serious as a child changing their gender identity. pic.twitter.com/mPbOc15v2t
“That’s something that we’ve reviewed and have found some difficulty with sometimes with staff engaging with students,” OASD superintendent Bryan Davis said, according to WLUK-TV. “We really want to make sure that we’re advocating for our students and with our students.”
Information wasn’t sent to parents until the change was fully implemented — three days after the notice was sent to district employees about the change to the transgender student policy.
“It was sent to the staff and it was not sent to the parents, and I guess I would ask myself, ‘Why would you not inform the parents?’” Oshkosh resident Chad Radtke told WLUK. “That seems like the first thing I would do!”
“It was just another sign that things are going in the wrong direction,” Radtke said. “From my perspective, and it’s hard to see it any other way, almost as if they’re deliberately riling up the parents to see how far they can push things; how many things they can kinda sneak past.”
Oshkosh city councilman Aaron Wojciechowski, however, said not allowing parents prior knowledge or input regarding what their minor children were doing in regard to their gender identity in public schools that their tax dollars pay for was important for the “comfort” and “safety” of their kids.
“Someone’s identity and their expression is so important to their core values and who they are, and I think this is important because now they have that comfort, that safety that they wouldn’t have otherwise,” Wojciechowski said.
School officials tried to make clear that this didn’t mean they wouldn’t inform parents of their child’s decision to start using different pronouns or changing their gender identity. Not at all, Superintendent Davis told WLUK.
“It’s actually just the opposite of that,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for our kids to feel valued and to open up in conversations and for our staff to be able to validate that, and many students need support in these difficult conversations, being able to engage with their parents and family members.”
Do you support this school district’s decision?
The parents would be told. They just had no say in it anymore, that’s all. See? No big deal! The school would do the right thing and open up conversations with their parents to explain why they shouldn’t have objections anymore.
Erika Sanzi, outreach director for Parents Defending Education, pointed out the hypocrisy of the policy when speaking to the Daily Caller.
“Oshkosh Schools likely require parental consent to give a Tylenol to a student at school. What school officials fail to understand, it seems, is that parental rights do not disappear when parents send their children to school — the very reason the school has authority over the child is because of parental consent,” Sanzi said.
“Concealing information from parents, or worse, deceiving them, is entirely at odds with that delegation of authority.”
Meg Kilgannon of the Family Research Council also noted the acetaminophen paradox.
“Deliberately concealing this information from parents, when those same parents would be consulted over the administration of Tylenol or permission to go on a field trip, is beyond outrageous,” Kilgannon said.
“This one of the many reasons we are seeing sustained pushback at school board meetings across the country.”
And make no mistake: This is is deliberately concealing information from parents. They may or may not eventually be told — the policy was only implemented less than two weeks ago, after all, and we haven’t seen how it will play out — but the assumption is that parental guidance for their child is unwarranted, unnecessary and problematic.
Once the student discloses it to school, the school will be there for “support in these difficult conversations” — and after all, the parents don’t get to have the final say.
More importantly, however, it’s a school board unequivocally saying that parental value judgments about gender identity not only don’t matter, they’re wrong and any decisions regarding them are being taken out of parents’ hands. This is the madness of transgender ideology: The school knows best. It’ll not only teach your kids, it’ll teach you, dear hidebound parent.
Just because a Food and Drug Administration panel recommended the COVID-19 vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds, does not mean that it is risk-free. If it was, it wouldn’t have taken eight hours for the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to deliberate the matter on Tuesday.
The whole meeting revolved around answering two questions: Do the benefits of Pfizer’s vaccine for children outweigh the risks? And what are the risks?
Pfizer announced in September that the vaccine is safe and efficacious for children, but there was a general consensus during the committee meeting that the data was limited. Ultimately, the panel’s decision to recommend the vaccines for children communicates that its members are fine with letting the general public be the next round of test cases to find out more about the possible risks and side effects of the vaccine.
“We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes,” microbiologist and infectious disease expert Dr. Eric Rubin said in the meeting.
Here is what is known about the COVID vaccine from the clinical trials so far.
First, it is important to note that the clinical trials for children were not huge. There were 2,268 participants between the ages of 5 and 11 in the trial, according to Pfizer.
This is technically in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s regulations for trial size, which require thousands of volunteers for the third phase. However, due to risks of significant health complications from the vaccine, federal regulators pushed both Pfizer and Moderna to expand their trial sizes over the summer.
A few thousand is not terrible for a clinical study, but with such a push to make the vaccine universal for the population, only 2,000 participants is a pretty small data pool.
Pfizer itself acknowledged that its data was limited. In fact, it did not even include data in its news release to show if the chances of children getting sick were lower.
Should young children be getting the vaccine?
“Gruber said that there were not enough cases of illness to tell,” Stat reported. “That means a decision has to be made on more limited data than regulators might like.”
The number of participants in this trial especially pales in comparison to the previous COVID-19 vaccine trials for adults. WCNC-TV reported in February that Pfizer’s Phase 3 of trials had 40,000 participants, while Moderna’s had 30,000.
With a relatively small clinical study, this means that if the vaccine is given emergency use authorization for children, 5- to 11-year-olds will more or less be joining a trial.
Besides concerns over fairly limited data, there are other risks from the vaccine that must be considered. One of the more serious risks, that still has lots of unresolved questions around it, is myocarditis.
Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle often caused by infection. It can cause a heart to beat irregularly, or even reduce its ability to pump. Sometimes the infection can leave the heart muscle weakened. In very rare cases, it can lead to death.
This problem can often resolve itself, but since it does affect the heart, it has the potential to become more serious, depending on the individual. Both the COVID-19 infection and vaccines have been linked to the heart complication.
This side effect of the vaccine has been rare, but it has shown up in Pfizer’s clinical trials. It is an especially concerning risk since Sweden, Finland and Denmark thought it problematic enough to pause Moderna, the other mRNA vaccine, due to an increase in myocarditis among youths.
“In the preliminary data … there is a suspicion of an increased risk of heart inflammation, when vaccinated with Moderna,” the Danish Health Authority said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Pfizer did look at the risk of myocarditis in its clinical studies, but determined it will take more time to really see how that potential risk could play out.
“The number of participants in the current clinical development program is too small to detect any potential risks of myocarditis associated with vaccination. Long-term safety of COVID-19 vaccine in participants 5 to <12 years of age will be studied in 5 post-authorization safety studies, including a 5-year follow-up study to evaluate long term sequelae of post-vaccination myocarditis/pericarditis,” Pfizer outlined in its briefing for the FDA committee meeting.
An outside Israeli study did provide more insight on this risk, however. The study, which looked at over 5 million people 16 years old and above that had been at least partially vaccinated, showed that the risk is small. But the demographic most at risk are adolescent males.
“During that time, 283 people had probable or definitive myocarditis, with 142 cases (50.2%) linked to the Pfizer vaccine,” the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reported, regarding the study.
So going into the FDA meeting, there were plenty of questions about the risk of heart problems being an adverse side effect of the vaccine.
“There’s not a lot of controversy that the vaccine is causing some myocarditis. The question for the panelists is going to be how to weigh this against preventing Covid-19, which may cause more of the condition, and how severe these cases are,” Matthew Herper wrote for Stat ahead of the meeting.
Sure enough, committee members quickly brought up the heart risks that were linked to Pfizer’s vaccine.
Dr. James Hildreth, the CEO of Meharry Medical College, asked about some scenarios that Pfizer ran in its trials that showed an increase in myocarditis.
“When you did your risk-benefit assessment in your briefing document, there were six scenarios that you considered. It strikes me that scenario three, where you have the incidents from — I think it’s June of 2021, where the cases are low, the hospitalizations from myocarditis actually exceeded hospitalizations from COVID-19,” Hildreth said. “So could you comment on that, because to me, the single most important question is whether the benefits outweigh the risks, and in that scenario, they clearly don’t.”
Dr. William Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president for vaccine clinical research and development, answered that the benefits outweigh the risks. So while heart problems might be a risk, the benefits that the vaccine can offer in getting everyone back to normal life are greater.
“[T]he other benefits, and particularly those societal benefits — obviously protecting vulnerable populations, including populations of color, the ability to get the children back into the schoolroom setting … all of those things, I think have to enter into the equation, regardless of the rate,” Gruber said.
In its FDA committee meeting document, Pfizer reiterated that it considers myocarditis a small risk. But it’s important to note the wording and to keep remembering that since the clinical trials have been sped up, the full effects of the vaccine will have to be further discovered once it’s in the general population of 5- to 11-year-olds. There are still many side effects and responses that Pfizer can only “expect” at this point.
Despite this, the FDA committee did decide in favor of the vaccine, 17 to 0. But it is important to look at the one member who abstained from voting.
Dr. Michael Kurilla, from the National Institutes of Health, was the single abstention. He noted there was a lack of data, but particularly he questioned if vaccinating 5- to 11-year-olds was worthy of an application for emergency use.
“I don’t see the need for ‘emergency use’ of this vaccine across the entire age group and would have preferred a more nuanced approach,” Kurilla said.
There is no question that overall children are at much less risk of contracting and getting seriously ill from COVID than adults.
According to data accumulated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, states reported that only between 5.3 percent and 13.6 percent of children tested positive for COVID. Furthermore, children only accounted for 0 to 0.26 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, and 7 states reported no child deaths.
During the FDA committee’s discussion, there seemed to be some consensus that the vaccine should be available to high-risk children, but to make it universal was a bit more controversial.
“This is a really tough one. I do believe children at highest risk do need to be vaccinated, but vaccinating all the children to achieve that seems a bit much to me,” Hildreth said, according to Stat.
With such a low risk of contracting or dying from COVID in children, pushing for emergency use authorization is concerning. There does not seem to be an emergent need for the vaccine in the broad population of 5- to 11-year-olds.
No vaccine is going to be perfect and it’s natural that there will be side effects and that some may even have quite adverse responses (like myocarditis). Trying to push through a vaccine for such young children in the name of emergency should raise questions.
The speed and small data pool of the clinical trials seem to leave more questions than answers about the risks of the vaccine. At best, the data half-answers a lot of questions. Instead of convincing the FDA on grounds of strong, extensive data, Pfizer is essentially saying, “We are pretty sure that the risks aren’t too serious, but we’ll have to really just find out by giving it to the general population.”
Many decisions are going to boil down to choosing the lesser of two evils, but it should not be too much to ask for more extensive data in order to make the soundest decision possible. Most parents don’t want their child to be a guinea pig.
A new study stops short of saying that vaccine mandates are as useful in stopping the spread of COVID-19 as a screen door on a submarine, but it admits that the delta variant hops from person to person with no regard for vaccination status.
The way that the experts whose study was published in the British medical journal The Lancet put it was that “fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts.”
When Bloomberg reported on the study, it cut to the core: “People inoculated against Covid-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus to contacts in their household as those who haven’t had shots.”
The study only tracked a tiny sliver of those impacted in the global pandemic but followed 621 people for a year.
The study’s goal was to look at whether vaccination impacted the spread of the disease, not just whether the vaccine could prevent severe illness or death.
It also sought to look at COVID-19 in the context of households, where exposure is repeated over time — not hospitals, workplaces or schools.
“We found that the secondary attack rate in fully vaccinated household contacts was high at 25%, but this value was lower than that of unvaccinated contacts (38%),” the study’s authors wrote.
They noted that the vaccine did offer greater protection against severe illness among those infected.
The authors added, however, that protection offered by a vaccine dipped quickly.
Are vaccine mandate not actually following the science?
“Risk of infection increased with time in the 2–3 months since the second dose of vaccine,” they wrote.
“The proportion of infected contacts was similar regardless of the index cases’ vaccination status. We observed transmission of the delta variant between fully vaccinated index cases and their fully vaccinated contacts in several households, confirmed by whole-genome sequencing,” they went on.
“Increasing population immunity via booster programmes and vaccination of teenagers will help to increase the currently limited effect of vaccination on transmission, but our analysis suggests that direct protection of individuals at risk of severe outcomes, via vaccination and non-pharmacological interventions, will remain central to containing the burden of disease caused by the delta variant.”
One of the study’s co-leaders noted that the report does not disparage vaccine use but that vaccination status is no bar to the spread of the delta variant.
“Our findings show that vaccination alone is not enough to prevent people from being infected with the delta variant and spreading it in household settings,” Ajit Lalvani of Imperial College London told Bloomberg.
The study said vaccinations alone will not stop the delta variant.
“Although vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe disease and deaths from COVID-19, our findings suggest that vaccination is not sufficient to prevent transmission of the delta variant in household settings with prolonged exposures,” the researchers concluded.
“Our findings help to explain how and why the delta variant is being transmitted so effectively in populations with high vaccine coverage.”
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that are largely unreported by the establishment media. In that same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, 7,439 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 20 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 652,480 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 16,101 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision of whether to receive a COVID vaccine is a personal one, but it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note
A lot has been written and said about companies and people relocating from California to Texas, but I wanted to know what it was really like for a CEO who actually made the move.
Recently, I had the opportunity to visit with the leaders of two Fortune 500 companies who did just that and relocated their businesses to North Texas from California. Jim Lentz, former CEO of Toyota Motor North America, made the move in 2014 and Brian Tyler, CEO of McKesson, made the move in 2019.
Lentz and Tyler joined me in Irving earlier this month to address the Texas Economic Development Corporation’s Fall Investor Meeting. I asked what prompted them to leave California for Texas and what advice they would give CEOs who are curious about their prospects in Texas.
Lentz and Tyler began contemplating their respective moves from California because they wanted to consolidate far-flung operations under one roof. Their companies eventually began looking for the right business and quality of life climates to make the move a good one for their employees personally, while also balancing the financial benefits, as many employees were being priced out of living in California.
If CEOs considering a move to Texas were to contact him about McKesson’s experiences, Tyler said, “I would tell them I regret not doing it a decade earlier.”
Tyler said he understands the inertia that surrounds such a major business decision — even when research shows an obvious benefit to the company.
“[Inertia] is what holds you back for two decades,” Tyler said. “There’s never a good time. If you’re having wild success and everything’s going right, you’re going to ask yourself, ‘Why would I want to. . .make my path harder?’ If your business is going terrible, you’re like, ‘Well, I’ve got enough problems. Why would I want to take this on?’ So there’s never a great time. So what I would say is, you’ve got to do your work, you’ve got to map your strategy, you’ve got to think long-term, and you’ve just got to peel off the Band-Aid and do it.”
Support from Texas elected leaders is key
But both Lentz and Tyler said another aspect of Texas’ business-friendly environment was also compelling — the cooperation of government officials in Texas with business owners.
“I’ve lived in 10 or 12 different places, I’ve run businesses in 10 or 12 different cities, and I’ve never been in a place [like Irving] where I felt like the community and business were so connected in supporting each other,” Tyler said. “Business really cares about the community, and the community really cares about business. . .That’s something I wouldn’t undersell.”
Lentz said Toyota had the same experience coming from California.
“Everybody’s heard how great Texas is as a place to move their business, that whether it’s local or state or federal government officials. . .how responsive they are and how they really want to partner with business,” Lentz said. “If you’re coming from somewhere like California and you hear that, frankly, you’re a little skeptical because that wasn’t necessarily our experience in California.”
The CEOs of other companies “want to really understand [whether] all these things they’re hearing about Texas, is it really true,” he said.
Lentz cited other companies that have also moved to Texas, and their leaders “said the same thing. We just should have done it 10 years earlier. It was the right thing to do,” he said.
In considering the company’s move to Texas, Lentz said Toyota’s priorities were what was best for the company and what was best for its employees.
Texas quality of life is a big draw
Hoping to retain the bulk of its workforce when it moved from California, Toyota took three years to transition to Plano. The company took steps to get employees acclimated to North Texas so that they would feel at home once they moved.
This strategy paid off — 73% of the Toyota workforce remained with the company, and after a year or two in Texas, very few made the decision to return to California, Lentz said.
Texas companies, like others around the world, have struggled with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as workforce shortages and supply chain issues.
But there’s a silver lining to some of these challenges, Lentz and Tyler said. Not only are there shortages in the supply chain but companies are suffering from “demand shock” as well. This is forcing companies to be leaner and more efficient and to gain depth in their suppliers in secondary and tertiary markets.
CEOs are bullish on Texas’s economy
Lentz and Tyler said they see positive momentum that will propel Texas’s economy through the pandemic and its aftermath.
The healthcare industry in Texas is poised to leverage the astonishing advancements in cancer treatment and other aspects of healthcare, Tyler said. Lentz said the automotive industry remains strong in Texas as it takes significant strides in electric vehicle technology.
“Texas is becoming the forefront for [electric vehicle production],” Lentz said. “This is an exciting time that is really going to help the environment.”
Building a skilled workforce is a priority
Texas will need to meet future opportunities by ensuring Texas has a competitive set of economic incentives for relocating and expanding businesses — and by continuing to build a skilled workforce pipeline, the CEOs said.
Tyler said to do that, educational institutions should focus on STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] curriculum, digital literacy and critical thinking skills.
“We don’t need to teach people what to think,” Tyler said. “I need people who can approach a problem in a new, innovative way, who aren’t afraid to take risks, who bring a diverse perspective to the table. This is how we can solve for some of the most pressing issues of our time.”
So, if you are looking at Texas I would strongly encourage you to take Brian Tyler’s advice and “peel off the Band-Aid and do it.”
The immunity conferred by COVID-19 infection and recovery has by now been shown to be superior to the protection given by COVID-19 vaccines, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) says.
“For people who’ve had the disease and who have naturally acquired immunity, there is no reason to get a vaccine,” Harris, the co-chair of the House Doctors Caucus, said on NTD’s “Capitol Report” this week.Play Video
Dozens of studies have shown strong immunity to reinfection among people who got COVID-19 and recovered.
“Our conclusion is that if you were previously infected, you are protected because of the previous infection and you don’t need the vaccine,” Dr. Nabin Shrestha, of the Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Infectious Disease, told The Epoch Times earlier this year.
Shrestha led a team that found employees at the clinic who had natural immunity were unlikely to benefit from vaccination.
“The science is becoming very clear that naturally acquired immunity actually is better than vaccine-acquired immunity,” Harris said.
Many experts agree with the school of thought, though the view is far from universal.
Top public health officials and agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, still urge practically everybody to get a COVID-19 vaccine, even those who recovered from the disease.
“Getting the vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and others around you, especially as the more contagious Delta variant spreads around the country,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the centers, said in August after a study suggested those with natural immunity benefited from vaccination.
The debate was on full display during a recent Food and Drug Administration panel hearing considering whether to advise the agency to give shots to children as young as 5 years old.
Multiple members said data indicates children with prior infection don’t need a vaccine. Another proposal bandied about is giving such children a single shot, as opposed to the two-dose regimen often used for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
Harris says the COVID-19 vaccine mandates that don’t incorporate testing or natural immunity opt-outs have widespread resistance and the consequences of the mandates are severe.
“There are always going to be 15 or 20 percent of Americans who will just resist the government mandate. They just won’t get the vaccine, whether or not they’ve had naturally acquired immunity, and the consequences of taking those people out of the workplace, for instance, is going to be very broad, very widespread, and I think very bad for our economy,” he told NTD.
“If someone doesn’t want to get the vaccine, then just ask them to be tested every few days, make sure that if they’re tested, they quarantine themselves. But vaccine mandate that doesn’t take into account naturally acquired immunity and doesn’t allow an exception, either for religious, medical reasons, or with a test out option, I think in the long run is going to be shown to be more harmful than helpful.”
A district court judge in Washington, D.C. issued a temporary injunction Thursday that bars both civilian and military plaintiffs from being fired after they filed a lawsuit against the White House’s vaccine mandate.
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, issued a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction preventing the plaintiffs from being fired while their religious exemption requests to the COVID-19 vaccine are pending.
“None of the civilian employee plaintiffs will be subject to discipline while his or her request for a religious exception is pending,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in an order, dated Thursday.You May Also Like
The judge also ruled that “active duty military plaintiffs, whose religious exception requests have been denied, will not be disciplined or separated during the pendency of their appeals,” noting that the federal government has provided “no guarantee of what will happen … if their exemption requests are denied.”
Defendants named in the lawsuit, including all Biden administration executive branch secretaries, have to issue supplemental memos by Friday that say they will not terminate or penalize staff while religious exemptions are being heard, Kollar-Kotelly also ruled.
President Joe Biden and members of his administration were sued by 20 plaintiffs last month over his Sept. 9 executive order requiring vaccines for all federal employees and contractors, reported Fox News.
In their complaint, the plaintiffs wrote that “plaintiffs along with hundreds of thousands of other federal employees and active-duty service members will be terminated, discharged or separated on or before November 22, 2021.”
“The Biden administration has shown an unprecedented, cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and an utter ineptitude at basic constitutional contours,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Yoder told the network after Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling.
Describing this mandate as “dangerous to American liberty,” Yoder said that “our Constitution protects and secures the right to remain free from religious persecution and coercion.”
Similarly, he praised Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling and said that “we are one step closer to putting the Biden administration back in its place by limiting government to its enumerated powers. It’s time citizens and courts said no to tyranny. The Constitution does not need to be rewritten, it needs to be reread.”
Biden’s announcement on vaccine mandates across different sectors of society drew significant criticism, leading to lawsuits from several states over the requirements.
Ahead of the mandate’s deadline, several trade associations—including cargo carriers and truckers groups—issued warnings to the Biden administration that vaccine mandates would snarl supply chain bottlenecks and trigger chaos nationwide.
The Washington court order came as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, announced that his state filed a lawsuit against the White House over its vaccine mandate for federal contractors.
The Epoch Times has contacted the White House press office for comment.
Mason became the second city in Ohio to criminalize abortion within city limits after a tense city council vote on Monday evening.
Located 25 miles northeast of Cincinnati, Mason, with a population of about 30,000 people, voted to ban abortions after four out of seven members of the city council supported the ordinance, which goes into effect in 30 days.
Mason now becomes the 41st city in the country and the second one in Ohio to offer “sanctuary for the unborn,” an initiative started by a Texas nonprofit. There are currently no abortion clinics in the city, but supporters of the ordinance say that this will ensure no facilities are set up in Mason.You May Also Like
There was a split between Republicans who believe in banning abortions and those who don’t, which was unexpected, according to Council member T. J. Honerlaw. Honerlaw, along with Tony Bradburn, Mike Gilb and Mayor Kathy Grossmann voted in favor of the ordinance, while council members Ashley Chance, Diana Nelson, and Josh Styrcula voted for abortion rights.
“I’m here to protect life. For me it’s a fundamental issue. If the foundations be destroyed, what do we have left,” said Vice Mayor Gilb at the meeting. “I’m not just here to decide how bright the street lights should be or where the next roundabout goes. Those things are certainly important issues, but they’re not as fundamental as protecting life.”
“America has a legal system in place to create order in our country. We must follow and abide by that system,” Nelson, who has served on the council for five years, said. “The supreme court has made a ruling on abortion, regardless of one’s opinion on abortion, creating local laws that contradict with federal laws is illegal and unconstitutional.”
There were demonstrators from both ends of the aisle displaying fierce support with banners that read, “Protect the Unborn,” and “Bans Off Our Bodies.” Speakers were allowed to voice their opinions while some constituents shouted to vote out the members who supported the ordinance.
The ordinance makes it illegal for anyone in Mason to “aid or abet” an abortion, including the possession and distribution of abortion-inducing drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol. Violators can be punished with up to 180 days in jail or $1,000 in fines. There are no penalties for someone seeking an abortion.
Exceptions include dangerous, disabling, and life-threatening situations for the mother, and accidental miscarriages.
While Kersha Deibel, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, said to AP that the Mason ordinance opened up the city to “public ridicule, promised boycotts, and costly litigation,” Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, said that this decision by the city council was a “a stand against the violence of abortion and for the protection of women and babies.”
Other smaller Ohio cities like London in Madison County and Celina in Mercer County are also considering implementing similar measures, and banning abortions within their city limits.
The only Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory panel member to abstain from a major vote this week that essentially authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as 5 said he did so because of limited safety and efficacy data.
All 17 others voted to advise the administration, or the FDA, to authorize the jab for children between the ages of 5 and 11. The agency already supported doing so and is expected to formalize the authorization soon. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would then decide which children should get the shot.
The vote was preceded by nearly eight hours of discussions and presentations, with multiple members expressing concern about the scant data on how the vaccine will affect the age group.You May Also Like
But Dr. Michael Kurilla, an expert on infectious diseases and pathology who directs a division inside the National Institutes of Health, was the only one who didn’t support the recommendation.
Kurilla told The Epoch Times in an email that he opposed the specific, binary wording of the question, which opens up the possibility that any child between 5 and 11 will be able to get the Pfizer vaccine. He was also concerned about the longest follow-up for the clinical trial involving the age group being only three months, data that shows children experience severe cases of COVID-19 much less often than adults, and how a large chunk of them have already had the disease, giving them some level of immunity.
If the authorization goes through as expected, at least some of the age group will be able to get two doses of 10 micrograms each, spaced three weeks apart.
The same dosage interval, with a dosage level three times as high, is currently in place for adults. But adults have seen waning effectiveness, especially against infection, prompting the recent authorization of booster doses.
Because the interval is the same, it can be predicted that the effectiveness will also wane in children, Kurilla said. The lower dosage level, meanwhile, brings into question whether the protection against severe disease and hospitalization will be as strong as in adults.
“Real-world evidence involving adults suggest the 3-week dosing interval is suboptimal in terms of durability and is likely to be similar in children, leading to waning immunity within 4–6 months,” Kurilla said. “Because the Pfizer vaccine offers protection against serious disease even after antibody titers have waned, there is some other basis for immunity, but at the lower dose in children, there is no expectation that those same immune processes will behave similarly to the higher adult dose.”
Pfizer/BioNTech’s new pediatric COVID-19 vaccine vials are seen in this undated handout photo. (Pfizer via Reuters)
Low Hospitalization Rate
During the meeting, members heard that among children 5 to 11 in the United States, there have been over 1.9 million infections since the start of the pandemic, but just 0.4 percent, or 8,400 of those cases, have required hospital care. And just 94 of them ended up dying.
They also heard that an estimated 20 percent of the hospitalized children were admitted for a reason besides COVID-19 and that nearly seven out of 10 of the children had existing serious health conditions like heart disease, illustrating just how little risk COVID-19 poses to healthy children.
Further, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 40 percent of children in the age group have already had COVID-19. Recovery from COVID-19 bestows some level of immunity, studies show, with multiple studies indicating the level is actually higher than vaccines provide.
“The benefit here is assumed to be prevention of severe disease, which is what we’re all hoping for,” Kurilla said during the meeting. But among the recovered, he added later, “The question really becomes, does this vaccine offer any benefits to them at all?”
Kurilla signaled he would have voted “yes” if the FDA had proposed opening up access to the vaccine to a subset of the 5–11 group. He also explained why he abstained.
“My abstention was based on the specific question the FDA asked. A ‘no’ vote would have been misconstrued as my opinion about the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times. “There are high-risk groups within the 5–11 age group that would benefit from the vaccine, suggesting a more tailored approach.”
In this image from video, Dr. Michael Kurilla (C) questions the CDC’s Dr. Fiona Havers (R) during an FDA advisory panel meeting on Oct. 26, 2021. (The Epoch Times via FDA)
Others Question Widespread Use
Additional panel members openly questioned whether all young children should get the vaccine.
“I’m torn. On one hand, we know that many mothers and fathers and parents are eager to administer this vaccine to children because they’re so frightened, perhaps overly so, … that they really are anticipating having access to this vaccine in children,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, the director of pediatric infectious disease at Tufts Medical Center.
“On the other hand, I think we saw that approximately 68 percent of the children who are hospitalized with COVID-19 have underlying comorbidities. That means about 32 percent do not. And then if we were to take 40 percent of that group that may have immunity already, we’re getting down to a very small percent of otherwise healthy 6- to 11-year-old children who might derive some benefit,” he added.
But others said they saw the need for the vaccination. The protection it gives would prevent more hospitalizations and ensure schools remain open, some argued.
“We don’t want children to be dying of COVID, even if it is far fewer children than adults, and we don’t want them in the ICU,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, a CDC official.
Jeannette Lee, a biostatistics professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said she was impressed by the data presented by Pfizer, which relied on an approach called immunobridging. In this case, Pfizer’s trial showed the vaccine triggered antibodies in children. The antibodies were compared to those elicited in older groups, and that was used as proof the vaccine will protect the kids against COVID-19.
Kurilla, though, voiced disapproval with the approach, telling colleagues “it’s being based on an immunogenicity marker that we know wanes.”
He said he hoped for more flexibility in the authorization, including a single dose for some children and no doses for others, based on factors like prior infection.
“There are high-risk individuals and I think they do need to be attended to, that we do need to provide a vaccine for them. But for many others, one dose—or no dose, even, if they’ve had prior COVID infection. I think they may not need anything more,” he said.
A 14-year-old girl gets a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Conn., on May 13, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
Side Effects
Cases of heart inflammation after receipt of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are highest in youth, especially boys in their teens. Based on reports submitted to the federally run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the cases are higher than expected in males aged 12 to 49 after the second Pfizer dose and females 12 to 24 after the second Pfizer dose.
Over half of the children with confirmed myocarditis or pericarditis studied in the Vaccine Safety Datalink surveillance system required hospital care, though no post-vaccination deaths due to the conditions have been confirmed, according to federal authorities.
Pfizer said none of the 5- to 11-year-olds in its trials experienced post-vaccination heart inflammation. Using a third of the amount of that given to older people is, in part, an attempt to curb side effects, though how that will ultimately turn out is unknown.
FDA scientists said they determined the vaccine would prevent more COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the age group than vaccine-linked heart inflammation cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. They assumed a vaccine efficacy of 70 percent against COVID-19 cases and an efficacy of 80 percent against hospitalizations linked to the disease. Among young males, “the benefits appear to outweigh the risks,” Hong Yang, an FDA scientist, told members. Among young females, “the benefits clearly outweigh the risks,” she added.
“What will the actual myocarditis rate be in these younger kids?” Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, wondered. That group “may be less susceptible to myocarditis, but right now that’s a speculation,” he added. “We don’t know that for sure.”
Members of the public also expressed concern, arguing the safety data wasn’t sufficient to authorize the vaccine for children so young.
But other members pointed to the trial data, the fact fewer reports have come in for 12- to 15-year-olds than 16- and 17-year-olds, and how, generally, fewer younger children experience heart inflammation versus older ones.
“I am not as concerned about myocarditis in this age group as I am in the older kids,” Dr. Melinda Wharton, another CDC official, said.
Surveillance systems like VAERS will help detect if inflammation becomes an issue in the younger children, members said.
“If the surveillance systems do start seeing severe outcomes and deaths from vaccination, I’m quite confident that those surveillance systems will tell us that we need to pause like we did with the J&J vaccine to really have a good idea of what the effects are vaccinating this age group,” said Dr. Patrick Moore, professor at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
In this image from video, Dr. Eric Rubin (L) explains why he will vote to advise the FDA to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for young children during an FDA advisory panel meeting on Oct. 26, 2021. (The Epoch Times via FDA)
The ‘Yes’ Votes
Ultimately, most members said the benefits and predicted benefits of the vaccine in the 5- to 11-year-olds outweighed the risks and potential risks.
“I think this vaccine will likely be effective in reducing pediatric COVID in this age group and may also help reduce transmission. On the safety end, I’m encouraged by the lower dose, … finding a dose that’s immunogenic and had not too much in terms of reactogenicity,” said Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Eric Rubin, an adjunct professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said he wanted to give parents the choice to vaccinate their kids, imagining he had a child who was a transplant recipient, though he joined others in saying there are probably some younger children who shouldn’t get the vaccine.
“The question of how broadly to use it, though, I think is a substantial one. And I know it’s not our question, but I—and I know we’re kind of punting that to [the CDC’s advisory panel]—but I do think that it’s a relatively close call,” he said.
Soon after, in a comment that was widely distributed online, he added: “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine.”
Rubin told The Epoch Times in an email, responding to critics: “The clinical trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children showed no adverse events. All data to date indicate that it is safe. It will prevent the hospitalization of children with severe disease, as it does with adults. The vaccine works, and saves lives.”
Isn’t it fitting that the homonym for vial is vile? [US Patriot]
The Biden administration has purchased an additional 50 million Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine doses for children to be delivered by the end of April next year, the drugmakers said in a statement on Thursday.
“The U.S. will receive these additional doses to continue to support preparedness for pediatric vaccinations, including securing vaccines for children under 5 years of age, should they receive regulatory authorization,” Pfizer-BioNTech said in a press release.
It comes after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted on Tuesday to recommend its authorization for the vaccine in children aged 5 to 11. Seventeen members of the outside panel voted yes to recommend the authorization, and one abstained.You May Also Like
Boxes of kid-size doses of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, October 2021. (Pfizer via AP)
If the FDA agrees with the panel’s recommendation the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory panel would subsequently decide who can receive a shot. The companies said they expect to then begin shipping the vaccine immediately, in 10 microgram pediatric doses, as directed by the federal government.
The companies said the latest contract with the Biden administration brings the total number of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine doses secured since the start of the pandemic to 600 million—spanning doses for adults and adolescents, and children.
Separately, the companies said the Biden administration has also purchased an additional 1 billion doses for donation to low- and lower-middle-income countries.
The companies said preliminary clinical trial data on the use of its vaccine in children—aged between 2 to 5 years, and 6 months to 2 years—is expected in the fourth quarter of 2021 or early first quarter of 2022.
If authorized and recommended by the CDC, children between 5 and 11 would be administered two doses of 10 micrograms, three weeks apart.
With a new law on the books, abortions in Texas dropped roughly 50 percent in September, according to a new report.
Research from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project compiled from 19 of Texas’ 24 abortion clinics said that there were 2,164 abortions performed in Texas clinics in September. In September 2020, there were 4,313 abortions performed, the report said.
“The decrease in the number of abortions provided in Texas during the first 30 days that SB8 was in effect was considerably larger than previously documented decreases that followed the implementation of other restrictions, which created widespread disruptions to abortion service delivery in Texas,” the authors of the report concluded.
“This large decline indicates that SB8’s very narrow criteria for providing in-state abortion care have excluded many pregnant people from obtaining abortions at Texas facilities.”
SB 8 is the legal shorthand for the Texas “heartbeat” law that makes it illegal to perform an abortion after a baby’s heartbeat is detected, which is usually around the sixth week of pregnancy.
Although heartbeat laws in other states have been swatted aside by the courts, Texas used an unprecedented enforcement mechanism. Individuals can file suit against anyone who has broken the law and collect $10,000 if they win.
The Supreme Court reviewed the law before it took effect and rejected efforts to prevent it from taking effect on Sept. 1. At that time, the court said its decision was based upon procedural grounds and was not a full-fledged decision on the constitutionality of the Texas law.
The court also has refused to block the law from remaining in effect as the Biden administration joins with abortion supporters in trying to do so. The law faces a challenge before the Supreme Court on Monday.
“S.B. 8 was designed to nullify this court’s precedents and to shield that nullification from judicial review,” the federal government’s argument to the Supreme Court claimed.
Will Texas win when the Supreme Court next rules on this law?
“So far, it has worked: The threat of a flood of S.B. 8 suits has effectively eliminated abortion in Texas at a point before many women even realize they are pregnant, denying a constitutional right the court has recognized for half a century,” the Biden administration argued.
“Yet Texas insists that the court must tolerate the state’s brazen attack on the supremacy of federal law because S.B. 8’s unprecedented structure leaves the federal judiciary powerless to intervene.”
The Biden administration’s effort to block the law is “a striking power-grab with no basis in precedent,” Texas argued in its brief.
“The Constitution does not guarantee pre-enforcement review of state (or federal) laws in federal court,” attorneys for the state wrote. “And there is nothing unprecedented about vindicating constitutional rights as a state-court defendant. To the contrary, that is the normal path by which constitutional issues come to this court.”
Texas said it is not trying to get a pass on the usual system of testing a law only to have its laws treated fairly.
“A time will come — and no doubt soon — for the state courts to rule on the constitutionality of SB 8, and this court will, in turn, retain the last word on the correctness of their adjudication of federal law,” Texas wrote. “But the United States does not get a free pass around long-settled federal-courts doctrines because it would prefer to litigate in a federal forum just a bit faster.”
Jonathan F. Mitchell, a lawyer who helped draft the law, said in a friend-of-the-court brief that the federal attempt to block the law has no merit, The New York Times reported.
“The constitutionality of the statute must be determined in the lawsuits between private parties,” he wrote, “not in a pre-emptive lawsuit brought against the sovereign government, which is not ‘enforcing’ the statute but merely allowing its courts to hear lawsuits arising under the disputed statutory enactment.”
In their brief filed to support Texas, 20 Republican-led states noted that a district court ruling that had sided with the Biden administration but was later overturned “threatens to expose every State in the Union to a suit by the federal Executive Branch whenever the U.S. Attorney General deems a state law to violate some constitutional right of someone, somewhere,” according to CNN.
Federal workers who are fighting President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate on the grounds of religion have won a round in court.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the District of Columbia on Thursday issued a temporary restraining order that protects military and civilian employees from being fired while their requests for religious exemptions to Biden’s vaccine mandate are being heard, according to Fox News.
“None of the civilian employee plaintiffs will be subject to discipline while his or her request for a religious exception is pending,” Kollar-Kotelly ordered.
The judge also ruled that “active duty military plaintiffs, whose religious exception requests have been denied, will not be disciplined or separated during the pendency of their appeals,” according to Fox News.
The court further ordered that Biden and the top administration officials named in the lawsuit file a notice Friday to indicate whether they will agree that no plaintiff will be disciplined or terminated until there is a final ruling on the question of religious exemptions.
Twenty people had sued Biden and his top officials over the executive order that mandated vaccinations for all federal workers, civilian and military alike.
“The Biden administration has shown an unprecedented, cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and an utter ineptitude at basic constitutional contours,” attorney Michael Yoder, who represented those suing the administration, said in a statement.
“This combination is dangerous to American liberty,” Yoder said “Thankfully, our Constitution protects and secures the right to remain free from religious persecution and coercion.”
“With this order, we are one step closer to putting the Biden administration back in its place by limiting government to its enumerated powers. It’s time citizens and courts said no to tyranny. The Constitution does not need to be rewritten, it needs to be reread,” he said.
BREAKING: @Yoder_Esq with a HUGE WIN in Church v. Biden.
(Yes, that’s the actual case caption. For those playing along, 1:21-cv-2815)
This is an amazing development from the DC District Court in the stand for OUR RIGHTS against the unconstitutional vaccine mandates. pic.twitter.com/kWus7XQ4pp
The complaint Yoder filed indicated that those filing it, and others, would face termination on Nov. 22.
“Contemporaneous with the commencement of this action Plaintiffs have filed an Application for a Temporary Restraining Order (‘TRO’) and Preliminary Injunction to maintain the status quo of our federal governmental operations and to put an end to this involuntary game of Monty Hall millions of Americans have been compelled to involuntary play,” the complaint said.
“And while the currency of this game is not exclusively money but also the rights to life, liberty, and property, it would be imprudent to not address the magnitude of the economic impact of this case,” it said.
The complaint said the stakes were high for those suing and the nation as a whole.
“Absent the injunctive relief Plaintiffs request herein, Plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm as their fundamental rights are trampled and they lose their jobs for no reason beyond their sincerely held religious beliefs,” the complaint said.
When religious exemptions are denied and thousands of Americans lose jobs because of their faith in God…
Let me be clear: — I will sue you RELENTLESSLY
God is more important than money. — learn that lesson or I’ll teach it to you
“If Defendants are not enjoined from enforcing the Vaccine Mandates, hundreds of thousands of federal workers and military personnel will be forcibly removed from our government and Armed Forces, thrusting our nation into a state more vulnerable than the United States has experienced in a quarter of a millennium,” it said.
The complaint noted that abortion was central to the religious objections offered by those suing the Biden administration.
“Because all three of the currently available COVID-19 vaccines are developed and produced from, tested with, researched on, or otherwise connected with the aborted fetal cell lines HEK-293 and PER.C6, Plaintiffs’ sincerely held religious beliefs compel them to abstain from obtaining or injecting any of these products into their body, regardless of the perceived benefit or rationale,” the complaint said.
The only Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory panel member to abstain from a major vote this week that essentially authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as 5 said he did so because of limited safety and efficacy data.
All 17 others voted to advise the administration, or the FDA, to authorize the jab for children between the ages of 5 and 11. The agency already supported doing so and is expected to formalize the authorization soon. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would then decide which children should get the shot.
The vote was preceded by nearly eight hours of discussions and presentations, with multiple members expressing concern about the scant data on how the vaccine will affect the age group.
But Dr. Michael Kurilla, an expert on infectious diseases and pathology who directs a division inside the National Institutes of Health, was the only one who didn’t support the recommendation.
Kurilla told The Epoch Times in an email that he opposed the specific, binary wording of the question, which opens up the possibility that any child between 5 and 11 will be able to get the Pfizer vaccine. He was also concerned about the longest follow-up for the clinical trial involving the age group being only three months, data that shows children experience severe cases of COVID-19 much less often than adults, and how a large chunk of them have already had the disease, giving them some level of immunity.
If the authorization goes through as expected, at least some of the age group will be able to get two doses of 10 micrograms each, spaced three weeks apart.
The same dosage interval, with a dosage level three times as high, is currently in place for adults. But adults have seen waning effectiveness, especially against infection, prompting the recent authorization of booster doses.
Because the interval is the same, it can be predicted that the effectiveness will also wane in children, Kurilla said. The lower dosage level, meanwhile, brings into question whether the protection against severe disease and hospitalization will be as strong as in adults.
“Real-world evidence involving adults suggest the 3-week dosing interval is suboptimal in terms of durability and is likely to be similar in children, leading to waning immunity within 4–6 months,” Kurilla said. “Because the Pfizer vaccine offers protection against serious disease even after antibody titers have waned, there is some other basis for immunity, but at the lower dose in children, there is no expectation that those same immune processes will behave similarly to the higher adult dose.”
Pfizer/BioNTech’s new pediatric COVID-19 vaccine vials are seen in this undated handout photo. (Pfizer via Reuters)
Low Hospitalization Rate
During the meeting, members heard that among children 5 to 11 in the United States, there have been over 1.9 million infections since the start of the pandemic, but just 0.4 percent, or 8,400 of those cases, have required hospital care. And just 94 of them ended up dying.
They also heard that an estimated 20 percent of the hospitalized children were admitted for a reason besides COVID-19 and that nearly seven out of 10 of the children had existing serious health conditions like heart disease, illustrating just how little risk COVID-19 poses to healthy children.
Further, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 40 percent of children in the age group have already had COVID-19. Recovery from COVID-19 bestows some level of immunity, studies show, with multiple studies indicating the level is actually higher than vaccines provide.
“The benefit here is assumed to be prevention of severe disease, which is what we’re all hoping for,” Kurilla said during the meeting. But among the recovered, he added later, “The question really becomes, does this vaccine offer any benefits to them at all?”
Kurilla signaled he would have voted “yes” if the FDA had proposed opening up access to the vaccine to a subset of the 5–11 group. He also explained why he abstained.
“My abstention was based on the specific question the FDA asked. A ‘no’ vote would have been misconstrued as my opinion about the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times. “There are high-risk groups within the 5–11 age group that would benefit from the vaccine, suggesting a more tailored approach.”
In this image from video, Dr. Michael Kurilla (C) questions the CDC’s Dr. Fiona Havers (R) during an FDA advisory panel meeting on Oct. 26, 2021. (The Epoch Times via FDA)
Others Question Widespread Use
Additional panel members openly questioned whether all young children should get the vaccine.
“I’m torn. On one hand, we know that many mothers and fathers and parents are eager to administer this vaccine to children because they’re so frightened, perhaps overly so, … that they really are anticipating having access to this vaccine in children,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, the director of pediatric infectious disease at Tufts Medical Center.
“On the other hand, I think we saw that approximately 68 percent of the children who are hospitalized with COVID-19 have underlying comorbidities. That means about 32 percent do not. And then if we were to take 40 percent of that group that may have immunity already, we’re getting down to a very small percent of otherwise healthy 6- to 11-year-old children who might derive some benefit,” he added.
But others said they saw the need for the vaccination. The protection it gives would prevent more hospitalizations and ensure schools remain open, some argued.
“We don’t want children to be dying of COVID, even if it is far fewer children than adults, and we don’t want them in the ICU,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, a CDC official.
Jeannette Lee, a biostatistics professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said she was impressed by the data presented by Pfizer, which relied on an approach called immunobridging. In this case, Pfizer’s trial showed the vaccine triggered antibodies in children. The antibodies were compared to those elicited in older groups, and that was used as proof the vaccine will protect the kids against COVID-19.
Kurilla, though, voiced disapproval with the approach, telling colleagues “it’s being based on an immunogenicity marker that we know wanes.”
He said he hoped for more flexibility in the authorization, including a single dose for some children and no doses for others, based on factors like prior infection.
“There are high-risk individuals and I think they do need to be attended to, that we do need to provide a vaccine for them. But for many others, one dose—or no dose, even, if they’ve had prior COVID infection. I think they may not need anything more,” he said.
A 14-year-old girl gets a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Conn., on May 13, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
Side Effects
Cases of heart inflammation after receipt of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are highest in youth, especially boys in their teens. Based on reports submitted to the federally run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the cases are higher than expected in males aged 12 to 49 after the second Pfizer dose and females 12 to 24 after the second Pfizer dose.
Over half of the children with confirmed myocarditis or pericarditis studied in the Vaccine Safety Datalink surveillance system required hospital care, though no post-vaccination deaths due to the conditions have been confirmed, according to federal authorities.
Pfizer said none of the 5- to 11-year-olds in its trials experienced post-vaccination heart inflammation. Using a third of the amount of that given to older people is, in part, an attempt to curb side effects, though how that will ultimately turn out is unknown.
FDA scientists said they determined the vaccine would prevent more COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the age group than vaccine-linked heart inflammation cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. They assumed a vaccine efficacy of 70 percent against COVID-19 cases and an efficacy of 80 percent against hospitalizations linked to the disease. Among young males, “the benefits appear to outweigh the risks,” Hong Yang, an FDA scientist, told members. Among young females, “the benefits clearly outweigh the risks,” she added.
“What will the actual myocarditis rate be in these younger kids?” Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, wondered. That group “may be less susceptible to myocarditis, but right now that’s a speculation,” he added. “We don’t know that for sure.”
Members of the public also expressed concern, arguing the safety data wasn’t sufficient to authorize the vaccine for children so young.
But other members pointed to the trial data, the fact fewer reports have come in for 12- to 15-year-olds than 16- and 17-year-olds, and how, generally, fewer younger children experience heart inflammation versus older ones.
“I am not as concerned about myocarditis in this age group as I am in the older kids,” Dr. Melinda Wharton, another CDC official, said.
Surveillance systems like VAERS will help detect if inflammation becomes an issue in the younger children, members said.
“If the surveillance systems do start seeing severe outcomes and deaths from vaccination, I’m quite confident that those surveillance systems will tell us that we need to pause like we did with the J&J vaccine to really have a good idea of what the effects are vaccinating this age group,” said Dr. Patrick Moore, professor at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
In this image from video, Dr. Eric Rubin (L) explains why he will vote to advise the FDA to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for young children during an FDA advisory panel meeting on Oct. 26, 2021. (The Epoch Times via FDA)
The ‘Yes’ Votes
Ultimately, most members said the benefits and predicted benefits of the vaccine in the 5- to 11-year-olds outweighed the risks and potential risks.
“I think this vaccine will likely be effective in reducing pediatric COVID in this age group and may also help reduce transmission. On the safety end, I’m encouraged by the lower dose, … finding a dose that’s immunogenic and had not too much in terms of reactogenicity,” said Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Eric Rubin, an adjunct professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said he wanted to give parents the choice to vaccinate their kids, imagining he had a child who was a transplant recipient, though he joined others in saying there are probably some younger children who shouldn’t get the vaccine.
“The question of how broadly to use it, though, I think is a substantial one. And I know it’s not our question, but I—and I know we’re kind of punting that to [the CDC’s advisory panel]—but I do think that it’s a relatively close call,” he said.
Soon after, in a comment that was widely distributed online, he added: “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine.”
Rubin told The Epoch Times in an email, responding to critics: “The clinical trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children showed no adverse events. All data to date indicate that it is safe. It will prevent the hospitalization of children with severe disease, as it does with adults. The vaccine works, and saves lives.”
The Delta COVID-19 variant can easily transmit from vaccinated people to their household members, said a recent UK study, although its researchers concluded that vaccinations and boosters are the way forward.
A year-long study from the Imperial College London published in The Lancet on Thursday found that the Delta variant is still highly transmissible within a vaccinated population.
“By carrying out repeated and frequent sampling from contacts of COVID-19 cases, we found that vaccinated people can contract and pass on infection within households, including to vaccinated household members,” Dr. Anika Singanayagam, co-lead author of the study, said in a statement.
The findings, Singanayagam added, provide some insight into why the Delta variant is “continuing to cause high COVID-19 case numbers … even in countries with high vaccination rates.”
An analysis found that the viral load declined most rapidly for those who were vaccinated with the Delta variant compared with those who are unvaccinated, according to the researchers.
But the peak levels of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, in vaccinated people were similar to levels in unvaccinated people, they found, adding that it might be the reason why the Delta variant can spread despite vaccination.
Because the Delta variant can spread easily among vaccinated people, another researcher involved in the study, Dr. Ajit Lalvani, argued it is necessary for people to get the vaccine or boosters to reduce severe COVID-19 symptoms.
“We found that susceptibility to infection increased already within a few months after the second vaccine dose … so those offered a booster should get it promptly,” Lalvani said.
Their study, which surveyed 621 participants, found that of 205 household contacts of people who had the Delta infection, about 38 percent of household contacts who were not vaccinated tested positive, compared with 25 percent who tested positive among vaccinated household contacts.
Immunity from full vaccination also dropped in as little as three months, their research also found. They didn’t say whether it should inform the UK’s booster policy.
However, amid the push to get large swaths of the population vaccinated, some immunologists and doctors have argued that natural immunity needs more research and should be factored into policy decision-making.
Steve Templeton, an immunologist with Indiana University’s school of medicine, wrote that “the key to ending the pandemic has always been the immune system.”
“The fact that so many have recovered from infection and that robust, durable, and protective immunity in those individuals has been unequivocally proven should be considered a good thing,” he said in an article dated Oct. 22, adding that “there appears to be a drive to cancel the term ‘natural immunity,’ a pretense that the vaccinated need fear the unvaccinated, and an unwillingness to treat the public as adults that can handle nuanced information and make decisions regarding their health.”
A school board president in southern California is facing calls to resign after a hot mic caught her throwing a vulgar insult toward a parent who had expressed concern over vaccine mandates for children.
The incident occurred Tuesday in Orange County at a meeting between parents and members of the Los Alamitos Unified School District Board of Education, KTLA-TV reported.
Marlys Davidson, the board president, and other members of the board listened to questions and statements from parents who expressed their opinions on issues ranging from mask mandates to critical race theory.
As we’ve seen in recent months, some of those questions were passionate. One woman who had identified herself as a concerned parent came up to a podium during the meeting with a message for Davidson.
KTLA reported Lauren Roupoli had asked the board to respect parents by not calling parents “selfish,” and concluded that any assumption that those in attendance to speak up for their children were there for themselves was “rude.”
Roupoli had barely concluded her comments when a microphone caught Davidson sharing a two-word response which she apparently thought could not be heard by the parents in the room.
Would you enroll your child in this school district?
“F*** you,” said a voice reported to be that of Davidson in a brazen display of disrespect amid a broader conversation nationally about school boards and their relationships with their communities. Footage from the meeting cuts before parents or fellow board members are given time to respond to the comment.
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language which some viewers will find offensive.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y8k2VLnmxJw
Davidson later issued an apology to Roupoli through a statement that was sent to KTLA.
“I am going go personally apologize to the speaker who most certainly deserves to know that when the member of the public address the Board of Education, they must be heard with respect,” Davidson said. “I reaffirm my commitment to serve our community with dignity and integrity, and I hope they will accept my sincere apology.”
The apology felt hollow to Roupoli, however, who said she wants Davidson to step down from the board.
Every school in California is required to mandate masks for students, faculty and staff. KNTV-TV reported Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom intends to make the shots mandatory for every student in the state.
For over nine months, the establishment media has attempted to use the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion to demonize the Republican Party. This week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced his latest effort to fight against the leftist narrative.
According to Newsweek, Carlson revealed a trailer on Wednesday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” for a documentary about “the true story behind 1/6, the war on terror 2.0 and the plot against the people.”
Carlson also posted the trailer to his Twitter account.
“The domestic war on terror is here,” a man says at the beginning of the trailer. “It’s coming after half of the country.”
Later in the trailer, President Joe Biden is shown characterizing Americans as terrorists.
“Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” he says.
Biden is correct that white supremacy is terrible and should be eradicated. The problem is that for many leftists, “white supremacy” is synonymous with “anything I don’t like.”
“False flags have happened in this country, one of which may have been Jan. 6,” a woman says as the trailer continues.
Will you watch Carlson’s new documentary?
The documentary will premiere on Nov. 1. Newsweek reported that it will be in three parts and will be available on the subscription-based streaming platform Fox Nation.
“We believe that it answers a lot of the remaining questions from that day,” Carlson said. “Our conclusion? The U.S. government has in fact launched a new war on terror. But it’s not against al-Qaida; it’s against American citizens.”
That language is certainly strong and could be jarring to many people. But given what we know about the Jan. 6 incursion, the possibility is at least worth exploring.
For one thing, the FBI reportedly had at least one agent planted in the crowd that day. Video footage of the incident shows a majority of the people inside the Capitol simply standing around. While they may have been guilty of unlawful entry, they were certainly not the violent terrorists the left made them out to be.
In August, Reuters reported that the FBI found “scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.” Nonetheless, the establishment media continued to cover the event as a right-wing scheme to overthrow the government.
If Carlson’s documentary makes these points and attempts to answer questions about FBI involvement and media coverage, that would be completely valid. If it tries to defend violent rioters, that should be condemned.
Of course, the establishment media has already jumped at the opportunity to label Carlson a conspiracy theorist.
“Tucker Carlson’s Most Deranged Moment Yet?” a Rolling Stone headline blared on Wednesday.
“Tucker Carlson’s new documentary baselessly suggests the January 6 riot was a false flag,” Business Insider declared. How can you know the claim is “baseless” if you haven’t watched a minute of the documentary to see what evidence is presented?
The media has already made its determination about the accuracy of Carlson’s documentary before it has even come out. That kind of dishonesty is exactly why Carlson needed to make the documentary in the first place.
Florida this week was tied for the lowest COVID-19 case rate in the United States among states, according to data provided by the state
“Without mandates or lockdowns, COVID-19 cases in Florida have decreased 90 percent since August,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a Wednesday update. “In addition to cases, hospitalizations have plummeted in our state. This has been accomplished by making monoclonal antibody treatments and vaccines widely available throughout our state while protecting Floridians from government overreach.”
Data provided by the Florida Department of Health shows that the state has nine cases per 100,000 people and is tied with Hawaii for being the state with the lowest case rate. U.S. territories such as the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands had lower case rates, it showed.
The United States average is 21 cases per 100,000 people, according to the data, which compiled findings from state and local agencies, the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and others.
Since August, according to a release from DeSantis’s office, COVID-19 cases in school children decreased by about 87 percent while cases in adults between the ages of 18 and 24 decreased by 93 percent.
This year, DeSantis has sought to impose fines on businesses and institutions that impose COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and, among other directives, he’s also moved to bar schools from requiring that students wear masks on the premises.
But the Republican governor’s stance against vaccine mandates and masking has triggered significant criticism from the Biden administration and White House health officials. Over the summer, when COVID-19 cases increased in Florida, DeSantis—and his approach toward the pandemic—frequently drew negative headlines.
Health officials in the state said that Florida now has among the lowest COVID-19 cases in the United States. Data provided by the state on Monday shows the case count has dropped for an eighth consecutive week.
The Sunshine State once approached 17,000 COVID-19 patients hospitalized at one point over the summer. Now, there are fewer than 2,300, according to the Florida Hospital Association.
“We saw a study from the University of Florida that said approximately 80 percent of the population has some type of antibodies now well that’s getting close to herd immunity so that’s exactly where we wanted to get,” Seminole County Emergency Manager Alan Harris told Fox35 earlier this week.
On Thursday, DeSantis and other top state officials filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden, NASA, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, and several within the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Defense over the mandate on federal workers and contractors that was announced by the president last month.
The lawsuit argues that NASA and other agencies “frequently [contract] with Florida, has current contractual relationships with Florida, and is and will continue to seek to impose the Biden administration’s unlawful requirements to Florida.”
Congressional Republicans are pushing proposals to exempt millions of American workers who object to President Joe Biden’s mandatory CCP virus vaccination orders and similar decrees by employers, which are prompting widespread protests and costing many workers their jobs.
Biden has ordered all federal military and civilian employees to be vaccinated, as well as those employed by federal contractors and entities receiving federal support, in connection with the government’s many virus recovery programs.
A new federal regulation is also being prepared that will require all private companies with 100 or more employees to make vaccination a condition of employment. The regulation is to be enforced by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Biden’s mandate and similar mandates by other officials are sparking protests around the country. Multiple cities, including Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and New York, have also ordered employees to get vaccinated. In New York earlier this week, thousands of police, firefighters, and other city employees took to the streets to protest.
Civil liberties groups such as Liberty Counsel report being contacted by thousands of federal military and civilian workers, as well as corporate employees, seeking legal assistance in their efforts to be exempted from the mandates on the basis of medical or religious grounds.
The commercial airline industry has also been hit hard by employee protests, including a recent sick-out that delayed thousands of Southwest Airlines flights. Liberty Counsel is also advising U.S. Freedom Flyers, a group of 35,000 transportation industry employees challenging the mandates.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) on Oct. 27 introduced her “Keeping Our COVID-19 Heroes Employed Act” to protect essential workers from being fired as a result of their objection to being vaccinated.
“Our essential workers are true heroes,” Blackburn said in a statement announcing the proposal. “For over 18 months, essential workers showed up to serve and protect their communities. Businesses across the country are desperate for workers, and we are in the midst of a supply chain crisis.
“There are more than 10.4 million open jobs across the country, and now President Biden wants to fire even more workers. Getting vaccinated is a choice that should be made between a patient and their doctor. No one should be forced by Joe Biden to be fired or get jabbed.”
The Tennessee Republican’s bill defines an essential worker as any that were defined as required by a state, tribe, or U.S. territory as “essential during the response to the COVID–19 pandemic.”
Employees who would be covered by the exemption to the mandate include those working for the federal government, state and local governments, private employers receiving federal contracts, and those receiving federal funds under multiple laws approved by Congress and the president in 2020 and 2021 in response to the pandemic.
Co-sponsors for Blackburn’s proposal include Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
“Well before President Biden’s ill-advised and divisive vaccine mandate, I had been hearing from doctors, nurses, first responders, and others facing the life-altering decision of having to choose between losing their job or being coerced into taking a vaccine,” Johnson said in the statement.
“We are already suffering severe worker shortages throughout our economy, especially in health care. Vaccine mandates will increase these shortages and degrade our health care system.”
On the same day Blackburn introduced her proposal, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) submitted a similar bill in the House, the “Options Over Terminations Act,” which creates a vaccine exemption “for any federal employee or contractor who provides proof of COVID–19 antibodies.”
Newhouse said in a statement announcing his bill that he believes “federal employees who have opted not to receive the vaccine because they have natural immunity developed after recovering from the virus do not deserve to be fired.”
“President Biden’s overreaching mandate has severe ramifications for communities across the country, especially for communities like Central Washington who make up a large part of the federal workforce. Instead of forcing our federal workforce to choose between employment and vaccination, my bill provides them with an option—a permissible, science-based exception from President Biden’s recent Executive Order,” he said.
Asked by The Epoch Times if he thinks Biden should revise his order to allow for such exemptions, Newhouse said, “It would be great if Congress didn’t need to constantly legislate on President Biden’s overreaching actions, but unfortunately, that is not the state we find ourselves in today.”
He said Biden’s order is the model for orders similar to that of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee that resulted in the firing or resignation of more than 1,900 state employees.
“Now, in addition to the hundreds of Washington state emergency personnel who are already out of work, threatening the safety of our communities, we also have hundreds of federal workers in Washington state alone who are facing termination,” Newhouse said.
Medical authorities disagree on whether individuals who have recovered from the virus benefit from also being vaccinated.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said in August that “if you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated.” But a study in Israel made public in August concluded that natural immunity isn’t significantly strengthened by also being vaccinated.
Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), a licensed pharmacist since 1987, told NTD during a recent interview that “there’s ample scientific studies that show that natural immunity is absolutely one of the best things you could have—and some studies even show that it’s more effective” than being vaccinated.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) introduced the “Let Me Travel America Act” on Oct. 20 that would bar the Biden administration from requiring vaccine passports certifying the bearer has been vaccinated as a condition for interstate travel.
Three people at a military base were injected with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in what the military is framing as some sort of accident.
The incident took place at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, but the military is keeping most of the details under wraps.
“Joint Base Lewis-McChord is aware three people were inadvertently administered the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine instead of another vaccine at the Lewis Main Exchange,” said Army Col. Joey Sullinger, I Corps public affairs officer, according to KOMO-TV.
“Positive corrective action has been taken at this vaccination site to prevent such errors from happening again. Army medical professionals are notifying and ensuring the health and welfare of those affected. This incident is under investigation.”
The names of those accidentally injected, what vaccine they were supposed to be given, and how exactly the wrong shots were given were not disclosed.
The incident was noted by a Twitter account with the name Terminal CWO that claims it offers “Exposés on the dirt that doesn’t get discussed in our ranks.” CWO is an acronym that commonly stands for Chief Warrant Officer. The account’s posts cannot be verified.
JBLM had a flu shot tent set up and injected “a lot” of people with the Covid vaccine “accidentally” according to a reliable source. So now we’re not only incapable of distinguishing between FDA approved and EUA, but apparently we can’t even get the correct drug either.
The base is currently only giving out the Pfizer vaccine and is also currently offering flu shots, according to the New York Post.
Has the COVID vaccine program been mismanaged?
Joint Base Lewis-McChord is home to the I Corps and 62nd Airlift Wing.
Vaccination errors have cropped up across the nation at a time when pharmacies are giving out COVID-19 shots at the same time as traditional flu shots.
As noted by CNN, mistakes can have serious consequences.
Earlier this month, Joshua and Alexandra Price took their children Sophia, 5, and Lukas, 4, to a Walgreens in Evansville, Indiana, for their annual flu shots.
They said they all were mistakenly injected with the adult version of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“When they called us and told us that they had made a mistake and had given us the wrong shot, I was just in shock,” Alexandra Price said. “All I could say to them was, ‘What does this mean for my kids?’”
“Lukas started feeling sick before we even got home from Walgreens,” Alexandra Price said.
“He was feeling yucky, lethargic, and already had begun a fever,” Joshua Price said.
This was not a simple post-vaccination illness.
“The children have experienced a number of adverse effects since receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Fever, body aches, cough, headaches, and nausea are among the symptoms the children are experiencing,” according to a statement released by the Prices’ attorney, Dan Tuley.
“The 4- and 5-year-old are also under treatment of a pediatric cardiologist for tachycardia and elevated blood pressure, respectively.”
Alexandra Price said that Lukas has improved but Sophia has not.
“Her blood pressure is in the 98th percentile and she continues to have no energy,” she said.
Joshua Price is also feeling the impact of the mistake.
“It’s been well over a week and I still have high blood pressure and chest pain,” he said.
When conservatives protest over ideas like “equity” and “critical race theory,” the average American who is uninterested in politics is left wondering what all the fuss is about.
To them, broad academic concepts like these couldn’t possibly affect their day-to-day lives.
A federal jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, seemed to disagree with that notion on Tuesday, however, when it awarded one man $10 million dollars due to discrimination via his former employer’s equity policy.
Michigan native David Duvall worked as the senior vice president of marketing and communication for Novant Health Inc., a health care system with facilities in North Carolina, up until July of 2018, the Winston-Salem Journal reported.
In a 2019 lawsuit against the company, Duvall alleged he was fired without warning and replaced by a white woman and a black woman as the company worked to institute “diversity, inclusion and equity” policies. Duvall accused Novant Health of racial and gender discrimination, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Novant Health contested Duvall’s claims, instead saying he was fired for his “poor leadership skills.” In addition to finding Duvall proved he was wrongfully terminated based on his race and gender, the jury also said Novant Health failed to prove it would have fired Duvall if race was not a factor.
Both Duvall and his lawyer were more than happy with the North Carolina jury’s determination.
“We are pleased that the jury agreed that Duvall’s race and gender were unlawful factors in his termination — that he was fired to make room for more diverse leaders at Novant,” Duvall’s attorney, S. Luke Largess, said in a statement released on Tuesday, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
Largess also noted Duvall was “a strong advocate of diversity at Norvant” and that the two believe the lawsuit “is a message that an employer cannot terminate and replace employees in order to achieve greater diversity in the workforce.”
A federal jury awarded a former Novant Health executive $10 million in damages after he claimed in a lawsuit that he was fired because he’s a white man. https://t.co/cwRRb6mb4i
“We are extremely disappointed with the verdict as we believe it is not supported by the evidence presented at trial, which includes our reason for Mr. Duvall’s termination,” Megan Rivers, a Novant Health spokeswoman, said. “We will pursue all legal options, including appeal, over the next several weeks and months
The jury, however, remained unconvinced and chose to award Duvall a whopping $10 million.
Despite this ruling, Novant Health has stubbornly doubled down on its racist practices, noting that racial equity will remain a central component of its hiring processes going forward.
“Novant Health is one of thousands of organizations to put in place robust diversity and inclusion programs, which we believe can co-exist alongside strong non-discriminatory policies that extend to all races and genders, including white men,” Rivers said. “It’s important for all current and future team members to know that this verdict will not change Novant Health’s steadfast commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity for all.”
“Equity” is perhaps the most pernicious form of racism seen in American society today. Rather than ensure that all people are treated equally, regardless of their race or ethnicity, “equity” ensures people are treated differently according to their race.
The reason left-wing organizations continue to push this notion is because of the false belief that, if not for “racism,” all racial groups would have the exact same amount of representation in every aspect of society.
But such an assumption assumes all groups are exactly the same. No person in their right mind would suggest that people who are white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish and so on are culturally homogenous.
Is “equity” racist?
If they were, what would be the point of celebrating “diversity”?
Moreover, since all of those groups do exhibit cultural differences, they are likely to experience different economic outcomes.
And that isn’t because of racism. Otherwise, as political scientist Wilfred Reilly has explained, the wealthiest racial groups of Americans would not be Indian Americans and Asian Americans.
“The wealthiest group of Americans is not Anglo-Saxon ‘WASPs’ — or Jews as is often claimed — but Indian Americans, with a median household income of $135,816. Taiwanese Americans come in second place, at $102,405,” Reilly wrote.
“All in all, seven of the 10 highest-earning groups — Indians, Taiwanese, Filipinos, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Iranians and Lebanese Americans — are not ‘white’ as this term is generally conceptualised. Another Top 10 group — South Africans, with $98,212 — consists of white and black immigrants, who both seem to do quite well away from their homeland’s quarrels.”
Nevertheless, companies like Novant Health will continue to judge applicants based on their gender and the color of their skin, rather than judge them based on their competency, keeping racism and discrimination on life-support at a time when most of the country is ready to move past such bigotry.
Dr. Francis Collins appeared to acknowledge this week that the U.S. agency he heads funded gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, China, which runs counter to claims he and a subordinate made earlier this year.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the agency Collins directs, revealed last week that money it gave to EcoHealth Alliance supported risky experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China that some experts said met the definition of gain-of-function.
The term gain-of-function generally refers to research that increases a biological agent’s pathogenicity or transmissibility. Until last week, the NIH defined it as research that modifies an agent “so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent.”
Both Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), claimed earlier this year that the NIH didn’t fund gain-of-function research in China.
“Neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses,” Collins said in May, though he stipulated that he was only referring to gain-of-function experiments that would have increased the viruses’ “transmissibility or lethality for humans.”
Fauci didn’t include that stipulation when testifying to Congress that month.
“The NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he said on May 11.
Collins was pressed on the statements during an appearance on CNN this week.
EcoHealth “did some things they should have told us about, but they did not do the kind of gain-of-function research that requires special, high-level oversight,” he said.
NIH was asked if it wanted to clarify his remarks, which appear to undercut Fauci’s previous comments.
Renate Myles, a spokeswoman for Collins, told The Epoch Times in an email that gain-of-function research “is done all the time.”
“For example, cancer immunotherapy, where a cancer patient is provided new cells that have been genetically or pharmacologically enhanced to ‘gain’ the function needed to attack the cancer. Most ‘gain of function’ research studies do not raise significant biosafety and biosecurity risks. So saying something is ‘gain of function’ alone doesn’t really mean anything,” Myles wrote.
Like Collins, Myles focused on the Department of Health and Human Services framework that defines research requiring special oversight. That research must be “reasonably anticipated to create, transfer or use potential pandemic pathogens resulting from the enhancement of a pathogen’s transmissibility and/or virulence in humans.”
Jonathan Latham, executive director of The Bioscience Research Project, said the NIH is obfuscating the issue.
“When people discuss gain-of-function research they are never talking about cancer. They are talking about actual or potential human pathogens,” Latham wrote in an email.
The P4 laboratory building at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is shown in Wuhan, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
“Francis Collins is obfuscating too, but in a different way. In Wuhan, research funded by NIH studied live MERS virus, an actual human pandemic pathogen, and live SARS-like coronaviruses from bats. These SARS coronaviruses were ones that the researchers believed to be potential pandemic pathogens. If Francis Collins thinks that such research does not require special oversight I do not know what research he thinks does require special oversight,” he wrote.
“In all, it seems that NIH is calculatedly deploying two working definitions of gain-of-function research that it is switching at will. One is so broad as to be meaningless and the other is so narrow as to encompass little or no actual research.”
Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director at the NIH, told lawmakers last week that the agency determined the research in question didn’t require enhanced oversight. He also claimed the viruses studied in China couldn’t have been the source of the COVID-19 pandemic, even though information on most of the viruses sampled in Wuhan in recent years hasn’t been shared with the public.
“It is molecularly impossible to derive SARS-CoV-2 from any of the strains described in the EcoHealth documents available to the public so far. But the question is what other work was being done,” Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, wrote on Twitter.
The NIH produced the documents after receiving inquiries from lawmakers on multiple panels, including Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“In my assessment, Dr. Collins appears to be invoking the letter of the law on gain of function but clearly evading the spirit of the law. That’s why it is so important to determine exactly what NIH was supporting in Wuhan,” Griffith told The Epoch Times via email. “I have asked for lots of information from NIH, but the agency has not provided most of it. Dr. Collins’ comments show why we need more details—to make sure the letter of the law does not allow the spirit of the law to be violated.”
“We now know for certain that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins have been misleading the American people for months,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a recent statement. “The documents released show that NIH was in fact funding gain-of-function research in China through EcoHealth Alliance. It is also clear there are significant failures at the NIH to properly oversee grant funding.”
EcoHealth officials didn’t immediately respond to requests from The Epoch Times for comment.
Shi Zhengli – the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s premier bat coronavirus researcher – celebrated her isolation of a coronavirus strain that could cause “direct human infection” in an annual lab report unearthed by The National Pulse.
The admission follows mounting evidence that COVID-19 traces its origins to the Wuhan-based lab and can be linked to risky “gain-of-function” research funded by Anthony Fauci. A “longtime collaborator” of several Fauci-funded researchers, Shi, also known as “Bat Lady,” has listed grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director on her resume.
Shi’s biography and research accomplishments, which appear in the lab’s 2013 annual report exclusively unearthed by The National Pulse, augment her ties to the scientific research carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that likely led to COVID-19.
The subheading “Research Interests” included in Shi’s profile outlines the focus of her work in her capacity as the Director of the lab’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. “This group focuses on emerging viral pathogens and their infection mechanisms,” the synopsis begins before providing examples of her work on the “interspecies infection mechanism of zoonotic virus” such as SARS-like coronaviruses:
Viral isolation and characterization, diagnostic method development and genomic studies; molecular epidemiology and interspecies infection mechanism of zoonotic virus (SARS-like CoV, Nipah virus, Hantavirus, etc); viral metagenomics in particular niche samples (animals and environments)
SHI’S PROFILE.
Focusing solely on her work accomplished in 2013, Shi boasts that “we successfully isolated a bat SARS-like coronavirus” before adding that the isolated strain could result in “direct human infection”:
“It was proved that WIV-1 was able to utilize ACE-2 of human, civets, and Chinese horseshoe bats as the receptor to enter the cells, suggesting the virus is potential to cause a direct human infection.”
The summary also references how coronaviruses “achieved cross-species infection by mutation of key sites of the spike protein,” which is the mechanism that allows COVID-19 to enter human cells.
After nearly two years of denials, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s parent organization, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has finally conceded that it had funded gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As these admissions were made, NIH officials told Congress that the viruses being experimented on were too genetically distant to have possibly caused COVID-19.
But the NIH failed to tell Congress that Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, the organization through whom Fauci was funding the Wuhan Institute, has kept a large number of unknown viruses in its possession. And only those with access to these viruses know what was done with them or exactly how genetically close to COVID-19 they actually are. Additionally, the Institute deleted its entire database of over 22,000 previously unreported virus samples on Sept. 12, 2019.
At exactly the same time that the NIH was making the gain-of-function admission, the agency quietly edited its website to redefine what constituted gain-of-function experiments. In doing so, the NIH narrowed its definition to focus only on known and established human transmission, instead of any potential dangers to humans.
The belated gain-of-function disclosure was made by Lawrence Tabak, the deputy principal director of the NIH, who noted in a letter to Congress, that, despite its previous denials, the NIH had, in fact, funded gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan facility.
Tabak’s letter, written in response to congressional inquiries, corrected previous assertions by NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Fauci that the NIH hadn’t funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Tabak also acknowledged that EcoHealth, the body through whom Fauci funded the Wuhan lab, had violated the terms and conditions of its NIH grant.
But Tabak’s assertion that the NIH was unaware of gain-of-function work being conducted by EcoHealth was contested in a statement issued by EcoHealth in response, which noted that “[t]hese data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report in April 2018.”
2018 EcoHealth Report Details Gain-of-Function Work in Wuhan
EcoHealth failed to provide the NIH with its contractually obligated 2019 fifth-year report until this month, although EcoHealth did share data with the NIH in 2018 and in previous years as part of earlier annual progress reports. Those reports were required as a condition of the five-year grant that Fauci’s NIAID had awarded to EcoHealth in 2014.
Notably, EcoHealth’s 2018 report should have immediately alerted the NIH that agency money was being used to create coronaviruses that were far more pathogenic than the original viruses.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, appears before a Senate hearing to discuss vaccines, in Washington, on Sept. 9, 2020. (Photo by Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images)
EcoHealth’s April 2018 report specified that it, in collaboration with the Wuhan facility, applied reverse genetic methods to construct artificial viruses. These newly created viruses contained novel spike proteins. As Daszak would later explain in a Dec. 9, 2019, interview, the “spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus.”
The resulting genetically modified viruses exhibited particularly high pathogenicity in humanized mice, with a viral load that was enhanced by a factor of 10,000. The construction of at least three such viruses was detailed in EcoHealth’s April 2018 report.
The report also stated that EcoHealth and the Wuhan lab were moving forward with similar work to be done on a different type of virus, the far more lethal MERS virus.
A second report was submitted by EcoHealth to the NIH in November 2018. That report, which took the form of a proposal for a second five-year grant, again described the same gain-of-function work laid out in the April 2018 report.
The 2018 disclosures by EcoHealth highlight two problems. First, EcoHealth had already violated the terms of its grant, which stated that if any artificial viruses showed evidence of enhanced virus growth by a factor of 10, NIH must be notified and all experiments with these viruses must stop immediately. But EcoHealth failed to follow the grant requirements and only notified NIH of the viral growth through a routine disclosure in an annual progress report.
Peter Daszak (R) and other members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Feb. 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
This violation by EcoHealth should have prompted immediate action on the part of NIH.
Secondly, the fact that EcoHealth made the NIH aware of the results of its gain-of-function experiments in 2018, placed an inherent oversight requirement on NIH to closely monitor EcoHealth’s experiments going forward. Instead, the NIH allowed Daszak’s team to continue their work without any monitoring for the next several years.
Missing EcoHealth Report Describes Lethal Virus Work
The lack of EcoHealth’s submission of a fifth-year progress report was only recently discovered, after The Intercept sued the NIH for documents relating to EcoHealth. If not for the alarms raised by The Intercept, it’s likely that EcoHealth’s fifth-year progress report would remain unsubmitted.
That fifth-year report described how EcoHealth and the Wuhan lab engaged in additional gain-of-function experiments by constructing clones of the deadly MERS virus—a virus with a case-fatality rate of 35 percent. The report also detailed how researchers at the Wuhan facility replaced the virus’s receptor-binding domain, which forms part of the spike protein—which determines the virus’s pathogenicity.
The gain-of-function work that EcoHealth described in the delayed fifth-year progress report appears to directly contradict a September 2021 statement made before the fifth report was finally released, when an EcoHealth spokesperson claimed that “[t]]he MERS work proposed in the grant is suggested as an alternative and was not undertaken.”
Tabak’s letter to Congress also stated that NIH had determined that Daszak’s experiments didn’t require strict oversight from NIH because the bat coronaviruses originally cited in Daszak’s work hadn’t been shown to infect humans.
The P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei Province, is seen on May 27, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
But one of the viruses tested by Daszak, WIV1-SHC014, a lab-created virus that had already been mentioned in the 2018 report, exhibited high lethality on humanized mice. According to Daszak’s belatedly submitted fifth-year progress report, 75 percent of the humanized mice that were infected with the virus died.
Humanized mice are mice that have been adapted to carry functioning human genes, cells, and tissue. They effectively act as experimental stand-ins for humans, particularly when testing whether a new virus is capable of infection and transmission in humans.
NIH Changes Gain-of-Function Definition
The NIH suddenly and quietly removed its long-standing definition of gain-of-function experiments from its website at around the same time that Tabak wrote his letter, replacing it with a new section on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP) research.
The NIH’s previous, long-standing definition focused on potential danger to humans. It stated that any NIH-funded gain-of-function research that was “anticipated to enhance the transmissibility and/or virulence of potential pandemic pathogens, which are likely to make them more dangerous to humans ” could only be conducted subject to “stringent oversight and appropriate biosafety and biosecurity controls.”
That definition was materially modified, narrowing the focus to humans to known and established human transmission—specifically “the enhancement of a pathogen’s transmissibility and/or virulence in humans”—from potential dangers.
The NIH’s new gain-of-function wording was remarkably similar to a statement from Fauci’s spokesperson, who said that EcoHealth’s research didn’t fall under strict NIH oversight since the funded experiments “were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans.”
This new definition was echoed by Tabak in his recent letter to Congress, when he wrote that Daszak’s work “did not fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential or ePPP because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans.”
Professor Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University, wrote on Twitter: “In essence, they are claiming that, because the NIH did not fund infection studies with lab-generated viruses and human subjects—Uyghur detainees? Falun Gong dissidents?—the NIH did not fund gain of function research.”
The new gain-of-function terminology may have originated with NIH Director Collins, who appears to have foreshadowed the definitional shift in a May 2021 statement when he claimed that NIH didn’t fund research on coronaviruses that “increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”
At the time of Collins’ statement, questions were beginning to be raised for the first time in the corporate media about COVID-19’s origins and NIH’s funding of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Collins himself had strongly denied that gain-of-function experiments had been funded at the lab, calling the reports misinformation.
NIH Claims EcoHealth Work ‘Distant’ From COVID but Ignores Hidden Viruses
On the same day that Tabak’s letter was sent to Congress, the NIH published a separate statement claiming that none of the work it had funded in Wuhan through EcoHealth Alliance could have led to the creation of COVID-19.
The NIH stated that “it is evident that the viruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant are very far distant from SARS-CoV-2.”
A medical staff member gestures inside an isolation ward at Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei Province on March 10, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
But the NIH failed to disclose that it simply isn’t possible to know what viruses were being studied by EcoHealth and the lab in Wuhan. The Institute deleted its database of viral samples in September 2019; the database remains missing. In addition, Peter Daszak, the Institute’s longtime collaborator, has admitted to holding a large number of undisclosed viruses.
The NIH also failed to acknowledge the existence of a blueprint for the creation of a COVID-19-like virus. In 2018, EcoHealth submitted a proposal to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program that detailed the organization’s plan to create entirely new coronaviruses through the synthetic combination of preexisting virus backbones. The proposal described how those viruses were going to be made more virulent in humans by the insertion of a furin cleavage site, a feature that distinguishes COVID-19 from all other SARS-related coronaviruses.
The furin cleavage site is the key to COVID-19’s pathogenicity in humans. Notably, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, left out any mention of COVID-19’s furin cleavage site when she first described the COVID-19 virus in a detailed Feb. 2020 article in the science journal Nature.
Despite its previous denials, the NIH knew that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology had conducted gain-of-function experiments that resulted in highly pathogenic viruses, and failed to hold EcoHealth accountable for requirements that the NIH itself had imposed.
Perhaps most importantly, the NIH knew that these experiments were being conducted on the soil of an adversary of the United States—communist China.
A Minnesota doctor is paying the price for standing up to authority.
On Oct. 11, Dr. Jeffrey Horak told the Fergus Falls school board that parents, not school officials, should be in charge of deciding whether their children wear masks to school, according to Fox News.
Nine days later the surgeon was informed by Lake Region Healthcare, a hospital in Fergus Falls, that he could either resign or be fired.
At the meeting, the school board decided to put in place a mask mandate for elementary school students as a two-week experiment, according to KFGO-FM.
“I’m used to wearing masks. I’m not trying to do it while I’m running or playing in the gym or all that other stuff. These masks, you want to stop the virus. The example of it is like trying to stop a mosquito with a chain-link fence, good luck,” he said, according to KFGO-FM.
Dr. Jeffrey Horak, a surgeon in Minnesota, told the Fergus Falls school board on Oct. 11 that parents should make the decision about whether or not their children wear masks.
He says he was dismissed from his job nine days later.
Horak said parents are the ones who should be making decisions about masks.
Are liberals afraid of honest debate?
“Who does God put in charge of these kids? Their parents. God gave each one of these kids … to their parents, and they speak for them. They may be wrong, they may be dumb, they may be perfect in their decisions. But it’s still their responsibility. It’s not yours. God gave it to them. Honor their wishes, either side of the fence,” he said.
Horak said he was then told his “views were no longer congruent with that of Lake Region Healthcare” and he had to choice to quit or be fired, Fox reported.
“We live in America where freedoms are held close. I am a man who believes individuals have the right to do their research and decide what is best for them and their children when it comes to their health. I don’t believe governments or institutions should dictate that,” Horak said in a post-dismissal statement published by KVRR-TV.
In his statement, Horak said there were many possible reasons for his termination, adding “perhaps my termination is because I was empowering the parents.”
Dr. Greg Smith, the president of the Medical Group Board for the Lake Region Medical Group, said the board made the “decision to discontinue Dr. Jeff Horak’s employment contract after a thorough review process,” according to a statement given to Fox.
“The reasons for Dr. Horak’s separation are a confidential matter,” Smith said. “To be clear, this was a decision that was made by Dr. Horak’s peers who serve on the Medical Group Board, not by Lake Region Healthcare, the community-based hospital where Dr. Horak practiced General Surgery.”
Dr. Jeff Horak, who was a surgeon at Lake Region Healthcare in Fergus Falls for 16 years, was fired after speaking at a school board meeting against mask mandates for students. Today 500+ people showed up at Lake Region Healthcare to protest…https://t.co/bOtBDokGQ9
“This isn’t a conservative vs. liberal, or vaxed vs. unvaxed, or mask vs. no mask issue,” rally organizer Angie Brown said, according to Fox.
“This is an issue of right vs. wrong, and I am so happy that so many in our community recognized this wrong and were willing to show up, both to support Dr. Horak, but to also, in a peaceful way, voice their disagreement with Lake Region Medical Group,” she continued.
Horak spoke at the rally, noting that in the current climate, freedom is in danger.
“One, you’re becoming aware that your freedoms are being taken away. Two, professionals such as myself are being silenced, and then so are you. If it happens to me, it can happen to all of us,” Horak said. “And third, you’re afraid. We’re all afraid. Today I want to empower you to say, ‘I stand up with Dr. Horak. Truly, I stand with you.’”
Government subsidies for homeless Americans can be more hurtful than helpful, according to Michael Shellenberger, author of “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.”
“We have a situation here where we’re literally paying people in the form of cash, welfare, housing, and other services to live in tents on the street, use hard drugs, defecate publicly, and commit crimes,” he said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. The full episode will be released on Thurs. Oct. 28 at 7pm ET on EpochTV.
Shellenberger said the problem begins with the word “homeless” itself—calling it a “propaganda word” that does not encapsulate what the issue is actually formed from.
He said since the 1980s, progressive activists demanded more subsidized housing, attributing the cause of homelessness to a lack of housing, expensive rents, or poverty— “and that’s not the case.”
The problem with using the word “homeless,” he said, is that it incorrectly combines two very different groups. It’s irresponsible to conflate mothers escaping abusive husbands, or people who are just going through some hard times, with people who are mentally ill, or drug-addicted, or both, says Shellenberger.
The term “homeless encampments” is another incorrect euphuism, he said, explaining that it’s often thought of as a homeless community where individuals are helping each other out; but in actuality, it is an open-air drug market.
“European researchers … describe [homeless encampments] as open drugs scenes, where people live inside of open-air drug markets. Buyers and sellers are meeting there, but they’re also just living there because they’re so addicted,” Shellenberger said.
The failed European homeless encampments, which is being repeated in California, involves giving homeless drug addicts methadone (a heroin substitute), clean needles, and encouraging drug treatment, he said.
“The people said, ‘No, I’ll just stay here in the squalor and use drugs,’ because they’re suffering from a kind of mental illness, which is what drug addiction is,” said Shellenberger.
A homeless man sleep near tents in downtown Los Angeles on Nov. 18, 2018. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
People struggling with drug addiction need to be met with some type of intervention, he said, or they will very rarely have a desire to try and help themselves.
“We don’t allow people with dementia—such as our grandparents suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia—we don’t allow them to wander the streets and live on the streets … Why then do we allow people that are suffering from psychosis, whether from schizophrenia or from chronic meth use to be on the streets?” he said.
While an arrest after committing a crime or dealing with some type of intervention can be hard, it allows the drug-addicted to at least detox for some amount of time before going back on the street, he said.
“They need some sort of structure to keep themselves healthy and clean. It used to be that addicts would be arrested every once in a while and would find themselves in jail or prison where they would have to detox and kick their addiction, at least for a period of time. We’re not doing that now,” he said.
“You don’t necessarily need to arrest addicts and put them in prison, but they do need the intervention so they can they can get clean and move on with their lives.”
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee approved the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 today after about eight hours of discussion.
Six hours into the conversation, one doctor made a comment about how widespread the rollout of the vaccine should be.
He said it is a legitimate question to consider and though this advisory committee was planning to punt the question on to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, it was worth talking about.
“We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it, and that’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines,” Dr. Eric Rubin said in the meeting.
The committee voted 17 to 0, with one abstention, in favor of recommending emergency use of the vaccine in young children. The final decision will be made by FDA leaders, most likely in the next few days, NBC News reported.
The one abstention came from Dr. Michael Kurilla, who said he “would have preferred a more nuanced approach,” and not a blanket authorization for the age group, according to Stat.
Another committee member, Dr. Cody Meissner, a pediatrician at Tufts Medical Center, did voice his concern over the possibility of a vaccine mandate for children.
“I am just worried that if we say yes, then the states are going to mandate administration of this vaccine for children to go to school, and I do not agree with that. I think that would be an error at this time,” he said, according to CNN.
Should the FDA approve COVID vaccines for young children?
Dr. James Hildreth, a temporary committee member, also had concerns due to the number of children who have already had COVID-19, NBC reported. He pointed out some estimated that almost 40 percent of children already had some form of immunity to COVID-19.
“It just seemed to me that in some ways we’re vaccinating children to protect the adults when it should be the other way around. If 30 million children already have some form of immunity, they’ve made their contribution to herd immunity already and our focus should be to get the adults vaccinated to protect the children,” Hildreth said.
Last month, when Pfizer announced that the vaccine was safe for this age demographic, outside experts did say the clinical study did not produce copious amounts of data.
“It’s not a lot to go on, but what we do have to go on looks great,” Kathleen Neuzil of the University of Maryland School of Medicine told Stat last month.
With the passing vote of this advisory committee, though, the process for getting vaccines to 5- to 11-year-olds is underway. If the FDA leaders give their approval, then the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent advisory will meet on Nov. 2 and 3 to decide whether to recommend the vaccine for this age group.
Since President Joe Biden began his push to subject Americans to vaccine mandates, many have pushed back. On Monday, superstar boxer Floyd Mayweather became the latest famous figure to speak out against the mandates.
In a video posted to his Twitter account, Mayweather expressed support for Kyrie Irving, an NBA player who has chosen not to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
“America is the land of the free — freedom of speech, freedom of religion and supposedly freedom to choose,” Mayweather said. “Never be controlled by money. I respect you for having some integrity and being your own man.”
Choice is defined as an act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities. America gave us the choice to take the vaccine or not take the vaccine. As time moves on, that choice is gradually being stripped from us. pic.twitter.com/7F6RsWaDkL
“A free mind makes its own choices; an enslaved mind follows the crowd,” he said. “Stand for something or fall for anything. One man can lead a revolution to stand up and fight for what’s right. One choice, one word, one action can change the world.”
In the caption of the video, Mayweather made clear that he is not arguing against the vaccine itself, but rather against vaccine mandates.
“America gave us the choice to take the vaccine or not take the vaccine,” he wrote. “As time moves on, that choice is gradually being stripped from us.”
Mayweather is absolutely right. While Americans can technically choose not to receive the vaccine, the federal government wants to make sure that choice comes at the price of a job.
Do you agree with Mayweather?
For most Americans, living without employment is not possible. When employers and governments threaten to fire unvaccinated workers, they are attempting to back them into a corner so that compliance is the only viable option.
Leftists on Twitter have attempted to argue that people losing their jobs for refusing the vaccine is simply an example of the old adage “actions have consequences.”
That is their decision to not get the vaccine so I have no sympathy for them. Actions have consequences and theirs is to not have their job. Same for all professions dealing with the public!! 👍
You made the choice not to get the vaccine that saves lives. Your employer requires the vaccine for you to work there. Actions have consequences, and this is yours. Hope your selfishness and irresponsibility doesn’t kill someone, or you.
This logic is completely flawed. Losing your job should not be a consequence of a personal medical choice. In fact, this so-called “consequence” is manufactured by tyrannical governments whose goal is to force as many vaccinations as possible.
If Irving had chosen not to get vaccinated and then contracted COVID-19, that would have been a consequence of his actions. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio barring Irving from earning a paycheck because he is unvaccinated is simply a gross abuse of power.
Instead of addressing the concerns of Irving, Mayweather and other black Americans, the Biden administration has continued to spout pro-mandate rhetoric in the hopes of convincing them to submit to the government.
The only way to stop further government overreach is to stand up to mistreatment, and that is exactly what Irving and Mayweather are doing.
Children should not get vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to Harvard University professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff.
“I don’t think children should be vaccinated for COVID. I’m a huge fan of vaccinating children for measles, for mumps, for polio, for rotavirus, and many other diseases, that’s critical. But COVID is not a huge threat to children,” he said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. The full episode will be released at 7 p.m. New York time on Oct. 26 on EpochTV.
“They can be infected, just like they can get the common cold, but they’re not a big threat. They don’t die from this, except in very rare circumstances. So if you want to talk about protecting children or keeping children safe, I think we can talk about traffic accidents, for example, which they are really at some risk.
“And there are other things that we should make sure to keep children safe. But COVID is not a big risk factor for children.”
Vaccinating older people and people of all ages with compromised immune systems against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, has drawn support from most medical experts. But vaccinating healthy young people, particularly children, has triggered more opposition, in part because of how little risk COVID-19 poses to them.
Children are more likely to contract serious disease or die from the annual influenza, or the flu, than COVID-19, according to data and studies that Kulldorff has reviewed. Just 195 children under the age of 4 and 442 between 5 and 18 have died from COVID-19 in the United States as of Oct. 20, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children are 15 times less likely to be hospitalized with the disease than individuals who are 85 or older, and 570 times less likely to die, the agency says.
“One example is from Sweden, during the first wave in the spring of 2020, which affected Sweden quite strongly,” Kulldorff said. “But Sweden decided to keep daycare and schools open for all children ages 1 to 15. And there are 1.8 million such children who got through the first wave without vaccines, of course, without masks, without any sort of distancing in schools.
“If a child was sick, they were told to stay home. But that was basically it. And you know how many of those 1.8 million children died from COVID? Zero. Only a few hospitalizations. So this is not a risky disease for children.”
When weighing whether to vaccinate children, the risk of vaccine side effects must also be taken into account, Kulldorff said. The main risk to young people seen so far is heart inflammation, which has occurred post-vaccination at much higher than expected rates. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a warning label to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines over the summer about myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation.
“If you’re 78 years old, then it’s the no-brainer in my view, because the benefits are so great that even if you have a small risk for some adverse reaction, the benefit far outweighs the risk,” Kulldorff said. “On the other hand, if you have already have immunity from having had COVID, then the benefits of the vaccines are much, much smaller. If you’re a child, even if you haven’t had COVID, the risk of serious disease or death is minuscule … So it’s not at all clear that the benefits outweigh the risks for children.”
Kulldorff was speaking ahead of an FDA advisory panel meeting. Members on Oct. 26 were considering whether to advise drug regulators to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in children between 5 and 11.
Many federal health officials and some outside experts support vaccinating children. They say vaccinating children would help quicken progress toward herd immunity and protect household members, especially those most at risk from COVID-19, and that hospitalizations among COVID-infected children rose over the summer and into September.
“Kids need protection against COVID-19 and this vaccine is safe and effective,” Dr. Patrick Hickey, chair and professor of pediatrics at the Uniformed Services University, wrote on Twitter.
The FDA in a briefing document to the panel said that the rate of post-vaccination heart inflammation cases among young children is expected to be the same as those 12 to 15, who have been getting vaccinated for months, and that the benefits of Pfizer’s shot outweigh “the known or potential risks.”
Last month, CNN published a rather alarming story that ran with the following headline: “Pro-China misinformation operation attempting to exploit US Covid divisions.”
In the words of the author, Zachary Cohen, a “pro-Chinese government online influence operation is targeting Americans in an effort to exploit divisions over the Covid-19 pandemic.”
This, of course, is alarming. The idea that the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to further divide a country that is already deeply divided should concern us all.
However, CNN is also guilty of running a “misinformation operation to exploit COVID divisions.” Let me explain.
In September, Joe Rogan announced that he had contracted COVID-19. The outspoken podcast host disclosed that he had taken Ivermectin, which was prescribed to him by a doctor, to treat the disease. CNN referred to Ivermectin as a “horse dewormer.” In the words of CNN host Anderson Cooper, the drug was “something more often used to deworm horses.”
In fact, Ivermectin has saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It is used to treat both humans and animals, and was used to treat the former long before it was used to treat the latter—a fact that was intentionally omitted from the “Joe Rogan takes horse dewormer narrative.”
Shortly after recovering from COVID-19, Rogan wasted no time in taking aim at CNN for its dishonest, borderline slanderous remarks.
Interestingly, Rogan had support from an unlikely source. In response to the “news” network’s inaccurate coverage, Mary Katherine Ham, a CNN contributor, took to Twitter to voice her outrage. According to the journalist, the coverage surrounding Rogan was thoroughly “dishonest.” Instead of reporting factual information, she argued, CNN opted to “dunk” on the influential commentator. For taking a stand against her employer, Ham should be applauded.
I reached out to CCN for comment on the rather controversial matter. However, no comments were offered.
The “Rogan takes Ivermectin” narrative has played out like a Netflix series, full of twists and turns, heroes and villains, lies and deceit, condemnation and conceit. In the middle of October, the narrative took another twist—Rogan invited Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his podcast. Gupta, for the uninitiated, is CNN’s resident doctor. Throughout the episode, which comes highly recommended, Gupta, not surprisingly, looked more than a little intimidated. Asked if he was embarrassed to work for a network that spreads lie after lie, Gupta offered Rogan a half-hearted apology. The gracious host appeared to accept. Case closed, or so it appeared. A couple of days after the interview went live, Don Lemmon, one of CNN’s most famous and most controversial employees, invited Gupta on his show. Rather incredibly, Lemon had Gupta retract the aforementioned apology. Rogan, in return, had some rather harsh words for Lemon. Expect more twists in this rather trippy tale.
Although CNN has shamed itself with its disingenuous storylines, it doesn’t have a monopoly on misinformation. In the first week of October, The New York Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli wrote an article designed to spread inordinate amounts of fear. According to the author, “nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the pandemic began.”
Twenty-four hours later, a correction was issued. The actual number of hospitalizations was, in fact, 63,000. In other words, Mandavilli had exaggerated the number by 837,000 cases. But, hey, why let facts get in the way of a really good story?
Because of the proliferation of misinformation surrounding the virus, millions of Americans are left scared and confused. According to a Gallup poll, “92% overstate the risk that unvaccinated people will be hospitalized, and 62% overstate the risk for vaccinated people.” The authors noted that “political affiliation has been a strong predictor of attitudes and behaviors related to disease risks and mitigation.” Those on the left are more likely to exaggerate the threat, while those on the right are more likely to underplay it. When it comes to the threat posed by COVID-19, the MSM’s willingness to spread fear and hysteria, rather than facts and honesty, is nothing short of shameful.
Today, ideologically-driven reporting starts with a conclusion and works its way back to the beginning. Objective analysis, now replaced by predetermined scripts, is considered quaint, even boring. The news has become entertainment—a story’s credibility is judged not by its importance but on its inherent shock value. Such an approach to reporting is a recipe for unquantifiable amounts of disaster. People are left disoriented, scratching their heads, desperately attempting to separate the factual from the fictional. The mouth can only speak what the eyes see and the ears hear; sadly, we are seeing and hearing a lot of lies. Is it any wonder that Americans’ trust in mainstream media is at an all-time low?
As you can see, one needn’t live in China to be fed fact-free narratives.
A local ABC news station accidentally opened up Pandora’s Box with a recent and now viral Facebook post. Currently boasting 64k+ shares, the post asked for stories about people that lost a loved one because they *weren’t* vaccinated….what ended up happening was a massive deluge of comments from people that had lost loved ones right after the vaccine instead.
The number of actual deaths and side effects from the vaccine is something many suspect the media, Big Pharma, this illegitimate administration, and the CDC are personally covering up.
Apparently the CDC doesn’t consider anyone that dies within 2 weeks of the vaccine as an actual “vaccination death” and of this post is as telling as it seems to be…..a LOT more people are dying from this vaccine than anything else.
The vaccine clearly doesn’t stop people from getting covid, and it’s got a lot of people wondering why they’re pushing it so hard at all.
I screenshot as many comments as I could as Facebook is already targeting the post and asking people if they “really” want to share it:
Representative Jim Jordan has said that if infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci had any dignity, he’d immediately resign.
“If Fauci had any sense of honor left, he’d resign today,” the Ohio Republican wrote in a Monday morning tweet.
Conservatives have long targeted Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), because of his continued advocacy for restrictive measures for slowing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the pandemic, Fauci has advocated for mask and vaccine mandates and school and business shutdowns, among other social distancing measures.
If Fauci had any sense of honor left, he’d resign today.— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) October 25, 2021
The GOP legislator and the infectious diseases expert have clashed several times before over COVID-19 prevention measures.
In mid-April, Jordan and Fauci got into a heated exchange during a congressional hearing. Jordan asked Fauci when Americans could stop following mask mandates and other social distancing measures.
“What metrics, what measures, what has to happen before Americans get more freedoms back?” Jordan asked Fauci.
Fauci accused Jordan of making the preventative measures “a personal thing,” which Jordan denied. Fauci then responded, “You’re indicating liberty and freedom. I look at it as a public health measure to prevent people from dying and going to the hospital.
Fauci later said he’d feel more comfortable relaxing social restrictions once the U.S. had reached less than 10,000 new COVID-19 infections a day. As of October 25, the U.S. is averaging just over 10,000 new infections each day, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In a late July hearing, Jordan accused Fauci of refusing to condemn public protests that could potentially spread the virus. Jordan said Fauci’s refusal was hypocritical, considering that Fauci had previously advocated closing down schools, businesses and other public gatherings to prevent the virus’ spread.
“You see the inconsistency though, Dr. Fauci?” Jordan told the doctor. “So you’re allowed to protest millions of people on one day in crowds, yelling, screaming, but you try to run your business. You get arrested.”
Ohio Representative Jim Jordan said that if infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci had any dignity, he’d immediately resign. Above, Jordan speaks during the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on November 13, 2019, in Washington, D.C.JIM LO SCALZO/GETTY
They have also claimed that the NIAID funded gain-of-function (GOF) research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology that helped COVID-19 leap from animals to humans, causing the pandemic.
While Fauci said that the NIAID has never funded GOF research, he has also admitted under Senate questioning that he can’t know for certain how the WIV lab used the NIAID’s funding. Recent documents have suggested that Fauci may have been “untruthful” about the funding’s use, though his agency has continued to deny that it ever funded GOF research.
More recently, Fauci has come under bipartisan criticism over a $1.68 million taxpayer-funded NIAID grant to a Tunisian laboratory to conduct drug and “de-barking” experiments on beagle puppies.
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and other conservatives have publicly called for Fauci’s firing. Greene herself has introduced the “Fire Fauci Act,” though Jordan has not yet cosponsored her legislation.
Greene’s bill would terminate funding for Fauci’s position until someone new is appointed as the NIAID’s new director. The legislation would also require an audit of Fauci’s emails, policy memoranda and financial transactions from October 1, 2019, until December 31, 2021.
Fauci has advised every president since Ronald Reagan and has served as director of the NIAID for nearly 40 years.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci’s salary – the highest of all federal employees – was increased due to his work on vaccine development and bioterrorism research, internal U.S. government documents have laid bare.
Obtained by transparency group OpenTheBooks through a Freedom of Information Act request, a letter from then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Deputy Director Raynard S. Kingston makes the case for Fauci’s sizable pay increase.
Fauci’s permanent pay raise was to “appropriately compensate him for the level of responsibility… especially as it relates to his work on biodefense research activities.”
Kingston outlines the rationale behind proposing Fauci’s salary increase, emphasizing how he “has been a key figure in the White House and Department’s response to bioterrorism”:
“More recently, Dr. Fauci has been a key figure in the White House and Department’s response to bioterrorism. His contributions to this effort have been outstanding and include the development of the departmental strategy to augment smallpox vaccine supplies and the development of a plan to develop new anthrax vaccine. He serves as an expert consultant to the White House, the Secretary of DHHS, congressional staff, and a number of HHS groups on the development of biodefense-related research, and public health priorities. He is leading the development of a series of research initiatives, has coordinated fast-track initiatives for academia and industry participation in biodefense-related research, and is responsible for the development of future intermediate and long-range research plans and policies for a sustained and committed biomedical research response to bioterrorism threats. During FY2004, under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, NIAID significantly expanded, intensified, and accelerated its research programs in biodefense.”
The documents reveal that, as a result, the George W. Bush Administration approved a “permanent pay adjustment” in excess of his regular salary in December 2004. From 2004 through 2007, the pay raise amounted to a 68-percent increase from $200,000 to $335,000-a year.
The unearthed justification for Fauci’s unparalleled taxpayer-funded salary follows extensive reporting revealing how Fauci’s NIH agency funded research at Chinese Communist Party and Chinese military-linked labs such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology – believed by many to be the source of COVID-19. Fauci and his advisors have also signed collaborative research deals with Chinese military fronts and funded American laboratories training Wuhan researchers how to work with “the world’s most dangerous pathogens.”
Rapper Bryson Gray announced on Twitter Thursday that his anti-Biden music video “Let’s Go Brandon” was banned by YouTube due to “medical misinformation.”
“YouTube has banned ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ song from YouTube due to ‘medical information.’ What medical misinformation is in the song? Whoa,” Gray posted on Twitter.
YouTube has banned “Let’s Go Brandon” song from YouTube due to “medical information”. What medical misinformation is in the song? Whoa. pic.twitter.com/W8sCcyH4IM
The policy reason noted in Gray’s post said, “YouTube doesn’t allow claims about COVID-19 vaccinations that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO).”
The ban involved “1 active strike” that includes the inability to “upload, post, or live stream for 1 week,” the post showed.
Gray noted that the lyric video was the first to be removed. The music video was taken down soon after.
Despite the YouTube ban, Gray’s song recently reached #1 on iTunes in the United States.
“We did it,” Bryson said in another Twitter post on Sunday. “From banned on YouTube to passing Adele on the iTunes charts to become the #1 song in the country!”
The post also challenged fans to stand up against censorship. “Stop being afraid of censorship. Stop being afraid to be cancelled,” Bryson added. “STAND UP. Thank y’all so much! KEEP IT GOING!”
The same post reported Bryson’s video had also been “removed” from Instagram. The Instagram response said, “It goes against our Community Guidelines on harmful false information.”
Bryson responded, “Haha cute but it’s too late.”
The phrase, “Let’s go, Brandon!” began trending online after an NBC reporter interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown after a race said fans were shouting support for the driver in the background. The fans were instead chanting, “[Expletive] Joe Biden!”
The “Let’s go, Brandon!” chant also quickly spread to major stadium events, including the day after the original interview at a New York Jets NFL game.
YouTube said on Sept. 29 that it will ban all “harmful vaccine content” from its platform, including claims that vaccines are ineffective at reducing transmission of disease, prompting concerns that the firm will escalate censorship of dissenting viewpoints.
“We’ve steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over into misinformation about vaccines in general, and we’re now at a point where it’s more important than ever to expand the work we started with COVID-19 to other vaccines,” YouTube wrote in a blog post.
Now, it removes content that claims, “approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines,” YouTube stated on its blog, saying that its policy will now apply to content that questions the efficacy of all vaccines, not just those for COVID-19.
Despite being promoted as safe and effective by legacy media, many health care workers are refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccines, and those who openly speak out about their concerns get censored by Big Tech companies or kicked off their platforms.
Some nurses and doctors are refusing vaccine mandates even if means it will cost them their jobs.
The Epoch Times reached out to some of these health care professionals to see why.
Emily Nixon is a registered nurse who has been working in the health industry for 18 years. When her employer, MaineHealth, announced that it would make the vaccine mandatory, she quickly organized a group called The Coalition for Healthcare Workers Against Medical Mandates and filed a lawsuit.
“Thousands of health care workers have and will be losing their jobs. The already weak health care infrastructure of Maine will not withstand this devastating loss of staff. Life will be lost. Care is already being rationed. We have been experiencing a media blackout in this state,” Nixon said.
“Speaking from my point of view, an intelligent, healthy, and empowered health care professional that takes excellent care of herself, it is an insult to expect that I would accept an injection of unknown substance and efficacy and provide an example to the great people that I serve that they too should submit their power over to pharmaceutical companies—convicted felons—in an effort to put a band-aid on the gaping wound of reality.
“It is unconscionable to mandate injections without exemption, especially when the injection is a brand new medical product still undergoing its first year of study. Breakthrough cases are not properly reported on. We know this vaccine is ‘leaky.’ The safety and effectiveness of this vaccine has not been proven. There are other safe and alternative treatments. It is impossible to give fully informed consent without long-term, unbiased data. Threatening our jobs is blatant coercion. Our God-given right to bodily integrity and personal autonomy has been stripped with these mandates and we will not stand for it,” Nixon said.
‘The Side Effects Are Real’
Jaclyn Zubiate, who was working for Southern Maine Health Care, loved her job as a nurse.
“I did not take the vaccine, even though I will be terminated … Now with the data that we have, we know that the survival rate is quite high. Over the last 18 months, I have only sent one patient to the ER in respiratory distress. COVID has no distinguishing features among other viruses like other diseases that we have vaccines for. Why would I need a vaccine for something with a 99 percent survival rate that does not have any distinguishable features?” said Zubiate.
“Health care workers are not taking it because they know that the side effects are real. In urgent care, I have seen myocarditis, cellulitis, [and] unusual neurological symptoms, among a variety of other side effects. I have seen people very ill post-vaccine, and then go on to test positive. The positivity rate for contracting COVID on the vaccinated is very high per the recent studies and what I am seeing in my clinic. A vaccine should work, and it is not working. It should be tested for years on something other than humans before we call it ‘safe and effective.’ There have been over 15,000 deaths from the vaccine that the media is not talking about. I will never take that risk on myself,” Zubiate said.
‘The Data Speaks for Itself’
Jessica Mosher has been a registered nurse for more than a decade. She is a mother of four and a veteran of the United States Navy who lost her job for refusing the shots.
She was a nursing supervisor, patient observer manager, and nurse program director at Redington-Fairview General Hospital.
“Protecting my health and staying true to my religious convictions will always be my choice over a job. The scriptures promise that ‘as long as the earth remains, there will be seedtime and harvest’; this side of heaven, we have an abundance of employment options, but only one life,” Mosher said.
“I have a master’s degree in nursing and am employed as a professor of nursing research and evidence-based practice. I am skilled in collecting and analyzing data and in drawing conclusions. I did not rely on the media, government, or Big Tech for any of my health care decisions prior to COVID-19 and I have no plans to change course. The data speaks for itself related to the harm these experimental vaccines have caused and the lack of studies that have been conducted.
“What I have seen as a nurse and what others have shared post-vaccination seals the deal. The virus, like the cold and flu, does not have a cure. However, it has an almost 100 percent survival rate. Those pushing the vaccine are following the money. I am following the science. Health care workers do not walk away from their passion or stable salary to be difficult. The amount of people willing to be fired should be cause for alarm in and of itself,” she said.
John Lewis worked for a large hospital in southern Maine.
He is pro-life and believes that all life is precious.
“Knowing all three available vaccines were either tested, developed, or produced using fetal cell lines from elective abortions, I could not in good conscience violate my deeply held beliefs. Anticipating I would be able to file a religious exemption, it is hard to accept [that] I’m not being afforded an exemption based on my duties after considering I am a remote worker and do not interact with patients,” Lewis said.
“Outside of medical or religious exemptions, many health care workers consider the risk-benefits of getting the vaccine. It is the same approach to providing patient care, where the patient is allowed informed consent. Many of the health care workers have natural immunity. Others do not feel there is enough long-term research into adverse effects. Also, these health care workers see with their own eyes what is happening in hospitals, which isn’t necessarily in line with the narrative,” Lewis said.
‘None of Us Are Seeing’ Surges
Heather Sadler, a registered nurse, also loves to be a nurse, but she said that her and her family’s health are much more important than her paycheck.
“This is new vaccine (if you want to call it that) technology that has NEVER been deployed successfully, and has no data regarding long-term effects, not to be confused with ‘side effects’ as the general public seems to be hung up on. I have always been someone who analyzes my health care choices through the lens of risk-benefit ratio. Knowing what I know about COVID (and I’ve done a lot of research), I do not fall into any of the high-risk for severe illness/death categories: age over 65, obese, heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung conditions, and immunocompromised. For me and my immediate family, there is greater risk of having a side effect, or long-term effect from injecting a virtually unknown substance into ourselves,” Sadler said.
“I am a nurse in Oncology/Hematology, and I’m seeing that we are experiencing an increase in hospitalizations/referrals for clotting and bleeding disorders. For one example, in one week, we had two patients in the hospital who were diagnosed with a rare clotting disorder that is normally only seen in 4 percent of the general population. And this happened twice in one week in rural central Maine. The only common factor, a COVID shot three days prior in each case. Was this reported to the CDC? I do not know.
“Only 4 of the roughly 20 to 25 people I’ve known personally who have tested positive for COVID recently have been unvaccinated. Yes, unvaccinated. The majority of the people around me who have tested positive in the past three months have been fully vaccinated. Why would I want to risk side effects or long-term effects of the shot if I can still contract and spread this virus? It’s just not logical. Those two examples clearly blow their theory that ‘it’s safe and effective’ out of the water,” Sadler said.
“I am in constant communication with other health care workers in the state of Maine and none of us are seeing the ‘surges’ that the general public is told is happening.”
“This is America! I have every right to make an educated decision regarding my health care. No matter what you are told, what I do has no direct effect on you,” Sadler said.
‘Freedom Is the Most Important Thing’
Sherri Thornton was a Maine SAFE Advisory Board member and chair and has been a nurse for 45 years.
She was planning to retire but wanted to work until the end of the year; however, when she saw the mandate coming, she decided to retire earlier.
“I believe that freedom is the most important thing in life outside of salvation. No one has the right to tell me what I can or can not do with my body except the Lord. The vaccines have been produced with fetal tissue, and I am staunchly opposed to abortion,” Thornton said.
“The components of the vaccines are not safe. There are many side effects that cause more harm than the coronavirus. It doesn’t protect against the variants. … Vaccinating everyone will not gain herd immunity and will only cause more variants to which those without natural immunity will succumb,” Thornton said.
Three other health care workers that are against the vaccine mandates reached out to The Epoch Times but didn’t want to have their names or employers disclosed.
I can’t escape COVID restrictions. Irrespective of my vaccination status, my personal risk profile, or my individual desires, they follow me everywhere. I live in New York City. I can’t go into a subway, coffee shop, gym, museum, restaurant, or college class without confronting them. But, with time, the precautions have made less and less sense.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I was abundantly cautious. As ridiculous as it feels to admit in retrospect, I diligently washed down my chip bags before putting them in my cabinet. Nobody had any clue what this disease was, how it spread, or where it came from. So, I erred on the side of caution.
But, since COVID-19 has intruded into just about every aspect of my life, I’ve found it worthwhile to vigorously engage with data and research. Lots of our unanswered questions at the beginning of the pandemic have since been answered, and many of our precautions proved futile.
As soon as I learned the virus didn’t transmit via surfaces, I gave up scrubbing down my chip bags. And, yet, it’s as though everyone else is still washing theirs. Why haven’t obscure precautions been retired? Have people not engaged with the data? Have they not done their own research? Have they not come to their own conclusions? Where has common sense gone?
The public attitude toward the pandemic, at least in my city, has been consistent deference to authority. Masks are an appendage regardless of context or vaccination status. I often see people wearing them while driving alone in their cars. And restrictions are unquestioned, no matter how contrived they may be.
People passively wait to be given answers by authority rather than searching them out for themselves. It’s hard to imagine how the herd mentality can persist. Faith in our institutions, our politicians, and our media have been eroded time and time again, and yet they seem not to crumble.
The virus originated just blocks away from a virology lab, but you were told that a wet market was the source, and suggesting otherwise was inexplicably racist. We learned early on that risk of outdoor transmission was infinitesimally small, and yet you were told to keep wearing masks outdoors and not to question the closure of parks and open venues.
In many cities, restaurants were forced to shutter their indoor dining but allowed to construct enclosed outdoor dining structures on sidewalks. Don’t question whether eating in a puny, unventilated box is safer than spacing out inside a restaurant. Oh, and don’t forget, all bars and restaurants must be closed by curfew, because everyone knows the virus only transmits after 10 p.m.
If you’ve been thinking critically throughout the pandemic, you know the feeling of being let down consistently, of losing faith in the institutions you thought you could trust.
Those of us who don’t blindly defer are often accused of being stubborn. We’re told most restrictions are minor inconveniences. Why not just suck it up? Sure, there’s truth in the fact that not every objector is a conscientious one. But many are.
We’re disparaged as anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti-whatever it may be—but that’s a false binary. I’m not unilaterally opposed to cautiousness. I don’t like being defiant or breaking rules. But there’s something I dislike far more: betraying my own conscience. Civil disobedience is necessary in the face of arbitrary rules. The pandemic is strangling our freedom to think.
Arbitrary restrictions have run awry. Our leaders, most of whom don’t even have medical credentials, have been enabled by the deferent mob to arbitrarily encroach upon freedom and absolve themselves of the burden of proof. The message: Our higher-ups don’t trust us regular folk to think for ourselves. They’ve decided it’s their role not to represent our will, but rather to protect us from our ignorance.
I, for one, will not hand over my freedom to think. I will continue to engage with the data, to trust in myself, and to defer only to common sense. It doesn’t matter how small the inconvenience is or how minor the freedom being restricted. If I capitulate and allow myself to act in conflict with my personal constitution on a small matter, who’s to say where that slippery slope will lead?
There is plenty of evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 have protection against reinfection, Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) said.
“There’s ample scientific studies that show that natural immunity is absolutely one of the best things you could have—and some studies even show that it’s more effective [than vaccination],” Harshbarger said during a recent appearance on NTD’s “Capitol Report.”Play Video
Natural immunity refers to post-recovery antibodies that shield people against reinfection of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.
Multiplestudies have indicated that natural immunity among past COVID-19 patients is strong and similar or superior to the protection from COVID-19 vaccines. Some experts have pushed for federal health officials to take natural immunity into account when issuing recommendations and rules. But federal authorities currently recommend virtually everybody get a vaccine, including the recovered, arguing the strong protection gets even better when those people have a jab.
Harshbarger, though, says a number of Americans object to getting a vaccine while pointing out that natural immunity to other diseases is accepted as an alternative to vaccination.
She and 10 other members of the House of Representatives late last week introduced the “Natural Immunity Is Real Act,” a companion to a Senate bill from Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).
It would require federal agencies to “acknowledge, accept, and agree to truthfully present, natural immunity pertaining to COVID-19 pursuant to promulgating certain regulations.”
The congressmembers are presenting the bill as President Joe Biden’s administration works to finalize a regulation that would force private companies with over 100 employees to mandate presenting proof of COVID-19 vaccination or have staff members be tested weekly for the disease.
There is no opt-out for natural immunity.
Other mandates are already in place on the federal, state, and local level that have led to some Americans losing their jobs.
“I’ve read some of the studies that show that natural immunity, in a lot of ways, can be more effective. And I know there’s one study that shows that the percentage of protection is even better than two doses of the vaccine, in some cases. There is ample scientific data out there that show that. Think about it. We have immunity against measles, and smallpox, and they accept that. Why won’t they do it for COVID?” said Harshbarger, a licensed pharmacist since 1987.
“Too many medical leaders are refusing to publicly recognize what overwhelming data has already shown—protection afforded to individuals with natural immunity is real, robust and durable,” Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) added in a written statement. “Denying science only contributes to existing confusion, misinformation, and mistrust among the American people. This bill helps restore trust and faith in the Public Health system, while maintaining our fight against COVID-19.”
The other co-sponsors are Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), Chris Stewart (R-Utah), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Mary Miller (R-Ind.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), and Chip Roy (R-Texas).
In late September, conservative parents and voters discovered what the NSBA is. It wasn’t a pleasant introduction:
The National School Boards Association penned a letter to President Joe Biden in which the educators group asked “for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.”
This sounds pretty dire until you realize the letter was talking, in large part, about parents revolting at school board meetings over radical curriculums that included elements of critical race theory and overreaches such as mask mandates.
In the letter, the NSBA accused parents of “spreading misinformation” and asserted, without evidence, that “extremist hate organizations” were “inciting chaos” at contentious school board meetings.
And then the kicker: This activity “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
In a matter of days, Attorney General Merrick Garland snapped to attention and sent out a memorandum promising the FBI would hold meetings with school officials nationwide to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”Is public education getting too woke?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
This quickly soured on both ends — particularly the NSBA’s assertion that parent activists were involved in “domestic terrorism.” Things got worse on Thursday when the Washington Free Beacon reported that emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show the NSBA’s president and CEO collaborated with the White House before the letter was sent — and that it was released without the approval of the NSBA’s board.
“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the letter stated.
“We apologize also for the strain and stress this situation has caused you and your organizations.”
Breaking: In the wake of yesterday’s @FreeBeacon report, National School Board Association announces “we regret and apologize for the letter” to Biden admin characterizing concerned parents as potentially domestic terrorists pic.twitter.com/3RBufvWqAN
“As we’ve reiterated since the letter was sent, we deeply value not only the work of local school boards that make important contributions within our communities, but also the voices of parents, who should and must continue to be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety,” the letter continued.
And, of course, what belated apology would be complete without this line?: “We are going to do better going forward.”
“Doing better” is apparently defined as “a formal review of our processes and procedures,” as well as “specific improvements” regarding “coordination and consultation among our staff, and our members across the country.”
This will apparently stop the NSBA from implying parents who love their children are engaged in “domestic terrorism.” It’s also worth noting that the memorandum does not address the specific inflammatory language and positions of the group’s Sept. 29 letter to the White House, nor does it discuss the prior coordination with the White House.
Also unaddressed is the questions Garland faced over the letter — and the Department of Justice’s subsequent memorandum, issued just days after the NSBA’s missive — during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week.
“Three weeks ago, the National School Board Association writes President Biden asking him to involve the FBI in local school board matters. Five days later, the attorney general of the United States does just that, does exactly what a political organization asks to be done,” Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said.
“Republicans on this committee have sent the attorney general 13 letters in the last six months,” he added. “Eight of the letters, we’ve got nothing — they just gave us the finger.” Other letters took weeks to merit a response, Jordan said. But it was merely days before Garland promised the NSBA “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting.”
“A snitch line on parents started five days after a left-wing political organization asked for it,” Jordan said. “If that’s not political, I don’t know what is.
BREAKING: Ohio Rep. @Jim_Jordan let loose on Attorney General Merrick Garland at Thursday’s hearing: “Folks all around the country, they tell me, for the first time they are afraid of their government” pic.twitter.com/9aWjNCnohU
None of this was mentioned in the NSBA’s apology. Just a sanitized “mistakes were made“-ish retraction of an inflammatory letter which, by all appearances, spurred the Department of Justice and the FBI to treat American parents as if they were domestic terrorist threats for caring about their children’s education.
It certainly took long enough. And after all that, the apology was neither public nor specific. Meanwhile, it appears the FBI still remains mobilized against the chimerical threat the NSBA railed against.
President Joe Biden has just been hit with impeachment paper and, in the charges, he has been accused of “treason.”
The Articles of Impeachment were introduced on Friday by Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“I have introduced House Res. 57, these are Articles of Impeachment on President Biden,” the representative said. “For abuse of power in regards to his willingness to use his position of power to aid his son Hunter Biden in his business dealings.”
“I have also introduced another Article of Impeachment on President Biden, which is H. Res 597,” she said. “This has to do with the national security crisis that President Biden has created with regards to the extreme threat at the southern border.”
“I have introduced House Res. 598, Articles of Impeachment on President Biden in regards to the failure in Afghanistan,” the firebrand representative said. “And I have introduced House Res. 596, Articles of Impeachment on President Biden for the Covid eviction moratorium and his willingness to use his position to try to do what he shouldn’t be doing. We have three branches of power.”
“Joe Biden swore an oath, he said ‘I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States and I will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States’ and he is failing to uphold his oath,” she said.
“Joe Biden is failing the American people by refusing to uphold the law and the Constitution,” the representative said. “But Afghanistan is where it really hurt. You see, Article III, Section 3, Joe Biden could be guilty of treason.”
“Our law says that levying war against the U.S., adhering to the enemies of the U.S., and giving ‘aid and comfort’ is treason,” she said. “President Biden did that by arming the Taliban with our taxpayer-funded U.S. equipment and weapons. He abandoned Americans in Afghanistan and seems to have no interest in getting them back.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I have introduced House Res. 57. These are articles of impeachment on President Joe Biden for abuse of power in regards to his willingness to use his position of power to aid his son Hunter Biden.” pic.twitter.com/KXQPAg3ayQ
In a House of Representatives controlled by Democrats and led by House Speaker and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the impeachment is not likely to go anywhere.
It is not the first time Articles of Impeachment were filed against Biden, as another Republican representative filed them for the crisis at the United States and Mexico Border in September.
Ohio Republican Rep. Bob Gibbs introduced articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden on Tuesday, citing his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border situation, attempt to expand the federal moratorium on evictions, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
Republican Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Brian Babin and Randy Weber of Texas signed on as co-sponsors of the impeachment resolution.
“I take this seriously. I don’t think it’s haphazard. I’m not trying to get media attention for myself,” Gibbs told the Washington Examiner. “He’s done so much damage to this country in less than nine months, which is really scary.
“He’s not capable of being commander in chief, and that’s obvious by the actions since Day One when he took the presidency back in January,” Gibbs added. “Maybe something like this makes the White House think twice before they do some of this nonsense.”
Gibbs said that he and his colleagues began working on the articles of impeachment even before Biden’s rushed, manic, deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“We actually started working before the Afghanistan debacle because I was so upset” about what is going on along the border, as well as the president ignoring the Supreme Court’s opposition to extending an eviction moratorium.
“Obviously, it’s not going to go anywhere with Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi,” Gibbs said, acknowledging the political reality that Democrats currently are in the majority in the House and Senate. Nevertheless, “it shows that there are some Republicans that think that this president needs to be impeached, he needs to be removed from office one way or another,” he added.
“At some point, they’re gonna be held accountable for their actions, and this is kind of putting them on notice,” Gibbs said.
Not long before the pandemic, the Irish state television, RTE, contacted me to ask whether I was prepared to speak about a different kind of epidemic, that of gender dysphoria and sex-change. I was reluctant to do so because the subject, though undoubtedly socially important and very topical, was not one that interested me particularly. In fact, I tended to avert my mind from it.
The people from the RTE persuaded me that it was my public duty to appear on the programme that they were making. They had found many professors of paediatrics, medicine, psychiatry, and psychology who did not think that the Trans Movement was a force for good, to put it mildly, but none was willing to speak out in public against it. They did not want to ruin their own careers or be the object of mass obloquy: the thirst for martyrdom is not common.
I recognized that my reluctance was tinged with fear (and therefore also with cowardice). It was with trepidation that I agreed, and I was reasonably circumspect in what I said in front of the camera.
If you wanted to understand the sudden increase in the phenomenon, I said, you were better off studying the history of fashion—Chanel, say, or Balenciaga—than anything else.
There were fashions in psychiatric conditions that come and go. Hysterical paralyses of limbs were once very common but are now rare (though they still did occur).
In the 1990s, multiple personalities were fashionable, so much so that the fifth edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” of the American Psychiatric Association quoted a survey suggesting that multiple personality affected up to 1.5 per cent of the population—a figure I found intrinsically absurd. As the Duke of Wellington said to the man who approached him and said “Mr Jones, I believe?”, “If you can believe that you can believe anything.”
The point is that patterns of behavior to which psychiatric labels are fixed wax and wane over time. I expected that the present craze would eventually evaporate—though it would probably be replaced by another.
I have no idea whether or not my contribution was used (I have sometimes given lengthy interviews only to find that they were not broadcast, or cut to ten seconds), but the most important or significant question about the whole episode, however, was not whether I was right or wrong in my characterization and prognosis of the Trans Movement, but the state of fear that the RTE people had described, which led to them scraping the barrel to find someone, in this case me, to say something even mildly critical of the movement. What they described, in effect, was the development of a totalitarian atmosphere in intellectual life.
Of course, we should not exaggerate. We do not yet fear the midnight knock on the door, and no one (as far as I know) has been killed for expressing unorthodox ideas on this subject.
People nevertheless fear for their careers and even their livelihoods. Followers of movements like the Trans Movement have no hesitation in calling for the dismissal of people who attract their wrath by disagreeing publicly with them. So-called transphobia is not irrational fear of people who want to change their sex, but fear of retribution by the movement that makes such people their cause (who may not be the same people).
Trans-sexualism is not the only subject on which it is now dangerous for one’s career or livelihood to express ideas that dissent from the current “progressive” moral orthodoxy. This explains the view of the journalist, Douglas Murray, that only those with no institutional affiliation, private or public, who are able independently to earn their livings, can now speak their minds on many subjects.
There are several asymmetrical wars currently going on in the intellectual sphere. On the one side are guerrilla monomaniacs with a cause, for whom the subject of their monomania is all-important, and the promotion of which is the meaning of their lives; on the other, normal people for whom that particular subject is merely one thing among many others.
In this situation, the monomaniacs have the advantage of fanaticism. Like Batista’s army in Cuba, normal people melt away in the face of fanatical attack, because they do not care enough, or are not prescient enough, to defend their position—though they may later come to regret not having done so.
What is particularly alarming about the totalitarian temper that is developing in western society is that it does not originate from the government but is a genuine expression of the thirst for power of a portion of the population, that part of it—the intelligentsia—that seemingly would have most to lose if the drive to totalitarianism were successful.
Individuals may have discovered to their cost that even merely intellectual revolutions tend to devour their young, today’s radicals often becoming tomorrow’s reactionaries hated in the eyes of a new generation of radicals that is ever on the lookout for new worlds to destroy, but young radicals never think that they will grow old: they always think that theirs is the last word in truth and justice.
Tolerance—a word that in the mouth of such radicals comes to mean the forced or coerced approval of what was formerly transgressive—is not natural to mankind. It is far more natural to want to suppress what one finds disgusting or does not want to hear. Our instinct is to turn away from views that are not our own, from evidence that might undermine our most cherished opinions, and even to dislike those who cite such evidence.
In other words, tolerance is an intellectual and moral achievement, an act of self-control rather than the expression of an instinct. No doubt some people by temperament find such self-control easier than others (I don’t find it easy myself), but there is a dictator lurking in many, perhaps most, of us, at least in those of us who take an interest in public affairs.
Suffice it to say that we are not living in a golden age of the kind of self-control necessary for a tolerant society in which diversity of opinion is taken in good spirit. And the so-called social media, which allow us to pour out our bile incontinently the moment we feel the inclination to do so, only compounds the problem.
When we were kids, our parents had to watch out to make sure we weren’t exposed to filth on television. Now, apparently, television has to ensure our parents aren’t exposed to the filth their kids are seeing in school.
That’s at least the situation in Virginia — ground zero for educational unpleasantness at the moment, where progressive educators are aghast that parents apparently think they have some say in what their kids are exposed to at school, no matter how objectionable or dissipated it might be.
The educators have an ally in Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate this year and a former governor of the Old Dominion. During his time as governor, McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have allowed parents to remove sexually explicit books from Virginia schools.
During the final gubernatorial debate last month with Republican Glenn Youngkin, McAuliffe vigorously defended his policies on education.
“I’m not gonna let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions,” McAuliffe told Youngkin. “I stopped the bill that I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Terry McAuliffe: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” pic.twitter.com/rs6pSWZw79
Most of the coverage regarding McAuliffe’s remark during the debate centered on the battles surrounding curricula that include elements of critical race theory, a controversial far-left school of thought that argues both the United States and Western civilization were founded on systemic racism.
That’s a rabbit hole for another day, but there’s a creepier side to McAuliffe’s remark, given another front in Virginia’s education battles: Pornographic materials that are either part of the curriculum or available to children.
Do parents deserve a greater voice in their kids’ education?
Take the book “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe. As a recent ad from conservative group Independent Women’s Voice noted, the material in the book is so graphic that “TV rules say adults can’t see this, but VA schools think it’s fine for kids.”
The scene from the graphic novel shows a character, who is apparently a girl who identifies as a boy, in a library exchanging sexual texts with someone. The text had to be redacted and the images blurred because even TV — home to “The Jerry Springer Show,” “Jersey Shore,” “The Real Housewives of [Insert City Here]” and “My Mother the Car” — still has some standards. An unexpurgated version of the ad is available IWV website — and, if you must know, the conversation revolves around a sex toy and several sex acts.
“This is the most turned on I’ve been in my life. I am DYING,” the girl says.
On the next page, one of the aforementioned sex acts is demonstrated — and needed to be blurred out, natch. Apparently, the girl doesn’t like it, saying that it “was MUCH HOTTER when it was only in my imagination.”
“Let’s try something else,” she says, to which her lover says, “Of course.”
This is all deliberately vague because, well, you’re not reading Teen Vogue. The ad — including the uncensored version — can be seen here. Be forewarned: You’ll likely wish this all remained vague.
However, it’s important because, when he was governor, McAuliffe vetoed a 2016 bill that would have allowed parents to block their children from accessing or being taught sexually explicit material.
“McAuliffe (D) said a state law is ‘unnecessary’ because the Virginia Board of Education is considering changing state policy to accommodate parents’ concerns,” The Washington Post reported at the time.
“School boards are best positioned to ensure that our students are exposed to those appropriate literary and artistic works that will expand students’ horizons and enrich their learning experiences,” McAuliffe said at the time.
This includes “Gender Queer,” which was one of two books a Virginia mom was able to check out of her kids’ high school in Fairfax, Virginia. She went viral after she confronted the school board about the availability of the material.
“Both of these books include pedophilia,” Stacy Langton told the board, according to a Fox News from Sept. 24. “Sex between men and boys … One book describes a fourth-grade boy performing oral sex on an adult male. The other book has detailed illustrations of a man having sex with a boy.”
When she began reading from the books, one of the school board members interrupted her with this immortal line: “There are children in the audience here.” I’d recommend laughing at the irony as opposed to crying over the rank depravity, if only because the latter is unbecoming.
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
So apparently, that “changing state policy to accommodate parents’ concerns” part turned out swimmingly in the intervening five years.
And now, the Democrats are looking to elect a man who says, “I’m not gonna let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.” This, presumably, includes “Gender Queer.”
This is why it would behoove parents to elect candidates who allow them to make the decision to take porn out of their child’s library.
According to the FCC, “Federal law prohibits obscene, indecent and profane content from being broadcast on the radio or TV.” The FCC acknowledges that what constitutes “obscene,” “indecent” or “profane” is subjective, but even in 2021, there are few sane adults who would argue that the scene depicted in the Kobabe work doesn’t fill the bill — and then some.
If they can’t show it on TV, schools shouldn’t be showing it to kids, either.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is demanding answers from Dr. Anthony Fauci after a government watchdog group accused the agency he directs of funding unnecessarily cruel medical research that used beagle puppies.
The White Coat Waste Project, an organization that advocates against both government waste and medical testing on animals, had accused the Fauci and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of appropriating taxpayer funds that were reportedly used to administer experiments on dogs in laboratories in Tunisia and elsewhere.
Fauci’s NIAD is part of the National Institutes of Health.
In a blog post on its website Oct. 12, the White Coast Waste Project shared what it said were documents that proved Fauci and his agency used taxpayer funds for research that included infecting dozens of puppies with parasites. The White Coat Waste Project said that similar testing had occurred three times previously, and that it had obtained that information through the Freedom of Information Act.
“This time, [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] spent $1.68 million of taxpayer money to poison and ‘de-bark’ 44 beagle puppies,” the group wrote. “Fauci’s taxpayer-funded white coats injected and force-fed the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them.”
“These dogs were subject to some of the cruelest treatment imaginable. In a procedure called a ‘cordectomy,’ sometimes called ‘de-barking,’ the puppies’ vocal cords were slashed,” the blog post stated.
The White Coat Waste Project added that in 2016, similar experiments were conducted on puppies at a lab in Bethesda, Maryland, where “infectious sand flies were strapped to beagles, and fed on them for 22 months.”
“The dogs developed infectious lesions, before Fauci’s staff killed and dissected them,” the post stated.
The letter further stated that the testing on beagles was unnecessary, because the drug in question had already been “extensively tested and confirmed…in different animal models such as mice…Mongolian gerbils…and rhesus macaques….”
Do you think Dr. Anthony Fauci will be fired?
A letter authored by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and signed by 24 members of the House of Representatives, Republican and Democrat, called on Fauci to answer questions about any such testing that has occurred since 2018, The Hill reported Friday.
“We write with grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on canine commissioned by Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Illnesses,” stated the letter, which cited the White Coat Waste Project and media coverage surrounding its claims.
In inquiring of Fauci’s agency’s alleged use the $1.68 to kill 44 beagles, the letter stated the animals were each “between six and eight months old.”
“The commissioned tests involved injecting and force-feeding the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them,” the letter stated. “Of explicit concern is the truth that the bill to NIAID included a line merchandise for ‘cordectomy.’”
“As you’re doubtless conscious, a cordectomy, also referred to as ‘devocalization,’ entails slitting a canine’s vocal cords with the intention to forestall them from barking, howling, or crying,” the letter also stated.
“This cruel procedure — which is opposed with rare exceptions by the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Animal Hospital Association and others — seems to have been performed so that experimenters would not have to listen to the pained cries of the beagle puppies. This is a reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.”
The lawmakers concluded that they want answers over how many tests were conducted on exactly how many dogs. Additionally, they asked for clarity of how much money was spent.
The letter also demanded to know if any dogs which were used for experiments were ever made available for adoption and asked about the medical necessity for such testing. The letter further reminded its recipients that the Food and Drug Administration does not require new drugs to be tested on dogs.
“We look forward to your prompt and thorough response,” the letter concluded.
The letter, dated Thursday, was written as the NIH admitted that taxpayer dollars were used to fund gain of function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Wednesday, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak confirmed the funding in a letter to GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky.
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July 28th NIH says “no NIAID funding was approved for Gain of Function research at the WIV.”
Obviously, they were lied to.
NIH confirmed today EcoHealth and the WIV conducted GOF research on bat coronaviruses. @PeterDaszak with EcoHealth hid it from the USG. pic.twitter.com/Ou3ZLKto0L
— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) October 20, 2021
Fauci had previously denied that U.S. taxpayer funds were used for such research.
There are two ways to be subjected to the preposterous awkwardness of elementary sex education: sitting through it and then sitting through the school meetings at which it’s discussed.
I’ve managed to experience both. Between fifth and 12th grades, I wasted hours of my life watching laughable videos on human sexuality and listening to teachers preach the gospel of permissiveness: As long as it was consensual and legal, it was OK and you were perfectly fine. Seriously. Don’t judge and don’t consider yourself judged, either by your parents or by any higher power. You’re doing great, really.
Then, for a brief period in high school, I attended some of the meetings where this curriculum was discussed. Parents, you may not be surprised to learn, weren’t thrilled about this. On perhaps the most sensitive topic a parent has to deal with, liberal value judgments were being imparted by educators who decided they got to act in the place of parents because kids might not otherwise get this message at home. This being the pre-YouTube days, things didn’t get performatively shouty, but the mood was tense — for good reason.
Those were different times, though, and the permissiveness being discussed — the mechanics of the coital act, how to get birth control, homosexuality — seems positively quaint nowadays, at least by the standards of the school that podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly sends her kids to. There, 8-year-old boys get to discuss taking puberty blockers, getting castrated and becoming women.
On Wednesday’s show, Kelly had middle school teacher Ramona Bessinger on. The Providence, Rhode Island, teacher was suspended earlier this month over an alleged lapse in safety protocol on her part, according to Legal Insurrection.
However, given the fact Bessinger has been an ardent critic of critical race theory and other left-wing pedagogy in Providence’s curriculum, this seemed like little more than a flimsy pretext to remove a fly in the ointment.
During her interview with Kelly, Bessinger said Providence had gotten caught up in “this whole push to embrace any child who wants to be pansexual, transsexual, multisexual, who the heck knows?”
Do children need to be taught this in sex education programs?
“As a teacher, I’m not interested in talking to children about their sexual preference, especially at the age of 12,” Bessinger said, adding she felt the school was encouraging impressionable children to take on identities they wouldn’t otherwise consider.
“Developmentally, middle school children want to fit in — more so than probably elementary or secondary” school children, Bessinger said.
“And so they’re preying on that psychological phase that kids go through. They want to fit in, and if they feel it’s going to please an adult, they may even pick a pronoun so that that adult applauds them.”
If you think things are bad in Providence, though, wait until you hear what’s apparently happening in Kelly’s kids’ school — which she said “was one of the top all-boys schools … one of the top schools in the country” and which she chose “because it was … more traditional, it wasn’t this far left.”
Kelly said her third-graders were subjected to an “experimental transgender education program,” which they found out about after she and her husband “went to parent-teacher night.”
“And we were sitting there, and one of our fellow parents — a man — raised his hand and said, ‘Why did my son come home’ — these are third-graders, 8- and 9-year-olds — ‘my son come home and ask if it’s true that he can take a pill to prevent puberty, and then, when he turns 18, can have his penis chopped off if he wants to become a woman?’”
“We were all like, ‘What? Say what?’” Kelly said.
“Trust me, we were angry, and the teacher acknowledged it. She didn’t deny it. She said, ‘Because we take the conversation where the boys want to take it’ — and of course, we were like, that’s bull, no 8-year-old was asking that question.”
Kelly added that discussing these topics with children just hopelessly confuses them — and she’s right. Are we to be shocked, though? That’s not a bug in the system. It’s a feature.
We live in the era of Drag Queen Story Time. In Washington state, an elementary school featured a book for LGBT pride month this year in which an underage character who received “top surgery” — the removal of breast tissue from women who identify as men to appear more masculine — appeared on the cover.
And if your public school district doesn’t play along, expect to pay. In a back-to-school message in August, the Biden administration’s Kristen Clarke, the Department of Justice’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, told transgender students they could file a lawsuit if their school was (among other things) stopping them from “receiving the supportive and life-saving care you may need.”
Talking to 8-year-olds about castration is supposedly part of the new awkwardness students and parents have to navigate, all thanks to educators with an agenda who think their values are better than yours — and want to make a mark on impressionable children. If you don’t believe the slippery slope is real, wake up.
The worst of the pandemic is behind us. Let’s rejoice. Some parts of the world, we’re told, are slowly returning to normal.
Although we can debate the meaning of the word ‘normal,’ for the sake of this piece, let’s define it as the time before COVID-19 brought the world to a screeching halt.
Rather worryingly, though, millions of people simply don’t want to give up the idea of mandatory masking and compulsory vaccinations. In fact, it seems many want us to wear masks forever. The question, though, is why? Why would anyone want to live in such an environment, especially if there’s absolutely no need to live this way?
In the United Kingdom, according to the most recent Ipsos MORI poll, a “strong majority” (64 percent) of people would like to see face masks “continue to be compulsory in shops and on public transport” until COVID-19 “is under control worldwide.” Meanwhile, 40 percent are in favor of face masks “being worn in shops and on public transport permanently, regardless of the virus itself.”
More than one-third (35 percent) of respondents are in favor of permanent 10-day quarantines. Almost half (46 percent) of those polled are in support of vaccine passports “becoming a permanent necessity.” A worrying 34 percent support mandatory social distancing measures for life. A staggering 56 percent support the use of contact tracing apps until the virus is under control worldwide, while 36 percent are in favor of permanent contact tracing. A quarter of those polled are in favor of closing nightclubs, pubs, and casinos for good. One in five support a mandatory curfew of 10 p.m.—again, for life.
It’s important to note that Ipsos MORI “interviewed a representative sample of 1,025 British adults aged 16 to 75.” Such subsets tend to accurately reflect the characteristics of a larger group—in this case, the British people.
The findings are both alarming and perplexing. Why are so many British people prepared to live in such a way? More importantly, why do they want others to live in such a manner?
The “until the virus is under control worldwide” point is an interesting one, not to mention a deceptive one. The virus might never go away, meaning there’s a high chance that it will never be “under control,” whatever “under control” actually means. The pursuit of ‘zero COVID,’ as we have seen in Australia and New Zealand, is a fool’s game, not to mention a dangerous one.
People wear face masks to curb the spread of COVID-19 during the morning rush hour at Waterloo train station in London on July 14, 2021. (Matt Dunham/AP Photo)
Across the pond, in the United States, plenty of alarmists can also be found. Earlier this year, in a piece for New York magazine, Eve Peyser interviewed a number of “forever maskers.” These people, as you can probably tell, believe not just in the efficacy of masking-up, but in the necessity of masking-up for life. To live without a mask, they argue, is to flirt with death. Throughout the article, the neuroticism is palpable. According to the author, a “common thread among these forever maskers” is “genuine worry” about infecting other people.
Although those interviewed appear to have full faith in their convictions, a number of studies have questioned the efficacy of both surgical and cloth masks. When it comes to preventing the spread of harmful viruses, including COVID-19, they appear to be of little use. In April of last year, the World Health Organization released a statement that discouraged healthy people from wearing masks. Unsupported “by current evidence,” wearing masks “carries uncertainties and critical risks,” the statement reads.
In the New York magazine piece, Lina Perl, a licensed clinical psychologist, warned that the pandemic has resulted in a sort of widespread “anxiety disorder.” Although wearing masks is no longer a medical necessity, this “safety behavior” has become an integral part of many Americans’ lives. This is very dangerous. In Perl’s own words, one “can get disconnected from the actual danger” very quickly. She’s right.
Like masochism, where people derive joy from painful or tedious activities, we are witnessing a new type of “–ism.” I call it “maskochism.” Today, millions of people around the world derive a sort of perverse pleasure from wearing masks, even if there’s absolutely no need to wear them, and even if they do more harm than good.
In the UK and the United States, people’s desire to mask up indefinitely, I contend, is symptomatic of a deeper pathology. We are very much products of our culture. The cultural milieu in which we find ourselves dictates our mindset. As I have discussed before, a culture of fear now dominates. Because of this, many are afraid to embrace freedom. In the words of the author Heather Marsh, “we are in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us.”
A submissive culture is a dangerous one.
According to a very recent Axios-Ipsos survey, 10 percent of Americans believe our lives will never return to normal. Now, imagine for a second that this 10 percent is representative of the American population at large. That’s a lot of people. A sizable number of these people probably occupy positions of importance and influence, including teaching and politics. Perhaps they are involved in policy decisions. They probably have kids. Are these kids being raised in an environment where irrational fears reign supreme? How will this affect their development?
Rather disturbingly, far too many people refuse to accept the fact that things are improving. Progressophobia is very real; it’s also very dangerous.
He doesn’t sound very good…and no, I’m not talking about how he can hardly string a sentence together and looks like a gray, sickly old man…It’s his new cough…it sounds pretty bad.
And he coughed an awful lot while he was in California yesterday.
Has old Bumbling Joe been tested for COVID lately?
Western Journal reported that California Gov. Gavin Newsom has choked his way through his first term in office, and on Monday, President Joe Biden coughed his way through remarks rallying against Newsom’s recall in the Golden State.
Is there anything more symbolic than that of the state of the Democratic Party both nationally and in California?
Biden spoke for roughly 15 minutes in Long Beach on Monday, KTTV reported. As is the standard for Biden, the speech was neither inspiring nor even very coherent. What stood out most were the repeated coughing interruptions.
You can watch the videos below:
“We need science, we need courage, we need leadership”: President Biden calls out “hypocrisy” of Republican governors on vaccine mandates pic.twitter.com/Vwe0FjnbEo
Whoops! Looks like the broadcast started earlier than they thought….
There’s been a lot of questions, suspicion, and controversy surrounding the COVID pandemic.
Now, before I get too deep into this, I want to make it clear that I believe COVID is 100 percent real. I’ve actually had it. Twice.
And if I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d tell you that the virus was used as a biological weapon in order to win an election and reset the entire world back to its “globalist” status, but I’m not, so I won’t tell you that.
But what I will tell you is that I believe the virus has been politicized in a big way by our dear leaders. I believe that it’s used to push an agenda and assert a great deal of power and dependence over the citizens of the world.
And I don’t think the “fact-checkers” would call that a “conspiracy theory,” because there’s proof of that everywhere we turn. Just look at what’s happening in Australia. That country has turned into the Hunger Games over a virus with a 99.8 survival rate.
The average death age for COVID is like 85-years-old. The “Died FROM” and “Died WITH” numbers are wildly different and yet, we don’t talk about that. Natural immunity matters, but we’re not allowed to talk about that either. And forget discussing therapeutics, we can’t mention those, we can only talk about the vax, and you can’t speak ill of the vax – only “good things” allowed.
Nothing weird about that, right?
And all the while, the people who are telling us to be afraid, don’t seem the least bit worried for themselves.
The political and social elites are having the time of their lives, while the “peasants” are told to wear masks, stay 6-feet apart, and don’t attend events or go to church and sing.
The unvaccinated are berated and treated like lepers, even as the vaccinated “breakthrough” cases surge in many states.
And what about natural immunity?
We can’t talk about any of that, either.
Unvaccinated people are told that the vaccine won’t work unless we’re vaccinated – a statement that is so bizarre, most people can’t even wrap their heads around it.
“My diet doesn’t work because YOU keep overeating.”
We’ve watched as mask-free Obama and the elites at the Met Gala have the time of their lives while the “help” is masked up.
What about the Delta variant and all the vaxed people getting sick?
We’ve seen political elites order their citizens to lockdown while they’re off on some fabulous Barbados vacation.
We’re masking children in schools, but there’s no science to prove that’s helpful – but we can’t talk about that.
And we’ve watched time and time again as elites only put on masks for the benefit of the camera – and that’s exactly what’s happened yet again.
A group of French politicians rushed to quickly put their maks on when they realize that live cameras were rolling.
Prior to that, they didn’t seem to have a care in the world…are we allowed to talk about that?
You can watch the video below:
What happens when the live TV broadcasting of politicians calling for the continuation of mask mandates starts earlier than expected… pic.twitter.com/XZIU2MWdFL
— Vallachian Rex – Infected with the F.U. variant (@VallachianR) September 14, 2021
Here are some of the comments from people online:
“How many videos like this do people need to see before they understand that this was never about anything but controlling you?”
“This is literally like The Truman Show lol”
“I said this a long time ago. Unreal that people still don’t believe we are being played”
“How do people not see this? Do people see a video like this and truly not see the theater going on? Its not a small deal. Its total bs and a massive, dividing issue in our country”
“It’s all theatre and people still believe this crap”
“…then the same politicians send the cops to beat and arrest people who don’t wear masks in the stores and on the streets.”
It’s things like this, and more that keep happening over and over and over since this pandemic started that make people feel very suspicious and leery, and honestly, how can you blame them?
“Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” White Coat Waste said.
Story at a glance:
A bipartisan letter demands answers from the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief medical adviser.
House members, most of whom are Republicans, want Fauci to explain himself in response to allegations brought on by the White Coat Waste Project that involve drugging puppies.
Allegedly, 44 beagle puppies were used in a North Africa laboratory, and some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed so scientists could work without incessant barking.
A bipartisan letter demands answers from the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief medical adviser.
The White Coat Waste Project, the nonprofit organization that first pointed out that U.S. taxpayers were being used to fund the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology, have now turned its sights on Anthony Fauci on another animal-testing-related matter — infecting dozens of beagles with disease-causing parasites to test an experimental drug on them.
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House members, most of whom are Republicans, want Fauci to explain himself in response to allegations brought on by the White Coat Waste Project that involve drugging puppies.
According to the White Coat Waste Project, the Food and Drug Administration does not require drugs to be tested on dogs, so the group is asking why the need for such testing.
White Coat Waste claims that 44 beagle puppies were used in a Tunisia, North Africa, laboratory, and some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed, allegedly so scientists could work without incessant barking.
Leading the effort is Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), writing a letter to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) saying the cordectomies are “cruel” and a “reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.”
“Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” White Coat Waste told Changing America. “They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies.”
Mace’s letter was signed by Reps. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa), Cliff Bentz (R-Ore.), Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Scott Franklin (R-Fla.), Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Fred Keller (R-Pa.), Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), Brian Mast (R-Fla.), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.), Maria E. Salazar (R-Fla.), Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.)
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Changing America.
Limited government does not mean no government.Posted by Fuzzy Slippers Friday, October 22, 2021 at 09:00am 22 Comments
Back in 2001, Obama infamously noted that the United States Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties” that details “what the states can’t do to you, what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
On this point, he is essentially right. The Constitution is designed to limit the degree to which the federal (and to a lesser degree, state) government can meddle in our lives. The Bill of Rights is a key example of this, detailing what the government cannot do—what it is not at liberty to do—to the American people.
This is right and just. The government should not be meddling in our God-given rights to freedom of speech and assembly, to keep and bear arms, to freely exercise our religion, and etc.
Obama was also correct in noting that the Constitution does not state what the government “must do on your behalf” beyond that detailed in the Constitution concerning the role and purview of each branch of government. He, of course, sees this as a flaw, but it’s a feature.
Indeed, it is arguably the single factor that makes our Constitution the best ever written in terms of establishing the government of a free people. By limiting the role of government, our Founders established that we, the people, are intended to have historically unprecedented freedom to make our decisions and to be able to live our lives free of endless and ever-growing government interference.
So what is the role of the states in all of this? What if the federal government tramples the rights of a free people by requiring a WuFlu vaccination that some people have determined they neither want nor need? Where is the recourse when the federal government itself steps beyond its Constitutional scope to force a private business to do its bidding?
It is through this lens that I consider the decision of Republican governors and legislatures to ban mask and/or vaccination mandates by companies in their states. Joe “I am the Democratic Party” Biden announced a WuFlu vaccine mandate on businesses with 100 or more employees. While this mandate has thus far not actually manifested (though the rule is expected to drop . . . at some point), the mandate on private businesses is an overreach. It falls into the category of Obama’s “what the government must do on your behalf” and, as such, is anathema to Constitutional conservatives.
The federal government, under the false premise of protecting public health, is forcing companies to force Americans to choose between their jobs and their God-given right to self-determination. At this point, these companies are not acting as private entities but as government agents acting not as they wish but as extensions of the federal government.
The federal government cannot mandate that every American get vaccinated, so this is the next best thing: an end-run around the Constitution.
Large parts of the RW commentariat are mentally incapable of grasping that when the Federal government orders private companies to act in certain ways, without there being a law passed or so much as a single regulation promulgated, this isn’t “voluntary private corporate action”. https://t.co/M3ARKb4Iyz
The Houston Chronicle editorial board published a sophomoric and moronic piece claiming that governors banning federal mandates are themselves guilty of mandates. In this twisted view, Texas governor Greg Abbott’s move to protect the American people from livelihood-destroying government overreach is itself government overreach (archive link).
The governor’s order conflicts with a soon-to-be-enacted federal regulation that will require businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure they’re either vaccinated or tested weekly. Butting up against President Joe Biden is precisely the point.
“In yet another instance of federal overreach, the Biden administration is now bullying many private entities into imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates,” Abbott wrote in the order.
Abbott’s anti-mandate mandate also conflicts with the classic conservative tradition in this state and elsewhere of the primacy of local control. Since Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton have ruled the Capitol roost, such rank hypocrisy is par for the course. Still, it’s one thing when the governor ignores local control over the use of plastic bags, cutting down trees or restricting fracking within the city limits; it’s another when thousands of lives are at stake in a global pandemic.
Well, no, there is no conflict “with the classic conservative tradition in this state and elsewhere of the primacy of local control.” Not only is the Constitution silent on the issue of “local control” of a person’s God-given rights, but the Constitution gives all authority not specifically assigned to the federal government to the states and to the people.
Abbott, as the duly-elected governor of Texas, is the exact Constitutionally-appointed person intended to step in to protect the rights of his state’s citizens. If the people choose to be vaccinated, that’s their choice. A federal government ultimatum—get this series of shots with untold numbers of “boosters” for the foreseeable future or lose your job—is the exact time that a governor not only can but must step in to stop the tyranny.
Furthermore, even companies and businesses that are imposing these vaccine mandates on their own, not under threat of the full force and power of the federal government, are depriving Americans of their liberty to make their own decisions and should therefore be constrained from doing so by the state government.
Doing so is in the very spirit of the Constitution, as a “charter of negative liberties.” No, the federal government should not be able to coerce or force you to take a vaccine you may not need upon threat of unemployment, and no, a private business should not be able to coerce or force you to do so, either. The very idea is anti-Constitutional conservative.
Constitutional conservatives—unlike, say, libertarians—are very much pro-government, as long as it’s the republic established in our Constitution. We recognize that there are some things that the government must do to protect the nation and her people.
That is why, as an example, Constitutional conservatives are perfectly fine with government bans on private companies engaging in the coerced or forced hysterectomies of its female employees. That is why we support minimal regulations such as those that ensure abortion mills are not literally selling baby parts for profit. Limited government, in other words, does not mean no government.
The state government should absolutely intervene to protect the liberty of we, the people. If a tobacco company mandated that all employees become addicted to cigarette smoking, this would be unacceptable and a good place for government intervention. If any company mandated abortions for all female employees or that all employees submit to plastic surgery or foot-binding, we would be, justly, outraged and demand legislative action to stop it.
Companies cannot just do whatever they like, and they certainly should not be free to coerce or force their employees to take one of or a mix of the WuFlu vaccine buffet items. Not only are the various vaccines available problematic and concerning for most age groups without high risk factors, but scientific research and findings are being deliberately ignored and/or suppressed (regarding acquired immunity, for example).
Further, and this seems to get missed rather frequently, these Republican governors or not banning the vaccine; indeed, they are urging everyone to get it. They are merely saying that a vaccine mandate is one step too far, that threatening a person’s career and livelihood over “getting the jab” is unacceptable.
These governors are taking a stand and saying, no, the federal government cannot do this to you, nor can it compel private business to do it to you; indeed, businesses cannot ‘independently’ do this to you, they cannot strip away your rights to self-determination, they cannot bully you or coerce you to accept the injection of something you do not want (and probably don’t need) into your body in order to remain employed and able to support your family.
This Biden (and so far only pending) vaccine mandate on private businesses is a federal government one-size-fits-all “solution” to a coronavirus (reminder: the common cold is caused by a coronavirus) that is demonstrably not a one-size-affects-all virus.
As such, banning harmful and unnecessary business mandates is not only correct, but it is the responsibility and duty of elected public servants whose job it is to protect and defend our Constitution and our individual liberty.
That’s been the motto of former U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Tom West with each pound of roasted coffee he’s bagged and sold as founder and president of Operation Transition Outside the Wire.
Based in Williams, Arizona, the new nonprofit launched in August. Its main purpose is to help struggling veterans stay off the streets and move on to better things.
Selling coffee is but a means to helping veterans reach their destination, he said.
“It’s really tough. Once you’re out on the streets,” West told The Epoch Times, the challenge is to “get yourself back off the streets.”
According to endhomelessness.org, 37,252 veterans were experiencing homelessness in 2020 amid the pandemic caused by the CCP virus. Half of them were living outside of shelters, while the vast majority—more than 90 percent—were men.
Shannon Francis of Operation Transition Outside the Wire in Williams, Arizona, shows a one-pound bag of branded coffee ready to go on sale. (Allan Stein/Epoch Times)
West and his partner in the nonprofit, Shannon Francis, both have witnessed first hand the plight of homeless veterans in California, as each morning the veterans would gather outside of their coffee shop in Long Beach.
They’d be given a free cup of coffee and any other help they needed. This continued until early 2020 when the shop was forced to close due to the pandemic.
“We got rid of our coffee shop at the end of March and we got rid of everything,” West said. “The pandemic just wiped us out.”
West said he got to know many of the homeless veterans personally. It often began with a friendly: “Hey, brother. Can you spare a free cup of coffee?”
Other veterans, however, were too proud to accept the couple’s help, because “the military teaches you to be tough,” he said.
“I was 17 when I went in. We see things we shouldn’t have to. We see death. When we get back to civilian life, it’s the inverse of that. We have to figure things out for ourselves.”
Brendan Bosley, formerly of Michigan, served in the Air Force until his honorable discharge in late August, and soon he fell upon hard times. He and other local veterans receive critical support through Operation Transition Outside the Wire in Williams, Arizona, on Oct. 20. (Allan Stein/Epoch Times)
West and Francis eventually decided to leave California for Williams, Arizona, known for supporting veterans. The town’s iconic Route 66 downtown district seemed the perfect spot to launch a nonprofit like Operation Transition, he said.
The organization is currently undergoing major expansion on to a 130-acre ranch, situated on the outskirts of town.
Once it’s completed, the working ranch will host 25 large safari-style tents that will serve as homes for veterans and their families.
There will also be a coffee roasting and distribution facility located on site, a mess hall, educational labs, and a ministry setup, all nestled within a safe, structured environment.
Operation Transition currently produces around 8,000 pounds of prime roasted Guatemalan coffee—whole bean or ground—per month at the location. The organization ships to nine states.
West said the goal is to increase production to 15,000 pounds of roasted coffee per month and boost membership subscriptions to increase revenues.
All proceeds go to support transitional programs and other forms of assistance for veterans, he said.
West said each one-pound bag of coffee comes with an ornamental dog tag and logo for easy identification in participating stores. The price per bag is a $20 donation.
Right now, Operation Transition is helping three local veterans and their families move from service to civilian life.
Brendan Bosley of Owosso, Michigan, is among those receiving crucial support.
Bosley joined the Air Force in January of 2019. He served as an analyst while stationed in Alaska, he told The Epoch Times.
But when the number of analysts exceeded the demand, he found himself in a situation known as “overmand.”
With a heartfelt “Thank you for your service—see you later,” he was offered, and accepted, an honorable discharge in late August.
His situation has been dire ever since.
The 29-year-old veteran said he is almost out of money, living out of a hotel room in Williams accompanied by his fiancée, his terminally ill mother, and two children from a previous marriage.
His hope is to stabilize his situation and then look for a job.
“In my personal situation, I’ve got a lot of needs and everything is important,” Bosley said. “In my situation, I still need help.”
One day, Bosley noticed the big mural sign over the Operation Transition building that read “Freedom Is Not Free.”
Something told him to go inside.
Operation Transition Outside the Wire Founder and President Tom West, a former Marine, explains how the nonprofit produces ground coffee using the Bellwether Coffee Roaster machine on Oct. 20. (Allan Stein/Epoch Times)
There, he met West, who explained the many programs and services available for veterans.
Bosley is now getting the help he needs and is slowly putting his life back together thanks to Operation Transition.
“Coming to this town was the best thing I could have ever done. It has literally been a life-saver,” he said.
West and Francis said Operation Transition seeks to address the dual problem of veteran homeless and suicide on a personal and local level.
They see the crisis only getting worse as thousands of veterans face dishonorable discharge for refusing to comply with the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Hopefully, the government will wake up and smell the coffee, and do more to help out these men and women who have served their country, Francis said.
West said more than 27 veterans commit suicide in America every day on a battlefield of homelessness and despair.
“In the military there is a saying ‘no man left behind’ and in these days some men get left behind.”
“We are trying to prevent them from going down the wrong road. We are stepping up in the right way,” giving veterans a sense of purpose, because “having purpose is a big thing in the military.”
In the United States, a sharp rise in the number of children identifying as transgender has alarmed some parents. As these numbers rapidly grow, three mothers share the warning signs of transgender indoctrination.
The Child Transgender Numbers Explosion
A study conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics released in May 2020 showed nearly 10 percent of high school students in just one school district identified as gender-diverse. That 10 percent figure is far higher than past estimates, such as a 2017 government survey of U.S. high school students, in which only 1.8 percent said they identified as transgender. While some studies suggest the higher rate of suicide and attempted suicide among transgender children is related to non-affirmation, other research shows that the higher rate of suicide and attempted suicide among adolescents with gender dysphoria is more related to their know history of other psychiatric diagnoses and self-reported emotional and behavioral problems. While the study called The Trevor Project—widely cited by those who push the affirmation-only approach to avoid self-harm—does show that a significant number of transgender youth admit the heavy use of drugs and alcohol, the study did not explore or provide any statistics regarding the preexistence of other psychiatric diagnoses or self-reported emotional and behavioral problems among the participants.
The Social/Mental Vulnerabilities
While each of the three families in this story come from different backgrounds and live in different states, each of their newly self-identified transgender children have some things very much in common. They are all in the same age group, they are all socially awkward, and all have been diagnosed with some form of social or psychological disorder.
Vera Lindner of Los Angeles, California, told The Epoch Times “the trans bomb was dropped,” into her world a year ago when her daughter was 14 years old. Her daughter, now 15, had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and Attention Deficit Disorder. She suffers from depression, anxiety, insulin resistance, and obesity. Her daughter was also diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
Dee, of Clover, South Carolina has a 17-year-old daughter who was indoctrinated at the age of 15. Her daughter has been diagnosed with pre-adoption trauma.
A concerned mom in Augusta, Georgia, who is a single parent, spoke to The Epoch Times under the condition of anonymity using the pseudonym Mary. She said her son made his transgender announcement in November 2020. While not formally diagnosed with any specific disorder, she “had him tested when he was younger for being on the [autism] spectrum and he fell in the gray zone.”
“They could not say yes or no,” Mary added. “He has always been a bit socially awkward and quirky.”
How it Began
Another commonality is the way each child was drawn down the transgender path. It all began with online connections who introduced them to the transgender world through various social media groups.
The trans-transformation of Vera’s daughter started when she began identifying as a lesbian and started watching a lot of YouTube videos like “What do lesbians look like?” and “Who is the ‘most lesbian’ from among this line-up?” Then came the “unrequited love for a butch-lesbian girl who was the first one to self-identify as a ‘trans-boy.’”
“This individual was the ring-leader, very aggressive,” Vera explained. “Also, very tech-savvy.” The “trans-boy” set up multiple Discord groups for the group her daughter had been introduced to, with channels such as “vent,” “general,” “art,” “LGBT” and specifically, “NSFW” where they were posting male nudes and pornography for each other to watch.
According to the Urban Dictionary, “NSFW” is “internet slang” for “Not Safe For Work” or “Not Safe For Wife” and is “used for a fandom of some sort when people want to discuss and share the sexual and porno side of the fandom.”
“At the same time,” Vera added, “they all got into TikTok and Instagram and started watching trans-related content—vile, stupid narcissistic young adults posting rotten material on these platforms.”
The subject matter of these posts centered around such things as, “you are trans if you…,” “you have been playing a role of a girl all along but you are not a girl,” and posed questions like “do you feel like a girl?”
For Dee’s daughter, everything started when “a friend who had decided she was trans a year before took her down the proverbial hole and taught her what to wear” and exposed her to lesbian pornography.
Through the social media platforms Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok, her daughter watched videos about “trans-men” and “how to get testosterone.”
As with Vera’s and Dee’s daughters, Mary’s son spent hours on social media sites consuming hard-core, graphic pornography sent to him by his new, online trans peer group that evades parental controls by classifying the content “cartoons.”
The Drastic Transformation
By the time Vera’s daughter was in eighth grade she “was so hyper-fixated on LGBT that she was incapable of speaking about anything else besides LGBT” and she “cycled through orientations of lesbian, pan, queer, until finally she dropped the trans bomb shortly after turning 14.” Soon after, she “cut her hair, started wearing boys’ clothes, bought men’s underwear” and “demanded a binder.” She also wanted to get a “supplement from Amazon for increasing testosterone,” which she refused to purchase for her, and to see a “gender doctor,” which she refused to take her to.
Where Dee’s daughter had once been a “happy, seemingly well-adjusted and mature,” child who “excelled academically, she quickly became “disobedient, contentious, contemptuous and untruthful.”
Where she once appeared as a normal teen-aged girl, she now “presents as a boy wearing dark colors, hoodies, and occasionally wears a binder” and she has “Cut off her beautiful hair and tries to pass with a man bun.”
Mary said she was shocked at her son’s trans declaration as there was “no prior behavior that would indicate any of this.”
As with Vera’s daughter, Mary’s son became “obsessed with talking about trans issues.” She said “all talks revolved around it,” and “he demanded puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy.”
Mary said the transformation of her son started after he “found friends who were also declaring non-binary and transgender status and they began providing him with “their old girl clothes.” He quickly went from “cautiously” wearing a skirt to “full-on cross-dressing” and he “became noticeably irritable and rude,” a characteristic she said was “extremely out of character” for her son. During one manic episode, she said her son began screaming at her to look at him to recognize that he is “a girl now.”
“It was very disturbing and frightening,” she said.
The Fight to Reclaim Their Children
Because her daughter was “going through a mental breakdown upon dropping the trans bomb,” Vera and her husband decided not to take away her electronic devices. To mitigate the destructive influence of social media, they did purge her accounts of all transgendered contacts. They also stopped sending their daughter to her therapist, who had started “casually talking about testosterone and encouraging transition.”
Her daughter’s PCOS is being managed with meds and she has a daily regimen of light exercise. She has started tenth grade in a charter school and is making new friends. Still, the therapy that has had the most positive impact on her daughter has been volunteering on family farms.
“She adores animals,” Vera said, “so we adopted two kittens in addition to the dog we brought with us. Being around animals and kind people has helped her rebuild her self-esteem. We also go for walks daily. Her depression is much better, definitely in remission. So is the eating disorder. Here, she is connecting with real humans and hearing their real-life stories.”
For Dee—because “there’s too much being shared at high school at lunch and during breaks”—parental monitoring of her social media accounts, a summer job, increased volunteer work to get her off social media, and new social circles has had only marginal improvements on her daughter’s behavior. But she isn’t giving up.
Fearful and overwhelmed by the sudden changes in her son, the decision was made by Mary to send her son to stay with his father. During those next three weeks, she began to dig into his online history and many changes have been made. Since her son’s return from his father’s home, she has taken away his electronic devices and has three layers of parental control on his phone. She uses Circle and Bark apps to monitor the phone’s screen-time and frequently checks with her internet provider for controls they provide. Despite her efforts, she said her son still manages to find “a lot of gender-bending in obscure corners of the internet.”
“His attitude is slightly better,” she said. “I have taken him to a new therapist that is not affirming. I am not sure how much that has helped so far though. The previous therapist was terrible and made things go from bad to violent with the blind affirmation model.
Their Greatest Fears
Vera fears that her daughter will be taken by Child Protective Services because she is “not affirming,” She also fears that her daughter will be influenced by her friends to take hormones or worse, to have irrevocable surgeries. “She has made tremendous progress in healing her mental illnesses and I don’t want her to slip back,” Vera said.
Dee also fears that her daughter will “medicalize and embark on a course of surgery that will cause irreparable damage to her body.”
“And I fear she will latch onto her ‘glitter’ family and become estranged from us,” she confessed.
Mary in Georgia also fears that her son “will begin medicalization when he turns 18” and that “he will ruin his body and his life in search for happiness that is promised to him” but “will only result in his ruination mentally and physically.”
“He will become a forever patient of the pharmaceutical and medical industry and dwindle his dating pool down to nothing and he will be alone,” she grieved.
Who’s to Blame?
Although a self-described “lifelong” liberal Democrat, Vera blames former President Barack Obama “who got bought with the millionaire transvestites’ money” and the liberals “who parrot trans slogans” and “allowed this ideology to infiltrate so deeply the American society and families.”
She blames the “friends who dragged” her daughter into the trans world, and the school lockdowns that left home-bound, isolated children “hanging on their phones all day long to be immersed into this cult.”
“And I blame myself,” she confessed, “for not doing deep reading on this whole trans-thing years ago. I immersed myself only after she dropped on us the trans-bomb, unexpectedly.”
Dee also blames “the friend who dragged” her daughter into this, “and social media, which uses algorithms to shove the trans-agenda into her online world.” She also blames her daughter’s three therapists, “all of whom affirmed her and treated her like a special unicorn.”
Primarily, Mary blames the tech industry.
“They know the danger this technology poses to our mental health and the influence it has especially on young vulnerable people,” she said. “I blame them for not having stronger walls against pornography when kids can easily click an ‘over 18’ button.”
She also blames the pharmaceutical and medical industry who “blindly affirm this and push drugs and surgeries on kids” and therapists who use suicide statistics to pressure them into affirming their child’s irrational decisions yet give no thought to the idea that the child may deeply regret those choices and “take their life after the transition.”
New Paths Require Wise Feet
“To all despondent parents who just got blindsided by this,” two mothers offer some advice.
Vera: “Read as much literature as possible, both affirmative and also trans-critical. Be familiar with the propaganda and lies so you can rebuff them. Nothing substitutes for knowledge and information.”
Mary: “Cut off electronics/online activity, be vigilant about parental controls and monitoring. Be cautious and not confrontational and keep communication lines open and encourage critical thinking. Give them as much love as possible but also be firm as the parent. Get them outdoors and back in nature and into the world like through volunteering, extracurricular activities, if they’re old enough getting a job.”
Colorado health system UCHealth explained that transplant patients who contract COVID-19 have a 20 to 30% mortality rate
With hospitals in Colorado denying unvaccinated patients organ transplants, more people are looking to Texas in the hopes of getting the potentially life-saving procedures.
Colorado’s UCHealth recently told Dawn McLaughlin, a woman with polycystic kidney disease, she was being kicked off the wait list to receive a transplant because she hadn’t gotten the COVID vaccine, CBS4 reported.
And earlier this month, another Colorado woman, Leilani Lutali, despite having stage 5 kidney disease, found out her hospital won’t approve her kidney transplant surgery until she’s gotten the COVID-19 vaccine.
Leilani Lutali, foreground, and Jaimee Fougner pose for a photo, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021 in Colorado Springs, Colo. Lutali recently found out her hospital wouldn’t approve her kidney transplant surgery until she got a COVID-19 vaccine. She has stage 5 kidney disease that puts her at risk of dying without a new kidney. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
Colorado health system UCHealth explained that transplant patients who contract COVID-19 have a 20 to 30% mortality rate.
“This shows the extreme risk that COVID-19 poses to transplant recipients after their surgeries,” UCHealth told Fox News in a statement.
UCHealth said patients who have undergone an organ transplant procedure require a lifetime of specialized management to ensure the organ is not rejected, which, in extreme cases, can lead to death.
“Physicians must consider the short- and long-term health risks for patients as they consider whether to recommend an organ transplant,” UCHealth said.
It noted that other transplant hospitals have been putting similar policies in place.
Now, many Texans – including the governor himself – are saying those denied transplants will be welcome in the Lone Star state.
FILE: A health care worker fills a syringe with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, Fil)
“Here in Texas, vaccines remain voluntary and never forced,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office told Fox News in a statement. “Anyone being denied critical, life-saving organ transplants is welcome here in Texas, where one’s rights and freedoms are always protected.”
Texas State Rep. Briscoe Cain, a Republican, told Fox News he was happy that Texas hospitals have, for now at least, “chosen to put patients before politics.”
“It seems too many in the medical profession have forgotten their oaths,” Cain said.
Meanwhile, the Niklas Organ Donor Awareness Foundation, based in Grand Prairie, Texas, is offering to help people like McLaughlin and Lutali find housing while they await organ transplants in Texas.
Rodney DeBaun, vice president of the foundation, told Fox News he is personally not against the vaccine, having gotten it himself. But he believes vaccines are “a personal choice.”
“It’s not up to the government to dictate whether you do, whether you don’t (get the vaccine),” DeBaun said.
He remains unpersuaded by UCHealth’s data showing that unvaccinated patients are at higher risk of mortality if they contract COVID after an organ transplant.
“If someone’s waiting for an organ transplant, if they don’t get a transplant, they’re going to die,” DeBaun said.
DeBaun received a heart transplant in 1993 and said he is grateful for the years he was given.
“I’ve been given 28 years of life. My boys were 8 and 11 years old, and I’ve gotten to see my kids grow up. I now have grandkids,” DeBaun told Fox News. “My philosophy is that I need to earn every single day that I’ve got. So, we just try to help any way we can help.”
Fox News’ Stephanie Pagones contributed to this report.Bradford Betz is an editor for Fox News. Follow him on Twitter @bradford_betz.
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio did not allow House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler’s claim to go unchallenged that the Justice Department became a lawless, political agency due to former President Donald Trump, asking, “Are you kidding me?”
“For four years, the democratic institutions that you have sworn to protect, first as a judge, now as attorney general, were deeply undermined by the former president and his political enablers,” Nadler told Attorney General Merrick Garland prior to the top federal law enforcement officer’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
“During that time, the Trump administration leveraged the department to protect the president and his friends and to punish his enemies, both real and imagined,” the New York Democrat said.
Nadler accused Trump of summoning the nation’s law enforcement officers following November’s election and demanding “they use the full power of the federal government to install him for another term.”
The Democrat told Garland his task is “unenviable … because you must build back everything [the Department of Justice] lost under the last administration. Its self-confidence, its reputation in the eyes of the American people and an institutional respect for our Constitution and the rule of law.”
Jordan, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, responded to Nadler’s opening statement by saying, “The chairman just said the Trump DOJ was political and went after their opponents. Are you kidding me?”
First, the congressman argued that Garland is overseeing a politically driven DOJ, pointing to a memorandum the attorney general put out earlier this month regarding “threats” against school officials from parents who are concerned about what their children are being taught.
“Three weeks ago the National School Board Administration writes President Biden asking him to involve the FBI in local school board matters,” Jordan said. “Five days later, the attorney general of the United States does just that. Does exactly what a political organization asked to be done.”
Do you think the DOJ is political under Biden?
Jordan contrasted that rapid movement by the attorney general with the slow response to 13 letters he and his congressional colleagues have sent to the DOJ, for which they sometimes wait weeks or months.
“Eight of the letters, we’ve got nothing,” the congressman said. “They just gave us the finger and said, ‘We’re not going to get back to you.’”
But what Jordan called a “snitch line” to report unruly parents was set up “five days after a left-wing political organization asked for it.”
“Think about this, the same FBI that Mr. Garland is directing to open dedicated lines of communication for reporting on parents just a few years ago spied on four American citizens associated with President Trump’s campaign,” the representative said.
“The Clinton campaign hired Perkins Coie, who hired Fusion GPS, who hired Christophe Steele who put a bunch of garbage together, gave it to the FBI. They used that as the basis to open up an investigation into a presidential campaign,” Jordan continued.
He further noted that a federal grand jury last month indicted Michael A. Sussmann, an attorney who worked at Perkins Coie, for allegedly passing false information to then-FBI general counsel Jim Baker alleging covert communications between the Trump campaign and Russians.
Jordan also pointed out, “A few weeks ago, the [inspector general] at the Department of Justice released a report that found that the FBI made over 200 errors, omissions and lies in just 29 randomly selected FISA applications.”
Last month, USA Today reported that the IG “faulted the FBI for ‘widespread’ errors in its applications for surveillance authority, concluding that the bureau failed to provide supporting documentation for sensitive wiretap requests.”
“Building on a 2019 examination of the FBI’s surveillance of a former Trump aide [Carter Page], Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the bureau did not include adequate support for 183 surveillance applications between 2015 and 2020 following a review of more than 7,000 such requests,” it said.
Multiple FBI and DOJ officials prominently discussed in text messages of those serving in the FBI’s Russia probe of the Trump campaign have been forced out or left the agencies, Politico reported.
Those include former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe; Comey’s chief of staff, James Rybicki; Baker; FBI agent Peter Strzok; FBI lawyer Lisa Page; and Bruce Ohr, who was associate deputy attorney general.
Bringing his remarks back to the present, Jordan contended that citizens’ constitutional rights have been under assault by the government and that “Americans are afraid.”
“They tell me for the first time, they fear their government,” he said. “And frankly I think it’s obvious why. Every single liberty we enjoy under the First Amendment has been assaulted over the last year.”
However, Jordan argued Garland’s memo was a turning point.
“I don’t think the good people of this great country are going to cower and hide. I think your memo, Mr. Attorney General, was the last straw,” he said. “I think it was the catalyst for a great awakening that is just getting started.”
Jordan concluded, “Americans are pushing back because Americans value freedom.”
As terrifying crime waves grip Democrat-run cities nationwide, President Joe Biden tacitly encouraged more lawlessness by saying unvaccinated police officers should be fired.
Biden made the alarming remarks Thursday during a CNN town hall in Baltimore hosted by liberal commentator Anderson Cooper.
“Should police officers, emergency responders, be mandated to get vaccines? And if not, should they be — stay at home, or let go?” Cooper asked.
Biden replied, “Yes and yes.”
WATCH: Joe Biden says “yes” police officers and emergency responders should be FIRED if they don’t comply with coercive vaccine mandates. pic.twitter.com/DQRUFRnHZe
This is a stark reversal from last year, when presidential candidate Biden opposed vaccine mandates.
As recently as December 2020 — a month after being installed in the White House — the 78-year-old career politician insisted that he would not impose such mandates.
“No, I don’t think [vaccines] should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory…” Biden on December 4, 2020
Almost a year into his presidential tenure, Biden has fully embraced vaccine mandates, which he claims are working despite an explosion of COVID-19 infections under his watch and mounting opposition from many Americans.
“By the way, I waited until July to talk about mandating, because I tried everything else possible,” the president told Cooper, according to a CNN transcript.
Last month, he signed an executive order requiring all federal employees to get the coronavirus vaccine.
In a comical irony, members of Congress and employees of the federal court system are exempt from Biden’s vaccine mandate.
Members of Congress, their staff, and federal court system employees are exempt from the Biden administration’s new vaccine mandates.
Across the United States, there is a growing movement of airline workers, military personnel, police officers, teachers and other Americans protesting vaccine mandates as unconstitutional and oppressive.
In Chicago, Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot is engaged in a standoff with the nation’s second-largest police force over her vaccine mandate.Do you agree with Biden that police officers and first responders who refuse the vaccine should be fired?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
A report last week said as much as half of the Chicago police force — or roughly 6,500 officers — could be placed on unpaid leave for refusing Lightfoot’s order.
The potential layoffs could ignite more crime surges across the city, which is already engulfed by rampant lawlessness that has been exacerbated by the left’s defund the police frenzy.
The stalemate is continuing into a second week as neither side is budging.
John Catanzara, the president of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, has underscored that he is vaccinated and is not anti-vaccine.
He and his fellow union members merely oppose the one-size-fits-all mandate and the invasive requirement that they disclose their vaccination status, which they say is a personal, confidential medical decision.
Despite the left-wing media narrative that people who oppose vaccine mandates are white Republicans, in reality, numerous Americans of all races and political persuasions oppose the Big Government overreach implicit in the mandates.
Chicago Alderman Anthony Beale, a Democrat, warned that firing unvaccinated cops would ignite a public safety nightmare.
“When you look at it, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Beale told WGN-TV. “And that’s what we’re seeing right now. It is why crime is escalating in the city of Chicago.”
Former Democratic mayoral candidate Paul Vallas, who previously served as city budget director and as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, said Lightfoot is opportunistically weaponizing the vaccine mandate to wield unprecedented power.
Vallas said the mayor didn’t care about public safety or the welfare of law enforcement before, as evidenced by her past actions.
“From start @ChicagoMayor threw CPD to COVID wolves,” he tweeted Tuesday. “Not enough masks, exp. hand sanitizer, no social dist during riots/looting by packing CPD in buses/vans.
“No quarantine still for CPD when in contact with an infected person they must still work. She’s never been about CPD safety.”
From start @ChicagoMayor threw CPD to COVID wolves. Not enough masks, exp. hand sanitizer, no social dist during riots/looting by packing CPD in buses/vans. No quarantine still for CPD when in contact with an infected person they must still work. She’s never been about CPD safety pic.twitter.com/xhepYq3svw
The Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police said Lightfoot is sacrificing public safety on the altar of unscientific vaccine mandates.
“@chicagosmayor seems to think that her game of brinksmanship is an acceptable risk to the citizens… Clearly, her position has nothing to do with the public’s safety or health policy and everything to do with ‘winning’ the political game against the union.” #LightfootDutyhttps://t.co/u2OPpS60Z9
— National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) (@GLFOP) October 21, 2021
If Biden gets his way and thousands of police officers who refuse the vaccine are fired, the crime infesting Chicago and other cities nationwide surely will get even worse than it is now. This is dystopian America under Democratic rule.
A North Carolina parent seeks to prohibit “medical tribalism” in schools after his child reported school officials differentiating between the vaccinated and unvaccinated students.
Chad Slotta spoke of two reported incidents to The Epoch Times: one in which his child recorded a Wake County school principal advising students over the intercom to get vaccinated, and the other in which a teacher had asked for a show of hands of who has had the COVID-19 vaccine and who hasn’t.
Slotta read the principal’s quote from what was recorded at a Wake County School Board meeting on Sept. 7: “I spent the last three or four days on the phone all day talking with students and parents who were forced into quarantine. If you are not vaccinated, I encourage you to seek out a vaccine if you are able to get one.”
In the meeting, Slotta asked the board to issue directives to all school officials that medical recommendations, including those regarding taking specific medications, remain between the parent and the child.
“If I have to sign a waiver that says my child is allowed to take an Ibuprofen, certainly I should have the say on if my child gets the vaccine,” Slotta said.
He also asked that the board issue a directive precluding teachers from inquiring about a student’s vaccination status, or any other private medical information.
“I advocate for a student’s right to privacy and secondly a parent’s exclusive and inviolable right to make all medical decisions and recommendations for their children without the influence or interference of a school official,” Slotta told the board. “Children rightly listen to and obey the authority figures in their lives. This administrator overstepped their authority in an unwise and an unethical manner.”
Transgressed Lines
A line of demarcation has been transgressed, Slotta said.
“It really concerned me,” he said. “I was very clear. I said I wasn’t there to argue for or against the wisdom of any vaccine, mask, or any other medical decision related to the current pandemic. I was specifically addressing a parent’s right to make those medical recommendations and decisions for their children.”
There could be numerous reasons why parents aren’t allowing their kids to get the vaccine, he said.
Vested Interest
One of the Wake County school system’s sources on COVID-19 policy is the ABC Science Collaborative (pdf), coordinated by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), a government agency that also has what NIH Director Francis Collins said in 2020 was a “particular stake in the intellectual property” of the Moderna vaccine.
The NIH is currently under criticism for its funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the first outbreak of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus occurred.
“You’ve got the NIH with a financial interest in the Moderna vaccine funding the ABC Science Collaborative, which is coming into school districts promoting vaccine mandates,” Slotta said. “That doesn’t mean that their advice is necessarily bad. What it does mean to me is that this information should be shared with parents. It should be pointed out that the school districts are listening to organizations who happen to be funded by people who have a vested interest in the vaccines.”
When this information is not disclosed, “it sadly creates doubt,” Slotta said.
“I think that’s something that we are seeing in our culture,” he said. “There is a mishandling with the rollout of this information that may be unnecessarily creating doubt where it might not need to be.”
Slotta emphasized that he and his family are not anti-vaccine, however, he said the money trails running through the COVID-19 vaccine narrative “are concerning.”
‘Creating Tension’
“Now you have a school administrator telling students to go get vaccinated, and that may very well put a child against their mom or dad at home in terms of creating tension,” Slotta said.
Just by having a show of hands, the “blatant violation of students’ right to privacy” can lead to dividing students into groups, pitting them against not just their parents, but against one another, Slotta said.
“We must never divide students into groups of any kind,” Slotta said. “We must never allow medical tribalism or any other form of tribalism to be taught or to take hold in our schools.”
While tribalism is festering in many areas of the country, Slotta said, it’s not the way to raise children.
“We are teaching the future leadership of this country, and we will certainly reap from the seeds that we are sowing, so I hope, as it relates to tribalism on a number of levels, that we make wise decisions here,” Slotta said.
Wake County School District Response
When reached for comment, the communications director for the Wake County School system said the school district doesn’t ask for the COVID-19 vaccination status of its students and has no plans to do so.
In accordance with North Carolina law, however, the school district is required to collect other vaccination information, such as measles, mumps, and rubella.
Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton introduced a bill on Thursday that would prevent schools from aiding and concealing a student’s “gender transition” from parents.
The bill, called the Empower Parents to Protect Their Kids Act, seeks to stop federally funded K-12 schools from facilitating a student’s “gender transition” without parental knowledge.
“Schools should never be allowed to impose radical, harmful ideologies on children — especially without parents’ knowledge and consent,” Cotton said in a news release announcing the legislation.
“My bill will protect students and ensure that parents are in control of their children’s education. Schools must remain institutions of education, not indoctrination camps where minors are manipulated and brainwashed,” he added.
Schools shouldn’t impose radical, harmful ideologies on children—especially without parents’ knowledge and consent. My bill will protect students and ensure that parents are in control of their children’s education.https://t.co/xfhbrTTiEz
“Without parental knowledge or consent, schools are facilitating ‘social gender transitions’ by changing the names and pronouns of children in school, or even allowing children to change which sex-segregated facilities they use, such as dormitories for overnight field trips,” the bill reads.
The legislation would require schools to receive parental consent before affirming a student’s “gender transition.”Should schools be allowed to conceal a student’s “gender transition” from parents?
In addition, schools could not “facilitate, encourage, or coerce students to withhold information from their parents regarding the student’s gender transition or the student’s purported gender identity, where the student’s purported gender identity is incongruous with biological sex.”
The bill would also make it illegal for schools to “pressure or coerce the parents of students, or students themselves, to proceed with any treatment or intervention to affirm the student’s purported gender identity.”
In New Jersey, state policy regarding students’ “gender identity” excludes parental consent.
“A school district shall accept a student’s asserted gender identity; parental consent is not required,” the state’s guidance on transgender students reads.
“Further, a student need not meet any threshold diagnosis or treatment requirements to have his or her gender identity recognized and respected by the district, school or school personnel.
“Nor is a legal or court-ordered name change required. There is no affirmative duty for any school district personnel to notify a student’s parent or guardian of the student’s gender identity or expression.”
A similar policy was enacted in Madison, Wisconsin, before being changed following a lawsuit.
“It should go without saying that school district staff should be honest with parents, especially when it comes to critical matters concerning their children, but we are pleased that the court has issued an order now requiring it,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Roger Brooks said in a statement last year.
“As this case moves forward, we will continue to argue for our clients’ legitimate concern over the Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy of deceiving parents and excluding them from profound decisions involving the wellbeing of their own children.”
By nearly any metric, President Joe Biden has disappointed the American people during his short time in office. Even many of the people who voted for him last November are coming to regret their decision.
Natalya Murakhver is one of those very people, and she went on Fox News on Thursday to discuss her concerns about Biden’s leadership.
“When I consider what [Biden] has done to America’s children, or rather not done, it is heartbreaking,” Murakhver said.
“I think we’re about 274 days into his presidency, and we are still masking, restricting and just curtailing every single freedom our school children have. He promised us schools open and children restored within 100 days, and we are way past that deadline.”
Biden voter Natalya: “What [Joe Biden] has done to America’s children, or rather not done, is heartbreaking. We are still masking, restricting, and just curtailing every single freedom our school children have.” pic.twitter.com/y3G0JAwhjQ
According to The Associated Press, Biden said on Dec. 8, 2020, that he would reopen “the majority of our schools” within the first 100 days of his presidency. He also said he would require Americans to wear masks for 100 days, implying that after that time period, the masks could come off.
While most schools in the country are reopened, many are still operating under ridiculously stringent restrictions, including requiring children to wear masks well past Biden’s initial deadline.
As of Sept. 29, 16 states and Washington, D.C., still had mask mandates for their schools, Education Week reported. Of the remaining 34 states, only nine have banned school districts from enforcing universal mask mandates.
Has Biden abandoned American children?
According to Bloomberg, Biden’s COVID-19 response team held a news briefing Wednesday to announce plans for the vaccination of millions of American children aged 5 to 11. Given the numerous questions regarding the safety of the quickly developed vaccines, many of which have been dismissed by the medical elites in Washington rather than answered, this is an incredibly disturbing plan.
Even if children do get the vaccine like the health elites are pushing, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said they should still be forced to wear masks in schools, Fox News reported.
“So, right now we are going to continue to recommend masks in all schools for all people in those schools and we will look forward to scaling out pediatric vaccination during this period of time,” Walensky said.
It is hard to express just how anti-science these recommendations are. First of all, recommending vaccines for children — the portion of our population least at risk of becoming severely ill or dying from COVID-19 — is at best questionable and at worst reckless.
According to The New York Times, only 63,000 children were hospitalized between August 2020 and Oct. 6, 2021, and just 520 had died.
Of course, the Times only reported those numbers after a previous version of the article inflated them by over 800,000, but that is beside the point.
Given that Statista reported only 5.2 million cases in Americans age 17 and under since the start of the pandemic, hospitalization and death rates for children are very low.
In addition, while adverse effects from the vaccine for children are relatively rare, they certainly do exist. Those two things combined are a pretty strong argument against vaccines requirements for children, especially until more research has been completed.
In its quest to maintain control over Americans, the Biden administration has abandoned its promises, especially as they pertain to American children. Murakhver is completely justified in her frustration, and many Americans are joining her by the day.
Anthony Fauci lied to the U.S. Congress, and EcoHealth veered wildly out of their lane. Who’s going to be held accountable?
he National Institutes of Health admitted that EcoHealth Alliance – a research partner of the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded by Anthony Fauci – carried out gain-of-function research and failed to report the findings “as was required by the terms of the grant.”
The admission comes in a letter from Principal Deputy Director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Lawrence Tabak, in response to Congressman James Comer’s inquiries about a controversial, multi-million-dollar grant from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.
The coronavirus-focused grant ultimately led to U.S. taxpayer dollars funding EcoHealth Alliance’s “longtime collaboration” with the Chinese Communist Party-run lab, believed by many to be the source of COVID-19.
Tabak explains how the “limited experiment described in the final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model. ”
“In this limited experiment, laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV 1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus. As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” he added.
As Dr. Richard Ebright, Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, explains:
NIH corrects untruthful assertions by NIH Director Collins and NIAID Director Fauci that NIH had not funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
Following the enhancement of the WIV1 bat coronavirus, EcoHealth “failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant.”
“EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award,” Tabak adds.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued last-minute changes to its school-reopening guidance after two prominent teachers unions asked the agency to do so, according to newly obtained emails by watchdog group Americans for Public Trust.
The emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the watchdog and published online show a string of communications between the CDC, the National Education Association (NEA), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers union and one of the top donors to the Democratic Party.
Multiple emails show that both of the teachers unions also received a copy of the guidance, pertaining to the reopening of K–12 schools, shortly before the CDC released it to the general public.
“These documents are further evidence that instead of following the science, the White House and the CDC allowed politics to influence policy,” Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, told Fox News.
One such email from AFT’s senior director of health issues, Kelly Trautner, to the CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Feb. 11, shows AFT suggesting alterations be made to the CDC’s guidance just one day before it was publicly posted.
“Thank you for your continued openness to our suggestions and input. We would like to share some thoughts regarding the paragraph below which was apparently leaked from the imminent guidance on reopening schools.”
The paragraph reads: “At any level of community transmission, all schools can provide in-person instruction (either full or hybrid), through strict adherence to mitigation strategies. Recommended learning modes vary to minimize risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in school by emphasizing layered mitigation, including school policies requiring universal and correct mask use. The recommended learning modes (in-person, hybrid) depend on the level of community transmission and strict adherence to mitigation.”
Within the email, Trautner says that “it would be great,” if the CDC insert the line: “In the event high-community transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, a new update of these guidelines may be necessary.”
Trautner goes on to cite concerns over the “likely” implications the language will have in schools where it is difficult to adhere to strict mitigation strategies due to them being located in “high density, crumbling infrastructure areas, and particularly when community transmission is high.”
“We don’t believe that any current research has demonstrated that all schools in those areas can safely reopen,” Trautner wrote.
One day later, on Feb. 12, CDC Chief of Staff Sherri Berger flagged Trautner’s suggestion for “possible follow-ups.”
Walensky forwarded the email on to the CDC’s Director of Preparedness and Emerging Infections, Henry Walke, who replied, “Yes, will work with team.”
On Feb. 12, Walke emailed Walensky with updated language for the guidance, writing, “see below, new is second paragraph.”
“Super, thank you for doing that,” Walensky replied, adding, “I’m so grateful for your help.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, speaks during a rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on June 9, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)People who are part of standout protest organized by the American Federation of Teachers chant, hold signs, and raise their fists outside of the Massachusetts State House in Boston, Mass., on Aug. 19, 2020. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
The emails also show CDC officials coordinating an early release of the final guidance with both teachers unions.
An email dated Feb. 11 from the CDC’s acting associate director for communications, Christopher Jones, has the subject headline, “AFT/NEA closing the loop.”
“Greta and team will reach out to NEA/AFT this evening to set up a technical discussion tomorrow with both groups to talk through the CDC operational strategy,” Jones wrote.
“Targeting 1130am so they have time to digest prior to the 2 pm release. Feel free to make that offer when you talk to them this evening and say CDC will be reaching out later tonight to set it up,” he continued.
Walensky responded: “Perfect. Will do. Will try to reach them before I board. Thank you!”
The following day, on Feb. 12, Jones wrote that the Department of Health and Human Services “said they are comfortable if we want to send something out at 145 we can. I am going to send the strategy and FS [fact sheet] to the unions at 145. If you all want to send the FS to partners at that time, that is fine. Amy, lets send FS to press at 145.”
Jones messaged Becky Pringle, NEA’s president, and Randi Weingarten, AFT’s president, thanking them for their “continued partnership and input,” along with a PDF version of the strategy posting that day with a fact sheet embargoed until 2 p.m.
“I know not much lead time but wanted to send your way as soon as was able,” Jones wrote.
AFT President Randi Weingarten has defended her organization communicating with the CDC regarding its school opening guidelines earlier this year.
“The CDC in February and March basically asked all sorts of different organizations to sit down with them and give them comments about what they thought was important,” Weingarten said in an interview with C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.”They talked to parent organizations, they talked to the two [teachers] unions.”
“This is normal rule-making,” she said.
The Epoch Times has contacted the CDC and the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers for comment.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was not willing to elaborate Tuesday on why Democrats’ $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” bill would not increase the national debt.
Of course, the price tag is up in the air as Democrats seek a top line that moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema are willing to stomach, but the essence of the legislation has remained the same: starting a bunch of new open-ended entitlement programs.
Some big-ticket items include taxpayer-funded pre-K, rental assistance payments, free community college, paid family and sick leave, expanded health care benefits, enhanced child tax credits and climate change initiatives.
“Does the president still believe that Build Back Better will not add a dime to the national debt?” a reporter asked Psaki during a Tuesday White House briefing.
The reporter understandably wasn’t ready to accept Psaki’s glib response without at least one more pass at the topic.
“[President Joe Biden] says he wants to get more taxes in,” he said. “What if the economy goes sour? Lots of things can happen. You’re going to tell … future generations not even born yet that they’re not on the hook for this? Is that right?”
“That’s right, and hopefully you’ll report accurate information yourself,” Psaki said.
Well, here’s some accurate information: Even the $3.5 trillion price tag is far less than the legislation is likely to cost.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Government estimated the true cost of the bill would be between $5 trillion and $5.5 trillion over the next ten years, because some programs are only partially funded by the legislation.
As the reporter hinted in his exchange with Psaki, one problem in determining whether the bill is paid for is that it counts on new revenue generated by taxing corporations and the “rich” more heavily.
However, hiking the corporate tax rate to the levels Democrats are proposing would make the U.S. one of the highest-taxed countries in the world, which is likely to hurt economic and job growth.
America’s combined average federal and state corporate income tax would be nearly 6 percent higher than China’s 25 percent rate.
Psaki has no idea whether the federal debt will increase if the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is passed into law. Strong evidence suggests it will likely go up by trillions.
There’s some accurate reporting for you, Ms. Psaki.
Dr. Malik Peiris, who previously served on the Lancet medical journal’s COVID-19 origins investigation committee, received China’s “Nobel Prize” for research affirming the Chinese Communist Party’s false narrative that COVID-19 developed naturally.
Peiris, a Sri Lankan virologist working in Hong Kong, was one of 12 scientists leading the now-defunctLancet probe into the origins of COVID-19. While the task force is no longer listed on the medical journal’s website, as it was forced to disband due to extensive conflicts of interests with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, archived web pages reveal Peiris’s participation in the effort.
Following Peiris’s stint on the task force, the Chinese Communist Party awarded him with the prize in life sciences in the 2021 Future Science Prize – dubbed China’s “Nobel Prize.” China’s top scientific honor is accompanied by a $1 million prize, which is funded by several Chinese Communist Party-linked companies such as Baidu, Hillhouse Capital, and Sequoia Capital China.
State-run media outletGlobal Times claimed the award was for his “major discoveries of SARS-CoV-1 as the causative agent of the global SARS outbreak in 2003 with impact on combating COVID-19 and emerging infectious diseases.” Peiris shared the award with co-author Kwok-Yung Yuen.
In an exclusive interview with the Chinese Communist Party-run media outlet, Yuen asserted “this is one of the most important prizes not just in China but also internationally.”
Peiris’s research was praised by award reviewers as playing an integral role in tracing the origins of COVID-19, as reviewer Wang Xiaodong noted “Chinese scientists were able to quickly identify the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to their contributions.” The research bolstered the Chinese Communist Party’s fake narrative that COVID-19 developed naturally as opposed to escaping from a lab.
As Global Times explains, Peiris’s research helped “support the bat origin of SARS-CoV-2”:
When asked how their discoveries affect people’s understanding of the cause of COVID-19, Yuen explained that since he and his team discovered in 2005 that the horseshoe bat was the natural animal reservoir for the ancestral SARS-CoV-1, they believe that SARS-CoV-2 “also went from bats to another mammal(s) before jumping into humans.”
Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 replicates very well in both bat and human intestinal organs, which further supports the bat origin of SARS-CoV-2, he said.
Conservative talk show host Dennis Prager announced on Monday during his daily nationally syndicated radio program that he had contracted COVID-19.
A vocal opponent of coronavirus vaccine mandates, especially for young people and those previously infected with the virus, Prager, 73, has refused the vaccine and intentionally sought speaking engagements and events throughout the pandemic whenever and wherever he could.
“I have hugged thousands of strangers … at rallies around the country. I have posed for photos with strangers in the thousands at speeches. And finally I got it from somebody,” he said while broadcasting the show from his home on Monday.
The radio host said he had taken the monoclonal antibody treatment Regeneron, which he said President Joe Biden has made “almost impossible for people to get … because the man is evil.”
From the start of the pandemic, Prager has been a harsh critic of the Democrats’ response to COVID-19 — such as small-business-crushing lockdowns and vaccine and mask mandates — but an enthusiastic promoter of therapeutics to treat the virus.
He began taking hydroxychloroquine prophylactically shortly after then-President Donald Trump mentioned in a March 19, 2020, news conference that the anti-malarial drug could prove to be a promising treatment for COVID-19.
Prager has interviewed prominent proponents for HCQ on his show, particularly Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who came up with the “Zelenko Protocol,” a concoction of low-dose hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin that he said resulted in fewer hospitalizations when given in the early stages of mild-to-moderate COVID infection.
And in November 2020, Prager added ivermectin to his personal regimen.
“I believe that what I had decided to do over the course of the last year-and-a-half, I believe, has been justified,” Prager said at his show’s opening on Monday. “I wanted to achieve natural immunity, which is by far the more robust immunity that one could have against COVID or any virus.”
He referenced a recent piece published in The Washington Post in which Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the John Hopkins School of Medicine, argued the superiority of natural immunity over vaccination.
Makary cited over 15 studies supporting his assertion, including a recent 700,000-person study in Israel that found that those previously infected with COVID-19 were 27 times less likely to contract the virus again than those who were vaccinated.
Prager most likely contracted COVID-19 while at a campaign event in Colorado on Oct. 10 with Republican Colorado gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, the front-running challenger to Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’ re-election, according to the Denver Gazette.
NEW: Conservative talk radio host @DennisPrager says he tested positive for COVID-19 last week, days after appearing at a Colorado fundraiser for @heidiganahl. Prager said he intentionally contracted COVID-19 by engaging with, hugging, and taking photos with people. #copoliticspic.twitter.com/FAKPMjZVlR
The hourlong “sold-out” campaign event, called “The Future of Colorado,” was held at a Marriott hotel in Colorado Springs with about 100 attendees.
A representative of Ganahl’s campaign told the Gazette, “We have not been made aware of anyone who attended the event outside of Dennis’ inner circle getting the virus. We are reaching out to all those who attended to make sure they are informed.”
On Friday, Colorado had the 14th-highest rate in the nation for COVID infections, the outlet reported, with 71.6 percent of eligible Coloradans fully vaccinated, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health.
While up on stage with Ganahl, Prager ironically said, “I’ve been trying to get COVID for a year-and-a-half.”
“It can hurt you. I know people that it has hurt. But it can also help. It’s somewhat of a crapshoot. But I don’t want you to take nothing,” he said.
“I think I am a living example of how effective taking these therapeutics is. I am not young. I admit I am healthy otherwise, but I am in the category of people who should be most concerned, theoretically,” Prager said. “And I am concerned. That’s why I’ve been taking all these therapeutics.”
When it comes to science and medicine, transparency is everything.
Scientific discourse requires all parties to be informed, and dissenting opinions, even if they are in the minority, need to be heard.
In medicine, how can people make the right decision for themselves if they aren’t given all of the relevant information?
According to the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, transparency apparently is not important in either of these areas.
In fact, OSHA believes that transparency and telling the truth are a hindrance to the common good.
While the agency has issued guidance requiring employers to “record and report COVID-19 infections and deaths,” it said it will not require those same employers to “record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination” through May 2022.
OSHA’s reasoning? Reporting on vaccine side effects might discourage or disincentivize employers’ efforts to vaccinate their workers.
“OSHA does not want to give any suggestion of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination or to disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts,” the agency’s website says on a 6,400-word page titled “Protecting Workers: Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID-19 in the Workplace.”
“As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR part 1904’s recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination at least through May 2022,” it says.
Should employers be required to report workers’ side effects from the vaccine?
This is disturbing news, but not because the COVID-19 vaccines pose any sort of existential threat.
Evidence shows COVID-19 side effects to be rather minimal, even more so than the effects of the virus itself.
Also, while the number of breakthrough infections is skyrocketing, showing the vaccine’s effectiveness might not be quite what the American people were promised, there’s no denying that the chance of dying from the coronavirus is greatly reduced by taking the vaccine.
With all of that being said, the vaccine does come with some side effects, as rare as they may be.
For individuals at extremely low risk of having an adverse reaction to COVID-19 — those who are young, physically fit and have no pre-existing conditions — it remains unclear as to whether the vaccines side effects are more or less of a threat than COVID-19 itself.
Colin Powell, a good man and a great American, has died. He had been suffering for years from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, as well as Parkinson’s disease, but according to the media (citing his family), the real cause of death was “complications” from—you guessed it—COVID-19, despite the fact that he was “fully vaccinated” and indeed was about to get a booster shot when his compromised immune system finally failed.
There will be accolades aplenty forthcoming for General Powell, a former secretary of state, who ably served both presidents Bush in various military and civilian capacities. But his death, coming as it does in the midst of our long political and biomedical wrangle over the severity of the threat posed by the CCP virus that causes COVID-19, once again focuses attention on the social and economic destruction the panic over the pandemic continues to cause.
Indeed, the general’s death “from” COVID—despite his vaccination status—indicates one thing very plainly: the vaccines don’t work. If they did, if they really prevented anyone from contracting the disease, Powell might still be alive while his doctors battled his other ailments. But they don’t, he didn’t, and it’s high time everyone admitted it.
Don’t wait for the media, those thoroughly corrupt handmaidens of the Democrat Party and, latterly, of the U.S. government, to admit that. Indeed, just hours after Powell’s death, various outlets hastily rushed onto the air and into print with assurances that just because the vaccines don’t work doesn’t mean they don’t work.
USA Today: “Colin Powell’s death the exception among vaccinated, not proof inoculations don’t work.”
CNN: “Why vaccinated people dying from COVID-19 doesn’t mean the vaccines are ineffective.”
WUSA9: “Gen. Colin Powell’s death does not prove COVID vaccines don’t work.”
Media Campaign
Who are you going to believe—the media or your lying eyes and your gift of reason? For nearly 18 months we have been subject to an increasingly manic media campaign, at the behest of political operatives, to convince the world that the still-experimental vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna—which are more akin to gene therapy than conventional vaccines—and the more conventional one from Johnson & Johnson, are the key to stopping COVID.
That they vastly increase the revenues and balance sheets of the pharmaceutical companies as well as aiding and abetting the government’s appropriation of unconstitutional powers has nothing to do with the official enthusiasm for them, of course.
The media’s been parroting the party line practically since the outbreak of COVID, from “two weeks to slow the spread” and “fifteen days to flatten the curve” to “social distancing of six feet,” and “wash your hands ten times a day,” and “wear a mask,” and “don’t overwhelm the hospitals,” and “get your shot,” then “get your second shot,” then “get a booster shot,” and now “it doesn’t matter which shots you get, just keep getting shots until Joe Biden tells you to stop.”
If a vaccine that was touted as nearly 100 percent effective when it was first introduced now needs a series of booster shots ad infinitum for it to have the remotest effect, what does that tell you?
Ask Washington. The government has been pushing the panic button from the jump—another of Donald Trump’s many and manifest personnel misjudgments was giving Dr. Anthony Fauci a national platform and thus elevating the nation’s neurotic obsession with “health” into national policy—demanding unconstitutional lockdowns, quarantines, travel restrictions, mandatory vaccines, vaccine “passports” and other naked displays of power-grabbing, all meant to punish the innocent. And for what?
In the process, Fauci, a career “civil servant” and superannuated bureaucrat who has seized the reins of power and continues to talk out of both sides of his mouth because it’s clear he has no idea what he’s talking about, no longer cares whether what he says makes any sense. He should have been forcibly retired—fired—long ago, but his usefulness to the forces behind Biden’s throne ensures they’ll keep trotting him out no matter how wrong he proves to be.
Gaslighting
The real question is why? Why this hysterical insistence keeping COVID in the headlines, day after day, inflating the threat of a relatively minor respiratory illness with a 98+ percent survival rate into the second coming of the Black Plague? Why the constant moving of the goal posts from deaths to “cases”?
Why the various “road maps” out of COVID lockdowns that were unnecessary in the first place? Why the press-gang enlistment of the media to keep the public in line with increasingly implausible claims about an illness that, left to its own devices, would have vanished into the woodwork long ago?
The unspoken, false premise, which has by now been thoroughly inculcated in our population, is that absent the Dreaded COVID, we would all live forever. And that the unvaccinated, by radiating death spores at their vaccinated neighbors, are tantamount to murderers, even though the “nearly 100 percent effective” vaccines are supposed to prevent exactly that.
After all, via the political-medical machinations of our betters, we have stopped caring about heart disease, strokes, cancer, and even the common cold—hey, even the flu has disappeared! We’ve also stopped caring about Thanksgiving and Christmas, our kids’ childhoods, classroom instruction, civic virtue, national history, verities like sex differences, full employment, the movies, most sports, religious worship and just about everything else that used to make America, America.
In their place we now have armed police clobbering protestors when they’re not actually being fired or defunded, cities burning over the deaths of petty criminals in police custody, statues toppling, and the collapse of public order as crime has been effectively decriminalized in the name of racial “justice.”
Meanwhile, with a populace confined to quarters, unregulated tech giants like Twitter, Google, and Facebook run rampant, stifling speech, hijacking personal information to sell to the highest bidder, de-platforming ideological opponents (even while maintaining possession of their personal information), and pushing disinformation such as the Russian “collusion” farce… and now COVID.
Why are they so desperate? Why are they gaslighting us with tales of implacable viral bogeymen? What is it that they aren’t telling us?
It might be something, it might be nothing. I suspect it’s this: They like it.
Without the phantom menace of COVID, they could never have changed election laws, mandated arbitrary and capricious punishment of their enemies, destroyed the Trump administration, wrecked the economy, harmed our national defense, crippled our police department, suborned our legal system, destroyed childhood, instilled fear and obedience, encouraged neighbors to rat each other out, scapegoated those they despise, eliminated the southern border, and moved the nation steadily away from sovereignty and toward the New World Order of the Great Reset, whose motto is: you’ll own nothing and you’ll like it.
How do you like that? And what are you going to do about it?
The first-ever “female” four-star admiral in the public health corps is actually a man.
Yes, you heard that right.
In a statement released Tuesday, the Biden administration lauded the appointment of Rachel Levine to the aforementioned position, saying “Admiral Levine now serves as the highest ranking official in the USPHS Commissioned Corps and its first-ever female four-star admiral.”
The Biden administration announces that Rachel Levine, a biological man, is now the “first-ever female four-star admiral” in the public health corps pic.twitter.com/1JIa5Eh0vZ
This is the same group that claims to be the “party of science,” mind you.
The same party that is allowing men like Levine to take over women’s athletics and invade female-only spaces, all in the name of inclusivity.
It’s funny, really: The Democratic party has so many groups to please, so many “oppressed” peoples to rescue, that those groups are starting to come into conflict with one another.
Now, the left is sacrificing its commitment to women’s empowerment and feminism so that it can promote the transgender agenda.
Just think about this: What is so special about a woman, if any man can simply identify as a woman, take her place and be equally celebrated?
At that point, why are women special at all?
Conservatives know the answer to this — women, due to their biological and social differences, are incredibly unique and complement men perfectly, just as men complement them.
Women can create and nurture life, for example. It’s hard to name a male attribute that is equally powerful.
Nevertheless, the left is set on claiming that any biological man — if he feels like it — can be just as much of a woman as anyone else.
Colin Powell, a good man and a great American, has died. He had been suffering for years from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, as well as Parkinson’s disease, but according to the media (citing his family), the real cause of death was “complications” from—you guessed it—COVID-19, despite the fact that he was “fully vaccinated” and indeed was about to get a booster shot when his compromised immune system finally failed.
There will be accolades aplenty forthcoming for General Powell, a former secretary of state, who ably served both presidents Bush in various military and civilian capacities. But his death, coming as it does in the midst of our long political and biomedical wrangle over the severity of the threat posed by the CCP virus that causes COVID-19, once again focuses attention on the social and economic destruction the panic over the pandemic continues to cause.
Indeed, the general’s death “from” COVID—despite his vaccination status—indicates one thing very plainly: the vaccines don’t work. If they did, if they really prevented anyone from contracting the disease and surviving it, Powell might still be alive while his doctors battled his other ailments. But they don’t, he didn’t, and it’s high time everyone admitted it.
Don’t wait for the media, those thoroughly corrupt handmaidens of the Democrat Party and, latterly, of the U.S. government, to admit that. Indeed, just hours after Powell’s death, various outlets hastily rushed onto the air and into print with assurances that just because the vaccines don’t work doesn’t mean they don’t work.
USA Today: “Colin Powell’s death the exception among vaccinated, not proof inoculations don’t work.”
CNN: “Why vaccinated people dying from COVID-19 doesn’t mean the vaccines are ineffective.”
WUSA9: “Gen. Colin Powell’s death does not prove COVID vaccines don’t working.”
Media Campaign
Who are you going to believe—the media or your lying eyes and your gift of reason? For nearly 18 months we have been subject to an increasingly manic media campaign, at the behest of political operatives, to convince the world that the still-experimental vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna—which are more akin to gene therapy than conventional vaccines—and the more conventional one from Johnson & Johnson, are the key to stopping COVID.
That they vastly increase the revenues and balance sheets of the pharmaceutical companies as well as aiding and abetting the government’s appropriation of unconstitutional powers has nothing to do with the official enthusiasm for them, of course.
The media’s been parroting the party line practically since the outbreak of COVID, from “two weeks to slow the spread” and “fifteen days to flatten the curve” to “social distancing of six feet,” and “wash your hands ten times a day,” and “wear a mask,” and “don’t overwhelm the hospitals,” and “get your shot,” then “get your second shot,” then “get a booster shot,” and now “it doesn’t matter which shots you get, just keep getting shots until Joe Biden tells you to stop.”
If a vaccine that was touted as nearly 100 percent effective when it was first introduced now needs a series of booster shots ad infinitum for it to have the remotest effect, what does that tell you?
Ask Washington. The government has been pushing the panic button from the jump—another of Donald Trump’s many and manifest personnel misjudgments was giving Dr. Anthony Fauci a national platform and thus elevating the nation neurotic obsession with “health” into national policy—demanding unconstitutional lockdowns, quarantines, travel restrictions, mandatory vaccines, vaccine “passports” and other naked displays of power-grabbing, all meant to punish the innocent. And for what?
In the process, Fauci, a career “civil servant” and superannuated bureaucrat who has seized the reins of power and continues to talk out of both sides of his mouth because it’s clear he has no idea what he’s talking about, no longer cares whether what he says makes any sense. He should have been forcibly retired—fired—long ago, but his usefulness to the forces behind Biden’s throne ensures they’ll keep trotting him out no matter how wrong he proves to be.
Gaslighting
The real question is why? Why this hysterical insistence keeping COVID in the headlines, day after day, inflating the threat of a relatively minor respiratory illness with a 98+ percent survival rate into the second coming of the Black Plague? Why the constant moving of the goal posts from deaths to “cases”?
Why the various “road maps” out of COVID lockdowns that were unnecessary in the first place? Why the press-gang enlistment of the media to keep the public in line with increasingly implausible claims about an illness that, left to its own devices, would have vanished into the woodwork long ago?
The unspoken, false premise, which has by now been thoroughly inculcated in our population, is that absent the Dreaded COVID, we would all live forever. And that the unvaccinated, by radiating death spores at their vaccinated neighbors, are tantamount to murderers, even though the nearly 100 percent effective vaccines are supposed to prevent exactly that.
After all, via the political-medical machinations of our betters, we have stopped caring about heart disease, strokes, cancer, and even the common cold—hey, even the flu has disappeared! We’ve also stopped caring about Thanksgiving and Christmas, our kids’ childhoods, classroom instruction, civic virtue, national history, verities like sex differences, full employment, the movies, most sports, religious worship and just about everything else that used to make America, America.
In their place we now have armed police clobbering protestors when they’re not actually being fired or defunded, cities burning over the deaths of petty criminals in police custody, statues toppling, and the collapse of public order as crime has been effectively decriminalized in the name of racial “justice.”
Meanwhile, with a populace confined to quarters, unregulated tech giants like Twitter, Google, and Facebook run rampant, stifling speech, hijacking personal information to sell to the highest bidder, de-platforming ideological opponents (even while maintaining possession of their personal information), and pushing disinformation such as the Russian “collusion” farce… and now COVID.
Why are they so desperate? Why are they gaslighting us with tales of implacable viral bogeymen? What is it that they aren’t telling us?
It might be something, it might be nothing. I suspect it’s this: They like it.
Without the phantom menace of COVID, they could never have changed election laws, mandated arbitrary and capricious punishment of their enemies, destroyed the Trump administration, wrecked the economy, harmed our national defense, crippled our police department, suborned our legal system, destroyed childhood, instilled fear and obedience, encouraged neighbors to rat each other out, scapegoated those they despise, eliminated the southern border, and moved the nation steadily away from sovereignty and toward the New World Order of the Great Reset, whose motto is: you’ll own nothing and you’ll like it.
How do you like that? And what are you going to do about it?
Joe Biden’s U.S. Agency for International Development launched a new $125 million dollar project with Washington State University and foreign collaborators to discover over 10,000 novel viruses in nature.
The ambitious program follows the agency funding a similar form of research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance and its controversial partner: the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Many experts believe this Chinese Communist Party-run lab is the source of COVID-19.
The new program, announced by Washington State University (WSU) on October 5th, will endeavor “to collect over 800,000 samples in the five years of the project.”
“This process is expected to yield 8,000 to 12,000 novel viruses, which researchers will then screen and sequence the genomes of the ones that pose the most risk to animal and human health,” a summary adds.
The program relies on collaboration with foreign countries, as its description outlines its efforts to “build scientific capacity in partner countries” focusing on coronaviruses, filoviruses, and paramyxoviruses. While WSU’s foreign collaborators have not been identified yet, in the past, the school has partnered with Chinese Communist Party-linked technology firms including DJI for research.
DJI has admitted complying with Beijing’s data requests, leading the U.S. Army to ban their use in 2017, citing cyber vulnerabilities. The office of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Los Angeles also sent a memo stating officials have “moderate confidence” DJI’s commercial drones and software are “providing US critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.”
“We will work to not only detect viruses but also build capacity in other countries, so the United States can collaborate with them in carrying out this important work,” said Felix Lankester, lead principal investigator for the project.
GoFundMe has said it took down a campaign worth more than $180,000 that was started by a nurse who sought to overturn a Texas hospital system’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
The campaign was created by Jennifer Bridges, a former registered nurse at Houston Methodist hospital who was fired along with hundreds of other staff members earlier this year after refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
“When our team initially reviewed the fundraiser, it was within our terms of service as the funds were for legal fees to fight vaccine mandates,” Heidi Hagberg, a spokesperson for GoFundMe, said in a statement to news outlets this week. “The fundraiser has since been updated to include misinformation which violates our terms of service.”
Hagberg didn’t elaborate on the nature of the alleged misinformation. The Epoch Times has contacted GoFundMe and Bridges for comment.
GoFundMe also stated that it has taken down “hundreds” of other fundraisers that allegedly contained “misinformation related to vaccines.”
Earlier this year, Bridges told Fox News that because she already contracted COVID-19, she doesn’t need to get the vaccine. Several studies have shown that a prior COVID-19 infection provides long-lasting and robust protection against the virus, and one Israeli research paper released about a month ago found that natural immunity confers greater protection than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Bridges also confirmed to the Epoch Times in June that she was fired by Houston Methodist, which was one of the first hospital systems to mandate vaccines in the United States.
“We worked so hard last year,” she said at the time. “I mean, we were there through thick and thin when we had no help … it was horrible. And these people that are putting forth these rules right now for us and kicking us to the curb, they weren’t there. They weren’t even in the building to be seen for months. They were staying at home while we were doing all the work.”
A spokesperson for Houston Methodist at the time described some of Bridges’ comments as false.
“Our leaders have supported our employees every step of the way,” the spokesperson said over the summer. “We greatly appreciate what all of our dedicated employees have done for our patients, and our leaders have been by their side since the beginning.”
A lawsuit that was filed by Bridges and a number of other healthcare workers against Houston Methodist was dismissed by a judge in June. Their attorneys, who have argued that mandatory vaccines violate the Nuremberg Code against medical experimentation, have appealed the judge’s decision.
Last year, GoFundMe courted controversy when it took down fundraising pages for Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who was charged in a shooting during widespread riots and unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
