If you thought the worst screenplay you’d have to endure this winter was anything written by a Wachowski sister, boy howdy are you wrong.

A couple of weeks ago I told you that Davos’ Last Stand bombed at the box office. Well, now I’m here to tell you that as bad as that movie’s opening weekend was, just wait for the resurrection of it later this year because they filmed the sequel, Omicron 2: COVID Boogaflu, at the same time.

And it’s coming this spring.

The problem for Bidenwood is Omicron spreads quickly but doesn’t hit nearly as hard as the original virus, or even the recent Delta variant.

After the early data came in, they realized this will be the last film in the series. So, they have one last chance to concoct a story they can use for the midterms.

Can’t let the opportunity of one last COVID wave go to waste can we?

Because these are people too incompetent at dealing with the actual problem and have pivoted completely to pure politics.

So, over the past few days we’ve seen a spate of about faces by the Biden administration and the Davos quislings with regards to COVID-19 and its offspring.

•CDC reduces quarantine to 5 days
•Biden says there’s no federal solution
•CBS Face the Nation discusses devastating impacts of COVID policies on children
•NYT and BBC admit vaccine passes don’t increase uptake

Promising, but suspicious. They’re up to something..

— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) December 28, 2021

To which I’ll add the CDC just sunsetted the use of the PCR test as valid means for detecting Omicron because it can’t select between it and the flu. So it would seem all of this is finally over and that by the summer we can expect these terrible writers to move onto their next straight-to-streaming monstrosity.

The initial reaction to these announcements has been a little too much high-fiving and victory-lap dancing from the ‘right.’

Because here’s the thing. Do you think they don’t know all of this about Omicron’s transmissibility and severity?

Let’s run a few numbers for the sake of argument. Let’s assume Omicron is 20 times more transmissible but just one-tenth as severe. And severity is defined as requiring hospitalization.

With the speed at which this thing is ripping through the population, even millions of mild cases will still result in hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations over a short period of time. Because the rate of transmissibility will create a swell in hospitalizations that is just a function of math.

I’m not saying the numbers I have here are right. That’s not the point of the exercise. The point is that even if you crush the severity down by a factor of twenty over Delta, it’s still a lot of strain on any state’s medical system.

So spare me the idea that President Depends and Peppermint Psaki woke up yesterday and had a flirtation with being compassionate humans. No, these people are full-blown political animals who turned on a dime for a reason.

My numbers are likely wrong but you know who has the real numbers? Yup. The Bidenwood screenwriters.

So, the CDC lowers the quarantine period for health care workers down to five days so asymptomatic health care workers can go back to work as the new wave of hospitalizations happens and Biden throws it back to the states to deal with.

Then we find out from the Florida Surgeon General that the Biden administration is “actively preventing” distribution of Regeneron monoclonal antibodies, holding up shipments to Florida.

NEW: Florida Surgeon General says Biden Admin is “actively preventing” distribution of monoclonal antibodies by pausing shipments of Regeneron, in letter to HHS Sec.

Feds paused Regeneron bc it may not work against Omicron. FL says it can still be used in existing Delta cases. pic.twitter.com/9mmw5SsuZJ

— Jay O’Brien (@jayobtv) December 28, 2021

This is the end of Act I.

In Acts II and III we will be treated to some of the laziest writing in the history of American political cinema.

Act II will start silently, no more daily case counts because of the CDC invalidating the PCR test and everything seemingly returns to normal. During that time you can expect guys like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to gloat publicly over beating COVID by supporting freedom.

Then at the mid-point turn, hospitalizations run wild as the law of large numbers takes over and the same cohorts of people vulnerable to the flu are found quickly by Omicron. It spreads throughout the U.S. quickly possibly overwhelming some hospitals, especially in the places where there aren’t health care workers because they were all fired for not getting the clot-shot.

And guess who will get the blame for all of it? Their Public Enemy #1, the man who at this point is the biggest threat to the Biden administration as well as what’s left of the COVID phase to bankrupt the world known as the Great Reset….

Yup. Governor Ron DeSantis.

The messaging will all be for weeks to come, “We would have licked this thing if it wasn’t for DeSantis allowing it to incubate in Florida. The States did a terrible job containing this thing and now we’re all suffering for it.”

After that comes the worst Act III in history as Biden tries to swoop in on a Huey lobbing missiles at the Red States to take credit for the natural burnout of Omicron and ending COVID-9/11’s threat to humanity.

Expect a big grandstanding speech written by Aaron Sorkin about serving the common good as the denouement to ensure millions take the blue pill and go back to sleep.

It may wind up being the worst screenplay since Young Einstein. Unfortunately, it’ll do enough box office to keep MSNBC in business.

But it’s coming to a screen near you.

tomluongo.me

This piece is part of a new series from TAC, “Taking the Mask Off.” For more about the series, click here.

China may have fired the gun to set off the Covid-19 pandemic, but American public health experts may have loaded and cocked it.

Thanks to Freedom of Information Act litigation, The Intercept has obtained more than 900 pages of documents that confirm and detail what many observers have long suspected. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, provided more than $3 million in grant money that went towards research to make coronaviruses more transmissible in humans from 2014 to 2019. Some of that cash, a whole $600,000 worth, made its way to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some believe to be ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic’s outbreak. Blame China for its Covid coverup all you want, but the documents released by The Intercept thus far confirm America’s expert class shares at least some culpability for the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, if the ever-more-likely theory that Covid-19 leaked from a Chinese lab proves to be true.

The grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance in June of 2014 forked over $3.1 million over the span of six years, stipulating the transfer of nearly $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Using the grant money, EcoHealth planned to collect a vast number of bat samples from China and test them for novel or existing coronaviruses, survey large numbers of individuals who work with live animals (such as workers at wet markets), and test coronaviruses on humanized mice to see how different tissues react, which some scientists believe amounts to gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research is a controversial field of virology involving the genetic alteration of viral pathogens to make them more infectious or dangerous (sometimes both) to humans. While proponents of gain-of-function research claim it can help scientists develop therapeutics and vaccines for viruses more quickly, critics claim it actually lays the groundwork for a potential pandemic, a scenario that may have played out with Covid-19. In April of last year, EcoHealth’s president, Peter Daszak, thanked Fauci for helping dismiss lab-leak Covid origin theories.

These NIAID-funded experiments weren’t just carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as previous reports suspected. They were also conducted at Wuhan University’s Center for Animal Experiment, a far cry from Fauci’s denials.

The recently revealed documents also show the researchers knew they were playing with fire all along. “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other Co Vs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled,” the grant approval admits. “There is also some risk of exposure to pathogens or physical injury while handling bats, civets, rodents or other animals, their blood samples or their excreta.”

The EcoHealth investigative and research team weren’t the only ones aware of the moral and health hazards associated with their research. The federal government issued a moratorium on gain-of-function research in 2014 after Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lab personnel were exposed to anthrax, only to repeal the ban just three years later in 2017.

To justify their reversal, the NIH put in place a review process performed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) called the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework for any NIH grant directed towards gain-of-function research. Simultaneously, the HHS adopted such a narrow definition of what constitutes gain-of-function research that some scientists claim the P3CO review process could be circumvented so easily that it rendered the entire review process obsolete. HHS’s updated definition created carve-outs for research involving enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (PPP) if they are either part of “surveillance activities” or “associated with developing and producing vaccines.”

NIH responded to a request for comment after publication deadline, providing this general statement:

NIH has never approved any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans. The research we supported in China, where coronaviruses are prevalent, sought to understand the behavior of coronaviruses circulating in bats that have the potential to cause widespread disease. The body of science produced by this research demonstrates that the bat coronavirus sequences published from that work NIH supported were not SARS-CoV-2. More importantly, because of similar research to understand coronaviruses, we were able to move swiftly to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and save lives.

In January, Harvard Professor of Epidemiology Marc Lipsitch, a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, pointed out other transparency issues surrounding the P3CO Framework. Even if a grant qualifies for a P3CO review, “none of the details of the analysis related to the HHS decisions approving the 2019 enhanced PPP experiments has been publicly released,” Lipsitch claimed in a journal article.

“Without a publicly released analysis of these experiments, there is no basis for understanding the HHS decision that the research is acceptable,” Lipsitch added.

Upon reviewing the EcoHealth grant documents, Rutgers University molecular biologist and a critic of gain-of-function research Richard Ebright told The Intercept that “the viruses they constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell” and that EcoHealth was working with MERS-related viruses—not just novel coronaviruses.

In the legislature, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a doctor himself, has been trying to hold Fauci and company to account for purportedly funding gain-of-function research—albeit to varying degrees of success.

Paul appeared on Hannity Tuesday night and took a well-deserved victory lap, but simultaneously conveyed the severe implications of The Intercept’s report. Paul claimed the documents proved that “they were taking viruses that were not as transmissible to humans and adding S proteins, which is how the virus attaches to the cell, from bat viruses out of the cave and lo and behold, they created viruses that are not found in nature more transmissible than when started—the very definition of gain of function.”

“And you’ve never heard one of the journalists that gets to interview Dr. Fauci, you have never heard one of them ask, ‘Why is it not gain of function?’ He just says, ‘Oh, it isn’t.’ Why is it not gain of function? The viruses are more transmissible to humans, why is it not gain of function?” Paul added.

Previously, Paul pressed the “good doctor” on whether or not NIAID funded gain-of-function experiments on bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when Fauci appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in May.

“Gain-of-function research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans. To arrive at the truth, the U.S. government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus’s ability to infect humans,” Paul asserted to open his line of inquiry for Fauci.

“For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create super viruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. The collaboration between the US. and the Wuhan Virology Institute continues. Drs. Baric and Shi worked together to insert bat virus spike protein into the backbone of the deadly SARS virus, and then used this man-made supervirus to infect human airway cells,” Paul claimed, referencing a 2015 study published in Nature and a 2017 study performed by Shi that altered coronaviruses found in bats to make them more transmissible to humans.

“Dr. Fauci, do you still support NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?” Paul asked.

“Senator Paul, with all due respect,” Fauci responded, before telling the gentleman from Kentucky that he is “entirely, entirely and completely incorrect… The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Fauci added that if Baric was performing gain-of-function research, it was only in North Carolina.

Dr Fauci dissembled or tried to hide his long time support for ‘gain-of-function’ research which creates super-viruses that jump from animals to humans.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) May 11, 2021

Ebright, the Rutgers molecular biologist, tweeted that Fauci was “brazenly” lying in his exchange with Paul. “WIV started with a SARS-related coronavirus that does not infect human cells or lab animals and constructed variants that infect human cells and lab animals,” Ebright said in a follow-up tweet. “This meets—unequivocally—definitions for GOF under Pause and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement under HHS P3CO.”

Fauci is lying. Brazenly.

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) May 11, 2021

Nevertheless, because EcoHealth’s research purportedly did not qualify as gain-of-function research, EcoHealth’s experiments continued apace and were unencumbered by the 2014 moratorium. Twenty-one other NIH gain-of-function pet projects weren’t so lucky, while ten, which were split evenly between the flu and MERS, received exemptions.

Just months before the first cases of Covid-19 cropped up in China, NIAID decided to renew the “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant in July of 2019, and the project was not subject to P3CO review because the NIAID determined it did not constitute gain-of-function research that required HHS input, according to a report from the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF).

“After careful review of the grant, NIAID determined research in the grant was not gain-of-function research because it did not involve the enhancement of the pathogenicity or transmissibility of the viruses studied,” an NIH spokesperson told the DCNF.

“We would not submit research proposals that did not meet the definition, because otherwise we would need to submit everything,” the spokesperson added, providing confirmation that an HHS P3CO review only takes place after an NIAID referral.

The Trump administration ordered the NIH to cancel the EcoHealth grant in April 2020, Fauci told Politico in June.

At a July Senate hearing, Paul and Fauci squared off once again over the American public health apparatus’s purported funding of this controversial research. To break the ice, Senator Paul reminded Fauci that lying to Congress is a crime that could carry a prison sentence of five years.

“Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans. This research fits the definition of the research the NIH said was subject to the pause in 2014 to 2017, a pause in funding on gain-of-function. But the NIH failed to recognize this, defines it away, and it never came under any scrutiny,” the senator pointed out. “Dr. Fauci, knowing it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement?”

Fauci refused to retract his statement, and claimed that grant money was not provided for gain-of-function research. As Paul continued to press, Fauci told the senator, “You do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about.”

Despite Big Tech and mainstream media’s tandem efforts to brush aside or belittle heretics like Paul, or worse, label them as conspiracy theorists to get them censored, the documents released by The Intercept seem to suggest that Senator Paul did indeed know what he was talking about. Fauci probably knows it, too, because for someone who claims to be above the partisan fray, the man dubbed “America’s Doctor” certainly has a knack for politics.

At this point, an admission of this caliber from the public health pontiff could expose him and his ilk to the will of the people, embodied in their democratically elected representatives. The president’s chief medical advisor is well aware that the ongoing tit-for-tat between himself and Paul isn’t just a debate in the marketplace of ideas. It’s a test of whether the country’s democratic institutions have the fortitude, or even the ability, to hold unelected bureaucrats like Fauci to account.

theamericanconservative.com

It was never just a mask, it has always been a way of thinking. “Mask” is just shorthand.

I got fired from my volunteer work at the Hawaiian Humane Society for choosing not to wear a mask outside walking their dogs. Neither science, the CDC nor the state requires a mask outdoors and I’m fully vaccinated. Some minimum-wage staffbot saw my naked face and informed me of their “policy.” I asked why they had such a nonsensical policy, and her only answer was “it is our policy.” The conversation ended like an ever-growing percentage of conversations in America now end, with her saying “Do I need to call security?” I didn’t enjoy it but I think she did.

It made me sad because I was doing something that was just good. I liked the big dogs, the lifers, the ones some other volunteers shied away from, and having brought one abused dog back from the edge in my home, had some small connection with the damaged ones at the shelter, too.

I was left with no good to do this week, and a simple, real COVID question. Why are fully vaccinated people treated the same as the unvaccinated? Everyone on the plane wears a mask and goes through the same mock social distancing. Everyone at a restaurant, office, concert, etc. does the same. The answer lies at the core of whether public policy in America will shift and allow us to crawl back into our lives.

The first answer, how can we know if someone has been vaccinated, is a strawman. Vaccinated people have little CDC cards. If they have no security features to prevent McLovin fakes, the CDC can create new cards and mail them to us; we had to give out all that info to get the shots. Why not have a database? We have NSA databases of all our emails, an international database of no-flys, Ohio can check if a Minnesota driver’s license is valid, and so forth. But vaccine status is somehow the third rail of privacy?

Or is COVID different? When children register for school, they prove their mandatory childhood vaccinations with little cards. My kids, born abroad, effortlessly proved their vaccination status in Virginia with cards issued in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. As an adult, you take me at my word I’m not carrying smallpox and have been vaccinated against measles, no card even needed.

The biggest reason for treating vaxxed and unvaxxed people the same miserable way is the claim that vaccinated people can still get COVID enough to pass it on. Funny thing is you can actually “get” the measles even after being vaccinated. That vaccine works by basically weakening the virus to the point where it does little harm but still exists. The vax is actually only 97 percent effective, similar to the COVID ones. But nobody talks about measles or demands we wear a mask to prevent their spread. We simply accept and deal with the risk, to include vaccination.

The next question is really, really hard to find an answer to. Exactly how many vaccinated people actually get COVID, the so-called “breakthrough” cases? That exact number is critical because it is the pivot point for the risk vs. gain decision our society needs to make. If we cannot make a wise choice we will be struggling with and fighting over the restrictions on our lives and livelihoods forever. If we assume we’ll never have full vaccination and that breakthrough cases are a non-zero number and likely always will be then we need to make an informed decision about risk. So is it a non-zero number like “smoking causes cancer” or a non-zero number like “very few people die from meteor strikes (or from the measles.)”

The current public policy decisions on risk are haphazard. All 50 states have different rules, many large cities, too, and each and every company. There are different rules if you take a bus or want to go dancing. One grocery store demands masks, another does not. It makes no sense. It becomes not a considered decision but an example of lack of public policy leadership. Into that leadership void enters superstition, pseudo-science, politics, voodoo, and most of all, fear.

So what are the chances of a fully vaccinated person getting a breakthrough infection? It turns out this pivotal question is not clearly answerable but we act as if it is, with consequences for our lives, our mental health, education, commerce, and more. Even for our stray dogs.

I started with Google and “What are the chances of getting COVID after being fully vaccinated?” expecting the answer in 0.0039 seconds like when you ask what year some historical event happened. Nope. The response from AARP said “less than one percent of fully vaccinated individuals have been hospitalized with, or have died from, COVID.” That’s a small number but does not fully address the question.

Over to NPR, which reports “On rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others.” What does rare occasions mean? This is supposed to be, you know, science, so we finally get some numbers from the CDC: out of 159 million fully vaccinated people, the CDC documented 5,914 cases of fully vaccinated people who were hospitalized or died from COVID, and 75 percent of them were over age 65. That means only 0.0000037 percent of vaxxed people were hospitalized or died, and most of them were elderly. That is a very small number. It is a lot less than one percent and a lot less than rare. Chances of dying in a car wreck are many tens of thousands of times higher and we drive on.

It still however does not answer the question of how dangerous the vaxxed but unmasked are in terms of transmitting the virus. No one really knows. Recent scare headlines calling for reinstated restrictions and vax mandates are based on a single outbreak, 469 cases, in one city in Massachusetts, that appears to show (at variance with existing studies) 75 percent of those infected had been vaccinated and oddly, almost all of those people (87 percent) were male. Most of the infected were asymptomatic or experienced mild symptoms. No deaths.

What is believed is the a) delta variant of COVID makes a b) temporary home inside a vaccinated man’s nose or upper respiratory area, c) outside the immune system. It waits there to be d) blown out and then be e) received by an f) unvaccinated person. So all of these multiple things have to go “right” for it to matter. It is not simply a matter of toting up how many vaccinated people tested positive and then hitting the panic button. As one doctor put it “We really need to shift toward a goal of preventing serious disease and disability and medical consequences, and not worry about every virus detected in somebody’s nose.”

Requiring everyone to wear masks again based on one outbreak that appears related to gender may seem as if it can’t hurt, but it does. Organizations waste time and credibility enforcing measures that have limited if any impact (and consider how many masks are old, dirty, improperly worn, etc. to be fully useless.) To simply dismiss the reality of numbers with a blithe “well you can’t be too careful” only works if you imagine COVID restrictions have no secondary or tertiary effects.

Via layers of Keystone Kops political gestures, entire cities’ economies have been devastated, with no clear end point for those dependent on renting office space or tourism. Education has near-disappeared for large numbers of kids. Despair grows menacingly. Economic inequality got a booster shot. The power of government has grown in ways that make the post-9/11 shenanigans look like amateur efforts. The ability to shape how we live, shop, work, and eat has been handed randomly to a near-endless range of actors, from the president to governors empowered with “emergency edicts” to flight attendants who can prevent you from seeing grandma in Florida to minimum wage store clerks ever-anxious to call security not on shoplifters but on an exposed nose.

Convincing Americans to set aside their irrational fears is no longer impossible. Those fears were created by politicians and the media, and have become a profit center. The Little Hitlers on the plane are unwilling to return to just serving drinks when they tasted power over lives. The NYT for months ran columns saying Trump’s vaccine was another government syphilis experiment. Vice President Harris refused to take the shot during the campaign. Biden took it, said it worked, then went right on masking as if it didn’t work. It was a very successful organized campaign to propagate uncertainty for a political purpose. Following the election, many right wing media outlets pivoted to pick up a version of the song. It is all their fault vaccine acceptance varies by political party, where we live, and how much education we have. No other country suffers this additional burden to a return to normal.

So we won’t concede the reality kids are unlikely to get sick and should go to school. That the vast majority of deaths occur among the elderly with comorbidities not the general population. That ill-fitting masks and wiping down groceries with Clorox are theatre. That the debate has become a political argument instead of an evidence-based one. That the CDC has lost credibility until one side needs it for some partisan purpose. That previously healthcare decisions started with the premise of “first, do no harm” while today there is no conversation allowed about the balance of benefits and harm. That we simply tally the collateral damage while the virus remains unaffected. That if we are to heal as a society there is only one answer: at some point we must simply ask what works.

We lack the political leadership to say what’s true so we’re going back to “let’s just argue about masks.” Meanwhile the virus continues to find unvaccinated hosts. The economy won’t snap back. Biden is facing a mini-civil war over mandates or restarting lockdowns and has no plan. Things will hit the fan in September as Hot Vax Summer sputters, when every school district does something different, and Federal unemployment supplements run out. People have grown weary of being afraid, and grown weary of being subject to the paranoid demands of safety fetishists. Many did what they were told to do — get vaxxed — only to find themselves stuck inside the same dysfunctional loop. Gonna be some angry folks looking for better answers than their leaders have given to date. So tell us how this ends, Joe.

wemeantwell.com

Is something ‘big’ coming? It feels as if it might possibly be so. There are serious problems brewing in western societies and the élites are becoming distinctly antsy. We can observe this in the way that the Establishment both are trying to preserve narrative in respect to the virus (‘all must be vaccinated’), whilst – simultaneously – acting to change it, by blaming any narrative deficiency on the Delta variant. Sir Andrew Pollard, a professor of paediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, says flatly that achieving herd immunity is “not a possibility” – now that the Delta variant is circulating. Effectively he is saying that the vaccine cannot do what was promised: i.e. bring about herd immunity; yet the professor continues to urge everyone to be vaccinated, anyway. And, too, a senior SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) adviser to the UK government, states baldly that Covid lockdowns can no longer be justified.

In short, their narrative is pointing in every which way. CDC Director Walensky stated last week that the vaccine does not prevent Covid infection, nor does it stop the vaccinated person from transmitting the Covid infection, including the Delta variant; the data shows an equally distributed infection rate, regardless of vaccination status, which is admitted by Director Walensky. As such, it is an admission that undercuts the entire argument for compulsory vaccines. According to the Director, the only benefit from the vaccine now is presumably that it might reduce the severity of symptoms.

If a vaccinated and non-vaccinated person have the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus – with or without symptoms – then what difference does a vaccination passport or vaccination ID make? According to the CDC, both the vaxxed and non-vaxxed person walking into a restaurant, store, group, venue or workplace present the exact same risk to other people there, so how does the presentation of proof of vaccine make the difference?

Infections (again narratively attributed to Delta variant) are spiking: Israel, is a case in point. It is the most highly vaccinated major society (and, according to leading Israeli commentator, Nadav Eyal, supposedly received “higher quality” Pfizer vaccines than the UK), and yet is experiencing a dramatic rise in new cases — severe cases jumping by 70% within just one week. The number of serious cases has increased about 10 times since the beginning of July: 90% of serious cases are people over 50; but also 95% of people over 50 are vaccinated.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, warns that cases may quadruple within three weeks, and that authorities are preparing for new lockdowns (even though lockdowns have proven to be ineffective against stopping the virus). Most Israelis have taken the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.

Again blatant contradictions in the established narrative are striking: Are lockdowns justified, or are they not? Antony Fauci has said that the recent surge in infections is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”; and that 99% of deaths were amongst the unvaccinated. But that’s just a lie. The CDC’s own data indicate that it is 15% of fatalities that had not been vaccinated.

Not surprisingly, the public are becoming deeply distrustful of claims on ‘science’.

What is going on? Well, we are no scientist. However, it was in the spring of 2021, that word began to trickle out that the messenger RNA vaccines had a serious problem with ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement). Once the initial protection from vaccines wore off (a process which took a few months), people who had been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid, than people who had not.

In effect, if this is right, the US and European governments have a self-inflicted disaster on their hands. So, the narrative unsurprisingly took another twist: It was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the population (for ‘herd immunity’). No, now everyone, including those with natural immunity, without exception, had to be vaccinated. If everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it is easier to claim that what is happening is a nasty new variant, rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody would be able to point an unvaccinated control group that is proving to be noticeably less vulnerable.

Some Covid vaccines introduce mRNA (messenger RNA) into muscle cells. These (erstwhile, healthy) cells are thus directed through the action of this synthetic DNA to manufacture synthetic spike proteins that constitute the virus’ main weapon of attack. This is a form of gene therapy. Should those cells create an immune response against the protein (which they themselves helped create), it would in theory, prevent the virus from infecting the body. The reality seems to be, however, that problems with the cardiovascular system, bleeding and clotting, are all associated with the Covid spike protein, which instead of remaining in the muscle tissue is circulating throughout the cardio-vascular system.

Some scientists say there is clear-cut evidence that the vaccines make the cells in our arm muscles manufacture spike proteins, which then get into the blood circulation, and that this spike protein, on its own, is almost entirely responsible for the damage to the cardiovascular system. Other scientists disagree.

The core problem, one researcher has observed, are microscopic clots in his patients’ tiniest capillaries. He said: “blood clots are occurring at a capillary level. This has never before been seen. This is not a rare disease. This is an absolutely new phenomenon”. Most importantly, Dr Hoffe emphasized these micro-clots are too small to show up on CT scans, MRI, and other conventional tests, and can only be detected using the D-dimer blood test: “And so, we understand in the end, that the reason why the lungs fail, is not because the virus is there. It is because micro blood clots are there…”.

Complicated stuff! The point here is that ‘breakthrough infections’ are spiking with increasing frequency – and likely, the higher the percentage of the population in that region that is vaccinated with mRNA, the worse they will be. Variants, of course, will be blamed. And the mainstream media will try to say the variants are all the fault of the unvaccinated, even though matters cannot be so easily reduced to a Manichaean pro, or anti, vaxx meme.

Why then, are the élites so ‘sticky’ in staying with their explicitly contradictory narrative? Clearly, they fear a popular backlash if it turns out that some vaccines are health damaging. The deeper reason however, is that the élite class in the US and Europe is locked into a deadly, domestic exchange of smart narrative ‘missiles’. Rational argument or strategy is ‘out’. Anyone who pops his head out from the ‘narrative trench’ will be zapped. Boycotting, shaming and de-platforming work, and are today’s ‘go-to’ tools.

What is different today is that this exclusionary ideology is being turned-in upon itself. Turned-in, within western societies, and not just outwards, towards the West’s foreign adversaries. Now, it is key segments of domestic society (and not just foreign leaders) that are being morally shamed and exiled from full participation in their societies – and threatened with sanctions – which if implemented – could destroy their livelihood.

Primarily, it is the ‘unvaxxed’ who are deemed morally inadequate, but the scope of the new moral ideology extends more widely, and includes those who fail to embrace the green agenda and LBGTQ rights – uncritically. Establishment media insist these politically self-serving narratives on vaccination, the climate ‘emergency’ and LBGTQ rights, represent the new ‘dividing line’, defining majority over minority.

Why is sustaining ‘the dividing line’ more important than getting the policy approach to this virus straight? Most of the élite know that Covid is not the threat that their propaganda implies; but the narrative gives them an opportunity to apply power through “moral judgment”, and so they lie – and they continue to lie about the data, until they think the lie will be accepted as reality.

The ‘underside’ to this noble lie approach is not just about protecting narrative — rather it affords the ‘majority’ the chance to feel pious and superior to those they are determined to harm.

A lingering epidemic, combined with deep job losses, a prolonged recession, and an unprecedented debt burden, will inevitably create social tensions that likely will turn into a political backlash — a long hot, angry summer. The implosion of trust in leadership, and fear of social upheaval however can implant a more profound pathology. It can produce the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called ‘anomie’; a feeling of being disconnected from society; a conviction that the world around one is illegitimate and corrupt; that you are invisible: a ‘number’; a helpless object of hostile repression, imposed by ‘the system’ — a feeling that nobody is to be trusted.

Yet this is not an end to it. The Establishment, with the whiff of desperation hanging about it, has reacted to its vaccine plight through shifting its thrust to a different flank of the cultural-warfare front: Moral ideology is being notched higher. Code Red of the climate ‘emergency’ has been launched, promising truly fearful consequences should new energy use restrictions and ‘lockdowns’ be not accepted by the public. The Washington Post made the subtext clear: Nationalism and Trumpist populism cannot be tolerated in the confrontation with a global climate emergency. The message is replete with tones of moral superiority, and piety.

These then, are the ‘street’ flash points; but what about the élite flash points? What if they become yet more desperate as their Re-set plans tank; their economies sink; their supply-lines are disrupted; shortages spread; and inflation soars? Will they ‘Go Big’, and trigger a new Lehman Brothers moment?

Is this the time for them to pivot away from the existing commercial banking system to a fully Central Bank-ing system centred on Central Bank issued digital currencies – and with Pay-Apps fulfilling most of the functions of the former commercial banks? Is this the way to secure the oligarchs? It is much easier to foreclose on possible bankruptcies and financial crises when the CB controls a digital currency: It determines if the depositor may draw on his or her wallet, or not; it can block, or even deduct, from it; and can allow or disallow expenditure from it, with a digital flip of a switch.

Will that work, or might it cause an intolerable backlash? Is this then, the moment for a diversion? Is Iran approaching nuclear threshold status (it may already have it)? Is Russia threatening Ukraine; is China readying to invade Taiwan? There is a smorgasbord of diversionary possibilities already prepared in the narrative kitchen that can be easily run up, in case of diversionary need.

After the CDC announced on May 13 that fully vaccinated Americans don’t have to wear masks, many big news organizations followed not with stories of celebration, but warnings that the guidance was confusing for businesses and governments and jarring to those who had gotten used to working from home.

This is The New York Times’ America: People learned to adapt to remote learning, and they’re so comfortable they fear going out again. In this America, anxiety is king.

A bigger story is out there. It involves the other America where people have been living as if the rules changed much earlier. In this America, folks couldn’t work at home, others traveled for pleasure and parents sent kids to schoolhouses in lieu of laptops.

My question: How will residents in lock-down cities and states like California react when they encounter Americans who lived larger?

I’m not talking about people who had to stay home and miss work or school because of health issues or vulnerable family members. They may choose to avoid public spaces and wear masks even after they are fully vaccinated.

Others, however, forfeited autonomy, friendships and their lives’ work out of a misplaced sense of the virtue in social-distancing overkill. They stayed indoors when they could have been outside in the fresh air and sunshine because experts ignored research that showed outdoor transmission to be responsible for less than 1% of cases.

When Americans start moving around outside their bubbles, the most powerful gut punch could follow when lockdown state parents watch their children go to school, play with friends and be kids again after a year-plus at home.

Middle-class parents may swallow that bitter pill and strive to make up for experiences their children should have had. But many single mothers and working-class stiffs won’t be able to help their children catch up with sons and daughters of higher-paid workers.

Income inequality will get worse and people will suffer as a result.

I’m not blaming health care professionals. The experts on then President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force got things wrong, but they got the most important thing right. They ably and patiently walked skeptical Americans (like me) to the place where they would take the virus seriously.

While the high number of more than 580,000 American COVID-19 deaths makes the mind reel, the death toll unquestionably would have been worse without the experts.

It’s the politicians and big media who went into overdrive with rules that weren’t based on “The Science.”

Be it noted that in May of 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not advise that public schools be shuttered. For that bad idea, thank timid governors and local officials, who disregarded CDC guidance and ignored research on the extremely low risk to children as they bowed to teachers’ unions.

In July, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised educators to start the fall semester “with a goal of having students physically present in school.” Trump supported the statement. Crickets.

Big media didn’t focus on the school closure fiasco until 2021. Before then to their undying shame, cable news networks were too busy fixating on their idea of a big story, people who don’t wear masks.

Not such a big story: How Operation Warp Speed motivated the medical establishment to develop vaccines in record time.

Now President Joe Biden doesn’t have to wear a mask — even if he does. And he can thank Trump — not that he will.

Partisan politics have poisoned the nation’s COVID response.

You just know that blue state governors banned mass meetings and outside dining because Trump supported such gatherings. Their progressive constituents happily ceded their vaunted right to choose just to show Trump how much better they are.

Trump made things worse by not keeping his ego out of the coronavirus response. He went barefaced, and worse, staged packed rallies and events that turned the Rose Garden into a COVID petri dish. And he got the virus.

As small businesses have been waiting for Washington, D.C., to signal that America is getting back to work, Democrats continued to use mask-wearing as the ultimate sign of virtue. It’s become such a partisan prop that for months after he was fully vaccinated and it became clear that he would not get or give the virus to others without a faced covering, Biden continued to wear a mask. Outside.

After the CDC said the fully vaccinated need not wear masks outdoors or indoors, Biden would take off his mask as he delivered remarks but don a face covering before or after.

No wonder Americans who didn’t follow CDC guidance to the letter don’t trust COVID rules and see them as politically motivated. This country should have been united during the pandemic. Instead, it became an excuse for finger-pointing at the other side. And maybe the other side wasn’t so wrong.

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