“During the transcribed interview, the Select Subcommittee believes that Mr. Cuomo made false statements about his involvement in and knowledge of the drafting of the July 6 Report.” That report, issued in 2020, was from the New York State Department of Health and titled “Factors Associated with Nursing Home Infections and Fatalities in New York State During the COVID-19 Global Health Crisis.”
“Accordingly, the Select Subcommittee attaches to this letter a detailed referral for criminal charges against Mr. Cuomo pursuant to 18 USC Section 1001. As explained in the attached referral, Mr. Cuomo made multiple criminally false statements, including that he was neither involved in the drafting nor the review of the July 6 Report,” the letter continued. “Documents establish that statement to be false.”
“Mr Cuomo also testified that he did not have any discussions about the July 6 Report being peer reviewed. Documents show that statement to be false. And Mr. Cuomo testified that he did not know whether the July 6 Report was reviewed by persons outside the NYSDOH. Documents again demonstrate that statement to be false.”
“Mr Cuomo provided false statements to the Select Subcommittee in what appears to be a conscious, calculated effort to insulate himself from accountability. The Department of Justice should consider Mr Cuomo’s prior allegedly wrongful conduct when evaluating whether to charge him for the false statements described in the attached.”
Fraudsters allegedly bought luxury cars, boats, jewelry, properties, and more with around $250 million stolen from the Federal Child Nutrition Program, ABC News reported of an audit report and court documents.
The crime ring used a nonprofit organization called “Feeding Our Future” to launder “millions of dollars in program funds that were intended as reimbursements for the cost of serving meals to children,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said when it indicted 47 people related to the scheme in September 2022.
More than half a billion dollars was stolen from Minnesota nutrition and frontline worker programs under Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrat vice presidential nominee, in an enormous pandemic-era fraud scheme for which critics are calling him out.
Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, 35; Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, 23; Said Shafii Farah, 42; Abdulkarim Shafii Farah, 24; and Ladan Mohamed Ali, 31, are all accused of conspiring to bribe one of the jurors to return a not guilty verdict, FOX 9 reported.
The Government potentially overstated the danger of Covid to the public at the start of the pandemic, Prof Sir Chris Whitty has admitted.
The Chief Medical Officer told the Covid Inquiry he still worries about whether the Government got “the level of concern” right as it introduced lockdowns and shielding measures.
Sir Chris said it was a difficult balance and if anything it was possible that authorities “overdid it” when communicating how dangerous the virus was at the beginning of the pandemic.
My effort to obtain corrections to a badly-flawed government-funded scientific study about the Amish approach to Covid has, at last, reaped results.
I’ve been notified by the Associate Publisher of Behavior and Health Sciences Journals that based on my challenges,the journal has issued multiple corrections to the original study.
A major new study has finally confirmed that the Covid mRNA vaccines are “far more” dangerous than the virus they are supposed to protect people from.
The explosive study concludes that the “overall risks greatly outweigh theoretical benefits”
The bombshell findings of the study were published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.
The team of leading American scientists was led by world-renowned cardiologist Dr. Peter A. McCullough.
The study is a follow-up to a previous study which determined that “health-related risks and drawbacks were drastically misreported and underreported in the Pfizer and Moderna trial evaluations of these genetic products.”
In this new study, part 2, the researchers sought to identify the “extensive range of adverse, crippling, and life-threatening effects.”
Harris for President requires all employees to be “up to date” on COVID-19 vaccination status as prescribed by the CDC as a condition of employment, unless otherwise prohibited by applicable law. If you seek a reasonable accommodation in relation to the campaign’s COVID-19 policy, you should speak to the HR Department prior to reporting to an office location.
(The Center Square) — A New York county has banned masks in public places in response to anti-Israel demonstrations over the war in Gaza, despite threats of a legal challenge from critics who say it’s unconstitutional.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican, signed the Mask Transparency Act on Wednesday. The law, which goes into effect immediately, makes it illegal to wear a mask or face covering “for the purposes of concealing an individual’s identity in public places.” The law exempts people who cover their faces for health, religious or cultural reasons. Violators of the misdemeanor face up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
A jury awarded a settlement of $687,240 to a woman in Tennessee who was fired from her job at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee (BCBST) for refusing to comply with a Covid-19 vaccine mandate. Of the total amount, $500,000 was for punitive damages levied against BCBST.
Tanja Benton, who worked as a biostatistical research scientist at BCBST from 2005 to 2022, was terminated from her job after her request for a religious exemption to the company’s Covid vaccine mandate was denied. She appealed the decision, but to no avail. She subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against the company.
A study released today of excess mortality in 125 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic found the major causes of death globally stemmed from public health establishment’s response, including mandates and lockdowns that caused severe stress, harmful medical interventions and the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We conclude that nothing special would have occurred in terms of mortality had a pandemic not been declared and had the declaration not been acted upon,” the authors of the study wrote.
Researchers from the Canadian nonprofit Correlation Research in the Public Interest and the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières analyzed excess all-cause mortality data prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning with the March 11, 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic declaration and ending on May 5, 2023, when the WHO declared the pandemic over.
The results, presented in a detailed 521-page analysis, establish baseline all-cause mortality rates across 125 countries and use those to determine the variations in excess deaths during the pandemic.
The researchers also used the baseline rates to investigate how the individual country variations in excess death rates correlated to different pandemic-related interventions, including vaccination and booster campaigns.
Not all of the results on a country-by-country basis were the same. For example, in some countries, mortality spikes occurred before the vaccines were rolled out, while in other places, the mortality spikes tracked closely with vaccine or booster campaigns.
In some places, excess mortality rates returned to baseline or close to baseline in 2022, while in others, the rates persisted well into 2023. Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., lead author of the study, told The Defender the disparities result from the complex nature of pandemic measures — and the data — in different areas.
Once Rancourt’s team was able to establish the baseline and excess mortality data for each place, they clustered and examined the data through different filters to interpret it, and drew several conclusions.
Data ‘Incompatible with a Pandemic Viral Respiratory Disease as a Primary Cause of Death’
The researchers established that there was significant excess mortality worldwide between March 11, 2020, and May 5, 2023.
Overall excess mortality during the three years in the 93 countries with sufficient data to make an estimate is approximately 0.392% of the 2021 population — or approximately 30.9 million excess deaths from all causes.
The conventional explanation for the excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rancourt said, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus caused virtually all deaths — and there would have been even more deaths if there hadn’t been a vaccine.
The variations in excess all-cause mortality rates across space and time, the authors wrote, “allow us to conclude that the Covid-period (2020-2023) excess all-cause mortality in the world is incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death.”
They said the theory that the virus caused the deaths is propped up by mass virus-testing campaigns that should be abandoned.
‘Idea that Vaccines Saved Lives Is Ridiculous’
Rancourt and his team cited several factors they believe disprove the theory that the virus caused a spike in all-cause mortality.
For example, they wrote that excess mortality surged almost simultaneously across several continents when a pandemic was declared, while there were no comparable surges in areas that had not yet declared a pandemic.
This suggests that pandemic interventions like lockdowns, which were implemented synchronously across many countries, likely caused the surges.
The researchers also pointed out the significant variation in mortality rates during the pandemic in all time periods, even across different political jurisdictions directly adjacent to each other. If the virus caused the deaths, it would follow that the infection fatality rate would be the same, or at least similar across political boundaries.
The researchers also found a lot of variability in death rates within countries over time, which also would not be an expected outcome if those deaths were caused by a pathogen.
Rancourt said they found “the idea that the vaccine saved lives is ridiculous,” and based on flawed modeling as he and colleagues also showed in a previous paper.
Here again, they found no systematic or statistically significant trends showing that vaccination campaigns in 2020 and 2021 reduced all-cause mortality.
Instead, they found that in many places, there was no excess mortality until the vaccines were rolled out, and most countries showed temporal associations between vaccine rollouts and increases in all-cause mortality.
Medical Interventions — Including Denial of Treatment — Caused Premature Deaths
Rancourt said the excess deaths his team identified are strongly associated with the combination of two major factors — the proportion of elderly in a country’s population and the number of people living in poverty. Both factors increased peoples’ vulnerability to “sudden and profound structural societal changes” and “medical assaults.”
While the proximal cause of death may be classified on death certificates as a respiratory condition or infection, the researchers noted, they argue the true primary causes of death are actually biological stress, non-COVID-19-vaccine medical interventions and the COVID-19 vaccination rollouts.
The study provides an overview of plausible mechanisms for this hypothesis, including research showing that some people experienced severe biological stress from measures like mandates and lockdowns.
“If you structurally change the society by preventing people from moving, breathing, working, having their lives, having to stay at home, lock them in. If you do all these incredibly huge changes, structural changes in society, that is going to induce biological stress,” Rancourt told The Defender.
“There’s very compelling scientific evidence that biological stress is a massive killer,” he added.
Rancourt also pointed out that the stress of lockdowns affected poor people quite differently than it did people who could easily work from home, have food delivered and live relatively comfortably.
The authors also pointed to extensive evidence showing that medical interventions — including denial of treatment — caused premature deaths.
Such interventions included but were not limited to the denial of antibiotics and ivermectin against bacterial pneumonia, the systematic use of mechanical ventilators, experimental treatment protocols, new palliative medications and overdoses, isolation of vulnerable people and encouraged voluntary or involuntary suicide.
The March-April 2020 COVID-19 peak they identified in several countries is difficult to explain without such medical interventions, they wrote.
17 Million Excess Deaths Tied to COVID Vaccines
Finally, the researchers projected that 17 million of the excess deaths they identified were associated with the COVID-19 vaccines, confirming the findings of their previous research on a smaller sample of countries.
Those vaccine-related estimations were based on analyses of places that had large spikes immediately following vaccination or booster campaigns and also by examining the numbers of vaccine doses and their relation to deaths over time.
Thirty percent of the countries they analyzed had no excess deaths until either the vaccine rollouts or the booster campaigns. And there were significant correlations between COVID-19 vaccine rollouts and peaks or increases in excess all-cause mortality. Ninety-seven percent of countries showed a late-2021 or early-2022 peak in excess all-cause mortality temporally associated with booster rollouts.
It is highly unlikely, the researchers wrote, that the vaccine-mortality associations are coincidental.
Rancourt noticed that people critical of this idea point to the fact that in some places, there are sometimes campaigns or booster campaigns that aren’t associated with spikes in excess mortality.
However, he said vaccination campaigns don’t always lead to such spikes because vaccination was not related to death in the same way in every situation. Vulnerability factors like the age of those vaccinated, the health of the population and other sociological factors related to stressors on the immune system change how they are affected by vaccine toxicity or the vaccines’ effects on the immune system.
Based on their analysis and interpretations, they concluded,
“We are compelled to state that the public health establishment and its agents fundamentally caused all the excess mortality in the Covid period.”
*
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Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield confirmed the dangers of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in a U.S. Senate hearing Thursday, calling them “toxic” and saying they should never have been mandated.
The late admission of vaccine injuries underscores the failure of public health agencies and the medical establishment to provide informed consent to the billions of vaccine recipients worldwide.
“It’s important that he is telling the truth now,” vaccine researcher Jessica Rose, Ph.D., told The Defender. “Adverse events were hidden and still are being hidden to prevent injection hesitancy.”
A district court judge had ruled AAPS lacked standing and denied AAPS’s attempt to amend the claim. But in a decision filed June 3, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed the dismissal, and the case has now been remanded to a lower court for discovery and potentially a full trial.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s “physical distancing” protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic lacked scientific evidence, a watchdog group charges.
Protect the Public Trust is calling for an investigation for “apparent violations of scientific integrity standards,” the Washington Examiner reported.
Protect the Public Trust obtained a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report titled “Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools through Phased Prevention,” which it said appears to be the “sole basis” for claiming distancing could work. The letter said the report has five sources, none of which reach that conclusion, the Examiner reported.
Sources cited in the report did not support social distancing and others said it was not a preventive method, the Examiner said.
ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Kathy Hochul said Thursday that she is considering a ban on face masks in the New York City subway system due to concerns about people shielding their identities while committing antisemitic acts.
Myocarditis and pericarditis only occur after vaccination and not after COVID-19 infection, according to a recent preprint led by researchers at Oxford University, which compared health outcomes among COVID-vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
“Whilst rare, all myocarditis and pericarditis events during the study period occurred in vaccinated individuals,” the authors wrote. There were no deaths from myocarditis or pericarditis.
The study evaluated over 1 million English children aged 5 to 11 and adolescents aged 12 to 15. Vaccinated minors were compared to an equal number of unvaccinated, and children who took one dose were also compared to those who took two doses.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said in congressional testimony that he reviewed no scientific evidence behind the specific recommendations for masking children or maintaining 6-foot social distancing before advocating these policies during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The revelations come from the full transcript, released Friday, of Fauci’s closed-door transcribed interview session in January before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The publication comes days before the former director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is slated to testify in his first public hearing since his retirement in December 2022.
When asked about social distancing recommendations that were implemented in businesses and schools during the early stages of the pandemic, Fauci said he did not recall where the precise number of 6 feet came from.
“It just sort of appeared,” Fauci said in his interview. “I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever.”
The committee, led by chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), provided a brief recap of Tuesday’s session. Monday and Tuesday’s sessions totaled 14 hours, according to lawmakers. In Tuesday’s session, Fauci admitted that the six-foot social distancing recommendation “was likely not based on any data,” according to the committee.
L.A. county officials blamed the spike in infections on holiday gatherings and the fact that people “gathered inside” during the cold December month.
There were 609 COVID-positive patients in L.A. County hospitals as of December 23— an increase from 259 on November 1 but a decrease from the 1,200 at this time last year. Some of the individuals were hospitalized for other reasons and were later diagnosed with COVID-19 after being tested at the hospitals.
Wearing face masks to counter COVID-19 provides no significant protective benefit to children, with kids facing potential developmental challenges from masking, according to a recent review of multiple studies.
The review, published in the BMJ Journal on Dec. 2, investigated the effectiveness of wearing face masks in children during COVID-19. Out of the 22 studies analyzed, 16 reported “no effect of mask wearing on infection or transmission.” While the remaining six found a protective association between mask wearing and transmission, these studies had a “critical or serious risk of bias.” Overall, “we fail to find any evidence of benefit from masking children, to either protect themselves or those around them, from COVID-19,” it stated.
A Spanish study of nearly 600,000 children failed to find any significant difference in the number of infections between the masked and unmasked, the review said. Another study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found no “significant association” between mask mandates for children and pediatric COVID-19 cases.
Hospitalization and mortality rates among unmasked kids were also on the lower side. In Sweden, only 15 kids from almost 2 million were hospitalized in spring 2020 despite schools not requiring face masks. No child died from COVID-19.
In Finland, no child death was reported even though none of the children below the age of 10–12 years wore masks. Some cities mandated children 12 and over to wear masks, and other cities mandated children 10 and over to wear masks.
In New York public schools with one million students under enrollment, the transmission rate during the Delta variant period was estimated to be only 0.5 percent.
Harming Children
While there were no significant benefits in terms of transmission, hospitalization, and death rates among mask wearers, other reports revealed a worrying factor—harms to masked children.
“An extensive body of research has found harms associated with mask wearing or mask requirements in children. These associated harms include negative impacts on speech, language, and learning. Mask wearing causes reduced word identification and impedes the ability to teach and evaluate speech,” the review said. “There is a link between observation of the mouth and language processing, and people of all ages continue to focus on the mouth when listening to non-native speech. The sensitive period for language development is through age 4, and development of connected speech is ongoing beyond age 10.”
Masks may have negatively impacted the mental health and social-emotional well-being of children—especially among younger kids—by restricting the ability to interpret emotions accurately.
Children with special education needs and autism may be “disproportionately impacted” due to masking mandates as they heavily rely on facial expressions to pick up social cues.
“Misinterpretation of facial expressions increases anxiety and depression in individuals. School environments with mask mandates were also found to have increased anxiety levels compared to those without mandates,” the review stated.
Psychological harm from masking could lead to reduced learning capacity and additional sick days among children, it said.
The review pointed out that in medicine, any intervention without unknown benefits but potential risks cannot be recommended unless an absence of harm is demonstrated.
“Child mask mandates fail a basic risk-benefit analysis. Recommending child masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is unsupported by current scientific data and inconsistent with accepted ethical norms that aim to provide additional protection from harm for vulnerable populations,” the review said.
Multiple studies have shown that face masks result in harm among children. A 2021 study from Germany analyzed the mask-wearing experience of 25,930 children who on average wore masks 4.5 hours per day.
Sixty-eight percent of parents reported that masking harmed their child. Some of the reported harms include headaches, malaise, irritability, drowsiness or fatigue, difficulty concentrating, impaired learning, and less happiness.
“We should always ask ‘At what cost?’ when considering any policy,” said Dr. Jeffrey I. Barke, a board-certified primary care physician in private practice in Southern California.
“The masking of children causes direct harm, including increased anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and learning disorders. And most importantly, it prevents the critical bonding between students and teachers because facial expressions aren’t able to be seen,” he said.
Insistence of the CDC
Despite studies showing harm to children, the CDC continues to advise face masks for kids aged two years and above, under certain circumstances, “to protect themselves and others from COVID-19,” according to a May 11 update.
According to the CDC, masking is needed in counties where COVID-19 hospitalization admissions are “high.” In areas where admissions are “medium or high,” the CDC recommends masking if the individual is at “high risk for getting very sick.”
“Choose a high-quality and comfortable mask or respirator that your child can wear properly. A poorly fitting or uncomfortable mask or respirator might be worn incorrectly or removed often, and that would reduce its intended benefits,” it says.
The Epoch Times reached out to the CDC for comment.
There have also been accusations of political maneuvers in research related to childhood masking. In June 2021, a study published in JAMA Pediatrics contended that children wearing face masks were inhaling carbon dioxide levels “deemed unacceptable by the German Federal Environmental Office by a factor of 6.”
JAMA Pediatrics pulled the paper citing “numerous scientific issues,” including concerns about study methodology and whether proper devices were used in measuring carbon dioxide levels.
In a statement to Just the News, Harald Walach, author of the study, pointed out that the retraction notice used “potential public health implications” as a “key phrase.” This suggested that “the retraction was political, because some people did not like our data.”
In a written response to comments on the study, Mr. Walach and colleagues defended the conclusions of their study.
“Facts are not constituted by single studies, but by multiple replications and discourse,” they wrote. “This is the first peer-reviewed study of carbon dioxide content under face masks in children in a short measurement set-up. The measurements, we contend, are valid and were conducted by individuals with high content expertise.”
“If someone doubts our results, the way to go is not to claim they are wrong without proof, but to produce better and different results.”
The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Epidemiology and Infection on Nov. 13, analyzed mask use among 3,209 individuals from Norway. Researchers followed them for 17 days, and then asked the participants about their use of masks. The team found that there was a higher incidence of testing positive for COVID-19 among people who used masks more frequently.
Among individuals who “never or almost never” wore masks, 8.6 percent tested positive. That rose to 15 percent among participants who “sometimes” used masks, and to 15.1 percent among those who “almost always or always” wore them.
Adjusting for factors such as vaccination status, the study determined that individuals who sometimes or often wore masks had a 33 percent higher incidence of COVID-19, compared to those who never or almost never wore masks. This jumped to 40 percent among people who almost always or always wore them.
However, adjusting for “differences in baseline risk over time,” the risk of wearing masks turned out to be “less pronounced,” with only a 4 percent higher incidence of infection among mask-wearers.
“The results contradict earlier randomized and non-randomized studies of the effectiveness of mask-wearing on the risk of infection,” the researchers wrote.
A federal court of appeals ruled that the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the FBI, and the surgeon general violated the First Amendment by using social media to suppress the speech and rhetoric of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
CDC Director Mandy Cohen ;”What I see is I don’t see any need for mandates or those kinds of things right now. But we have to keep watching this virus, seeing how it changes, and if we need to make other recommendations, we will,” the CDC head said.
Fauci had been informed by January 2020 that his institute had funded the discovery and study of dozens of novel coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including the closest cousin virus to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, new records show.
In a series of now-infamous tweets, FDA implied ivermectin was dangerous, and that it was intended only for horses and other animals. The appellate judges noted that FDA failed to acknowledge that a safe and effective human form of the medicine has been in use for decades.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has towed the anti-ivermectin narrative all along, with its infamous tweet reading, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”16 While commanding the U.S. public and physicians not to use ivermectin for an off-label use, the irony stands that close to 40% of U.S. prescriptions are for off-label uses.17
SB 29 prohibits state and local government entities from implementing certain COVID-19 preventative measures, like mandated face masks and COVID-19 vaccines. It also prohibits the closure of private businesses and schools due to COVID-19. The bill was signed by Abbott and takes effect on Sept. 1, 2023.
“Lockdown has a purpose,” the pseudoscientist continued. “One of the purposes, if you don’t have a vaccine, it’s to get more ventilators, get the hospitals better prepared … until you decompress the pressure on the hospitals.“If you have a vaccine available, you might want to lock down temporarily so you can get everybody vaccinated,” he suggests.
“You had to have something to immediately shut down the tsunami of infection,” he states, adding, “that lockdown was absolutely justified.”
“If you have a vaccine available, you might want to lock down temporarily so you can get everybody vaccinated,” he suggests.
“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” says Fauci, the former White House coronavirus czar and now-retired public health official who became the face of both the Trump and Biden administrations’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, in a lengthy sit-down with The New York Times. “Never. I never did.”
Fauci 2020 2021
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease doctor, said he thinks every state in the nation should have stay-at-home orders to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. At the time he spoke, 10 states still didn’t have a stay-at-home mandate. “You know, the tension between federally mandated versus states’ rights to do what they want is something I don’t want to get into,” Fauci said. “If you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that. We really should be. I don’t understand why that’s not happening.”
Asked by CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “State of the Union” if he’d like a “national lockdown” where people are being told they need to stay home and out of restaurants and bars, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said he’d “like to see a dramatic diminution of the personal interaction that we see” in those places.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Anthony Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress about the National Institutes of Health’s gain-of-function research. While we don’t desire to see Fauci imprisoned, the complaint demonstrates the severity of the NIH’s deficiencies and the need for sweeping reform.
Any honest assessment of the NIH’s pandemic performance would give it a poor grade. While NIH support for the rapid development of the Covid vaccine deserves some credit, the NIH failed in almost every other aspect of its contribution to the pandemic response.
Morris Brown College (MBC) in Atlanta, Georgia, announced Sunday that it would be implementing a mask mandate for all students, faculty and staff for the 2023 fall semester, according to an Instagram post.
In addition, students must continue social distancing, all large gatherings have been canceled for the next two weeks and anyone going on campus must get their temperature taken, according to the post. Students and staff who test positive must quarantine for five days in line with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention protocols.
James told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement that MBC has no cases yet but that the school is “taking precautionary measures for the next 14 days.”
All Americans will be urged by the Biden administration to get a coronavirus booster shot this autumn ahead of what it claims is a new wave of infections, a White House official said Sunday.
Mattingly said, “[T]he Biden administration would regularly reach out to Twitter and Facebook and other companies in kind of the early stages of their COVID response and say, this person is spreading lies about vaccines, this account is spreading misinformation that is inhibiting — not just our efforts, the administration’s efforts to address COVID — but also public health, do something about it. And often, I think more often than not, the companies would respond and say, okay. And there are emails that came out during the course of this case that that was something that I think — when it was explained to me at the time, I thought, alright, that makes sense, that’s probably what we should do on public health grounds.”
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki pushed social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 information coming from conservative voices starting in May 2021, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, the Daily Caller reported.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana granted an injunction barring President Joe Biden’s administration from contacting tech companies to request the censorship of some users.
The ruling came in response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri. Their lawsuit alleged the federal government overstepped in its efforts to convince social media companies to address postings that could result in vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic or affect elections.
“If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the injunction read.
Early in the Covid pandemic concerns were raised that lockdown and other non-pharmaceutical interventions would cause significant multidimensional harm to society. This paper comprehensively evaluates the global state of knowledge on these adverse social impacts, with an emphasis on their type and magnitude during 2020 and 2021. A harm framework was developed spanning 10 categories: health, economy, income, food security, education, lifestyle, intimate relationships, community, environment and governance. The analysis synthesizes 600 publications with a focus on meta-analyses, systematic reviews, global reports and multi-country studies. This cumulative academic research shows that the collateral damage of the pandemic response was substantial, wide-ranging and will leave behind a legacy of harm for hundreds of millions of people in the years ahead. Many original predictions are broadly supported by the research data including: a rise in non-Covid excess mortality, mental health deterioration, child abuse and domestic violence, widening global inequality, food insecurity, lost educational opportunities, unhealthy lifestyle behaviours, social polarization, soaring debt, democratic backsliding and declining human rights. Young people, individuals and countries with lower socioeconomic status, women and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities were hit hardest. Societal harms should challenge the dominant mental model of the pandemic response: it is likely that many Covid policies caused more harm than benefit, although further research is needed to address knowledge gaps and explore policy trade-offs, especially at a country-level. Planning and response for future global health emergencies must integrate a wider range of expertise to account for and mitigate societal harms associated with government intervention.
Federal officials gave more than $23 billion in COVID-19 aid to the nation’s top 20 nonprofit hospitals, even as a 62 percent increase in their collective net assets led to parallel surges in the institutions’ total profits and revenues during 2018–2021, according to a new report.
Only two of the 20 institutions have repaid the government for the COVID-19 aid they received.
“The 20 largest nonprofit hospitals in the country continued making massive profits while their cumulative net assets soared to $324.3 billion in 2021, up from $200.6 billion in 2018.
“Those hospital systems received congressional COVID bailouts of $23 billion and only two providers partially paid their COVID bailout back,” according to the report compiled by Open The Books, an Illinois-based research nonprofit that compiles and posts spending by all levels of government in the United States.
The two institutions that have partially repaid the government weren’t identified.
The biggest jump among the top 20 was 92 percent by the Mayo Clinic, based in Rochester, Minnesota, whose assets surged to $17.7 billion in 2021 from $9.2 billion in 2018. The Mayo Clinic received $350,000 in federal COVID-19 aid, the lowest amount received among the top 20 institutions.
The Cleveland Clinic Health System, based in Independence, Ohio, saw its assets rise 60 percent, to $15.7 billion from $9.8 billion, while receiving $118 million in federal COVID-19 aid. Intermountain Healthcare, based in Salt Lake City, the 12th-largest of the top 20, enjoyed a 63 percent growth in net assets to $11.6 billion from $7.1 billion; Intermountain received $518 million in aid.
The Northwestern Medicine system saw a 43 percent jump in net assets, moving to $11.9 billion from $8.3 billion, and received $419 million in COVID-19 aid. The Indiana University Health System went to $10.3 billion in 2021 from $7 billion in 2018, a 47 percent increase. The Indiana facility received $726 million in COVID-19 assistance from the government.
As the revenue poured in for the 20 hospitals, compensation for their top executives soared, often beyond $10 million annually, according to the report.
For example, the CEO of Ascension Healthcare, which is based in St. Louis and is the nation’s second-largest such system, received $13 million in 2021 and more than $22 million over the period covered by the study.
The recipient among the top 20 of the most COVID-19 aid was San Francisco-based CommonSpirit Health with $3.6 billion, followed by Providence St. Joseph Center with $3 billion, Ascension Healthcare with $2.7 billion, Livonia, Michigan-based Livonia Health with $2.3 billion and Sutter Health, based in Sacramento, California, with $1.7 billion.
Meanwhile, the overall health of Americans got worse between 2018 and 2021.
“American life expectancy during this period sharply declined by a staggering 2.5 years from 2019 through 2022. While ‘comparable country averages’ rebounded from a COVID-related drop in 2021, the United States continued declining in life expectancy,” the report found.
“Yet, the cost of health care is still astronomically high, as the average family paid $22,463 in health insurance premiums in 2022. That does not include out-of-pocket costs like co-pays and deductibles, which can be thousands more. This has led to medical debt for about 100 million Americans,” the report continued.
Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall is warning that a new virus could break out of China and cause another worldwide pandemic as he releases “Muddy Waters,” a comprehensive new report on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and staff reviewed more than 50,000 documents for the report, which found that the COVID-19 virus was created in a lab and the outbreak was likely the result of two unintentional lab leaks.
“This report concludes most likely this was two leaks,” Marshall said during a briefing with reporters ahead of the release of the report. “The possibility of a lab leak in the September-October [2019] time frame, even as early as July or August, was followed by vaccine development in November 2019. And then another lab leak seems to be the most sensible explanation in this retrospective review.”
The report determined that the U.S. government was funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A rapid review report published by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) investigated if high-quality masks, such as the N95, KN95 and FFP2 coverings, protect clinically vulnerable people in the community from catching Covid.
However, the report was unable to find a single piece of scientific research which had usable data.
“The review did not identify any studies for inclusion, and so could provide no evidence to answer the research question,” the authors state. “No studies matching the inclusion criteria were found, so no evidence could be presented.”
WASHINGTON – The U.S. national emergency to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic ended Monday as President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan congressional resolution to bring it to a close after three years — weeks before it was set to expire alongside a separate public health emergency.
A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked President Joe Biden’s order that federal employees receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
The administration had argued that the president was akin to CEO managing a private corporation and therefore held the authority to require employees to get vaccinated, according to the Associated Press.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, disagreed and reversed the decision of a panel that had sided with the administration. That panel included three judges from the Fifth Circuit, two of whom favored the government’s argument. The full appeals court, a group of sixteen judges, ruled Thursday.
Trump-appointed District Judge Jeffrey Brown of Texas initially blocked the order in January. President Joe Biden issued the directive in September 2022.
Sweden’s COVID policies worked like a charm, compared to everybody else. Their excess death rate since COVID began killing people is lower than every other country in the OECD.
The weird thing is we aren’t sure why that is.
The superiority of Sweden’s more laissez-faire policies was obvious from the beginning, but I assumed that time would show that mortality rates in Sweden would pretty much match those in other countries while avoiding all the negative consequences caused by draconian policies followed by most other countries.
I was wrong.
Sweden’s excess mortality during the pandemic is vastly lower than almost every other country in the world, and it has little to do with the death rate from COVID itself.
“Excess deaths” are simply the number of people who died in a period of time in excess of the number expected, given historical trends and demographics. Sweden suffered fewer excess deaths overall, despite having a slightly higher number of COVID-related deaths than her Scandinavian neighbors, to whom they are usually compared.
The Scandinavian countries as a whole did well during COVID compared to most other OECD countries, but none did as well as Sweden. This fact has been buried by the COVIDiots, who seem to think that deaths from COVID are the only important variable, and hence they simply ignore that vast numbers of people who shouldn’t have died from other causes are now buried in the ground.
At least they didn’t die from COVID, so that’s no big deal, I guess.
Sweden was excoriated for their policies, with all Right Thinking™ people certain they were engaged in mass murder. And for a brief period of time, their COVID death rates were higher than their neighbors, but mostly because their sane policies didn’t drag out the inevitable dying.
I have been following the excess death statistics for a year now, and the trends are both very troubling and, frankly, bizarre. There is lots of speculation in the medical and public health community regarding the reasons for a dramatic increase in excess deaths, amounting to millions of people dying who shouldn’t have, and understandably a growing sense of crisis.
Not that most people have been informed about the scary excess death rates. There is remarkably little discussion outside small circles, and “experts” try to blame the deaths on COVID or COVID-related health issues. Sweden’s experience proves that isn’t the case. People there got COVID just like the rest of us, but it’s population isn’t dropping like flies.
Those of us who have been much more skeptical of the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness might point to the vaccine itself as a major cause of the rise of excess deaths, and I suspect some fraction (probably small) is explained by adverse reactions to the vaccine. But Sweden is, if not quite as vaccinated a country as Norway, still very highly vaccinated. Over 80% of the population was vaccinated in 2022 and it ranks very high compared to other countries with far greater excess mortality.
In other words, vaccine reactions may be a contributing factor, but if so it isn’t a huge one or at least a decisive one. Anecdotes of vaccine-induced deaths may tell a real story–it would shocking to find out that injecting anything into billions of people caused no serious problems in any of them–but vaccines themselves are not the cause of the excess mortality spikes.
I have been combing the literature trying to figure out what IS the common variable among the countries where excess mortality is out of control and those few countries where it is not. Obviously, I am not doing the studies and admit that I couldn’t design a good one, although I am competent enough at statistics to recognize a bad one (usually). So I am awaiting a few really good studies by people who know what they are doing and have access to the data.
A few things are clear already, though:
Focusing on COVID mortality statistics is a fool’s errand. The way in which different jurisdictions label a COVID death is so different that what counts as a COVID death in one place wouldn’t be somewhere else. So direct comparisons of those numbers are nearly useless.
Excess mortality–and generally we can rely on these data because a dead person is a dead person, and are easy to count–is the variable that matters. Even if a country prevented every single death from COVID it would benefit nobody if the way that was done caused far more deaths overall. Dying from a heart attack is not somehow unimportant compared to dying from COVID.
Lots more people are dying from non-COVID causes than should be. This is worrying the hell out of the public health community and scaring the pants off some public officials, and it should be. In the UK there is a sense of crisis and there should be everywhere.
We don’t have much of a grip on what is causing this spike. Much of the speculation is simply off the wall.
Sweden’s status as an outlier is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it provides a natural control group. While most Western countries went insane, Sweden actually followed the pandemic protocols that had been in place for years. Protocols, by the way, very similar to the US-planned approach that was thrown out the window when COVID hit.
We may not know exactly what went wrong everywhere else, but Sweden tells us what to look for, and it ain’t going to be pretty for the lockdown strategy everybody else adopted.
There are probably multiple causes for what is a public health disaster, but one of them is almost certainly the total breakdown that bad policies caused in the medical system. It was not the influx of COVID patients that caused this breakdown–the medical system is still totally dysfunctional long after the short, temporary crisis passed. Last time I spoke with an emergency room doctor she told me that she hadn’t treated a COVID patient in months, but emergency rooms are packed.
Whatever the reasons–and I am determined to keep digging–it is clear that most Western governments screwed up big time. Sweden didn’t, despite all the crap directed at them.
We need to know what worked and what didn’t. Unfortunately, most countries still refuse to admit that Sweden’s approach worked and theirs didn’t.
In the meantime, many more people will die due to those bad policies.
The New York Police Department is advising businesses to ask patrons to take off their masks before entry in light of the high number of thefts and robberies across the city.
Removing masks should be made a “condition of entry,” NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said at a press conference last week, noting that criminals have been taking advantage of masks to avoid detection on surveillance cameras.
“People are coming up to our businesses, sometimes with masks, hoods and latex gloves, and they’re being buzzed in, they’re being allowed to enter into the store and then we have a robbery or some kind of property being stolen,” Maddrey said.
“We are asking the businesses to make this a condition of entry: That people, when they come in, they show their face, they should identify themselves,” he continued. “And if they feel like they want to put their mask on after they identify themselves for their safety, by all means, they should do so.”
Two Colorado hospitals are dropping their mask requirements after roughly three years of forcing individuals to mask up.
DenverHealth announced this month that it will finally end its mask mandate, which has been in place for nearly three years, originally going into effect March 2020.
That all changes Wednesday, March 1, as “asymptomatic patients, visitors and vaccinated staff at all Denver Health facilities may choose to mask but are no longer required to do so,” according to the hospital, which said the decision is “aligned with other peer health care institutions in the Denver metro area.”
However, the update states those with respiratory symptoms, as well as unvaccinated staff members, will still be required to wear masks in the facilities.
The coronavirus pandemic most likely began with a laboratory leak, a U.S. Energy Department classified intelligence report now before the White House and key Congress members sets out.
The Wall Street Journalreported on Sunday the Energy Department’s revised assessment of the pandemic’s origins is based on fresh intelligence noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
Full-year revenues for 2022 came in at $100.3 billion, which is an “all-time high” for the multinational corporation, according to the earnings release by Pfizer on Jan. 31.
An international research collaboration that reviewed several dozen rigorous studies of “physical interventions” against influenza and COVID-19 through last year failed to find even a modest effect on infection or illness rates from masks of all qualities.
Published in the peer-reviewed Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, run by the British evidence-based medicine charity Cochrane, the study raises new doubts about ongoing mask mandates and public health recommendations worldwide.
A state Supreme Court judge has shut down New York’s Covid vaccine mandate, blasting the order as “Orwellian” and ruling that the order is “null, void, and of no effect.”
Judge Gerard Neri ruled that Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Commissioner of Health for New York State, and the New York State Department of Health overstepped their authority by mandating the COVID-19 vaccine for NY’s healthcare workers.
Neri noted in his ruling that the vaccine mandate was not authorized by state public health law.
The court sided with a lawsuit that was brought in October and struck down the health order.
The lawsuit was filed by Medical Professionals for Informed Consent.
The judge also slammed the state for claiming that taking mRNA shots is a “public health” issue rather than a personal medical decision.
“In true Orwellian fashion, the Respondents acknowledge then-current COVID-19 shots do not prevent transmission,” Judge Neri wrote.
The New York’s Department of Health issued a statement in response to say that it is “exploring all options” moving forward.
“The requirement is a critical public health tool,” the agency said.
This law allows doctors to face discipline for spreading so-called misinformation or disinformation about COVID-19—including information about vaccine effectiveness and other treatments—and categorizes it as unprofessional conduct.
The group has made it their mission to distribute widely what they claim to be “real” information about the pandemic, often going against CDC recommendations. The article, titled “The Case for Wearing Masks Forever, written by Emma Green and published Wednesday, describes the People’s CDC as a “ragtag coalition of public-health activists” who “believe that America’s pandemic restrictions are too lax.”
The U.S. government has contracts with thousands of companies, and courts have said the issue could affect up to 20% of U.S. workers.
A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to uphold a lower court decision that blocked President Joe Biden’s September 2021 contractor vaccine executive order in those states after Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi brought suit to seek invalidation of the mandate.
Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced on Tuesday his plans to pay back the people and businesses who were fined by the state for violating Covid lockdown policies put in place by his predecessor, Democratic former Gov. Ralph Northam.
In an executive order, Youngkin commanded all state enforcement agencies, boards, and commissions, to report the fines and disciplinary actions they imposed upon those individuals and entities. According to an official statement, a reimbursement process is in the works for his upcoming budget proposal.
“Today we were told that Yulia cannot have a transplant at Duke even if we have a live donor for her because of our refusal of the HPV and Covid vaccines. The HPV is new, we just learned of it yesterday. So here we sit contemplating our next steps.”
In June 2022, the U.S. Centers for Control and Disease Prevention (CDC) said that pharmacies and state health authorities and federal agencies in the United States discarded 82.1 million doses of Covid shots between December 2020 and May 2022.2
Many doses of Covid shots have been discarded because their shelf life expired or because they were compromised due to broken freezers and power outage issues.
India Threw Away 100 Million Doses of CoviShield
Switzerland Will Throw Away 9 Million Doses of Spikevax
Swiss government officials have reported that they will destroy nine million doses of Spikevax that have expired, with an additional 5.1 million shots to expire by February 2023
Canada Disposes of More Than 25 Million Covid Shot Doses
The government of Canada recently discarded 7.7 million doses of Moderna/NIAID’s Spikevax mRNA biologic because of low demand.
The governor said he would be working with Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo “to hold these manufacturers accountable for this mRNA [shot] because they said there were no side effects and we know that there have been a lot.”
The Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) on Friday raided a popular bar and grill that violated the state’s COVID-19 guidelines early in the pandemic. Matt Strickland, the owner of Gourmeltz in Fredericksburg, is an Army veteran who says it’s important to stand up to tyrannical government edicts, so the next generation doesn’t have to.
An analysis carried out by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, for The Washington Post’s Health 202, found that 58% of coronavirus fatalities in August occurred in instances where the person was vaccinated against COVID-19 or had received a booster.
The District of Columbia had the highest number of children who died with coronavirus per capita (12 deaths equating to 95 deaths per million children), even though its schools were almost completely closed for the 2020-2021 school year, with its school coronavirus policies arguably the most draconian in the nation. Wyoming, which has a nearly identical population size to D.C. and whose schools remained open more than any other state, had the fewest deaths per capita (zero).
Brown University economics professor Emily Oster appeared this week in The Atlantic to petition for a “pandemic amnesty.” As the evidence gets harder to bury that the ruling class’s responses to Covid were, as some of us predicted in March 2020, worse than the disease, Oster wants to deflect rising public acrimony over these devastating leadership failures. — Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children.
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know. – Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University.
Following the pattern of President Biden and his coronavirus adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, “fully vaccinated” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky experienced a “rebound” of COVID-19 after completing a round of Pfizer’s antiviral treatment Paxlovid.
The judge ruled on Monday that the New York City Sanitation Department had to cease enforcing proof of vaccination, and furthermore, that the workers had to be reinstated and given back pay on Tuesday.
A new law in California will punish doctors if they give their patients information related to Covid-19 that does not conform to “contemporary scientific consensus” and can be deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation” by the California Medical Board or California Osteopathic Board.
Assembly Bill 2098 was sponsored by State Senator Richard Pan, a pediatrician, and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on September 30, 2022.
It is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2023, and allows doctors to be charged with unprofessional conduct and put on probation of no less than five years or be suspended and lose their medical license.
(The Center Square) – Pandemic-era shutdowns caused historic learning loss for grade school students, according to data released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education.
The Education Department released its “National Report Card,” which showed the “largest score declines” since the federal government began tracking these metrics in 1990. Math took the hardest hit, but reading scores did not fare well either.
