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When will it end?
Suffering Australian farmers have had to harvest the largest total volume of agricultural produce since records began, highlighting how stupid it is to let coal plants keep releasing vital plant nutrients into the atmosphere.
The Guardian
Agricultural production will be the largest total volume of commodities Australia has ever produced, with a historic gross production value of $78bn, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences is predicting.
Just one week ago on Reuters:
 Weds December 1 LONDON, Dec. 1 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – As a warming planet brings higher sea levels and wilder weather – from droughts to floods – the challenge of growing food is getting tougher with less reliable harvests.
Climate Change destroys investigative journalism.
H/t Tom Nelson
10 out of 10 based on 109 ratings
All the vaccines are supposed to be Intra-muscular (IM), not Intravenous (IV). But a needle going into a muscle can sometimes end up in a vein. So fergoodnesssake, why aren’t we taking the 10 extra seconds to do an injection properly and reduce some of the worst side effects?
Anatomy varies. In an accidental IV injection the dose will be dropped straight into the blood supply, and within minutes will be spread throughout the body, potentially ending up in tissues like the heart, ovaries, or pancreas, where it is not designed to go. If heart cells, for example, make the virus spike and display it on their surface, it’s quite understandable if our immune systems think that look foreign, and generate a reaction. That’s myopericarditis.
Not all veins are identical
 Don’t vaccinate veins. Image by Dr. Johannes Sobotta
Spread the message about “aspiration”. This used to be standard practice for most IM injections but has been dropped over the last couple of decades.
To aspirate, a nurse would put the needle in, then briefly pull back on the syringe. If the end of the needle is in a blood vessel that brief suction will pull blood into the chamber. If that happens the whole syringe, needle, everything should be retracted and tossed in the bin.
Two studies now suggest that accidental IV injections may be responsible for increasing the risk both of myocarditis and blood clots.
A study in mice by Can Li showed that the mice injected “IM” did not develop myocarditis, only the mice injected intravenously did. The markers of cardiac inflammation were also raised.
The histological changes of myopericarditis after the first IV-priming dose persisted for 2 weeks and were markedly aggravated by a second IM- or IV-booster dose. Cardiac tissue mRNA expression of interleukin (IL)-1β, interferon (IFN)-β, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α increased significantly from 1 dpi to 2 dpi in the IV group but not the IM group…
Bizarrely, some were arguing that myocarditis is only a 1 in 50,000 thing and aspirating slows vaccinations, and thus it might be worse to aspirate when it makes no difference to 49,999 people. I’m guessing most people would think it was 10 seconds well spent.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
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9.5 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
Omicron is a superspreader, but so far behaving better than expected
It appears Omicron will replace Delta around the world. Not only has it rapidly replaced Delta in South Africa, there have now been three superspreader events in Norway, one of which infected 120 people, and another one in Denmark that infected 52.
Omicron is acting for all the world like the same cluster spreading Covid we know so well. And of course, it is happily shed and spread by both the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. Quick, lock one of them up?
 South African Covid Cases | Source: OWID With 16,000 cases a day, and test-positivity up to 25%, there is no doubt there is a real and rampant wave of infections.
All over the world epidemiologists and doctors are watching for hospitalization statistics from South Africa. What is promising are the change in symptoms:
In another encouraging sign, the Steve Biko and Tshwane District Hospital Complex in Pretoria, South Africa, said that most patients in the Covid wards didn’t require oxygen. That marks a departure from previous waves.
_MSN
There are conflicting reports. There was a story a few days ago of how 10% of cases in hospital were children under two. Another reporting teenagers struggling.
There appears to be some immune escape, meaning that protection from a past infection isn’t as good, and people are more likely to get reinfected. (Though three times a tiny number is still a small number).
It would be the sweetest irony if Big Pharma were undone by the great unvaxxed of Africa where the poorest people in the world don’t want the vaccines may have brewed a new variant that, maybe possibly, could give a lot of people protection. But it’s too soon to call.
Don’t party just yet
No one wants to be reminded, but sometimes the sting can be delayed. It’s summer in South Africa, so people have more Vitamin D, and the virus is mostly spreading in the young university students. Last year in the UK autumn — when things seemed to be going so well it took 6 – 12 weeks to spread from young party goers to high risk people who were acting more cautiously. Deaths are also delayed by around three weeks, and possibly even longer.
Watching Omicron spread
Omicron is just starting to show in most national graphs on Nextstrain.
In the last two weeks of November 240 cases were fully sequenced in South Africa and 207 of them were Omicron. The cases are not necessarily randomly chosen for sequencing.
 Omicron takes over from Delta. Source.:Nextstrain.
There are currently about 16,000 cases a day in South Africa, up from a couple of hundred a month earlier.
A week ago in Botswana only a quarter of the cases were Omicron. But in Ghana, about 70% were. In the USA already 14% of cases are Omicron, based on 120 samples.
But in most nations there isn’t enough data.
 And so it begins in the USA (top right corner). Things in Norway have moved so far the assistant health director Espen Rostrup Nakstad already says that they have no control over the new variant.
Keep reading →
9.5 out of 10 based on 57 ratings
Doesn’t look like the dawn of a “new energy era”
 The third largest economy in the world signed up to the Glasgow circus, but is actually telling its own corporate heavyweights to get into oil and gas. The government approved a strategic energy plan on October 22 which essentially says “double oil and gas production by 2040”. (From 34.7% of domestic consumption up to 60%). This is mostly about being energy self sufficient. But they aren’t telling industry to “double your wind farms”. They’re not worried they might run out of solar panels.
It’s a kind of quiet NetOneHundred plan.
Which countries at Glasgow are the suckers reducing fossil fuels?
Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
Japan Is Backing Oil and Gas Even After COP26 Climate Talks
By Stephen Stapczynski and Tsuyoshi Inajima, Bloomberg
Government officials have been quietly urging trading houses, refiners and utilities to slow down their move away from fossil fuels, and even encouraging new investments in oil-and-gas projects, according to people within the Japanese government and industry, who requested anonymity as the talks are private.
Japan imports 90% of its energy. This is about security:
That plan says “no compromise is acceptable to ensure energy security, and it is the obligation of a nation to continue securing necessary resources.”
That latest strategy calls for the share of oil and natural gas produced either domestically or under the control of Japanese enterprises overseas to increase from 34.7% in fiscal year 2019 to more than 60% in 2040. Japanese officials plan to convey to other nations the importance attached to continued investments in upstream supply, the people added.
Renewables are the thin-blue and-yellow GT stripe across the graph. Call it “decoration”.
 … Oil Barrels: http://pngimg.com/image/21314
10 out of 10 based on 75 ratings
Finally, a detailed explanation of how bureaucrats are effectively deciding doctor patient decisions in hospitals throughout the US. Something that explains why hospitals are bafflingly working so hard to stop doctors using alternate protocols. Money.
There is a system of payments to hospitals that effectively punish them for using ivermectin or any other treatment outside the one permitted protocol. The amount of money involved is not disclosed but “Attorney Thomas Renz and CMS whistleblowers have calculated a total payment of at least $100,000 per patient.”
Hospitals must pay back these “bonus” payments if they use drugs outside the one approved protocol. Does it apply to vitamins too?
If the payments really are of this size, hospital management would be very effectively controlled, and there would be little competition, no free market, and only the illusion of choice.
The AAPS or Association of American Physicians and Surgeons started in 1943, and after 75 years, astonishingly still seems to be sticking to the original intent — speaking for doctors who want to serve patients and the freedom to do what they believe is best.
By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D. and Ali Shultz, J.D. – https://www.truthforhealth.org/
Patients are being imprisoned in hospitals:
The combination that enables this tragic and avoidable loss of hundreds of thousands of lives includes (1) The CARES Act, which provides hospitals with bonus incentive payments for all things related to COVID-19 (testing, diagnosing, admitting to hospital, use of remdesivir and ventilators, reporting COVID-19 deaths, and vaccinations) and (2) waivers of customary and long-standing patient rights by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Creating a “National Pandemic Emergency” provided justification for such sweeping actions that override individual physician medical decision-making and patients’ rights. The CARES Act provides incentives for hospitals to use treatments dictated solely by the federal government under the auspices of the NIH. These “bounties” must paid back if not “earned” by making the COVID-19 diagnosis and following the COVID-19 protocol.
The hospital payments include:
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- A “free” required PCR test in the Emergency Room or upon admission for every patient, with government-paid fee to hospital.
- Added bonus payment for each positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
- Another bonus for a COVID-19 admission to the hospital.
- A 20 percent “boost” bonus payment from Medicare on the entire hospital bill for use of remdesivir instead of medicines such as Ivermectin.
- Another and larger bonus payment to the hospital if a COVID-19 patient is mechanically ventilated.
- More money to the hospital if cause of death is listed as COVID-19, even if patient did not die directly of COVID-19.
- A COVID-19 diagnosis also provides extra payments to coroners.
Outside hospitals, physician MIPS quality metrics link doctors’ income to performance-based pay for treating patients with COVID-19 EUA drugs. Failure to report information to CMS can cost the physician 4% of reimbursement.
Because of obfuscation with medical coding and legal jargon, we cannot be certain of the actual amount each hospital receives per COVID-19 patient. But Attorney Thomas Renz and CMS whistleblowers have calculated a total payment of at least $100,000 per patient.
ht dadgervais
Some of the stories are truly harrowing
Veronica Wolski was effectively imprisoned in hospital for three weeks, denied the treatments her doctors ordered, forced to take treatments she did not want. A whole team of outside medical specialists came on board, hired lawyers, and did everything they could to get her out of the hospital. They even set up a team with an ambulance with equipment and medicines ready to transport her but the hospital would not release her and she died alone.
There is now a program called the Veronica Wolinski mobile care team — they are responding to requests from other patients trapped in hospitals they don’t want to be in around the US.
Final word: Obviously statistics in the US have been compromised hopelessly by these incentive payments, but bear in mind that statistics from other nations with other systems show the CCP coronavirus is a problem. The world is watching the Omicron numbers unfold and hoping that the new variant will be “the variant we’ve all been waiting for” and less malicious. We’re looking for hospitalization data from populations with older patients of both the vaccinated and unvaccinated kind. And it takes eight days for people to need hospital, and it may take longer for ADE reactions (where vaccinated people suffer a worse outcome.) Tick, tick, tick…
Beyond all that, the shocking corruption has to exposed. Spread the word.
10 out of 10 based on 88 ratings
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8.1 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
The Coalition must be thrilled. The Australia election is due in the next six months, it’s on a knife edge which the current government could easily lose, and the Opposition leader just announced that instead of the current 27% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030, they will aim for a 43% cut.
The question is whether Australian voters fall for the magical fantasy plan
As usual, Labor will “pick winners” in a competitive market and somehow make things cheaper, better and increase jobs too:
Mr Albanese said Labor’s long-awaited emissions reduction target would create jobs, cut power bills and reduce emissions.
“Electricity prices will fall from the current level by $275 for households by 2025 at the end of our first term if we are successful,” he said.
The policy would create an additional 604,000 jobs by 2030, with the majority in regional Australia, he said.
To bad that for every Green Job created, two to five real jobs are lost.
Labor is the best friend of foreign bankers
 … Labor plans to ramp up our secret emissions trading scheme. In a coded transmission, Labor announces that Australians will send their hard earned money overseas and get nothing in return but paper certificates for CO2 emissions that third world countries may have once intended to emit.
“In particular, we welcome the use of the existing Safeguard Mechanism and the Climate Change Authority to set emission budgets.”
Concealed from the public, the Safeguard Mechanism was installed by Malcolm Turnbull, also known as the Member for Goldman Sachs. The World Bank was happy. Turnbull and Hunt brought this in as a legal framework that is already running but barely. Labor don’t even need to get new legislation in place to feed the bankers, all they have to do is turn the dial and they’ve just said they will.
The Safeguard Mechanism applies to Australia’s largest 150 companies and will force them to make more emissions cuts and buy carbon credits to meet those targets. And who sets the targets? Another unelectable bunch of bureaucrats: “The Climate Change Authority”.
Unless Australians get serious and vote for minor parties to hold the balance of power — even if the Coalition wins, the Green Blob does too. Somehow a conservative party that sold out on its own promises may escape punishment. Every time the Rightwing moves left, the Leftwing move lefter.
Can Labor lose another unloseable election by throwing itself on the Climate pyre? Oh yes, they can, but only if the Coalition can point out the flaws in a policy they voted for, and endorsed with Net Zero.
9.9 out of 10 based on 75 ratings
Just what the world doesn’t need, another giant global bureaucracy which is a tool of President Xi.
Omicron has barely got out of the gates and the WHO are already clamoring to create a kind of nightmare IPCC version for pandemics. They’re calling it an International Pandemic Treaty as if they can make peace with inanimate rogue nucleotides.
In any case, a global unaccountable, unelected ruling body in charge of borders, lockdowns and our medical supplies sounds like the DeathStar of Bureaucracies.
As Marc Morano says, it’s a “virus version of the IPCC”:
The assembly’s decision will see the creation of an “intergovernmental negotiating body” to draft and negotiate the final convention, which would then need to be adopted by member states. … Tedros said omicron “demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics,” and called for a “legally binding” agreement.
— @WHO
The UN is bought and controlled one vote at a time by the highest bidder, or the one with the Biggest Belt and Road. And when it came to stopping the biggest pandemic in a century, the WHO helped it spread, just as President Xi might have hoped.
The WHO only had one job, and they failed dismally
Remember February 2, 2020? That’s when the WHO could have saved millions of lives and told the world to turn off the flights and keep the Wuhan Flu in Wuhan. Instead Tedros, the told the world ridiculous fictions and Chief Health Officers believed him:
““Travel restrictions can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies,” the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.”
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Chief of the WHO
Apparently we needed to fly in a deadly airborne disease that spread from symptomless people because doctors wouldn’t be able to email, phone, tweet, youtube and generally share info?
 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus As for securing “medical supply chains”, at this point the planes of the world were carrying those medical PPE supplies straight to China where they could be used, hoarded, and traded back for political favours, thus creating the shortage Tedros said he was trying to stop.
On February 3 last year I noted that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia at the same time that China loaned them billions to build a railway line. He was part of a one-party government which was formerly a Marxist Lenninist far left group. Suddenly there might be a reason (or $13 billion) why Tedros went out of his way to praise President Xi of China..?
And praise he did. Tedros met Xi and raved to the world
Could President Xi have asked any more of a minion?
“…Tedros said it is admirable that the Chinese government has shown its solid political resolve and taken timely and effective measures in dealing with the epidemic.
President Xi’s personal guidance and deployment show his great leadership capability, Tedros said.
He said that China has released information in an open and transparent manner, identified the pathogen in a record-short time and shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in a timely manner with the WHO and other countries.
China’s measures are not only protecting its people, but also protecting the people in the whole world, he said.
A petition to sack Tedros gathered more than a million signatures. Some five million people have died since that craven day last year, yet Tedros is still in the job.
Marc Morano says “this must be stopped now”:
“This will be a virus version of the UN IPCC & Paris climate style pacts. The pandemic ‘crisis’ will become permanent just like the ‘climate crisis.’ Attempts to impose lockdowns for future COVID variants or new viruses may be internationally imposed instead of national, state or local. If you don’t like your governor, mayor or school board, you can vote them out, but if a ‘radical’ WHO ‘pandemic treaty’ that is ‘legally binding’ becomes reality, global mandates may be coming your way and local elections will cease to matter as unelected bureaucrats will be yielding the real power over your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. This must be stopped now. Even the Washington Post is calling a ‘pandemic treaty’ a ‘radical’ idea.
The WHO needs to be cancelled.
10 out of 10 based on 84 ratings
Far from being the wild fringe, this was middle Australia speaking.
JP Morgan and Ubermedia traced the phones of people at the enormous rally in Melbourne on November 20 and discovered that they came from everywhere and every class.
Half the people at the rally were the richest, most educated or the average homeowner and the other half were the strugglers, the truckies and cleaners, but also the the young professionals and libertarians, and fitness junkies.
All sides of the political spectrum were in the streets. Something that ought to shake any politician in an election year.
Daniel Y. Teng, The Epoch Times
Tens of thousands of protestors who took to the streets of Melbourne in some of the largest protests so far against government-mandated COVID-19 health regulations hailed from a broad cross-section of society—including the wealthiest segment of the state—and were not extremist or fringe elements portrayed by some media outlets.
The heat map shows the origin of the protestors
Some people drove from miles away:
 People came from all over Victoria. (Roy Morgan and UberMedia, data was anonymised). As many as 30% were from the highest income and most educated brackets (earning $133,000pa). These include the “Blue Chip” the progressives, humanitarians and career achievers and entrepeneurs.
Another 23% were what is called Home & Hearth, “closest to the average Australian”. 15% were the young professionals, and another 15% were lower socioeconomic groups the “Fair Go” crowd. The black lines represent the proportion these groups normally have in the population.
This is a microcosm of the whole nation. Victoria may have had the largest protests, but the crowds in other capitals were the same kinds of people. The most over-represented groups were the “average” homeowners and the struggling low socioeconomic groups. But the richest most educated group was nearly a third of the crowd, exactly in proportion to it’s population.
UPDATE: And yes, they can do that? Track people and personality-type them. Time to buy a Faraday Cage or ditch the phone.
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9.8 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
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9.2 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
 China’s Long March-5B launch* This should rattle the Wokeness Cage: Russia and China are actively testing the US defences in space on a daily basis. US assets are being harassed with lazers, radio jammers, cyber attacks and even other satellites with robotic grappling hook arms. The Russians even launched a satellite into an orbit so close to a US Security satellite that from the ground people couldn’t tell if it was being attacked, then, in something like a James Bond movie stunt, the Russian satellite launched a little target and shot it, “dangerously close”. That was in 2019. We can see now why Trump set up “Space Force”.
Last week the news came out that China’s space program was going nuclear, and the 1MW reactor would be 100 times larger than the one NASA plans to put on the moon by 2030.
Gen. David Thompson from Space Force estimates China may overtake the US in space by the end of the decade.
So by 2030 the US hopes to reduce CO2 by 50% and China hopes it will command space.
Meanwhile, China is a developing nation that doesn’t need to reduce CO2 emissions at all, and in the US, some schools for gifted and talents students are being closed “because they are racist and elitist“.
Hopefully, the thought of China weaponizing space might make people rethink climate change and education.
The Washington Post
“The threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time,” [said] Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations…
Both the Russians and the Chinese are working on satellites that can attack other satellites, he said. For some time now there have been reports that China was developing a satellite that could claw another satellite or grab one with a robotic arm or a grappling hook. The Chinese government has several reasons to want to disable U.S. satellites, which have been useful in revealing concentration camps built to intern Uyghur Muslims and new Chinese nuclear missile silo fields.
In 2019, Russia deployed a small satellite into an orbit so close to a U.S. “national security satellite” that the U.S. government didn’t know whether it was attacking or not, Thompson said. Then, the Russian satellite backed away and conducted a weapons test. It released a small target and then shot it with a projectile.“It maneuvered close, it maneuvered dangerously, it maneuvered threateningly so that they were coming close enough that there was a concern of collision,” he said. “So clearly, the Russians were sending us a message.”
The Daily Mail:
Thompson said China is sending up new satellites twice as fast as the US is managing to, and that the budding superpower is working on a system of global satellites aimed at surveilling any part of the world.
‘They’re fielding operational systems at an incredible rate,’ he said.
In theory it could disrupt or even disable US satellites which revealed information about China’s nuclear operations and the existence of Uyghur Muslim concentration camps.
‘The Chinese are actually well ahead’ of their Russian counterparts, Thompson claimed.
But Russia blew up an old spy satellite of their own two weeks ago, leaving a trail of debris of 1,500 trackable pieces circling the Earth possibly causing havoc for spacecraft for years.
*The rocket ended up going out of control and crashed in the Indian Ocean. China being good global citizens, NOT.
9.8 out of 10 based on 57 ratings
 …. Just like the climate debate, the crooks are the ones claiming they are “the science” even as they destroy it.
It’s a sacred shield to fend off questions they don’t want to answer.
The Daily Mail
‘It’s sort of a way of ending all debate because if you attack him or have any debate over any of his edicts or his mandates, you’re attacking science,’ Paul said on Tuesday.
‘But this is a very, very dangerous sort of idea. The idea that a government bureaucrat represents science and that he is now untouchable – that it is sort of like you are now contradicting the all high priest of science, if you say anything.’
Ted Cruz wants to know: did he or didn’t he fund Gain of Function research?
The Daily Mail
[Ted] Cruz told Sean Hannity: ‘I’ve got to say, Dr. Fauci, I think, is the most dangerous bureaucrat in the history of the country. He talked about hurting science but I don’t think anyone has hurt science or hurt the credibility of doctors more than Dr. Fauci because throughout this pandemic, he has been dishonest, he’s been political, he’s been partisan.’
Referring to that interview, Cruz continued: ‘(Fauci) said, I represent science. I am science. I was laughing. It’s like Louis XIV, the sun king in France saying “I am the state.” It is this delusion of grandeur.’
There’s a five year jail term for lying to Congress.
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9.8 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
Just another cheap, safe and long-used-drug for our Health Ministers to ignore
A new study looked at 944,000 US Veterans who had a Covid test sometime. Of those, 2,200 were alcoholics who were also prescribed disulfiram. We might expect alcoholics to crash and burn against Covid, but amongst them, strangely, infections were lower than in the non-alcoholics — 34% lower. And there were no deaths from Covid in the 188 either. Sadly the death rate in infected vets who caught Covid, but weren’t using disulfiram, was 3%.
It’s only a very odd observational study, not a randomized one. The mechanism isn’t known for sure, but there are suggestions the drug interferes with an enzyme the virus needs and may reduce hyperinflammation. Haven’t we heard that before?
Ivermectin appears to be better, but for people without access to it, at least there is the option to become an alcoholic. Thinking about the corruption at the FDA or the TGA will help. And if you are already an alcoholic, best get treatment now before they ban it.
It obviously needs a proper study. Bear in mind there were only 188 alcoholic veterans who caught Covid. But still, none of them died, and we’d expect 5 or 6 deaths in a group of 188 non-alcoholic vets.
Wonder what the drug might achieve in a non-alcoholic test group?
The message here is that we are living in a sea of antivirals, but our funding system, the bureaucracy, and our deep medical swamp are getting in the way.
By HealthDay News
The investigators found that people taking disulfiram, known as Antabuse, for alcoholism had a lower risk of infection with COVID-19 and were less likely to die from the coronavirus…
Listen to the sweet naivete of a Professor:
“This is a great candidate for a repurposed drug. It could easily be made available worldwide if we can prove it has a positive effect on patients with COVID-19,” said Chris Sander, a professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School.
They noted that disulfiram has been prescribed for more than 60 years as a treatment for alcoholism, and that it’s safe, inexpensive, familiar to physicians, and widely used in many countries.
And he thinks those are good selling points. If only this drug were $3,000 a dose, barely useful and fully patented.
Keep reading →
9.6 out of 10 based on 48 ratings
8.5 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
The media headlines have been everywhere, but the truth is we know very little.
Like everyone here, I was surprised at the *universal* instant Omicron media coverage which went from 0 – 100 in two seconds or less. I’m going to skip (for the moment) the obvious political questions like “is this the midterm election variant” and consider the virus.
 … We know Omicron has many mutations. We don’t know what the combined effect of them is. Presumably the particular mutations, and lab tests of antibody binding suggest it may evade vaccine or even natural immunity. However, many of these mutations are new and unknown, so the in vivo, real effect is only something the patients and doctors might know. And the doctors are giving mixed reports in South Africa. It may turn out to be a more infectious but nicer variant. We’ll know in a few weeks.
It’s certainly spreading fast. Case numbers have increased six-fold from 300 cases to 1,800 in just two weeks. Test numbers are up but test positivity has also risen from 1% to 3.7%.
Symptoms have changed. Doctors say that they noticed a change in the presentation of cases around 10 days ago. The symptoms were suddenly different, and while Dr Angelique Coetzee, said it appeared to be mild, (which is very encouraging) she was referring to young patients, and is still concerned about older patients. The new symptom list includes headaches, extreme tiredness, body aches and pains, but not a loss of smell, or coughing.
But Rudo Mathivha, head of Soweto’s Baragwanath hospital said that young people in their 20s to 30s are coming in with moderate to severe disease, some needing ICU. That’s not good.
About 65% are not vaccinated. John Campbell interprets this to suggest that the unvaccinated are at higher risk, but if only a quarter of South Africans are double vaccinated, and the vaccines work, shouldn’t we see even more unvaccinated patients than that? Wouldn’t most of the young people be unvaccinated?
Omicron has already been circulating somewhere for more than a year
Looking at the evolutionary history of these mutations — the last and nearest branch was around May 2020. That means it’s likely that the Omicron variant has been silently spreading in a population that is rarely if ever tested or sequenced. That would explain why so many mutations seem to have “suddenly” appeared. Presumably if it was a variant that was very deadly, it would have come to our attention months ago, even in a remote African village, surely? Though if it has been circulating in Africa (and we don’t know that) it has probably been affecting a younger population, possibly one that’s fitter or leaner and which gets more sun (and Vitamin D). We don’t know the effect it has on the older, indoor, and more diabetic people of The West, and we don’t know much about the effect on people who are vaccinated, either. Assume that it has become more infectious recently, but collecting mutation for a long while.
It may be a blessing that this variant has evolved in a region that has low vaccination. It might be less deadly. But we don’t know that, yet. It’s possible that even a virus that is milder, but spreads much faster will ultimately cause higher mortality. (Think of SARS-2, compared to SARS-1). But the new variant might be good news. What we want, after all, is for it to evolve into a highly infectious mild disease.
The solution is still antivirals and borders (til we get antivirals)
The key to this is still antivirals. Because Ivermectin has so many mechanisms of action, many that apply to our own molecules (ACE2, TMPRSS2, Ribosomes, Importin) even if ivermectin didn’t bind to the new Omicron spike, it would still be very useful against the virus. So start right now. It should be offered to people at risk.
Given the risk of Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) in vaccinated people, and the risk it might pose to unvaccinated seniors and the co-morbid, it makes sense to shut borders for a couple of weeks, just to get more information. Though possibly it’s already too late, since the virus has been found in so many places. And if reports that Dutch Authorities detected Covid cases in 61 out of 600 passengers from South Africa on Friday morning are true, and those passengers are also vaccinated, wow? Did they catch it on the flight? Update: Apparently only 13 of the 61 cases were the Omicron variant.
The value of a travel ban is the time it gives to test the antivirals in the lab, test the virus against the antibodies, test the virus against the tests! How many cases are we missing?
Of course, it makes no sense to tell everyone that vaccines are the solution to a variant that might be able to escape vaccines. Not coincidentally, Big Pharma is suddenly saying they can develop a new vaccine pronto, which is why they were so keen on using the experimental mRNA vaccines in the first place. But we still have no long term data and much better alternatives.
Omicron has probably been circulating for a long time
In order to collect so many mutations and to have been undetected for so long, it’s likely this branch of the virus was wandering through a population that rarely gets tested. Presumably, they are also rarely vaccinated. This may turn out to be a good thing.
The new Omicron branch is marked in red below.
 Omicron has probably been roaming for a year undetected. The last branch, marked with a black arrow dates back to May 2020. Either that, or Omicron is an artificial variant, planted from somewhere. Who knows? It’s theoretically possible for a malicious gene lab to take a sample, add some tweaks, and drop it anywhere. We need mass testing to find the missing links to be able to say whether this is absolutely a natural infection branch, and find where it has been hiding.
It’s spreading fast
 Cases have increased about six-fold in the last two weeks from around 300 to 1,800. Source: OWID
The current wave is tiny compared to the past three waves.
Obviously, for perspective:
 South Africa has had three waves. Source: OWID,
Omicron has rapidly overtaken Delta in South Africa, but this was during a time when cases were very low, so the sample size for the mass Global Headlines is surprisingly and suspiciously small (the trend line is heavily dependent on just a few cases).
For perspective, when Delta surged and overtook in May 2021 there were 400-800 samples on the graph in South Africa, but the current total tally on Nextstrain used to generate this “prevalence” graph was only 6 cases. (Mouseover the graph on the source page to see case numbers.) Perhaps there are many more samples that haven’t been reported to the Nextstrain database?
 Obviously the trend of “rapid” growth is there, but the number of samples is small. Source: Nextstrain Omicron has a lot of mutations
Many of these also occur in other strains and have been studied (top half). But many are new (bottom half). We really have no idea what effect the latter have. It may be nothing, or everything.
 Omicron contains man shared mutations (top), but also many new ones (lower half). Source: Nextstrain.
9.3 out of 10 based on 56 ratings
How much of the public narrative does Bill Gates buy for $300m?
 Buying national policy through backroom deals and party donations is so passe. For the Uber Rich it’s so much better to purchase the policy they prefer with glorious golden philanthropy. Be a hero, change the world, make money too.
Bill Gates runs his own branch of the Charity Industrial Complex. Other moguls buy a newspaper, but Gates buys influence one topic at a time.
Despite the reputation of funding the poor and downtrodden, somehow three hundred million dollars or more was gifted to the media. As if perchance the starving reporters of The Guardian needed it more say, than the malnourished of Chad?
Bill Gates has given $319 million to the media
Allan McLeod, Mintpress News
SEATTLE — Up until his recent messy divorce, Bill Gates enjoyed something of a free pass in corporate media. Generally presented as a kindly nerd who wants to save the world, the Microsoft co-founder was even unironically christened “Saint Bill” by The Guardian.
After sorting through over 30,000 individual grants, MintPress can reveal that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has made over $300 million worth of donations to fund media projects.
Even though this is “in plain view” there’s a level of deceit. If the people think the media is telling the whole news and nothing but the news, they might even believe they willingly chose the policy.
These are just the top ten beneficiaries:
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- NPR- $24,663,066
- The Guardian (including TheGuardian.org)- $12,951,391
- Cascade Public Media – $10,895,016
- Public Radio International (PRI.org/TheWorld.org)- $7,719,113
- The Conversation– $6,664,271
- Univision- $5,924,043
- Der Spiegel (Germany)- $5,437,294
- Project Syndicate- $5,280,186
- Education Week – $4,898,240
- WETA- $4,529,400
Others with $3.5 million or so are the deprived outlets like the BBC, CNN and The Daily Telegraph.
So at the same time as Google and Facebook were threatening the funding model of newspapers, radio and TV, Bill was helping them cover the costs of writing more on topics he was interested in.
Cynics might wonder if $300 million really buys much at all these days, but remember how cheap it was for the CCP to buy the New York Times? The masthead of record for the United States effectively sold out the nation for a piddling $100,000 a month. That was all that Chinese Communists had had to pay to “earn” sanitized stories of China that were little more than advertising, while stories of human rights abuses of Uigher concentration camps were quietly deleted. Imagine the effect it could have had if the New York Times had gone in hard with real news. Yet the cost to subvert that for President Xi was practically nothing.
So imagine the effect on news rooms all over the West when a few million dollars here and there lands on cash strapped editors with noble strings attached. Gates wouldn’t have to tell them how to report a climate change story, or a gender narrative — it was part of a culture that would permeate the tea-room.
Gates funded the media, journalism, in so many ways
The Gates Foundation even spent some $38 million on associations for journalists too, like the International Centre for Journalists, and the International Womens Media Foundation. It funded groups like Education Writers Association, and the National Press Foundation. It funded a few universities that train journalists
For groups like these a million dollars buys a lot of mileage.
It’s an Octopus:
“Today, it is possible for an individual to train as a reporter thanks to a Gates Foundation grant, find work at a Gates-funded outlet, and to belong to a press association funded by Gates. This is especially true of journalists working in the fields of health, education and global development, the ones Gates himself is most active in and where scrutiny of the billionaire’s actions and motives are most necessary,” MacLeod writes.
An unaccountable, unelected Octopus:
While the Gates Foundation fosters an air of openness about itself, there is actually precious little public information about what happens to the money from each grant, save for a short, one- or two-sentence description written by the foundation itself on the website,” he continued.
And these figures are just the primary donations. There will be secondary rivers of money, where groups funded by Gates divert streams toward the media too.
Media Gates keepers
That the Gates Foundation is underwriting a significant chunk of our media ecosystem leads to serious problems with objectivity….
[Tim] Schwab’s research has found that this conflict of interests goes right to the very top: two New York Times columnists had been writing glowingly about the Gates Foundation for years without disclosing that they also work for a group — the Solutions Journalism Network — that, as shown above, has received over $7 million from the tech billionaire’s charity.
Let’s not forget … the “MS” in MSNBC stands for Microsoft.
Read it all…
9.9 out of 10 based on 69 ratings
There is a lot to talk about.
9.7 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
Rafe Champion is fishing for responses
 Daniel Westerman, AEMO In May this year Daniel Westerman replaced Audrey Zibelman as the CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator. She was appointed in the Turnbull era after she was tipped as a possibility for Energy Secretary under President Hilary Clinton. In the event their loss was our gain.
Daniel Westerman is now the head man in the organization that runs the operation of our grid and prepares scenarios for decarbonization of the power sector.
What questions would you ask him if you were on the panel to interview the candidates for the position?
Keep reading →
8.8 out of 10 based on 34 ratings
Dr Aseem Malhotra is a consultant cardiologist and he’s calling for an end to mandatory vaccination while we investigate new results suggesting inflammatory blood markers are raised by the mRNA vaccines.
“We know now that heart attacks are an inflammatory condition.”
These same markers are used to estimate what the risk of a heart attack is. And the new higher markers hint that in this group of 500 patients, the 5 year risk of a heart attack has doubled, from 11% to 25%. They only followed these patients for 2.5 months, so the increased risk may well be temporary (apart from all the boosters, eh?).
We’ll just have to wait for the five year results from Pfizer, sometime in 2082 or so.
Even if it’s temporary, Dr Malhotra points out that in the UK there have been 10,000 excess non-Covid deaths — many of which were due to heart attack and stroke. If the mRNA vaccines were increasing the risk of heart attacks, even temporarily, this would explain some of the excess deaths. Inflammation might be temporary, but death usually isn’t.
A few days after these ominous results came out, a whistleblower and researcher from a different group contacted Dr Aseem Malhotra to say that in imaging studies they have found inflammation in the coronary arteries after vaccination. But their group decided not to publish this yet because they are afraid of losing future grant money from the drug industry. The whistleblower was quite upset about this. Understandably.
How many other researchers and doctors are sitting on results too unpleasant to publish?
Malhotra also mentions that he’s heard from other medical workers that there has been an increase in heart attacks in the UK, and in younger people. Of course, it all needs a proper study, not just anecdotes and retrospective observations, or preprint abstracts. The increase in heart attacks could be lifestyle factors, it could be infections, or it could be due to people staying home and watching the telly during lockdowns.
Gundry: Blood markers suggest mRNA vaccines increase the risk of a heart attack
Dr Malhotra mentions results from the “Steven Gundry paper”. Gundry’s group has used a standard test to predict the risk of heart attacks in their patients for the last eight years. But they noticed that some of the blood markers they were looking for in the test were significantly higher after the second mRNA vaccination dose.
We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.
The blood markers they use in the PLUS Cardiac Test (GD Biosciences) include inflammatory molecules like Interleukin-16 (IL-16), as well as other like soluble Fas, and Hepatocyte Growth Factor (HGF). People at risk of cardiac arrest would typically get measured every 3 – 6 months.
Gundry’s group followed 566 people both before and after their second vaccination to see how the PULS score changed. Strikingly many of the markers doubled. Frustratingly, the paper is a preprint and only available as an abstract (it seems). They don’t have a control group (as far as I can tell). The journal has added an “expression of concern”. Ain’t that the way. But it would be a shame to sit on results like these. Which is exactly what the other group Dr Malhotra talks about is doing, even though they have similar results.
Keep reading →
9.8 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
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