CORONA Main Coronavirus thread

Weft and Warp

Senior Member
It's funny how the definition of herd immunity has changed over the past year to where it "has" to have vaccines as part of the equation and not a percentage of people that had covid and are now immune.

Fair use:

LANCASTER, Pa. - Medical experts are debating whether an Amish and Mennonites community in Lancaster County has achieved herd immunity from COVID-19 after a local medical center reported nearly every household had at least one case in 2020.

Experts at a New Holland borough healthcare center said around 90 percent of households dealt with at least one coronavirus case after churches reopened last year. They said those households are now immune.




"So, you would think if COVID was as contagious as they say, it would go through like a tsunami; and it did," said Allen Hoover, an Old Order Mennonite and administrator of the Parochial Medical Center, a clinic that primarily serves the Plain community.

MORE: CDC director concerned over rising COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations


Public health officials and epidemiologists did not dispute the widespread outbreak Hoover described. But they voiced concern that a misplaced perception of herd immunity in a population that makes up 8% of Lancaster County may compromise the effort to turn the tide on the pandemic.

"We don't really know how long you're protected and we've seen cases where people get re-infected," Dr. Mike Cirigliano said. He believes herd sustainable herd immunity won't be reached without the intervention of vaccines.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the country recorded a 7-day average of about 57,000 new Covid-19 cases per day, a 7% jump over the previous week. Walensky added that new hospitalizations are slightly up at roughly 4,700 admissions per day.

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Dr. Cirigliano, and other health experts, believe with new variants popping up globally true herd immunity will not be reached without widespread vaccinations. The U.S. is doing its part, having administered millions of doses with a presidential directive to make all adult vaccine eligible by April.

"The idea that we'll just let it happen naturally is a bad, bad idea," Dr. Cirigliano said. "We need to vaccinate to prevent severe illness and death."

The Associated Press contributed to this report
 
Last edited:

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden Administration Responds to Reports on Development of Vaccine Passports
March 29, 2021 14:23, Last Updated: March 29, 2021 16:09
By Zachary Stieber

President Joe Biden’s administration is not creating COVID-19 vaccine passports but officials are working with private companies to set guidelines for the systems, which people can use to show proof they’ve been vaccinated, the White House said Monday.

The administration will “provide guidance” on the effort to develop vaccine passports and similar systems, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington.

“There is currently an interagency process that is looking at many of the questions around vaccine verification, and that issue will touch many agencies, as verification is an issue that will potentially touch many areas of society. That’s guidance we’ll provide. A determination or development of vaccine passport or whatever you want to call it will be driven by the private sector. Ours will more be focused on guidelines that can be used as a basis and there are a couple of key principles that we are working from,” she added.

The key principles are that there will be no centralized, universal database tracking COVID-19 vaccinations, there will be no federal mandate requiring all Americans to obtain a single vaccine passport, there will be encouragement of an open marketplace with both companies and nonprofits developing technology, and there will be an effort by the government to ensure all passports meet key standards, such as “accessibility” and “affordability,” Psaki said.

“This is something we are working through. We want to provide clarity to the public,” she added.

Several reports had indicated over the weekend that the administration was leading the effort to create passports by setting standards for the systems.

New York state became the first state in the nation to roll out a vaccine passport last week. The technology, developed with IBM, will be used at entrances to stadiums, arenas, and businesses to prove the holder has received a COVID-19 vaccine.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks during a briefing in Washington on March 29, 2021. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

“As more New Yorkers get vaccinated each day and as key public health metrics continue to regularly reach their lowest rates in months, the first-in-the-nation Excelsior Pass heralds the next step in our thoughtful, science-based reopening,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Other companies and groups are developing similar technology, with an eye on requiring vaccinations to fly on planes, attend concerts, and for other venues where crowds of people gather.

Some have expressed concern about the passes.

“I think vaccine passports are a disproportionately technologically heavy solution, and they’re likely to be a waste of resources. But beyond that, I think there are also serious ethical concerns.

I think that it’s an unnecessarily divisive approach. And I think it’s going to create more unfairness and inequality in an already unequal society,” Dr. Sarah Chan, an expert in bioethics at the University of Edinburgh College of Medicine, told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” in a recent interview.

“If we start deciding who’s allowed to freely participate in society based on individual vaccination status, we’re really trying to put the responsibility onto individuals to be vaccinated.

And that, in turn, assumes that whether or not a person has been vaccinated is wholly a matter of their own completely free choice. And that’s just not the case. In fact, vaccination is going to be dependent on a whole load of other factors beyond people’s control, such as ability to access the vaccine, pre-existing health conditions, and so forth,” she added later.

A top adviser to Biden earlier Monday said that Americans, as well as those in other countries, who get vaccinated “will want to be able to demonstrate that vaccination in various forms.”

“Unlike other parts of the world the government here does not view its role as the place to create a passport, nor a place to hold the data of citizens. We view this as something that the private sector is doing and will do. What’s important to us, and we are leading an interagency process right now to go through these details, are that some important criteria be met with these credentials,” such as “equitable access,” Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House on COVID-19, told reporters during a virtual briefing.

“Privacy of the information, security, and a marketplace of solutions are all things that are part of what we believe in as is the ability for people to be able to access this free and in multiple languages,” he added.

Pressed on why the government isn’t developing the passports itself, Slavitt later said that a segment of the population is already concerned about the government being heavy-handed in some aspects with regard to vaccinations.

“Point of fact, it would discourage people to feel like that was the role we are playing. So we think we can have the best of all worlds and put forward guidelines and guidance,” he said.

Former Clinton adviser Naomi Wolf said that a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine passport would be the “end of human liberty in the West if this plan unfolds as planned.”
 
Evening news, Dr. Birx said something about after the first 100,000 nobody had to die. There was nothing from her after that, end of the sound byte. I’m sure I’m not quoting her accurately. There was certainly nothing about HCQ or IVM said, which is what I would want to hear.
Any ideas, heard anything else from her?
Turns out she said Trump was to blame for further deaths after it got started. Both her and phukface are denying HCQ, that would have actually made a difference.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden Urges Governors, Mayors To Reinstate Mask Mandates
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Savannah RychcikMarch 29, 2021

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President Joe Biden is calling on the nation’s governors and mayors to reinstate mask mandates if they previously revoked them.

“I’m reiterating my call for every governor, mayor, and local leader to maintain and reinstate the mask mandate. Please, this is not politics,” Biden said while delivering remarks Monday.

He added, “Reinstate the mandate if you let it down. Businesses should require masks as well.”

Watch his remarks below:

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1376605318441009159
.17 min

The president slammed state leaders earlier this month for lifting mask mandates, as IJR reported.

“I think it’s a big mistake. Look, I hope everybody’s realized by now these masks make a difference. We are on the cusp of fundamentally changing the nature of this disease because of the way in which we’re able to get vaccines in peoples’ arms,” Biden said.

He continued, “And the last thing, the last thing, we need is neanderthal thinking that ‘in the meantime everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it.’ It still matters.”

Mask-wearing is not mandated in Texas, Arizona, Florida or Wyoming.

Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle Walensky, warned Americans of an “impending doom.”

“When I first started at CDC about two months ago I made a promise to you: I would tell you the truth even if it was not the news we wanted to hear. Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth, and I have to hope and trust you will listen,” she said during a press briefing.

Walensky added, “I’m going to pause here, I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope, but right now I’m scared.”

According to The New York Times, more than 30,318,400 Americans have been infected with COVID-19 as of Monday.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhTidqt5tAE
2:16 min
What is Antibody Dependent Enhancement? Does it Occur With COVID 19 Vaccines?
•Mar 29, 2021


MedCram - Medical Lectures Explained CLEARLY


Dr. Victoria Male explains what antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) is and how the coronavirus vaccine clinical trials were designed to monitor for it. See the MedCram interview with Dr. Male on Pregnancy and COVID-19 here: https://youtu.be/fFudXb8l7H8 Victoria Male, PhD is a Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College in London and Lecturer in Reproductive Immunology. Dr. Male's PhD was at the University of Cambridge on natural killer cells in human pregnancy. Full bio: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/v.male

Interviewer: Kyle Allred, Physician Assistant, Producer / Co-Founder of MedCram.com Image from this article: Coronavirus vaccine developers wary of errant antibodies (Nature Biotechnology) | https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mDSzkOY6nU
6:31 min
Episode 22 Title: Why Does Contact Time Matter for Disinfection?

•Mar 29, 2021


Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)


In this episode of Inside Infection Control, Dr. Abby describes why disinfectant contact time can make a big difference in stopping the spread of germs. Check it out so that you can feel confident knowing you’re taking the correct steps to slow or stop the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19.
 

AlaskaSue

North to the Future
I'll add this to this immense thread: Alaska is almost (not quite) to 300 deaths since the start of the CV last year, with 61,700 cases ("cases") so far. Including my sister - a spec ed teacher in North Pole, who now has the flu she says. Since she is a teacher she has to stay home until cleared, but doing very well.

EVERYone who want a jab has gotten one in this state. They can hardly get anyone in line anymore. But...well, we used to see this bumper sticker and I think maybe, perhaps it still holds: We don't give a D.... how they do it Outside. (Outside is our word for anything non-Alaska).

Having said that...I have to travel outside the state again next week. I'm disgustingly healthy and hope to remain that way. But wanted to let this lovely group know that I'll be out there. Will be hiking in the lovely area around Salt Lake and enjoying as much outdoors as I can stand (which is a lot, since we are currently under blizzard conditions here, ha)!
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

White House started pushing 'vaccine passports.' Here's what we need to do to stop it.
White House started pushing ‘vaccine passports.’ Here’s what we need to do to stop it.

To some, it may sound like no big deal. If you take the Covid vaccine, this will make it easier to prove that you did. And therein lies the problem. Why should people have to prove they took one of several questionable vaccines for a disease with such a high recovery rate? Privacy, safety, and authoritarian concerns abound in this draconian move.

NOQ Report
by NOQ Report
March 29, 2021

It’s proving to be challenging to convince people Joe Biden’s new venture into pushing “Vaccine Passports” is a really, really bad idea. It’s a little like convincing them that universal background checks do not work; if they aren’t aware of the facts or statistics, they are more likely to think these ineffective speedbumps to firearm ownership are good ideas.

The same holds true for vaccine passports. To those who do not take the time to think about them or who are used to being obedient servants to government, getting and showing proof of vaccine participation may seem like a good thing. After all, most of them have or will get vaccinated, so why shouldn’t they get the “benefits” associated with succumbing to the fearmongers?

In reality, accepting a vaccine passport as a method of entry into, well, anything is a really bad idea that should be opposed by all, even those who have been vaccinated. I discussed this a bit more thoroughly on the latest episode of NOQ Report, but it’s easy to break it down in writing. First, the details. According to Trending Politics:

The Biden administration is set to launch a COVID passport that would track Americans that took the vaccine, despite warnings by civil rights advocates.

“The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as ‘vaccine passports’ — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen,” the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

“The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again,” the report continued.

“The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort,” the report added.
“Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” the administration’s coronavirus coordinator Zients said at a March 12 briefing. The Biden White House refused to go on the record about the COVID passports.
The cognitive dissonance in the administration’s reasoning is stunning. By their reckoning, regaining “normalcy” can only be accomplished by doing something so abnormal, so unAmerican, that it seems closer to the efforts by Nazi Germany to separate out Jews than a proposed action by the United States government. They noted they were going to make it as easy as possible to make this happen, and that alone should scare you.

Lest we forget, government tends to make things difficult. In many places, the basic act of holding a yard sale requires applications and licensing as well as acceptance of compliance guidelines. When government says they’re going to let things happen without hassle, that should tell us something about their motives.

To be clear, I’m not sure what their motives really are. It’s not about normalcy. It is about pushing the vaccine, but is there more to it than that?

Whatever their nefarious plans are, we need to do what we can to stop them. We often hear that we should reach out to our representatives. This is one of those times, but it cannot be a simple email, Tweet, or even a single phone call. We need to get aggressive with our opposition to this draconian proposal. Otherwise, they’re going to ram their path forward and by the time it is implemented, it may be too late to stop it. Even the judiciary may have a hard time reversing it if it ever gets that far which is why we need to act immediately.

Part of my roadmap for non-compliance, which is specifically designed for situations like this, is to work hard on the first four steps so we never have to realize the fifth step. The first step is to announce our opposition. This is often here people stop; a Tweet targeting a Congressman or a comment on a blog post is as far as many go. We cannot.

The next two steps are protests and legal action. Protests are becoming more challenging following the January 6th Capitol Riots… at least that’s what our government wants us to believe. But the Constitution has not been suspended and our rights to assemble and protest our government are still intact. As for legal action, it’s important to get started immediately. We cannot wait to sue the government after their mandates are already in place. The opening research and preparations must be done now.

The fourth step is to participate in civil disobedience. This has never been as important in America since the civil rights era. We must not comply, and we must reward businesses who choose to not comply as well.

All of this must be done immediately if we’re to stop the fifth step—direct conflicts which could lead to civil war—from becoming the final option. This is not something we want which is why the first four steps are paramount.

If we do not act immediately and alert our representatives, law enforcement leaders, business owners, and local communities that we will not stand for dystopian vaccine passports, they will be forced upon us. Fight now so we don’t have to fight in futility later.

Watch this show on Rumble or Locals, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
45 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Mark Meadows on the War Room Pandemic – Dr. Birx CNN Interview Was Patently False

By Joe Hoft
Published March 29, 2021 at 3:30pm
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Mark Meadows was on with Steve Bannon on the War Room where he shared that Dr. Birx was ‘patently false’ in her CNN interview that aired last night.

Steve Bannon held an interview with Mark Meadows this morning on the War Room. Meadows shared the following:
Well what we heard from the CNN report last night was rhetoric that we never heard in the West Wing from Deborah Birx or Dr. Fauci…I’m hopeful that some of it was edited and that it was taken out of context. For Dr. Birx to say that hundreds of thousands of people’s lives would have been saved if we had done things differently, is patently false and not accurate and was never uttered in the White House.
Rumble video on website 3:44 min

After a very short period of time, we believe most Americans saw through doctors Fauci and Birx. They indicated they were not trustworthy then and they are proving it now.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

EXCLUSIVE: Per the CDC There Are Nearly Twice As Many Vaccine Related Deaths SO FAR in 2021 (1,755) Than All the Vaccine Deaths this Past Decade (994)

By Joe Hoft
Published March 29, 2021 at 4:52pm
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There are more US deaths related to vaccines in 2021 in less than 3 months than there were the entire past decade.

The number of deaths related to vaccines this year has absolutely skyrocketed. According to the CDC’s own data, in 2021 in less than 3 months, we have already seen over 1,750 deaths due to vaccines in the US.

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This data comes from the CDC’s VAERS database:

“The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database contains information on unverified reports of adverse events (illnesses, health problems and/or symptoms) following immunization with US-licensed vaccines. Reports are accepted from anyone and can be submitted electronically at www.vaers.hhs.gov.”

The ages of those who have died plies with the elderly:

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The two primary vaccine manufacturers who have the most deaths related to their vaccines are Moderna and Pfizer/Biontech:

2021-03-29-CDC-Vaccine-Deaths-by-Manu.jpg


Based on a report from the CDC through February 16, 2021, there were over 55 million individuals who have taken the COVID-19 vaccine and most of these vaccines were either manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer/Biontech:

CDC-Number-of-Vaccines-Through-Feb-16-2021.jpg


Although the percentage of individuals who have died from the COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ is minuscule (less than 0.003%) the number of deaths in 2021 already is WAY OVER (71 times) the average for the past decade.
 

TammyinWI

Talk is cheap
Turns out she said Trump was to blame for further deaths after it got started. Both her and phukface are denying HCQ, that would have actually made a difference.

Oh, the drama!! And the WHO is taking their good ol' time, since their Feb. 15th discussion, releasing their findings on Ivermectin- when it had already been proven by many medical professionals and people that recovered. They said 4-6 weeks, and that is up now.
 

TammyinWI

Talk is cheap
From the UK...makes my blood boil:

Number of women to lose their unborn child after having the Covid Vaccine increases by 366% in just six weeks
BY THE DAILY EXPOSE ON MARCH 21, 2021 • ( 28 COMMENTS )

Losing a new born is a heart breaking endeavour, as is the pain of losing an unborn child. Which is why we’re both saddened and shocked to bring you the latest update on the number of unborn and newborn children to lose their lives as a result of the mothers receiving one of the Covid-19 vaccines in the United Kingdom.

The Government have released weekly reports on adverse reactions to the experimental Covid-19 vaccines, the first of which covered data inputted to the MHRA Yellow Card Scheme from the 9th December 2020 through to the 24th January 2021. Their latest report (find it here), which is the seventh to be released covers data inputted to the MHRA Yellow Card Scheme from the 9th December 2020 though to the 7th March 2021.

Just six weeks separate the first and seventh report, and the shocking increase in the number of women losing their unborn and newborn child in that time due to having either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca Covid vaccine is appalling.

Continued here:

 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Man’s Skin Burns, Swells, Then Peels Off in Severe Reaction to Johnson & Johnson Covid Vaccine

By Cristina Laila
Published March 30, 2021 at 3:43pm
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Photo courtesy of WRIC
A Virginia man’s skin swelled, burned then peeled off in a rare reaction to the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.

74-year-old Richard Terrell said he began to feel discomfort in his armpit four days after he received the Covid-19 vaccine earlier this month.

Soon Terrell developed an itchy rash and his skin began to swell, turn red and burn.

“It was stinging, burning and itching,” Terrell said as he described the pain. “Whenever I bent my arms or legs, like the inside of my knee, it was very painful where the skin was swollen and was rubbing against itself.”

After a few days, the rash covered his entire body and his skin peeled off.

WRIC reported:
A Goochland County man suffered a severe reaction after getting his COVID-19 vaccine and VCU doctors believe it was a direct result of the shot.
Richard Terrell got the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine earlier this month. He suffered a severe rash that spread over his entire body and turned his skin red. The 74-year-old was admitted to the hospital and spent five days at the VCU Medical Center.
Terrell was released from the hospital and is now sharing his vaccination story as he recovers from the comfort of his Goochland home. He tells 8News that he’s still very weak and that it will take some time for him to fully recover, but he’s thankful to have received his dose.

“It all just happened so fast. My skin peeled off,” Terrell said as he looked down. “It’s still coming off on my hands now.”
On March 6, Terrell received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in Ashland. He shares that everything went perfectly fine, however four days later he started experiencing symptoms.
More from WRIC:

Rumble video on website 2:48 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The CDC Extends Its Eviction Moratorium for Landlords for Another Three Months Through June

By Joe Hoft
Published March 30, 2021 at 2:49pm
CDC-Atlanta-HQ-USG-Photo.jpg

CDC headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia, photo via CDC

The CDC which can’t get much right since the China coronavirus came to the States believes it has the right to extend eviction moratoriums due to the pandemic.

The CDC has decided to extend the moratorium on evictions due to the China coronavirus pandemic. According to the CDC website:
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has signed an extension to the eviction moratorium further preventing the eviction of tenants who are unable to make rental payments. The moratorium that was scheduled to expire on March 31, 2021 is now extended through June 30, 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a historic threat to the nation’s public health. Keeping people in their homes and out of crowded or congregate settings — like homeless shelters — by preventing evictions is a key step in helping to stop the spread of COVID-19.
The Washington Examiner wrote:
The eviction moratorium, first implemented by the Trump administration last September, was set to expire on Wednesday. Its aim was to prevent people who have suffered financially from resorting to living in congregate settings such as homeless shelters, where COVID-19 can spread more easily from person to person.
The income cap for renters who qualify for coverage under the ban is $99,000, or $198,000 if a couple files taxes together. The renter must also offer “a completed and signed copy of a declaration” to their landlord that they are unable to pay their rent, and eviction could result in their becoming homeless.
A federal judge noted the following about the ruling:
“The federal government cannot say that it has ever before invoked its power over interstate commerce to impose a residential eviction moratorium,” Judge John Barker, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, wrote in his ruling. “The federal government has not claimed such a power at any point during our nation’s history until last year.”
The CDC has messed up nearly everything it has touched since this pandemic occurred but they still somehow believe they can regulate how long renters who aren’t paying rent can remain in the premise they aren’t paying on. To hell with the landlords.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

UK Now Considering Digital Face-Scanning To Enter Pubs

TUESDAY, MAR 30, 2021 - 03:30 AM
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

The UK government is funding companies that are producing technology which will utilize digital face scans to check people’s vaccination status and allow or block them from entering pubs, stadiums and other venues.


“Britons could have their faces scanned to allow them to access pubs, gigs and sports events under one government-funded plan being drawn up for vaccine passports,” reports the London Times.

Two companies – Mvine and iProov – are working together on the system after being given a £75,000 grant by the government having already worked with the NHS on facial recognition technology in the form of the contact tracing app.

The technology is being proposed as a solution to concerns that presenting vaccination status via an app on a phone will be too slow when multiple people are entering a busy venue.

“Whoever is standing on the door of the pub is going to have to scan the certificate, read the name and date of birth, then ask the person for an ID document, check that the name and date of birth on the ID document are the same, squint at the photograph on the ID document and then make sure that the person in front of them is that person,” iProov CEO Andrew Bud said. “To which the answer is, that’s not going to happen.”

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Bud said that the facial recognition system would reduce this process to a matter of seconds, streamlining the system.
“It speeds the process up and it absolves people of what would otherwise be a very heavy responsibility,” he added.
After months of promising that there would be no domestic vaccine passport, every indication is now that the government is going ahead with it.

Millions of Brits will refuse to submit to digital face scans to go about their everyday business, but the vast majority are likely to accept it without question, creating a two tier society where those who resist the biosecurity surveillance state will remain in a de facto permanent state of lockdown.

This again underscores the fact that the ‘vaccine passport’ is a digital identity card that citizens will be expected to carry at all times and use whenever they want to engage in basic commerce or other normal leisure activity.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

New COVID-19 Waves Sweep Through Asia

TUESDAY, MAR 30, 2021 - 02:45 AM

New waves of coronavirus infections have been sweeping through several countries in Asia, threatening to become more ferocious than previous outbreaks.
Infographic: New Coronavirus Waves Sweep Through Asia | Statista
You will find more infographics at Statista

Statista's Katharina Buchholz notes that Philippines broke their record for new cases recorded in a day five times since March 19, recording almost 10,000 new cases on Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University. Looking at new cases in relation to population, the country is also the most affected in Asia. The 7-day rolling average of new cases per one million of population stood at more than 75 Sunday, followed by almost 42 new cases/million in India.

India saw 68,000 new cases Sunday, still below the September peak of almost 98,000, but rising rapidly. Bangladesh, where case numbers are growing at a similar rate to its larger neighbor, came very close to its daily record when it recorded 3,908 new cases that day. The number was just short of the 4,019 new infections that were recorded on July 2, 2020, at the height of the country's first wave. Mongolia recorded 896 new cases on Sunday after having recorded more than 100 new cases in day for the first time ever on March 7.

Third-most affected in relation to population was Malaysia, but cases in the country have been slowing. Fifth-most affected Indonesia has also seen a light easing of the situation. This is according to numbers collected by research project Our World in Data located at the University of Oxford.

Other growing outbreaks are being monitored in Pakistan and once again in Japan (which would constitute a fourth wave for the country). Countries in Southeast Asia - Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand - have also seen more new cases than usual. Yet, the overall number of cases in the little-affected region remains low. New infections remained at stable levels in South Korea, Singapore and Nepal.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Great Unvaxxed - A 'Fictional' Look At What Lies Ahead

MONDAY, MAR 29, 2021 - 11:40 PM
Authored by TE Creus via Off-Guardian.org,

The vaccine was a resounding success. Yes, there had been a final death rate of 10% among the vaccinated, but this was mostly among the elderly or the already ill, so it was probably not the vaccine’s fault, and if it was, no one could prove it one way or another, and even if they could, well, the vaccine manufacturers were not liable to lawsuits due to the agreements they had made with the various governments.


In any case, the pandemic had ended, that was for sure.

Of course the masks and the lockdown mandates continued to be enforced; the reason was that while the pandemic had most certainly been defeated, the virus still existed in its natural form somewhere out there, and so it was vital to continue with the safety procedures to avoid any possible resurgence of the disease.

So what? People got used to it, as they had gotten used to so many other things before that. And was wearing a mask in the end much worse than wearing a helmet or a safety belt? Was being forced to stay at home for a few months every year much different than being forced to be at the office working for five days out of the seven in the week? Rules are rules, and those were not as bad as others that had been instituted in the past.

But there was something that worried the authorities. While most people had predictably complied with the mandatory vaccination campaign, there were a few groups that had refused them, alleging religious or health reasons, and found refuge in rural communities living off the grid. They had abandoned the use of mobile and network technology and so could not be traced so easily, and, since non-digital cash had been abolished, they appeared to have returned to a form of commerce based in the exchange of physical goods.

At first, the authorities ignored them; most people saw them as a minority of loser hicks, “anti-vaxxers” as they had been called in earlier pre-scientific times, and since it was unlikely that too many among the masses would opt for such a harsh lifestyle away from the comforts of modern urban life, they were not seen as a menace.

But what happened, in the end, was that rumours started to appear, even in the cities, about small communities where no one needed to wear masks, and people were dancing and smiling, and food was delicious and natural and people were even – gasp! – falling in love and procreating in natural ways.

Of course this was an obvious and mendacious falsity, but the authorities could not permit such fairy tales to gain acceptance among the people at large. So they started to persecute “the great unvaxxed”, as they called them, or the “free renegades” as they preferred to call themselves.

Their communities were dispersed. Their leaders were arrested. Planting organic, unmodified seeds became illegal.

It was dangerous, the authorities alleged. Non-genetically modified crops were unsafe and could lead to sickness or birth defects. Many of the people who lived in the previously free rural communities were arrested and forcibly vaccinated, or were killed in shootings with the police.

But in the end it was not possible to arrest or forcibly vaccinate them all. Now, hidden among the normal population, using fake certificates, there lived an undisclosed number of unvaccinated people, whom the authorities had been unable to locate or identify.

A young woman named Miranda, who was born in a barn in the literal sense, and never vaccinated, was one of them. When organic farming was prohibited and most of the land was taken over by large companies using mechanized agriculture, she was forced to move to a small village where she subsisted doing odd jobs and occasionally teaching art classes. She had learned drawing and painting sill as a child, and was quite talented; she could sing very well too.

She had a fake vaccine certificate that looked for all purposes almost identical to the real ones, and while a bio-test could determine that she had not really taken the shot, or the “jab” as it was popularly called, she was careful never to be in any position that could require any kind of test.

For a few years she and hundreds of others like her had subsisted in this manner, but it was not ideal and never easy. Because before at least the renegades could live freely in their own communities, under their own rules, but now they had to hide and wear masks and follow dictates like everyone else, so what was the point? If they could not be free in any case, why not do like all the others and just take the jab and be done with it?

Miranda thought about it sometimes. But she had promised her parents – who had died in a shootout with the police – that she would always remain faithful to their ideals. And so she refused to compromise. She knew, or hoped, that the current tyranny could not be maintained forever. She wanted to believe that it would be possible, one day, to be free again.

Finally, they got her. It was her own stupid mistake; she was outside, a routine patrol was approaching and she had left her fake certificate at home. This would not normally happen, but she had recently bought a new jacket and had forgotten the certificate in the pocket of the old one.

Walking around without a certificate was illegal, so they had to scan her arm, finding no signs of vaccination, and later a second test found no trace of antibodies in her system. Unable to explain the reason, or to produce a valid vaccine certificate – she knew now that the fake one she had at home would now be microscopically analyzed and would not be useful any longer – she was taken to the local jail, and later to a federal prison.
“There is an easy way out of this”, said Captain Antoine Huxley-Ehrlich, chief of the Vaccine Resistance Unit. “Just take the jab, and you’ll be free.”

“Never”
,
replied Miranda. “You’ll have to do it by force.”
That was an option, of course, and legally possible with the recent change in the constitution. But it was not what Antoine wanted. No, she had to freely choose the vaccine. Not only because otherwise she could have become a martyr and inspire other rebels, or because people could start to think that there really was something bad or sinister about the vaccine; but because he firmly believed that winning by persuasion was better than winning by force, and he was convinced of his own righteousness.

He could not understand her stubborn refusal – hadn’t he, like all others, voluntarily taken the vaccine? As a member of the upper classes, he reminded her, he was not required to do it at the time; and yet he had volunteered. Why? Because he believed in law and order, but, most of all, because he believed in the vaccine.

He was sure that sooner or later he would be able to convince her that her uneasiness with the medication had only been caused by the trauma of her childhood experiences, living in a harsh rural area and watching her parents die as criminals fighting the law.

But Miranda was indeed very stubborn. She refused all the options she was given. She preferred jail to vaccination and denial to compromise. She even refused to see a psychiatrist. So she lingered in prison for months and months.

One day, the warden brought to her cell a new book that she had requested from the prison library – Civil Disobedience, by Thoreau. As she began to read, she found a handwritten note stuck between the first pages. “When you get your dinner tonight, ask for salt”, it said. “A friend”, it was signed.

Who could that be? She was puzzled, as it was years since she last had any contact with anyone else from her former community. But later that evening, as the warden brought her dinner, she meekly asked if she could have an extra amount of salt. The warden didn’t betray any sign of recognition or suspicion; she just brought her a small white salt-shaker. There was nothing unusual about it, but when Miranda opened it, from the bottom, she found a small magnetic key and another note inside.

The note explained that the key would open her cell door, and that all the security guards had either been bribed or put out to sleep. She could safely escape. Further instructions indicated how to reach a cabin in the woods nearby where she would be able to join her colleagues from the resistance movement.

She waited until midnight; when all was silent, she tried the key. It worked. She slowly walked out of her cell, then out of the prison, undisturbed.

She followed the instructions to cover her face with a mask and her hair with a veil to avoid recognition. She was afraid a patrol would stop her as she left the city, as police presence was constant and sometimes there were curfews, but all the time she saw only a small group of policemen that she had no trouble evading.

She walked for several hours; the note had been clear that she should avoid any form of public transportation. It was already morning when she reached the destination informed, a few miles outside town.

She knocked. No one answered. But she turned the handle and realized that the door was unlocked. She entered, very quietly, as if afraid to disturb the eerie silence. Finally, she saw a man sitting in an armchair, his back turned to her. He was wearing a dark jacket and a black fedora hat.

“So you’re finally here”, he said. She seemed to recognize the voice, although she couldn’t quite locate it. Was it perhaps someone from her old community?

Then he turned towards her. It was Antoine Huxley-Ehrlich.

It had been a trap, of course.
The idea was to raise her hopes only to crush them, as an additional form of torture, an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. Also, now that she had tried to escape and join a rebel movement, she could be accused of sedition and other charges. She could easily be tried by a military court and condemned to death.

And that was exactly what happened.

She was offered a full pardon in exchange for vaccination, but still she refused. If she had to die, then she might as well die on her own terms. Like Saint Joan or the early Christian martyrs, she’d rather burn at the stake or be thrown to the lions than renege.

They could not convince her to get the “jab”, but they also did not want to turn her into some sort of hero for a cause, even if a crazy and hopeless one. So they decided that the execution would be done in secret, and the official story would be that, since she had refused several times the vaccination, she was never immune to the virus and had finally contracted the disease.

Today Miranda will be shot. She refused all offers for public announcements of regret and even a last meal. She also refused the blindfold; she did not want anything to cover a single part of her face.

As the executioners raise their rifles, Miranda is not afraid. Her golden hair flutters in the wind, and she looks up at the soldiers with a confident smile. She knows that they can kill her body, but they cannot touch her soul.

And as she waits for the bullets to slowly arrive, Miranda sings a song that she remembers from her childhood, a song that her mother taught her and perhaps she also sang before she died:

And when you come and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead, as dead I well may be
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden COVID ‘Shield’ Proposes China-Level Surveillance Way Worse Than COVID Vaccine ‘Passport

March 30, 2021

COVID19TRACKER-810x442.jpg

14d82f3bb3cc9f0e8724516d767fa5ad

Written by Kyle Becker

“We need a SWAT team approach for hotspots. The goal should be to isolate confirmed positives in hours, not days.”

That is a harrowing line from a University of Illinois proposal to the Biden administration for an app that would integrate medical data, geolocation and motion-tracking to ban potentially contaminated citizens from accessing certain public locations and private businesses.

The China-type mobile app would use a color-coding system to label Americans who are exposed or may have been exposed to COVID and restrict them from access, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.

TRACKER-scaled.jpg

“A PowerPoint produced by the school suggests scaling up the university’s intrusive contact tracing system for use across the United States,” Aaron Sibarium reported. “Its file name, ‘2020-12-14 Shield Biden Covid Team,’ indicates that it was presented to the Biden team in December, amid an ongoing search for solutions to a seemingly insoluble problem: how to stop the virus without stopping the economy? The presentation proffered an answer.”

“The school’s system uses a mobile app that records test results and Bluetooth data to determine who has been exposed to the virus—and ‘links building access’ on campus to that information,” the report continued. “Local businesses have also embraced it, making entry conditional on a ‘safe status’ reading from the app.”

As reported at BeckerNews earlier, even the slightly less privacy invasive COVID vaccine “passport” has remarkable similarities to the Chinese color-coding system, which records a user’s “health status” as green, yellow, or red. The Biden “Shield” would use yellow, orange and red instead — a superficial difference.

In March 2020, the New York Times reported on China’s state surveillance system.
CHINASURVEILLANCE.jpg

“As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces,” the Times reported.

“But a New York Times analysis of the software’s code found that the system does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk,” the report continued. “It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.”

China released the mobile app in February 2020 that “tracks people and alerts them if they have been in ‘close contact with someone infected’ with the new coronavirus,” CNBC reported.

“The ‘close contact detector’ was released Saturday night, according to China’s state news agency Xinhua,” the report continued. “Users scan a QR code on popular Chinese apps like WeChat and QQ, and submit their name, phone number and government-issued ID number to request information about whether they have been in close contact with anyone infected by the virus.”
VIRUS-TRACKER-scaled.jpg

“Once users enter their name and ID number, the app will tell them whether they were in close contact with someone infected,” the report said, adding that “each registered phone number can run the search for three different ID numbers.”

On Sunday, the Washington Post broke the news that the Biden administration is planning to use similar technology to track if Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine.

“The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as ‘vaccine passports’ — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen,” the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

“The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again,” the report continued.

In New York, a COVID vaccine “passport” has already been rolled out: The Excelsior Pass.
NYEXCELSIORPASS-scaled.jpg

New York launched its COVID passport on Friday, following a trial run on thousands of New Yorkers testing the program. The Excelsior Passport is “the first of its kind to be rolled out in United States and allows specific sites that administer COVID vaccines or test for the coronavirus to upload the data to the app,” the Gothamist reported.

In New York, companies have already lined up to virtue-signal that they “care” about people and don’t want them to get the virus. Citizens have begun to protest against the app; one petition at Change.org is set to pass its initial goal of 15,000 signatures. New York residents can sign the petition here.

Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is pre-empting any ability for companies to even implement such apps. On Monday, he announced that he is taking emergency executive action and calling on the state legislature to do the right thing and ban the apps.

“We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said. “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society.”
COVIDTRACKERSLIM-scaled.jpg


Many companies, however, see such apps as “reasonable” ways to get back to “normal” sooner; but this new “normal” means Americans will ultimately have every aspect of their lives tracked by the state. Citizens who do not comply with the state’s mandates may have more than just a grande latte from Starbucks denied to them. They can be ‘unpersoned’ with a technocratic push of a button.

The Chinese people’s experience should be a direct warning to the American people about such surveillance apps: They are dangerous tools of the state and its corporate allies. They pose far more long-term risk to Americans’ rights and to those of their children than they do to help curb the spread of a disease with a 99.98% global survival rate.

The loss of life due to COVID-19 tragic, but the United States should not become like China due to a virus. That would be a tragedy with repercussions far graver than a pandemic with a 99.98% survival rate.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

JUST IN: Wisconsin Supreme Court Strikes Down Democrat Governor’s Mask Mandate

By Cristina Laila
Published March 31, 2021 at 11:59am
IMG_8353.jpg
Tony Evers
The conservative-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ statewide mask mandate in a 4-3 ruling.

The state supreme court ruled that Evers violated the law by unilaterally issuing multiple emergency orders and circumventing the state legislature.

“The question in this case is not whether the governor acted wisely; it is whether he acted lawfully. We conclude he did not,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for the majority.

Evers fought very hard to keep the mask mandate in place and ignored the will of the legislature, the body closest to the people that voted to repeal the mask mandate.

Governor Evers issued an emergency 60-day order in August of 2020 and continued to extend his unlawful mandates.

Last month Evers issued a new statewide mask mandate one hour after GOP state lawmakers voted to repeal the previous mask mandate.

The GOP-led Wisconsin senate last month voted 18-13 to repeal Evers’ statewide mask mandate.

The joint resolution to end Evers’ emergency order passed the Republican-controlled legislature in late February in a 52-42 vote.

Wednesday’s ruling was a huge victory for Wisconsin Republicans who spent months fighting Evers’ lockdowns and mask mandates.

“The governor’s repeated abuse of emergency powers and pervasive violation of state statute created a state of chaos and had to be stopped,” Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said.

Mask mandates in Dane and Milwaukee County remain in place.
 

Pinecone

Has No Life - Lives on TB

Biden COVID ‘Shield’ Proposes China-Level Surveillance Way Worse Than COVID Vaccine ‘Passport

March 30, 2021

COVID19TRACKER-810x442.jpg

14d82f3bb3cc9f0e8724516d767fa5ad

Written by Kyle Becker

“We need a SWAT team approach for hotspots. The goal should be to isolate confirmed positives in hours, not days.”

That is a harrowing line from a University of Illinois proposal to the Biden administration for an app that would integrate medical data, geolocation and motion-tracking to ban potentially contaminated citizens from accessing certain public locations and private businesses.

The China-type mobile app would use a color-coding system to label Americans who are exposed or may have been exposed to COVID and restrict them from access, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.

TRACKER-scaled.jpg

“A PowerPoint produced by the school suggests scaling up the university’s intrusive contact tracing system for use across the United States,” Aaron Sibarium reported. “Its file name, ‘2020-12-14 Shield Biden Covid Team,’ indicates that it was presented to the Biden team in December, amid an ongoing search for solutions to a seemingly insoluble problem: how to stop the virus without stopping the economy? The presentation proffered an answer.”

“The school’s system uses a mobile app that records test results and Bluetooth data to determine who has been exposed to the virus—and ‘links building access’ on campus to that information,” the report continued. “Local businesses have also embraced it, making entry conditional on a ‘safe status’ reading from the app.”

As reported at BeckerNews earlier, even the slightly less privacy invasive COVID vaccine “passport” has remarkable similarities to the Chinese color-coding system, which records a user’s “health status” as green, yellow, or red. The Biden “Shield” would use yellow, orange and red instead — a superficial difference.

In March 2020, the New York Times reported on China’s state surveillance system.
CHINASURVEILLANCE.jpg

“As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces,” the Times reported.

“But a New York Times analysis of the software’s code found that the system does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk,” the report continued. “It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.”

China released the mobile app in February 2020 that “tracks people and alerts them if they have been in ‘close contact with someone infected’ with the new coronavirus,” CNBC reported.

“The ‘close contact detector’ was released Saturday night, according to China’s state news agency Xinhua,” the report continued. “Users scan a QR code on popular Chinese apps like WeChat and QQ, and submit their name, phone number and government-issued ID number to request information about whether they have been in close contact with anyone infected by the virus.”
VIRUS-TRACKER-scaled.jpg

“Once users enter their name and ID number, the app will tell them whether they were in close contact with someone infected,” the report said, adding that “each registered phone number can run the search for three different ID numbers.”

On Sunday, the Washington Post broke the news that the Biden administration is planning to use similar technology to track if Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine.

“The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as ‘vaccine passports’ — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen,” the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

“The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again,” the report continued.

In New York, a COVID vaccine “passport” has already been rolled out: The Excelsior Pass.
NYEXCELSIORPASS-scaled.jpg

New York launched its COVID passport on Friday, following a trial run on thousands of New Yorkers testing the program. The Excelsior Passport is “the first of its kind to be rolled out in United States and allows specific sites that administer COVID vaccines or test for the coronavirus to upload the data to the app,” the Gothamist reported.

In New York, companies have already lined up to virtue-signal that they “care” about people and don’t want them to get the virus. Citizens have begun to protest against the app; one petition at Change.org is set to pass its initial goal of 15,000 signatures. New York residents can sign the petition here.

Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is pre-empting any ability for companies to even implement such apps. On Monday, he announced that he is taking emergency executive action and calling on the state legislature to do the right thing and ban the apps.

“We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said. “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society.”
COVIDTRACKERSLIM-scaled.jpg


Many companies, however, see such apps as “reasonable” ways to get back to “normal” sooner; but this new “normal” means Americans will ultimately have every aspect of their lives tracked by the state. Citizens who do not comply with the state’s mandates may have more than just a grande latte from Starbucks denied to them. They can be ‘unpersoned’ with a technocratic push of a button.

The Chinese people’s experience should be a direct warning to the American people about such surveillance apps: They are dangerous tools of the state and its corporate allies. They pose far more long-term risk to Americans’ rights and to those of their children than they do to help curb the spread of a disease with a 99.98% global survival rate.

The loss of life due to COVID-19 tragic, but the United States should not become like China due to a virus. That would be a tragedy with repercussions far graver than a pandemic with a 99.98% survival rate.
I have never carried our one cell phone out shopping. It's my time, away from it all. This is just another reason to do so.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

"But Dr. Fauci Says..."

WEDNESDAY, MAR 31, 2021 - 11:25 AM
Authored by Josh Kantrow via AmericanThinker.com,

I was surprised to receive his text message because I had not heard from him in over a year, he had not responded to two of my texts sent eleven and nine months ago, and we used to see each other about every six to eight weeks for coffee or drinks to talk politics.

And it apparently dealt with an urgent matter: "I need to talk to you, ASAP," it read.
I was concerned he was in trouble, so I responded and we spoke yesterday.

The person I spoke with, who I will call "Jim," to protect his privacy (although he doesn't really deserve it), started off the conversation by stating:
"Something is wrong with you."
When I asked him to elaborate, he said
"People like you are the reason things are not back to normal."
And on and on his rant went.

The upshot is that Jim, a man of the left in his late 40s, has been following me on social media and was highly agitated about the fact that, since travel opened back up, I've spent a significant amount of time roaming around our beautiful country, mostly out west, enjoying the great outdoors hiking, biking, rafting, skiing, etc., with various family members, as I work remotely.

My explanations (not that he deserved any) that we observe all local, state, and federal mandates, and reasonable precautions, fell on deaf ears.

Jim signaled his virtue throughout this unpleasant conversation by stating that, unlike me, he and his family have largely stayed indoors, in their house, over the past year.


He said that the only exception to this are occasional early morning walks, "when no one else is around," essential doctor visits, and weekly excursions to the grocery store (he and his wife alternate), where they wear double masks and equipment to protect their eyes. The person doing the shopping then quarantines in a separate room inside their house for a few days.

When I asked Jim why he didn't have his groceries delivered, he had no good answer. When I asked him whether he or any family members had any medical issues that warranted such extreme precautions, he said he was "highly offended" by my use of the word "extreme," but that no one had any pre-existing medical conditions.

He added, "You know, some of us just want to do our part."

When I explained that the very outdoor activities that we have been engaging in are healthy, well within guidelines, and even encouraged by public health officials, and that I was, contrary to his statement, "doing my part" in that I was helping small businesses and the travel and hospitality industries who have been ravaged by the lockdowns, he kept saying I was wrong, frequently by invoking some variation of the phrase "But Dr. Fauci says…."

My take is that Jim has a serious crush on Dr. Fauci and desires to receive a "Good Citizen" award in a nationally televised event from him when this is over. Of course, for Jim and those that think like him, it never will be.

Our conversation ended when I asked Jim whether he would jump off a bridge if "Dr. Fauci says." Jim shouted an expletive at me and hung up the phone.

As I was not given the opportunity, let me use these pages to wish Jim and the virtue-signaling intolerant people who think like him goodbye and good riddance.

For it is they, not people like us, who are doing their level best to stop things from returning to normal.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

PFIZER-BIONTECH ANNOUNCE POSITIVE TOPLINE RESULTS OF PIVOTAL COVID-19 VACCINE STUDY IN ADOLESCENTS
Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - 06:45am
  • In participants aged 12-15 years old, BNT162b2 demonstrated 100% efficacy and robust antibody responses, exceeding those reported in trial of vaccinated 16-25 year old participants in an earlier analysis, and was well tolerated
  • The companies plan to submit these data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) as soon as possible to request expansion of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and EU Conditional Marketing Authorization for BNT162b2
  • The companies also provided an update on the Phase 1/2/3 study of BNT162b2 in children aged 6 months to 11 years
NEW YORK & MAINZ, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) and BioNTech SE (Nasdaq: BNTX) today announced that, in a Phase 3 trial in adolescents 12 to 15 years of age with or without prior evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine BNT162b2 demonstrated 100% efficacy and robust antibody responses, exceeding those recorded earlier in vaccinated participants aged 16 to 25 years old, and was well tolerated.

These are topline results from a pivotal Phase 3 trial in 2,260 adolescents.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: Pfizer-BioNTech Announce Positive Topline Results of Pivotal COVID-19 Vaccine Study in Adolescents

“We share the urgency to expand the authorization of our vaccine to use in younger populations and are encouraged by the clinical trial data from adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15,” said Albert Bourla, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Pfizer. “We plan to submit these data to FDA as a proposed amendment to our Emergency Use Authorization in the coming weeks and to other regulators around the world, with the hope of starting to vaccinate this age group before the start of the next school year.”

“Across the globe, we are longing for a normal life. This is especially true for our children. The initial results we have seen in the adolescent studies suggest that children are particularly well protected by vaccination, which is very encouraging given the trends we have seen in recent weeks regarding the spread of the B.1.1.7 UK variant. It is very important to enable them to get back to everyday school life and to meet friends and family while protecting them and their loved ones,” said Ugur Sahin, CEO and Co-founder of BioNTech.

About the Phase 3 Data from Adolescents 12-15 Years of Age
The trial enrolled 2,260 adolescents 12 to 15 years of age in the United States. In the trial, 18 cases of COVID-19 were observed in the placebo group (n=1,129) versus none in the vaccinated group (n=1,131). Vaccination with BNT162b2 elicited SARS-CoV-2–neutralizing antibody geometric mean titers (GMTs) of 1,239.5, demonstrating strong immunogenicity in a subset of adolescents one month after the second dose. This compares well (was non-inferior) to GMTs elicited by participants aged 16 to 25 years old (705.1 GMTs) in an earlier analysis.

Further, BNT162b2 administration was well tolerated, with side effects generally consistent with those observed in participants 16 to 25 years of age.

The companies plan to submit these data to the FDA and EMA for a requested amendment to the Emergency Use Authorization of BNT162b2 and the EU Conditional Marketing Authorization for COMIRNATY® to expand use in adolescents 12-15 years of age as quickly as possible. All participants in the trial will continue to be monitored for long-term protection and safety for an additional two years after their second dose.

Pfizer and BioNTech plan to submit the data for scientific peer review for potential publication.
Update on the Phase 1/2/3 Study in Children 6 months to 11 years old
Last week, Pfizer and BioNTech dosed the first healthy children in a global Phase 1/2/3 seamless study to further evaluate the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children 6 months to 11 years of age. The study is evaluating the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on a two-dose schedule (approximately 21 days apart) in three age groups: children aged 5 to 11 years, 2 to 5 years, and 6 months to 2 years. The 5 to 11 year-old cohort started dosing last week and the companies plan to initiate the 2 to 5 year-old cohort next week.

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, BNT162b2, has not been approved or licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but has been authorized for emergency use by FDA under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) for use in individuals 16 years of age and older. The emergency use of this product is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of the medical product under Section 564 (b) (1) of the FD&C Act unless the declaration is terminated or authorization revoked sooner. Please see Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers Administering Vaccine (Vaccination Providers) including Full EUA Prescribing Information available at www.cvdvaccine.com.

The vaccine, which is based on BioNTech proprietary mRNA technology, was developed by both BioNTech and Pfizer. BioNTech is the Marketing Authorizations Holder in the European Union, and the holder of emergency use authorizations or equivalent in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and other countries in advance of a planned application for full marketing authorizations in these countries.

AUTHORIZED USE IN THE U.S.:
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is authorized for use under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for active immunization to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 16 years of age and older.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION FROM U.S. FDA EMERGENCY USE AUTHORIZATION PRESCRIBING INFORMATION:
  • Do not administer Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to individuals with known history of a severe allergic reaction (e.g., anaphylaxis) to any component of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine
  • Appropriate medical treatment used to manage immediate allergic reactions must be immediately available in the event an acute anaphylactic reaction occurs following administration of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine
  • Monitor Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine recipients for the occurrence of immediate adverse reactions according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/)
  • Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressant therapy, may have a diminished immune response to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine
  • The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine may not protect all vaccine recipients
  • In clinical studies, adverse reactions in participants 16 years of age and older included pain at the injection site (84.1%), fatigue (62.9%), headache (55.1%), muscle pain (38.3%), chills (31.9%), joint pain (23.6%), fever (14.2%), injection site swelling (10.5%), injection site redness (9.5%), nausea (1.1%), malaise (0.5%), and lymphadenopathy (0.3%)
  • Severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, have been reported following the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine during mass vaccination outside of clinical trials. Additional adverse reactions, some of which may be serious, may become apparent with more widespread use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine
  • Available data on Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine administered to pregnant women are insufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy
  • Data are not available to assess the effects of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine on the breastfed infant or on milk production/excretion
  • There are no data available on the interchangeability of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine with other COVID-19 vaccines to complete the vaccination series. Individuals who have received one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine should receive a second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to complete the vaccination series
  • Vaccination providers must report Adverse Events in accordance with the Fact Sheet to VAERS at https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html or by calling 1-800-822-7967. The reports should include the words “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine EUA” in the description section of the report
  • Vaccination providers should review the Fact Sheet for Information to Provide to Vaccine Recipients/Caregivers and Mandatory Requirements for Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Administration Under Emergency Use Authorization
  • Please see Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers Administering Vaccine (Vaccination Providers) including Full EUA Prescribing Information available at www.cvdvaccine-us.com
(See website for more)
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Corrupt Monopolies Are A Constitutional Loophole For Fascism

Corrupt Monopolies Are A Constitutional Loophole For Fascism
While Twitter trolls ridicule Republicans for coining 'corporate communism,' state actors are letting companies decide the limits of your freedom through vaccine passports.


Kylee Zempel

By Kylee Zempel
MARCH 31, 2021

“Corporate communism” began trending on Twitter Tuesday afternoon due to a video of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene coining the term.

The freshman Republican was talking about the Biden administration’s ambitions to buddy up with so-called private companies in creating a way to identify who has been vaccinated against the Wuhan virus. These “vaccine passports” would allow some combination of companies and the government to prohibit unvaccinated people from traveling, going to events or gatherings, or otherwise participating in a free and normal society.

Perhaps more troubling than the ruling class telling Americans they must receive a vaccine in order to participate in normal life is the prospect of the government colluding with monopolistic corporations to accrue private health data from American citizens and restrict their lives accordingly.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1376900032184586245
.53 min

Vaccine passports “would mandate your ability to be able to travel, your ability to be able to go to events, your ability to be able to buy and sell,” Greene said in the video, likening the “disturbing” endeavor to “Biden’s mark of the beast.” All of this is being done, she said, under the guise of trying to keep everyone safe.

“Well, let’s analyze that,” the congresswoman continued. “It’s still the same thing. It’s still fascism or communism — whatever you want to call it — but it’s coming from private companies. So I have a term for that. I call it ‘corporate communism.’”

Detractors immediately attacked the idea online, calling Greene’s phrase an oxymoron:

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Words have meaning, of course, and communism historically means government fully controls the means of production, while among corporations there is a broad range of government influence that typically does not include full government ownership. But criticizing Greene’s wording or bickering over semantics is a huge distraction from the root of the issue.

While perhaps technically inaccurate, Greene is absolutely right on principle and implications: Corrupt monopolies, with vaccine passports as with other regulations and invasions of privacy, are a gaping constitutional loophole for fascism.

Vaccine Passports Rely on Private-Public Fusionism
First, consider the fact that the government is working with corporations to create these vaccine passports. As first reported by the Washington Post, the Biden administration is working with private companies to create the passports, which “are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass.”

This implies two things: first, that the government is using private companies to accomplish its goals, meaning the resulting vaccine passport won’t be a private good unadulterated by government input. This move by the Biden administration will result in a sort of public-private fusionism that enables it to issue a centralized and authoritarian program while sidestepping constitutional landmines.

The hands of federal and even state governments are tied in ways that those of monopolies parading as innocuous private companies are not. Therefore, this could comprise government outsourcing to technically private industry that which it is constitutionally and legally barred from doing.

Second, the fact that these passports will be coordinated through smartphone apps implies the government and corporations will use existing tech infrastructure to create them. We’ve already seen this with creepy smartphone contact tracing, through which Apple and Google worked together to use Bluetooth on your smartphone to collect and transmit information about when one person crosses paths with another who tests positive for COVID-19.

Worse still is the troubling word “free.” Nothing is free with technology. Users of tech services always pay at least with their data, a reality that becomes particularly concerning when the currency is private health information and when the option is to comply or else be banned from returning to normal life.

In that way, vaccine passport apps won’t be like TikTok. Deciding your data and privacy are more important than possessing the app won’t just mean you forgo watching dance videos. It could mean you can’t travel, can’t go to certain stores or venues, and thus can’t be truly free.

This Effort Is Backdoor Fascism
We’ve seen this trend before, whereby so-called private companies control the means of production and thus operate as authoritarian gatekeepers of information and goods and services. It’s about as close to “corporate communism” as you can get.

Big Tech, the unaccountable monopolies that we’ve entangled in nearly every aspect of our lives and the veritable gatekeepers of our information, are the nastiest culprits. Throughout the 2020 election cycle and immediately following, these companies, including Facebook, Apple, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, and Amazon, went on a censorship spree.

That included suppressing information that didn’t service their preferred political candidate, de-platforming conservative voices that cut against their prevailing narrative, digitally burning books they found offensive, nuking videos and channels that offered a dissenting perspective, robbed alternative platforms of the digital infrastructure of the internet, and even silencing the sitting president of the United States.

Much like their response to Greene’s “corporate communism” rant, the left piled onto conservatives over their fears of Big Tech throughout that purge. Private companies have a right to kick users offline, they said. It isn’t “censorship,” if it isn’t the state doing the silencing. “At least it’s not the government,” short-sighted libertarians, weak-kneed conservatives, and complicit Democrats responded.

Meanwhile, corrupt monopolies violated users’ privacy, muzzled their voices, and interfered in an election, only to walk away with their man in the White House and absolutely zero consequences for their corporate despotism. Now that same monopolistic power threatens to further gut the remaining blessings of American life by creating a passport system that will determine the limits of your personal liberty.

“I cannot say this forcefully enough: This is literally the end of human liberty in the West if this plan unfolds as planned. ‘Vaccine passport’ sounds like a fine thing if you don’t understand what these platforms can do,” said Naomi Wolf, author of “The End Of America,” on Fox News this week Monday. “I’m the CEO of a tech company. I understand what this platform does. It is not about the vaccine or the virus; it is about your data. What people need to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all.”

Stop pretending authoritarian rule by mammoth actors, government or not, is not a threat to liberty. While Twitter trolls ridicule Republicans over “corporate communism,” state actors are giving private companies the reigns to decide the limits of your freedom.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Over 100 fully vaccinated people contract COVID-19 in Washington state, officials say

Officials said the so-called breakthrough cases are expected with any vaccine.

ByMorgan Winsor
March 31, 2021, 4:53 AM

How COVID-19 vaccines work


Video on website 4:02 min

How COVID-19 vaccines work

Over 100 people in Washington state have tested positive for COVID-19 more than two weeks after becoming fully vaccinated against the disease, officials said.

The Washington State Department of Health is investigating reports of the so-called breakthrough cases, which it said are expected with any vaccine.

Out of the 1.2 million people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in Washington, epidemiologists have reported evidence of 102 breakthrough cases in 18 counties since Feb. 1, representing less than 0.01% of all fully vaccinated individuals in the northwestern U.S. state.

Most cases were patients who experienced only mild symptoms, if any, according to a press release from the Washington State Department of Health.

PHOTO: A man signs up to take a COVID-19 test at a mobile testing van in Herald Square in New York, March 16, 2021.

Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Brendan McDermid/Reuters

However, at least eight people with breakthrough cases have been hospitalized. The Washington State Department of Health is also investigating two potential breakthrough cases where the individuals died. Both patients were over 80 years old and suffered from underlying health issues.

The Washington State Department of Health said further investigation will help identify patterns among the breakthrough cases, such as if a variant of the novel coronavirus may have caused the infection.

A breakthrough case is confirmed with a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test or a positive antigen test in an individual more than two weeks after they have received their final dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Washington State Department of Health.

"Finding evidence of vaccine breakthrough cases reminds us that, even if you have been vaccinated, you still need to wear a mask, practice socially distancing, and wash your hands to prevent spreading COVID-19 to others who have not been vaccinated," Dr. Umair Shah, Washington state's secretary of health, said in a statement Tuesday.

PHOTO: A patient receives the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at the McLeod Health Clarendon hospital in Manning, S.C., Feb. 17, 2021.

Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg via Getty Images
A patient receives the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at the McLeod Health Clarendon hospital in Man

Large-scale clinical studies found that COVID-19 vaccines reduced the risk of contracting the disease in vaccinated individuals by up to 95%, compared with those who were not vaccinated.

However, the vaccines are not 100% effective in preventing infection and thus a small percentage of breakthrough cases can be anticipated, according to the Washington State Department of Health.

"It is important to remember that every vaccine on the market right now prevents severe disease and death in most cases," Shah said. "People should still get vaccinated as soon as they are eligible, and encourage friends, loved ones, and co-workers to do the same."

MORE: Likely COVID-19 virus origin laid out by WHO, but concerns raised about report
More than 30.3 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States and over 550,000 of them have died, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Washington state has registered at least 363,235 confirmed cases and 5,237 deaths. So far, more than 16% of the Evergreen State's population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins data.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Yes, COVID-19 Was a Biological Attack by the Chinese Communist Party – Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D.

By Joe Hoft
Published April 1, 2021 at 10:08am

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Guest post by Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D.

In a must-read article in the December 2020 issue of Indian Defense Review, Dr. Sharad S Chauhan defines “Opportunistic Bioterrorism” as:
“Concealment of the emergence of a biological agent, pathogen or a disease by acts of commission or omission with the knowledge that such an act will harm or kill humans’ animals or plants with the intent to intimidate or coerce a government or civilian population to further political or social objectives or by using a situation to get power or an advantage.”
That “opportunity” was COVID-19, a product of policies and actions undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

First and foremost, it is critical for everyone to understand that, in the People’s Republic of China, there is no difference between military and civilian research centers.

Chapter 78 of the CCP’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) describes the fusion of military and civilian research including the area of “synthetic biology.”

Even prior to the publication of that plan, it had been common practice for the CCP to change the name of military research centers to something more civilian-sounding and for Chinese scientists to disguise their military connections.

A second component of the CCP’s military-civilian fusion effort is the integration of Chinese scientists working abroad as part of the network, even to the extent that Chinese scientists have become U.S. citizens, but remain active members of the CCP’s program.

In that way, foreign institutions and foreign funding sources become de facto partners in the CCP’s research program and contributors to China’s military and economic might.

The most glaring, but far from the only example of such American “useful idiot” participants in the CCP military-civilian research program, is Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded coronavirus research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology via long-time CCP research collaborator Peter Daszak, who is head of the EcoHealth Alliance.

The CCP integration of military-civilian virus research is led by the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, where Dr. Wei Chen, a Major General in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the virologist, is Director of the Institute of Bioengineering and presumed to be the head of China’s biological warfare program.

In January 2020, the CCP dispatched Major General Wei Chen to Wuhan to take charge of the response to the growing pandemic. She was also responsible for China’s COVID-19 vaccine development.

It is also Major General Wei Chen’s own experience and research connections that provide the background for the origin of COVID-19.

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The following is just a snapshot of a more widespread and deeper internal and international network representing the fusion of China’s military-civilian research program.

In 2004 and 2005, Major General Wei Chen was working in the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, where she studied the spike protein of the first SARS coronavirus using a genetic technology called RNA interference to silence gene expression of the virus, as well as analyzing immune therapy in SARS patients.

According to her publication record, between 2008 and 2013, Major General Wei Chen conducted experiments on dengue fever virus in the Department of Microbiology, Third Military Medical University, Chongqing.

It is important to note that Chinese whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan claims that the backbone of the COVID-19 virus, bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21, was characterized and genetically engineered under the supervision of the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing.

Around 2014, Major General Wei Chen returned to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences as Director of the Institute of Bioengineering, where she supervised human testing in Africa of a genetically engineered viral vector Ebola vaccine.

Dr. Yusen Zhou was one of the Chinese military scientists, who collaborated with Major General Wei Chen in the response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

He received his training as a military medical doctor and also studied the spike protein of the first SARS coronavirus in 2004, while working in the same research center as Major General Wei, the Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences.

Yusen Zhou’s co-author on that 2004 scientific article “Identification of Immunodominant Sites on the Spike Protein of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Coronavirus: Implication for Developing SARS Diagnostics and Vaccines” was Dr. Shibo Jiang.

Also a graduate of a military medical university, Shibo Jiang worked at the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute of the New York Blood Center for nearly twenty years and received more than $17 million in U.S. research grants, the vast majority coming from Fauci’s NIAID.

During that period, Shibo Jiang developed an extensive network of collaborative research with other U.S. virus research laboratories and became the nexus connecting China’s military-civilian research program with those in the United States.

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At the same time, Shibo Jiang maintained research activities with Yusen Zhou and several PLA laboratories, described in detail here, while simultaneously inviting other Chinese scientists into his U.S. laboratory.

One was Dr. Lanying Du, allegedly Yusen Zhou’s wife, who is still an employee of the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute in New York and recently received a 5-year grant totally $4.1 million from Fauci’s NIAID.

Shibo Jiang’s U.S. network consisted of laboratories conducting cutting edge coronavirus research, including the controversial “gain of function” experiments:
Dr. Ralph Baric, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC
Dr. Fang Li, University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, MN
Linfa Wang, director of the Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke University-NUS Medical School, Singapore
Chien-Te K. Tseng, University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston, home of the Department of Defense-funded Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases and the high viral BL-4 containment facility.

All of the above are linked to the CCP’s military-civilian research program via Yusen Zhou or the “bat woman”, Dr. Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Another CCP scientist linked to both the Chinese military and the highest levels of U.S. research programs is Dr. Gao Fu, also known as George F. Gao, a virologist and immunologist, who has served as Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC).

In 2019, he was elected a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Science and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.

Gao Fu is a long-time research partner of China’s military with whom he published in 2002, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Gao Fu’s colleague at the CCDC, Dr. Wenjie Tan, is not only linked to Shibo Jinag and Yusen Zhou, but is a close collaborator of Dr. Zhenhong Hu from the General Hospital of Central Theater Command of the PLA in Wuhan.

Zhenhong Hu conducted research with the Third Military Medical University from where the bat backbone of the COVID-19 virus is alleged to have originated.
The Third Military Medical University was also Major General Wei Chen’s place of employment for five years.

It is perhaps no coincidence that, according to patient data, the epicenter of the outbreak during its earliest phase was the General Hospital of Central Theater Command of the PLA (map coordinates 30.53148, 114.34356).

That location is less than one mile from the P-3 level laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Hubei Engineering and Technology Research Center for Viral Diseases (map coordinates 30.53941, 114.35085).

That information also matches data published by the Wuhan Wuchang District Health Bureau stating that the highest concentration of infections in the early phase of the outbreak occurred in the residential areas about one mile from the hospital.

Those observations fit, in time and location, the social media data obtained from the Sina Weibo platform, which was designed as a channel for suspected COVID-19 patients to seek help.

It is interesting to note that during May 2020, the U.S. National Academy of Science initiated a series of conference calls between Chinese and U.S. scientists to exchange information about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The three Chinese participants on those calls were Gao Fu, Wenjie Tan and the “bat woman” Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The calls could also be described as de facto briefings for China’s military.

There is still much we do not know about the origin of COVID-19, largely due to a cover-up operation led by the CCP and facilitated by members of the Western scientific community, some U.S. government officials and a compliant media.

One could argue that they are all co-conspirators in “Opportunistic Bioterrorism.”


Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired from an international career in business and medical research with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a member of the Citizens Commission on National Security. His email address is lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Time Has Come for Anti-Lockdown Amendments
Ethan Yang
Ethan Yang
April 1, 2021
law-800x508.jpg


The most beautiful thing about a constitution is that it establishes boundaries for those wielding power to abide by. A constitution is what establishes some semblance of legitimacy because, without guaranteed limits on power, what are politicians but egotistical thugs? Even if such powers are democratically granted, without limits on the powers of the majority it is essentially mob rule.

The text of the US Constitution lists a number of important guidelines on power and many of the later additions, or amendments, were added in response to the grievances the authors had at the time. The document itself was made with the assumption that we are endowed by virtue of our humanity with certain inalienable rights that are inherent to our humanity, amongst them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, albeit it only lists a select few of those rights. The written Constitution expresses the immediate concerns of the people who wrote it. The Declaration of Independence with its long list of grievances against the King of England inspired the restrictions on government power outlined in the US Constitution.

The text of the US Constitution and by extension state constitutions, although bulwarks against tyranny, are reactive documents that require constant updating as new problems arise. For example, the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 after the Civil War and prevented individual states from infringing on the privileges and immunities of individual citizens granted by the US government.

This was primarily made to ensure that Black Americans were treated as full and equal citizens by every state, not just the anti-slavery ones.

If you have paid attention at all to how governments have acted during the age of Covid-19 and lockdowns you should be able to guess where I am going with this. The time has come for a movement across the nation to demand constitutional restrictions on the powers that have enabled governors across the country to unleash so much havoc on society.

The Context for Anti-Lockdown Amendments
Under lockdowns, we have seen some of the most arbitrary, offensive, and ignorant exercises of power that have not only wrecked the economy but stained the notion of a free society and undermined the rule of law.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch writes in a court opinion regarding New York Governor Cuomo’s restrictions on church gatherings when he notes,
“At the same time, the Governor has chosen to impose no capacity restrictions on certain businesses he considers “essential.” And it turns out the businesses the Governor considers essential include hardware stores, acupuncturists, and liquor stores. Bicycle repair shops, certain signage companies, accountants, lawyers, and insurance agents are all essential too. So, at least according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”
In Michigan, it was reported by Forbes that the governor imposed a ban on selling gardening equipment. The stores could remain open, they just had to rope off the sections to prevent access to things like seeds and rakes. It goes without saying that these are silly examples of what governors have done with their emergency powers and the lockdowns they unleashed.

Two weeks to flatten the curve turned into one year and a nation undone. Lives and dreams have been crushed under the boot of lockdowns, which have proven to have done little to stop the virus. According to a Yelp survey, 60 percent of polled businesses will never reopen. For young people, suicides skyrocketed and surpassed Covid-related deaths. With much of the country beginning to open up and shattering the predictions of impending Covid doomsday sayers, the time has come to enact structural change to ensure this never happens again.

What Would Anti-Lockdown Amendments Look Like?
If you were wondering how governors across the country could issue draconian policies such as stay at home orders, “nonessential” business closures, and mask mandates that seemingly violate everything in the Constitution it’s because of emergency powers. Emergency powers, generally speaking, give the government the power to violate individual rights and ignore certain procedural hurdles to respond to crisis situations. They are such an important but dangerous tool that we have now personally witnessed how flawed our constitutional framework is in regulating their use.

The Maine Policy Institute has created an interactive scorecard detailing the rules governing the use of emergency powers in states across the country. Ideally, such powers should have a clear and robust framework for their use. An ideal framework should require legislative approval and not merely allow the governor to declare a state of emergency at will. The timeline to do so should have reasonable deadlines and limits on how much a governor can do given the context of the emergency. States of emergency should be brief and require ongoing legislative approval to continue with mandatory deadlines for their cancellation in the absence of legislative approval. There should also be clear restrictions on the use of these powers depending on what can be justified and efficient avenues for challenges to be brought. Sadly most states have inadequate constitutional frameworks for the use of emergency powers, which is exactly why we are where we are.

According to the Maine Policy Institute,
“Vermont, Washington, Ohio and Hawaii are among the worst-ranking states because they bestow on their governors the sole authority to determine when and where an emergency exists, and when an emergency ceases to exist. Nearly one-in-four states have this arrangement.”
Nick Murray from the Maine Policy Institute writes in the Maine Wire that,
“At the time most of these state laws were constructed, few could have predicted they would be used to micromanage every interaction within society in the face of a pandemic. Indeed, most of these laws were established to help states respond to a natural disaster or terrorist attack, not a public-health matter like COVID-19.”
He also references a report from the Pacific Legal Foundation that recommends that executive orders should be required to be narrowly tailored and legal challenges to those orders should receive an expedited judicial review. Such a reform would be essential in preventing governors from arbitrarily closing businesses and imposing odd restrictions on society without rigorous scientific backing. The expedited judicial review will allow citizens to get their day in court in a timely manner to challenge such orders if they feel they have been wronged.

The summary of recommendations in the report are as follows:
  1. Require emergency orders to be narrowly tailored.
  2. Subject emergency orders to expedited judicial review.
  3. Only governors may issue a statewide emergency order that infringes on constitutional rights. (Pertaining to unelected public health officials issuing orders rather than elected officials)
  4. Sunset emergency orders in seven days if the legislature is not in session or called into session.
  5. Sunset emergency orders in 30 days if the legislature does not ratify the order.
  6. Allow remote participation for legislators to debate and vote on emergency orders.
  7. Prohibit governors from reissuing emergency orders that expired or the legislature rejected.
All of these reforms would make the use of emergency powers less arbitrary and prevent unhinged exercises of authority.

Fortunately, Murray notes,
“At least 16 states (Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, and Washington) have pending legislation to reform emergency executive power. Elected officials in other states, including New York, North Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia have signaled that they will submit legislation on the issue. And lawmakers in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio are actively debating bills that deal directly with their governor’s existing COVID-19-related orders.”
The use of emergency powers along with the alarming ease at which they can be accessed and maintained is a problem that extends far beyond Covid-19. In their current state, they are like exposed gunpowder just waiting for a loose spark to ignite disaster.

Key Takeaways
The Founders crafted the Constitution in direct response to the injustices they faced under the King of England. Throughout the life of our republic, numerous amendments were introduced in response to pressing issues that exposed shortcomings in the framework of our government that exists to protect our freedom.

Regardless of your stance on lockdowns, they have shown us all the glaring threat to our democracy that exists in the absence of adequate constitutional restrictions on emergency powers. Covid-19 exposed what governors could do in the absence of strong reforms. Without swift and deliberate action there will be another episode of drunken power grabs under the guise of a different threat in the not-too-distant future. The time is now for universal sobriety on this matter and for freedom-loving citizens across the country to rise up and say: never again.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

IMPENDING TYRANNY
NEWS: COMMENTARY
2021-03-31-biden_harris_tyranny.jpg

by Rodney Pelletier • ChurchMilitant.com • March 31, 2021
America on the path to dictatorship
The United States is falling headfirst into tyranny, and most people are OK with it. A quick scan of social media shows that we all have family members, friends and coworkers who are just fine with the government stripping away our rights, all for a virus with a 99.8% survival rate.

But that's been the purpose of the mainstream media's constant fearmongering about the China virus. In the early phases, little was known about it. Now that there's been more than a year of "two weeks to flatten the curve," a lot more is known — and many believe the lockdown orders went way too far.

It's evident for those who are able to understand the situation for what it is that it's all been an orchestrated plan to shut down the U.S. economy and bankrupt and disenfranchise Americans.

At first, the media and government talking heads said "just stay home," and people complied. Now, in most states, masking up with a paper or cotton mask is demanded by businesses and expected by most people.

Now the next big thing is experimental gene therapy — described as a "vaccine" — being pushed on every person in the United States. And now, the Biden administration is working with private companies to help implement a "passport" that would allow those who have taken the vaccine to live normal lives again.

One tool that is being heavily promoted is called CommonPass. It is co-sponsored by the World Economic Forum and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Church Militant discussed the Rockefeller Foundation on an FBI episode, revealing that it has been trying to destroy the Church for decades.

These same anti-God, anti-freedom organizations are bent on turning the full force of the State on those who would not be in lockstep with the new Marxist takeover of the once-free United States.

They are dangling freedom before everyone's eyes, saying 'if you want this, do what we say.'GabTweet

Harry Litman, a former Department of Justice official, tweeted on Sunday, "Vaccine passports are a good idea. Among other things, it [sic] will single out the still large contingent of people who refuse vaccines, who will be foreclosed from doing a lot of things their peers can do. That should help break the resistance down."

The same political powers that claim to be concerned for the marginalized and minorities are bent on destroying any dissent from their plan. It will make the non-compliant into a lower class of people who have greater difficulty buying things and earning a living for their families.

They are dangling freedom before everyone's eyes, saying, "If you want this, do what we say." But, at the end of the day, if these fickle bureaucrats can just take away God-given freedoms so easily, is it really freedom when people give in to their demands?
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

COVID Tracking Apps Have Eerie Echoes of Chinese Surveillance System
  • GettyImages-1276398723_736x514-736x514.jpg
    Getty
Aaron Sibarium - MARCH 30, 2021 5:00 AM

President Joe Biden's COVID team appears to have entertained an electronic test-and-trace program pioneered by the University of Illinois that would have let businesses deny service to patrons based on their health data, a PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows. The program has eerie echoes of China's surveillance system, which uses data from citizens' phones to impose quarantines.

A PowerPoint produced by the school suggests scaling up the university's intrusive contact tracing system for use across the United States. Its file name, "2020-12-14 Shield Biden Covid Team," indicates that it was presented to the Biden team in December, amid an ongoing search for solutions to a seemingly insoluble problem: how to stop the virus without stopping the economy? The presentation proffered an answer.

The school's system uses a mobile app that records test results and Bluetooth data to determine who has been exposed to the virus—and "links building access" on campus to that information. Local businesses have also embraced it, making entry conditional on a "safe status" reading from the app.
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The system resembles the one being used in China, where a mandatory app gives each user a "health status"—green, yellow, or red—that dictates access to public spaces. The University of Illinois app likewise divides users into three categories: "yellow" if they've recently tested negative, "orange" if they've potentially been exposed, and "red" if they've recently tested positive. Only students with a yellow status may enter buildings.

The proposal would amount to a more extreme version of the "vaccine passports" being rolled out by airlines and some U.S. cities, which are already causing controversy. Those passports, such as New York's "Excelsior" app, indicate whether an individual has tested negative or been vaccinated, but not whether they've been exposed to the virus based on tracking data. They collect less information and use a less granular classification scheme than the University of Illinois app, meaning they pose relatively fewer risks to civil liberties.

It's unclear how such a scheme would play with liberal activists. While it represents the sort of ambitious, nationwide COVID response Biden has said he wants, it also threatens to exclude far more Americans from public life than measures like voter ID laws, which progressives have decried as the "new Jim Crow."

Only 11 percent of Americans do not have a government-issued ID, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, whereas 19 percent don't own a smartphone. Widespread adoption of the app could ice nearly a fifth of the United States out of the economy, never mind the polling booth.

Stacey Abrams's Fair Fight, whose founder has called voter ID laws a way to "scare people out of voting," did not respond to a request for comment.

The app's selling point is its ability to quickly isolate cases. "We need a SWAT team approach for hotspots," the presentation reads. "The goal should be to isolate confirmed positives in hours, not days." It further encourages the universal adoption of the app's "safe status requirements," saying they are a "critical aspect of curbing the spread in any community."

Asked to clarify the context of the presentation, neither the university nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

Digital contact tracing has proven an effective substitute for lockdowns in many countries, allowing them to remain open without uncontrollable spread.

Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea all mandated the use of mobile contact tracing apps and were largely spared the tradeoffs Western countries ended up making.

The University of Illinois saw similar success. As of December, its test positivity rate was just 0.43 percent, whereas the rate for the surrounding county was 7.9 percent, according to a graphic in the presentation.


Illinois-slide-2.jpg


All this would have made digital contact tracing of interest to Biden, who said on the campaign trail that he would "shut down the virus, not the country."

"Opening up society as much as possible for economic, educational, entertainment, and religious activity depends on local successes in testing, contact tracing, [and] isolation," the presentation reads. "Overwhelming the health care infrastructure is extremely costly and shuts down the economy."

Even so, the proposal effectively substitutes one tradeoff for another: Digital test-and-trace could have enabled faster reopenings at lower risk, without centralizing surveillance in the hands of the federal government. But it would likely have encouraged a form of decentralized surveillance among businesses and local bureaucrats, which poses threats of its own.

Privacy and public health experts are ambivalent about the tradeoff.

"The concerns for privacy and liberty here are obvious," said Ari Schulman, the editor in chief of the New Atlantis, which has run several essays on the dangers of digital surveillance. "The best way to strike the right balance with a system like this is to offer model programs and infrastructure to local institutions, but leave it to them to adapt it in a way that their members will find legitimate."

The proposal gestures at this point. It assumes adoption of the app would be optional and says it can be tailored to the needs of local communities. The federal government should support these measures, the presentation states, but "efforts to mitigate the virus need to be led and managed locally."

In order to be effective, however, the app requires widespread participation—meaning local institutions would have a strong incentive to mandate it. If every business in a city made the app a requirement for entry, residents would have little option but to download the app. That might drive down cases and stave off lockdowns, an attractive prospect for the retailers hurt by them. But it could also be the beginning of a kind of social credit system, in which access to public life is determined by personal data.

Nicholas Christakis, an epidemiologist at Yale University, noted that many Asian countries had taken steps in this direction to fight the pandemic.

In South Korea, Christakis said, the government tracked "people's credit card usage to see which stores they had been in," a move that would have raised legal issues in the United States and Europe. "I was concerned by the extreme measures that China and Korea and Singapore employed in this regard," he said. "Requiring people to have negative tests to enter a building is concerning from a privacy point of view."

But, Christakis added, it may be necessary. "The measures in the slide deck do not strike me as that extreme" compared with other countries, Christakis said, "and we, as a society, must make at least some sacrifices if we are to work together to effectively counter a collective threat."

Because the University of Illinois app uses Bluetooth data to determine exposures, it is less invasive than some other systems that rely on GPS tracking.

"When a user has a positive test result," the school's website explains, students who have come within Bluetooth range of that user are notified and marked as exposures. In other words, the app doesn't track users' locations, just their proximity to one another.

But the surveillance schematic is there, and it could become a flashpoint in future crises. With over a sixth of the population fully vaccinated, such schemes have been temporarily tabled by the Biden administration. Whether they stay that way is an open question.
 

TammyinWI

Talk is cheap

"But Dr. Fauci Says..."

WEDNESDAY, MAR 31, 2021 - 11:25 AM
Authored by Josh Kantrow via AmericanThinker.com,

I was surprised to receive his text message because I had not heard from him in over a year, he had not responded to two of my texts sent eleven and nine months ago, and we used to see each other about every six to eight weeks for coffee or drinks to talk politics.

And it apparently dealt with an urgent matter: "I need to talk to you, ASAP," it read.
I was concerned he was in trouble, so I responded and we spoke yesterday.

The person I spoke with, who I will call "Jim," to protect his privacy (although he doesn't really deserve it), started off the conversation by stating:

When I asked him to elaborate, he said

And on and on his rant went.

The upshot is that Jim, a man of the left in his late 40s, has been following me on social media and was highly agitated about the fact that, since travel opened back up, I've spent a significant amount of time roaming around our beautiful country, mostly out west, enjoying the great outdoors hiking, biking, rafting, skiing, etc., with various family members, as I work remotely.

My explanations (not that he deserved any) that we observe all local, state, and federal mandates, and reasonable precautions, fell on deaf ears.

Jim signaled his virtue throughout this unpleasant conversation by stating that, unlike me, he and his family have largely stayed indoors, in their house, over the past year.


He said that the only exception to this are occasional early morning walks, "when no one else is around," essential doctor visits, and weekly excursions to the grocery store (he and his wife alternate), where they wear double masks and equipment to protect their eyes. The person doing the shopping then quarantines in a separate room inside their house for a few days.

When I asked Jim why he didn't have his groceries delivered, he had no good answer. When I asked him whether he or any family members had any medical issues that warranted such extreme precautions, he said he was "highly offended" by my use of the word "extreme," but that no one had any pre-existing medical conditions.

He added, "You know, some of us just want to do our part."

When I explained that the very outdoor activities that we have been engaging in are healthy, well within guidelines, and even encouraged by public health officials, and that I was, contrary to his statement, "doing my part" in that I was helping small businesses and the travel and hospitality industries who have been ravaged by the lockdowns, he kept saying I was wrong, frequently by invoking some variation of the phrase "But Dr. Fauci says…."

My take is that Jim has a serious crush on Dr. Fauci and desires to receive a "Good Citizen" award in a nationally televised event from him when this is over. Of course, for Jim and those that think like him, it never will be.

Our conversation ended when I asked Jim whether he would jump off a bridge if "Dr. Fauci says." Jim shouted an expletive at me and hung up the phone.

As I was not given the opportunity, let me use these pages to wish Jim and the virtue-signaling intolerant people who think like him goodbye and good riddance.

For it is they, not people like us, who are doing their level best to stop things from returning to normal.

I am soooooooo sick and tired of Fauci always being touted as the "nation's top infectious disease specialist."

I wish that these people's noses would Pinocchio after each lie, including this title they keep repeating.
 

TammyinWI

Talk is cheap

IMPENDING TYRANNY
NEWS: COMMENTARY
2021-03-31-biden_harris_tyranny.jpg

by Rodney Pelletier • ChurchMilitant.com • March 31, 2021
America on the path to dictatorship
The United States is falling headfirst into tyranny, and most people are OK with it. A quick scan of social media shows that we all have family members, friends and coworkers who are just fine with the government stripping away our rights, all for a virus with a 99.8% survival rate.

But that's been the purpose of the mainstream media's constant fearmongering about the China virus. In the early phases, little was known about it. Now that there's been more than a year of "two weeks to flatten the curve," a lot more is known — and many believe the lockdown orders went way too far.

It's evident for those who are able to understand the situation for what it is that it's all been an orchestrated plan to shut down the U.S. economy and bankrupt and disenfranchise Americans.

At first, the media and government talking heads said "just stay home," and people complied. Now, in most states, masking up with a paper or cotton mask is demanded by businesses and expected by most people.

Now the next big thing is experimental gene therapy — described as a "vaccine" — being pushed on every person in the United States. And now, the Biden administration is working with private companies to help implement a "passport" that would allow those who have taken the vaccine to live normal lives again.

One tool that is being heavily promoted is called CommonPass. It is co-sponsored by the World Economic Forum and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Church Militant discussed the Rockefeller Foundation on an FBI episode, revealing that it has been trying to destroy the Church for decades.

These same anti-God, anti-freedom organizations are bent on turning the full force of the State on those who would not be in lockstep with the new Marxist takeover of the once-free United States.

They are dangling freedom before everyone's eyes, saying 'if you want this, do what we say.'GabTweet

Harry Litman, a former Department of Justice official, tweeted on Sunday, "Vaccine passports are a good idea. Among other things, it [sic] will single out the still large contingent of people who refuse vaccines, who will be foreclosed from doing a lot of things their peers can do. That should help break the resistance down."

The same political powers that claim to be concerned for the marginalized and minorities are bent on destroying any dissent from their plan. It will make the non-compliant into a lower class of people who have greater difficulty buying things and earning a living for their families.

They are dangling freedom before everyone's eyes, saying, "If you want this, do what we say." But, at the end of the day, if these fickle bureaucrats can just take away God-given freedoms so easily, is it really freedom when people give in to their demands?

They can try all they want to cancel culture and true history, but they can't cancel God.

Just posting this here as a reference, what happened to such a hateful, corrupt woman. Dance with the devil, get stabbed in the back. One of her two sons had converted to Christianity, and much later, she was murdered and dismembered, along with her other son and granddaughter. They were all found in a shallow grave. They were betrayed by a former employee of their atheist org., it is quite a story:

She became America's most hated woman in 1963, when her lawsuit protesting school prayer reached the U. S. Supreme Court.

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Madalyn Murray O'Hair
When atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son, and granddaughter mysteriously disappeared from their Austin, Tex., home in 1995, the police didn't lift a finger to find the family that had taken God out of America. Five years went by before a determined reporter would unravel the mystery of her disappearance.
by Lona Manning
"There is no God. There's no heaven. There's no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you."

-- Madalyn Murray O'Hair
 

greysage

On The Level
Looks like they're using their newspeak confusion and feigned incompetence to keep us locked down. As far as I'm concerned, we are not open, some places are a little open, and that's it. Still feels like lock down to me.

Infections are rising along with the vaccination rates. But no correlation, at least none they mention.

They blame it on people being complacent now that there is a vaccine. Also pandemic fatigue.




On Thursday, Vermont reported 233 new cases of Covid-19, one of the highest one-day totals since the pandemic began. The state’s seven-day average is nearly tied with its highest ever, which came in January.

It’s not alone. Across the country, coronavirus case totals are rising yet again, particularly in New Jersey, New York and Michigan. The latter has been hit hard by the spread of variants. CDC director Rochelle Walensky has warned of “impending doom” and urged states not to reopen too quickly.
Yet Vermont has begun to reopen despite its rising cases. In mid-March, Gov. Phil Scott announced that unvaccinated Vermonters could gather with one other household, with no limitations on vaccinated Vermonters.

Soon after, the state loosened restrictions on restaurants and bars, allowing leeway for members of different households to eat together. Scott said he plans to release more details soon on how the state plans to reopen in anticipation of a final return to normalcy by July 4.

Officials have cited these measures as a reward for Vermont’s rising vaccination rate, particularly among the oldest members of the population. About 38% of all Vermonters, and more than 80% of people 65 and older, have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

While state Health Commissioner Mark Levine said the new numbers are concerning, he said Vermont is a public health success for protecting the most vulnerable members of the population.
“When you look at what our strategy is, we wanted to make sure that we prevented loss of life and to reduce the impact on our health system. That’s been our focus since Day One,” Scott said at a recent press conference.

No quick surge
Did Vermont’s latest reopening measures lead to the latest wave? VTDigger reviewed several new measures and whether they were followed by rise in cases seven to 10 days later, the minimum amount of time needed for the disease to incubate, transmit to others and appear in state data.
So far, there’s no clear trend. The rise in cases has been mostly steady, rather than quickly surging after a single measure.

Levine said Tuesday that it was too soon to see the impact of bar and restaurant reopenings on case numbers.
Scott added that, relative to other states, Vermont’s reopening so far has not been extreme. “Vermont still has among the strongest, if not the strongest, mitigation measures in place throughout the Northeast, and in the country,” he said.
“While we made some small spigot turns for restaurants, bars, and social clubs like the Legion and the VFW, we still have more stringent measures in place than Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and others in the region,” he said. “This includes capacity limits, distancing, hours of operation, seating requirements, masking and more.”

Elizabeth Winterbauer, a consulting epidemiologist and health services researcher, said too many variables were at play this March to draw conclusions about the reopening.

“We’ve got new, more contagious, more transmissible variants circulating, more and more now,” she said. “And we’ve got pandemic fatigue, and people’s perception that we’re in the homestretch, this is over.”
The rise in cases also came not long after the beginning of spring and the first warm days of the year, VTDigger data shows.

It’s difficult to say how much the presence of variants has been a factor in viral spread. Winterbauer said early findings from Michigan have shown how much the B.1.1.7 variant in particular can increase transmission.
“In the past, [when] there was a case and a bunch of people went into quarantine because they were exposed to that case, none of them actually ended up having Covid. Now, that’s flipped,” Winterbauer said. “And in a very similar scenario of exposure, now people in quarantine were testing positive for Covid.”

Reopening benchmarks
Last spring, as the state’s cases started to crest and Scott announced the end of lockdown, the state presented metrics to help determine whether Vermont was ready for further reopening.
They included the test-positivity rate staying below 5%, a low percentage of Covid-like symptoms appearing in doctor’s offices, ICU capacity below 70% and case growth remaining stable rather than rising uncontrollably. Later, a benchmark of more than 5,000 Covid tests per day was added.

The latest data presented by the state show that Vermont has met most of those benchmarks. ICU capacity has risen above 70%, but most beds are occupied by non-Covid patients, and ICU hospitalizations have not been rising.
Scott’s announcement suggests that Vermont won’t be using these metrics to make decisions about its reopening, instead creating a steady timeline of new spigot turns. In recent press conferences, state officials haven’t mentioned the benchmarks portion of their own report.

That calls into question whether the state will follow its old rules as cases spread. The test-positivity rate and case growth in particular have been rising, heading toward a potential point of hitting the benchmark.
Winterbauer believes the higher test-positivity rate is cause for concern.

“We’re hearing anecdotally that perhaps people aren’t as interested in testing because vaccination is more widespread,” she said. “We have to change that. Testing is going to be so critical right now and continuing into the next phases of the pandemic. That’s one way to reopen: make sure people are getting tested and have access to testing, and want to be tested.”

Scott said he is confident the blueprint for reopening is feasible, based on the effect of vaccinations so far. “In terms of those 65 and over we’ve already vaccinated, hospitalizations are down significantly,” he said.
“It won’t change our strategy, and we think this will provide some assurance as to what we’re going to be doing over the next three months as we work towards normalcy,” he said.

Winterbauer pointed out that if reopening businesses is a priority, perhaps the state should prioritize the frontline workers who data have shown are at increased risk.
“Restaurant owners are suffering, and [the livelihoods of] people who work and in bars and restaurants are dependent on this, so I understand Scott’s desire to be able to support these people,” she said. “But can we give them the vaccine so that they’re not at risk every day during their work of getting Covid?”

Screen Shot 2021-04-02 at 12.25.56 PM.png
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

CDC Says Fully Vaccinated People Can Travel Domestically and Internationally – But Still Recommended to Wear a Mask

By Cristina Laila
Published April 2, 2021 at 11:02am
CFDBC42E-DA67-4DBC-9FA8-FDE9644A4C6D.jpeg


We are one step closer to Covid vaccine passports.

The CDC on Friday released updated guidance on how fully vaccinated people can travel domestically and internationally.

The CDC said fully vaccinated people can travel domestically and internationally without having to show a negative Covid test (unless the destination requires it) but are still recommended to wear a mask and social distance.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Wednesday said new data suggest vaccinated people do not carry Covid-19 so why do fully vaccinated people need to wear a mask and practice social distancing??

Rand Paul on Wednesday linked to a study examining T cell responses in Covid-19 convalescent individuals.

“T cell immunity after natural infection shown to include variants,” Rand Paul said in a swipe to Fauci. “Do we still need to wear multiple masks after we’ve recovered or been vaccinated?”

Per the CDC:
Updated Information for Travelers
Fully vaccinated travelers are less likely to get and spread COVID-19. However, international travel poses additional risks and even fully vaccinated travelers are at increased risk for getting and possibly spreading new COVID-19 variants.
CDC recommends delaying international travel until you are fully vaccinated.
If you are fully vaccinated with an FDA-authorized vaccine:
  • You should continue to follow CDC’s recommendations for traveling safely and get tested 3-5 days after travel.
  • You do NOT need to get tested before leaving United States unless your destination requires it.
  • You do NOT need to self-quarantine after arriving in the United States.
The Biden Administration is now working to launch “vaccine passports” so Americans can prove they’ve been inoculated.

The vaccine passports will be the key to returning to normalcy and may actually control who is allowed to participate in the workforce.

Leftists aren’t even hiding it anymore. They are openly admitting they will discriminate against people who don’t get the Covid vaccine.

A doctor appeared on CNN this week and said, “We have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status because if everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be… How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine… So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden Admin need to come out a lot bolder and say “if you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things…here are all the freedoms that you have, because otherwise people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Not Crazy Enough? Liberals Are Now Pushing a “Well Health Safety Seal”!

By Joe Hoft
Published April 2, 2021 at 11:15am
Well-Health-Safety-Seal-2.jpg

A new entity has been created to make us all feel better. We now can now know that the buildings and communities we live in will be safe and secure by just looking for the “Well Health Safety Seal”. What could go wrong?

Crazy communist liberals are at it again – they keep getting further and further out there:

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1377656392652316673
1:19 min

Wake up, people.

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What could go wrong right?

Liberal communists are at it again – pushing garbage initiatives from some unknown international organization to put more constraints on Americans who just want to make a living. You can see it already, if you don’t have this seal, you won’t be able to do business. Only far-left organizations will be approved. What will Trump Tower have to do to obtain the seal?

The Well Health Safety site says:
The International WELL Building Institute™ (IWBI™) is leading the global movement to transform our buildings and communities in ways that help people thrive. The WELL Health-Safety seal is awarded after an annual review of a building’s health and safety policies and protocols. Achievement of the WELL Health-Safety Rating does not guarantee that a space will be free from pathogens. Please take health and safety precautions whenever indoors by adhering to local laws and public health guidelines. If you have any questions regarding a medical condition, contact your healthcare provider. International WELL Building Institute, IWBI, the WELL Building Standard, WELL v2, WELL Certified, WELL AP, WELL Portfolio, WELL Portfolio Score, The WELL Conference, We Are WELL, the WELL Community Standard, WELL Health-Safety Rating, WELL Health-Safety Rated, WELL Workforce, WELL and others, and their related logos are trademarks or certification marks of International WELL Building Institute pbc in the United States and other countries.
More insanity for times when you think it just can’t get any more insane.

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marsh

On TB every waking moment

CNN 'Medical Expert' & CDC Suggest Americans' "Freedoms" Be Restricted Until They Are Vaccinated

FRIDAY, APR 02, 2021 - 04:10 PM

With nearly every state having opened vaccinations to all adults, the CDC on Friday announced the second loosening of certain federal guidelines by declaring that all Americans who are "fully vaccinated" - a status obtained two weeks after the second dose (for Moderna and Pfizer) or the one and only dose (for JNJ) can travel "at low risk to themselves" both with the US and abroad, and won't need to be tested for COVID before boarding a plane.

However, the CDC advised that they should continue to take precautions like wearing a mask in public, avoiding crowds, maintaining social distancing and washing one's hands frequently.

While the press celebrated the advisory as a milestone in the road back to "normalcy", some wondered whether the CDC got the memo about packed seats on airplanes and the virtually completely reopened Florida that's attracting tourists from around the country.
CDC TO SAY VACCINATED PEOPLE CAN NOW TRAVEL: POLITICO

Should I not have been traveling this whole time. Oops
— Quoth the Raven (@QTRResearch) April 2, 2021
While many Americans might not have realized it, the CDC has officially discouraged Americans from traveling - until now.

As more countries prepare to start using vaccine passports (airports have already been demanding proof of negative COVID status since last summer), the CDC said vaccinated Americans will not need a COVID test to travel anywhere, including another country (that is, unless they're required to do so by authorities in their destination country).

While all this probably sounds promising, there's a catch: vaccinated travelers still have to get a negative test result before boarding a flight back to the US, where they then must be tested against 3-5 days after returning home. This could create the potential for an explosion of false positives as some have linked to over-magnification on PCR tests used to detect the virus.

As we noted earlier, the CDC's latest edict, just like its first one, is essentially "permission" to do something that millions of Americans are already doing. What's wrong here? Did the CDC not get the memo that states are reopening already?

The answer can be found in a recent interview featuring Dr. Leana Wen, a former head of Planned Parenthood who served as a "medical expert" on CNN (just the facts, right people?).

She explained that the CDC's only hope for convincing every adult American to get vaccinated is to withhold the "carrot" of freedoms from the people until they assent to being vaccinated.

View: https://youtu.be/z5JhPiGJ2gU
1:19 min

Since the CDC wants everybody to continue observing social distancing guidelines like wearing masks and maintaining a safe distance, limiting their ability to travel and visit public places is really the only option. As Wen pointed out, the CDC needs to find ways to force people to get the vaccine now, or otherwise people "are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway."
"we need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life and the window to do that is really narrowing..." Wen added.
Put another way, while this latest message is couched as the CDC loosening restrictions on travel, what's really happening is the government is giving private industry the green light to start barring travelers and customers who can't prove their vaccination status. So instead of granting more freedom, they're preparing to take freedoms away.

This latest announcement adds to the CDC's previous guidance, released in March, allowing fully vaccinated people to visit with others in small groups in a private setting. We expect more declarations about the rights of the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated will be made in the near future.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Trump Was Right: Sunlight Destroys COVID 8x Faster Than Scientists Believed, Study Shows

FRIDAY, APR 02, 2021 - 03:10 PM
As it turns out, President Trump might have been on to something last spring when he rambled during a press conference about the possibility that "sunlight" could be leveraged to destroy the virus.

Research recently published by a team of academics at UC Santa Barbara found that the coronavirus is "inactivated" by sunlight as much as 8x faster than "current theoretical modelling" had anticipated. UC Santa Barbara assistant professor of mechanical engineering Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz analyzed studies exploring the effects of different forms of UV radiation on SARS-CoV-2, and found a significant discrepancy, according to RT.


As with all electromagnetic radiation, UV falls on a spectrum. Longer-wave UVA reacts differently with parts of DNA and RNA than mid-range UV waves that are found in sunlight. These shorter-range waves can kill microbes and cause sunburns in humans. While short-wave UV radiation has been shown to deactivate viruses like SARS-CoV-2, light from this end of the spectrum is often deflected away from humanity by the Earth's ozone lawyer.

But an analysis of various studies of how different types of UV light interacts with SARS-CoV-2 found that COVID should disintegrate even more quickly when exposed to summer sunlight, which features more short-wave radiation, one reason risk of contracting the virus outdoors during the summer is much, much lower than being indoors in the winter.

In practice, the team found that "inactivation" of virus particles rendered in simulated saliva was more than 8x faster than scientists believed in conditions similar to summer sunlight.

A July 2020 experimental study tested the power of UV light on SARS-CoV-2, contained in simulated saliva, and found the virus was inactivated in under 20 minutes.
However, a theory published a month later suggested sunlight could achieve the same effect, which didn’t quite add up. This second study concluded that SARS-CoV-2 was three times more sensitive to UV radiation in sunlight than the influenza A virus.
The vast majority of coronavirus particles were rendered inactive within 30 minutes of exposure to midday summer sunlight, whereas the virus could survive for days under winter sunlight.
"The experimentally observed inactivation in simulated saliva is over eight times faster than would have been expected from the theory," Luzzatto-Feigiz and his team said. "So, scientists don’t yet know what’s going on."
The UC Santa Barbara team hypothesized that the process that destroys the virus is similar to a process seen in wastewater treatment plants.
The team suspects that, as the UVC doesn’t reach the Earth, instead of directly attacking the RNA, the long-wave UVA in sunlight interacts with molecules in the virus’ environment, such as saliva, which speeds up the inactivation, in a process witnessed previously in wastewater treatment.
Their research suggests that an air filtration system equipped with certain types of UVA-emitters could dramatically reduce the spread of viral particles indoors.

For some reason, all this research about the effects of sunlight on the virus has been ignored by governments like the Spanish government, which recently ordered masks to be worn outdoors, something the country's hospitality industry fears will destroy more already-embattled businesses while contributing nothing to the public safety effort. But maybe soon that will change.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
[COMMENT: It is not a right if you have to ask permission]


A Step-By-Step Look At How COVID Passport Propaganda Works

THURSDAY, APR 01, 2021 - 08:20 PM
Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

With reports that President Joe Biden’s administration is planning for imposing a vaccine passport mandate in America, expect to see in the media a deluge of vaccine passport propaganda. What will that propaganda look like? A template illustrating several elements you can expect to see in the propaganda push was provided several weeks ago in a CNN interview.



In the first week of March, host Fareed Zakaria and his guest Arthur Caplan provided at CNN a textbook example of how to present vaccine passport propaganda to the American people. Let’s look at some of the major elements of the propaganda template as demonstrated by Zakaria and Caplan.

1) Include some short expression that the idea of vaccine passports can be troubling, but make sure to only bring this up superficially. This is accomplished in the CNN segment by starting with a clip from a short scene from the movie Casablanca. In the clip, a policeman asks to see a man’s "papers," the man says he does not have them, and the policeman responds, "in that case we’ll have to ask you to come along." Not shown is the remainder of the scene in which the accosted man, after presenting apparently expired papers, attempts to flee only to be gunned down. Not showing the full scene demonstrates the care demanded in the propaganda to not allow any depiction of potential dire consequences from imposing vaccine passports.

2) Frame the imposing of a vaccine passport mandate as something that is both inevitable and threatens only minimal, if any, harm. Zakaria accomplishes this task with the first sentence he utters to begin the media segment. Zakaria states: "From Casablanca to today, a demand to produce personal documents can be uncomfortable, but, post-pandemic, it’s something we’ll all likely have to get more and more comfortable with." Masterfully, Zakaria, in addition to minimizing the problems with passports as just causing discomfort, asserts that even that discomfort with time will disappear, suggesting objecting to vaccine passports is just an irrational or silly reaction.

3) Bring on a guest who, despite his description making him sound like someone who would be looking out for the interests of people concerned about vaccine passports, pretty much says that vaccine passports are the best thing since sliced bread. In the CNN interview the guest performing this role is Arthur Caplan, who Zakaria introduces as a "medical ethicist" and "professor at NYU." A medical ethicist will surely provide some warning about dangers from vaccine passports, right? Yes, in many cases. But, Caplan is not that sort of medical ethicists. He is the one picked to be interviewed in a media segment designed to promote acceptance of vaccine passports.

4) Reiterate that vaccine passports are inevitable, and that people should support them. Zakaria hits the nail on the head with this, presenting this first question to his guest: "So explain why you think, basically, that this is the future and we should be comfortable with it."

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5) Declare that vaccine passports must be imposed on the American people because of coronavirus. Caplan accomplishes this task in his first words in the media segment. He states: "Well, I’m sure that the future holds vaccine passports for us, partly to protect against the spread of Covid." Of course, as coronavirus has turned out not to be a major danger to most people, imposing a vaccine passport mandate to counter it makes no more sense than doing it to counter any other of many diseases. But, this is not a topic to be brought up when selling people on vaccine passports. Fearmongering, no matter how ridiculously unjustified, is the name of the game. This is the fraudulent message people are encouraged to act on without much critical thought: Coronavirus is gonna kill us all unless we take the shots and show our papers!

6) Say that mandating vaccine passports is really no big deal because of some other supposedly very similar restriction to which some people are already subjected. Caplan states: "And, you know, it’s not a new idea, we have it for yellow fever; there are about more than a dozen countries that say you can’t come in if you haven’t been vaccinated against yellow fever, and many others require you to show proof of vaccination if you transit through those countries."

Are the yellow fever-related requirements justified? Caplan does not say more than that, because these somewhat similar restrictions exist someplace, the mandating of vaccine passports in America is fine. That’s medical ethicist reasoning? Anyway, the yellow fever stuff, because most Americans have no experience with or knowledge of it, is a fine example for the propaganda. Few watchers of the segment will have any basis for questioning the current practice that is used to justify the new desired mandate. One big difference, though, jumps out on further consideration. Caplan explains that the yellow fever requirements apply for just coming to several countries. In contrast, Zakaria early in the interview says the vaccine passports that will, he claims, inevitably be imposed on Americans will be required for people "to get on an airplane, to go to a concert, or to go back to work." The vaccine passport mandate is, thus, much more troublesome for most Americans than yellow-fever-related requirements for entry into a few countries that most Americans never visit. But, the point is to quickly present the example as if it provides conclusive support no matter how far that representation is from the truth.

7) Dismiss as insignificant people’s concerns about being required, in order to go about their daily activities, to present a vaccine passport and to take a vaccine, or, really, an experimental coronavirus vaccine that is not even a vaccine under the normal meaning of the term. Assert instead that the only danger to freedom could be something theoretical that could be additionally required in the future. Here is how Zakaria puts it in a question to Caplan: "What about the concerns that many people have about privacy, about the privacy of their health data, that, you know, is there a slippery slope here — 'OK, I’m comfortable telling you whether or not I have Covid, but does that mean it becomes OK to ask about other things?'" Of course, many people are justifiably wary of being pressured to take the shots and then having their mandated vaccine passport used to track them as they go about their daily activities. That is why this media segment and others like it are being presented, after all.

8) Dismiss any concern that vaccine passports can in fact harm freedom. Instead, describe people as benefiting from and gaining freedom by their being mandated to take experimental coronavirus vaccines and present vaccination passports in order to go about their daily activities. Oh yeah, and keep quiet about all the mass surveillance facilitated by a vaccine passport program, the vaccinations-based caste system resulting from the mandate that will make people who do not take the shots suffer, and how the vaccine passport program can be expanded to advance many additional types of control over people. Here is how Caplan puts it: "With a Covid certification, you’re going to gain freedom, you’re going to gain mobility, and I’m going to suggest that you’re probably going to be able to get certain jobs." Talk about turning things on their head. The mandate really means that people who do not comply will be barred from the mobility they already have and fired from their jobs. Freedom is supported by rejecting the mandate, not by supporting it.

9) Insist that the vaccine passport mandate is fine because it will be applied equally to all people. This is something Zakaria and Caplan spend a long time talking about in the CNN segment. Come on guys, something bad does not become good because it is applied to the maximum number of people, irrespective of their race, sex, or whatever. We are dealing with a mandate here, not giving everyone a serving of his favorite dessert.

10) Declare that a vaccine passport mandate helps encourage people to take the shots. (Unlike the other nine elements of the vaccine passport mandate propaganda template, this one is likely true. Threats can yield compliance. Still, the threats could deter some people from taking the experimental coronavirus vaccine shots. It sure makes you wonder about shots’ supposed safety when an extreme, and unprecedented, act of force is employed to ensure people take the shots.) States Caplan in the interview: "It also gives you an incentive to overcome vaccine hesitancy. Some people are not sure still whether they want to do the vaccine, but if you promise them more mobility, more ability to get a job, more ability to get travel, that’s a very powerful incentive to actually achieve fuller vaccination." What Caplan is really talking about is coercion. He is saying that people who would otherwise refuse taking the shots will be forced to do so by the vaccine passport mandate severely restricting their activities and even depriving them of the ability to earn an income so long as they do not give in to the demand they take the shots. All this authoritarianism is dressed up in deceptive language. "Vaccine hesitancy" is substituted for "vaccine refusal" to disguise that the vaccine passport mandate is about stopping people from exercising free choice. "Incentive" is substituted for "coercive technique."

Watch Zakaria and Caplan’s interview here:

View: https://youtu.be/tPYMgwN-oII
6:44 min

Hopefully, many people will see through the deception and be able to prevent the implementation of the vaccine passport mandate Zakaria, Caplan, and others are promoting in the media.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Hawaii May Introduce Vaccine Passport For Inter-Island Travel.

The state of Hawaii is considering the adoption of a “proof-of-vaccination requirement for inter-island travel” (a COVID-19 vaccine passport).

“I would love to pilot it in mid-April with the cards at least for inter-island travel,” Hawaii Lt. Gov. Josh Green said Tuesday to KHON-TV.

He also said that state authorities are looking to develop an app to verify traveler vaccination with a local developer.

Green tried to assure Hawaiians that the passport would not unduly violate privacy:

“They would be able to verify the health record, they would then encrypt it so people can’t steal someone’s health record. Although really, all it is is whether you got vaccinated or not and your name and the date it occurred.”

Green did not go into more details on the proposed app, but it seems probable it would be like the “vaccine passports” being implemented in New York.

“Think of it as a mobile airline boarding pass, but for proving you received a COVID-19 vaccination or negative test. Businesses and venues can scan and validate your pass to ensure you meet any COVID-19 vaccination or testing requirements for entry. Along with your Pass, you’ll be asked to show a photo ID that shows your name and birth date to verify that the Pass belongs to you.

Adults may hold passes for accompanying minors,” NY state authorities described the app.

They did say that “alternative proof of vaccination” (cards, for instance) would also be acceptable.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis professed strong opposition to the idea of vaccine passports at a Monday press conference, saying, “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society.”

Hawaiian tourism officials, however, have reacted positively to the proposed vaccine passport. Mufi Hannemann, president and CEO of the Hawaii Lodging and Tourism Association, stated, “That’s what we see, families that haven’t seen each other for a while that live in Kauai, Maui, Hawaii Island, Oahu. And this will allow that kind of travel to take place without the additional cost of being tested.”

Hawaiian Gov. David Ige will make the final decision on whether or not to implement a “vaccine passport” travel requirement, “in consultation with island mayors.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Vaccine 'passports,' incentives raise fears over privacy and discrimination

Some claim passports are necessary to getting back to "normal;" others warn of encroachment on rights.


By Daniel Payne
Updated: April 2, 2021 - 9:24am

Efforts to institute "vaccine passports" that identify those inoculated against COVID-19 are raising alarm about infringing on the civil liberties and privacy of Americans on the other side of the pandemic, while business campaigns to incentivize both employees and customers to get shots are raising some concerns about discrimination.

World leaders were calling for a vaccine for COVID-19 nearly at the outset of the pandemic in 2020, with health experts claiming that vaccinations were the only feasible path back toward normalcy and prosperity for the world.

The development and rollout of the vaccines has coincided with growing demands for vaccinated individuals to be able to identify themselves when taking part in public life, with industry leaders and politicians proposing various systems to verify an individual's inoculation status quickly and reliably.

Those demands have coalesced around what are being called "vaccine passports." In some areas such programs are moving forward rapidly
In New York State, for instance, Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week rolled out what he said was a first-in-the-nation "transformational technology" meant to identify individuals who have been injected with the coronavirus vaccine.

Multiple businesses and industries, meanwhile, are offering perks for vaccinated individuals in an effort to incentivize as many Americans as possible to get the shot.

Concerns over privacy, data storage
Some commentators and experts are speaking out against the passport proposals, claiming they could pose a threat to the civil fabric of the United States due to privacy concerns and potentially as a significant number of people who forego the vaccine are increasingly excluded from public life.

Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Boston University's WBUR last month that a vaccine passport system could "create a really chilling implication for privacy going forward."

"You know, this is creating what could turn into a permanent layer of surveillance infrastructure on the scale of nothing we've seen since 9/11," he told the station.
He criticized "the idea that you have a government app that can track every place you go, that can tell whether or not you're going to the supermarket, or going to a church, or going to a mosque or going to any number of other crowded spaces.”

Ultimately it is not guaranteed that a vaccine passport system would be government-mandated. Robby Soave, an editor for the libertarian magazine Reason, noted the private sector may ultimately take up the mantle itself.
"In terms of the government, citizens should resist all efforts to make vaccine passports a required element of travel, public schooling, etc," he said. "But if private entities want to experiment with requiring customers and employees to be vaccinated, I don't think that's something the government should prohibit. In general, we need to move away from the idea that everything should be either mandated or banned."

Patrick Eddington, a civil liberties research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the risk for privacy violations are still present if private parties are administering the passport system.

"If we're looking at a potential privacy or civil liberties violation," he said, "it really comes in the form of data storage—electronic or paper—stored by businesses subject to potential national security applications."

Eddington dismissed the likelihood of that threat, further arguing that the private sector will likely take a patchwork approach to passports, with some types of businesses requiring them and others not.

"My thought is most businesses want to get back into business," he said. "They're probably not going to be nearly as concerned by this as many others are."

Jay Stanley, the senior policy analyst with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said the group opposes "a vaccine passport that leads to our most vulnerable people getting further shut out of full participation in our society."

"We don't oppose in principle the idea of requiring proof of vaccination in certain contexts," Stanley said. "But the devil is in the details, and any proposal for 'vaccine passports' must not be exclusively digital, must be decentralized and open source, and must not allow for tracking or the creation of new databases with personal medical information. Not everyone has access to a smartphone, especially people from some of our most vulnerable communities."

"There is also real concern that the creation of vaccine credentials could lead to overuse, or have a chilling effect on immigrant communities and communities of color who are already subject to over-policing and surveillance," he argued further. "There are legitimate circumstances in which people can be asked for proof of vaccination, but right now not everyone can get vaccinated."

"That's precisely what herd immunity attempts to protect against: community spread to people whose medical conditions contraindicate a vaccine or don't have access." In a blog post on the subject, Stanley said the civil liberties organization would be "closely watching developments in this area."

Perks, bonuses for individuals who have been vaccinated
Apart from requiring an individual's proof of vaccination to access services, some businesses have been incentivizing the vaccine by promising extra perks to both consumers and employees who receive it.

The donut chain Krispy Kreme, for instance, announced last month that it would offer a free donut every day through 2021 to anyone who presented a vaccine card at one of their establishments. Local businesses in states ranging from Minnesota to Wisconsin to Michigan to Massachusetts have announced discounts for patrons who can prove their vaccinations.

The NBA's Miami Heat took incentives to the next level last month, announcing new "vaccinated fan sections" for less than 500 sports-goers. Most of those fans will be able to bypass security procedures such as "COVID-19 Detection Dogs" and will be seated in courtside sections of the stadium.

Employers nationwide, meanwhile, have been offering various perks to workers to obtain the vaccine, including paid time off, bonuses and other benefits.

The legal ramifications of such efforts are unclear so far. Perhaps no medicine in human history has been as aggressively pushed as has the COVID-19 vaccine, with countless leaders at the local, state and national levels in both the private and public sectors urging staffers, underlings and coworkers to receive it.

Those efforts, though well-meaning, could potentially run afoul of U.S. disability law, which protects both workers and customers with medical disabilities from discriminatory practices. The CDC notes that "because of age, health conditions, or other factors, some people should not get certain vaccines or should wait before getting them."

In February, a group of professional organizations wrote to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Charlotte Burrows asking for the commission to "quickly issue guidance clarifying the extent to which employers may offer employees incentives to vaccinate without running afoul of the Americans With Disabilities Act and other laws enforced by the EEOC."

Attorney Jonathan Mook told the Society for Human Resource Management last month that while "employer incentives may come into play in order to encourage employees voluntarily to take the time and make the effort to be vaccinated," nevertheless, "at the present time, there are a number of legal gray areas as to the legality of an employer providing incentives."

Doron Dorfman, an associate professor of law at Syracuse University, told Just the News that, as far as consumer-based incentives are concerned, the likelihood of a legitimate discrimination claim is slim.

"My sense is that it's not discriminatory [to offer incentives to consumers]," he said. "Giving some kind of a special bonus or special treatment for people who got the vaccine, it's not discriminatory against people with disabilities" because individuals have "no right to incentives" in the first place.

Dorfman worried that "if we do see it as some kind of discrimination, then it will be used by people who object to vaccines who will manipulate it to their benefit." He argued that people attempted the same stunt with masks in the early days of the pandemic, claiming a disability in order to avoid wearing one.

"This line of thinking can actually be used against people with disabilities," he said.

He acknowledged that "passports or requiring a vaccine for work, that's another issue."

According to the CDC, the U.S. had fully vaccinated about 17% of its population as of Friday; around a third of the population had received at least one dose.
 
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