Authored by Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea via Racket News,

There’s a scene in videographer Matt Orfalea’s arresting new “Nobody is Safe!” compilation in which Jeff Van Gundy — one of the sharpest basketball announcers alive, and one of my favorites to watch — leans back and says, “I don’t even understand what means, ‘I’m doing my own research.’”

The whole quote, from a preseason Heat-Rockets game Van Gundy called in October of 2021:

What does that look like, you doing your own research? Are you doing studies yourself? Are you in a lab on a nightly basis? What are you doing? I don’t understand what that means, ‘I’m doing my own research.’
How about this: we’ve got really smart people… who’ve already done the research.

The subtext of Van Gundy’s quote was one of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, a collective roar against “asking questions” or “doing your own research.” Just a few weeks earlier, Brian Stelter on CNN hosted a panel about “four little words that are hurting America’s pandemic response.” He showed evil always-villain Sean Hannity repeatedly uttering the “seemingly innocent” phrase, “Do your own research.” He then rolled tape of comic Trevor Noah saying, “Nobody who’s saying that is getting in a lab and doing tests.”

In hindsight, who knows, that might have been where Van Gundy got the idea. Make no mistake, however, there was and is an active campaign against people who do their “own research.” This was a mostly unexplored theme in the #TwitterFiles material, as we did repeatedly see anti-disinformation “experts” identifying people who didn’t quickly accept official messaging without question as already, in a way, spreaders of mis- or disinformation.

We touched on this a little in a report about the Stanford Virality Project, which advised that “just asking questions” was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.” We also saw it in an Aspen Institute report on misinformation, which recommended “strikes” against people they called “savvy spreaders,” i.e. those who used phrases like “just asking questions,” evading censors by “couching” misinformation as mere “uncertainty”:

I got the shot and never advised people not to get vaccinated. I couldn’t imagine an area where I was less qualified to give advice. But this is the point: the same people Orf shows picking up torches and railing with bloodcurdling certainty against “the unvaccinated” are nearly all people who knew as little as me, and whose beliefs about the vaccine were at best secondhand.

You’re disgusted at those who “do their own research”? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.

In this case one didn’t need a microbiology degree to recognize something about Covid-19 messaging was off. From flip-flops about masks (an “evolving situation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said) to unwillingness to be frank in discussing natural immunity or risks to children, even casual news-readers saw confusion in the ranks of senior officials. Later, a series of reversals on key questions — first about whether the vaccine prevented contraction, then about whether it prevented transmission — left even people who wanted to follow official advice unsure of what to do.

I hope Matt’s video survives as a warning. There is still a lot of investigation to be done, in particular about the origins of the pandemic — certain segments of the national audience may still be in for a shock or two there — but as Matt shows, we already see a cautionary tale about faulty information being used to gin up real hatred.

Subscribers to Racket News can read the rest here…

Via the Brownstone Institute,

In a statement made today on a case concerning Title 42, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch breaks the painful silence on the topic of lockdowns and mandates, and presents the truth with startling clarity.

Importantly, this statement from the Supreme Court comes as so many other agencies, intellectuals, and journalists are in flat-out denial of what happened to the country.

[T]he history of this case illustrates the disruption we have experienced over the last three years in how our laws are made and our freedoms observed.

Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.

They shuttered businesses and schools public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too.

They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

Federal executive officials entered the act too. Not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide.They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.

They threatened to fire noncompliant employees, and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent. Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few—but hardly all—of the intrusions upon them. In some cases, like this one, courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation.

Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.

A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes.

We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.

But maybe we have learned another lesson too. The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government. However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process.

Decisions produced by those who indulge no criticism are rarely as good as those produced after robust and uncensored debate. Decisions announced on the fly are rarely as wise as those that come after careful deliberation. Decisions made by a few often yield unintended consequences that may be avoided when more are consulted. Autocracies have always suffered these defects. Maybe, hopefully, we have relearned these lessons too.

In the 1970s, Congress studied the use of emergency decrees. It observed that they can allow executive authorities to tap into extraordinary powers. Congress also observed that emergency decrees have a habit of long outliving the crises that generate them; some federal emergency proclamations, Congress noted, had remained in effect for years or decades after the emergency in question had passed.

At the same time, Congress recognized that quick unilateral executive action is sometimes necessary and permitted in our constitutional order. In an effort to balance these considerations and ensure a more normal operation of our laws and a firmer protection of our liberties, Congress adopted a number of new guardrails in the National Emergencies Act.

Despite that law, the number of declared emergencies has only grown in the ensuing years. And it is hard not to wonder whether, after nearly a half-century and in light of our Nation’s recent experience, another look is warranted. It is hard not to wonder, too, whether state legislatures might profitably reexamine the proper scope of emergency executive powers at the state level.

At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another. Make no mistake—decisive executive action is sometimes necessary and appropriate. But if emergency decrees promise to solve some problems, they threaten to generate others. And rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Arizona v. Mayorkas marks the culmination of his three-year effort to oppose the Covid regime’s eradication of civil liberties, unequal application of law, and political favoritism. From the outset, Gorsuch remained vigilant as public officials used the pretext of Covid to augment their power and strip the citizenry of its rights in defiance of long standing constitutional principles.

While other justices (even some purported constitutionalists) absconded their responsibility to uphold the Bill of Rights, Gorsuch diligently defended the Constitution. This became most apparent in the Supreme Court’s cases involving religious liberty in the Covid era.

Beginning in May 2020, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging Covid restrictions on religious attendance across the country. The Court was divided along familiar political lines: the liberal bloc of Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan voted to uphold deprivations of liberty as a valid exercise of states’ police power; Justice Gorsuch led conservatives Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas in challenging the irrationality of the edicts; Chief Justice Roberts sided with the liberal bloc, justifying his decision by deferring to public health experts.

“Unelected judiciary lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people,” Roberts wrote in South Bay v. Newsom, the first Covid case to reach the Court.

And so the Court repeatedly upheld executive orders attacking religious liberty. In South Bay, the Court denied a California church’s request to block state restrictions on church attendance in a five to four decision. Roberts sided with the liberal bloc, urging deference to the public health apparatus as constitutional freedoms disappeared from American life.

In July 2020, the Court again split 5-4 and denied a church’s emergency motion for injunctive relief against Nevada’s Covid restrictions. Governor Steve Sisolak capped religious gatherings at 50 people, regardless of the precautions taken or the size of the establishment. The same order allowed for other groups, including casinos, to hold up to 500 people. The Court, with Chief Justice Roberts joining the liberal justices again, denied the motion in an unsigned motion without explanation.

Justice Gorsuch issued a one paragraph dissent that exposed the hypocrisy and irrationality of the Covid regime. “Under the Governor’s edict, a 10-screen ‘multiplex’ may host 500 moviegoers at any time. A casino, too, may cater to hundreds at once, with perhaps six people huddled at each craps table here and a similar number gathered around every roulette wheel there,” he wrote. But the Governor’s lockdown order imposed a 50-worshiper limit for religious gatherings, no matter the buildings’ capacities.

“The First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion,” Gorsuch wrote. “But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”

Gorsuch understood the threat to Americans’ liberties, but he was powerless with Chief Justice Roberts cowing to the interests of the public health bureaucracy. That changed when Justice Ginsburg died in September 2020.

The following month, Justice Barrett joined the Court and reversed the Court’s 5-4 split on religious freedom in the Covid era. The following month, the Court granted an emergency injunction to block Governor Cuomo’s executive order that limited attendance at religious services to 10 to 25 people.

Gorsuch was now in the majority, protecting Americans from the tyranny of unconstitutional edicts. In a concurring opinion in the New York case, he again compared restrictions on secular activities and religious gatherings; “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 February 2021, California religious organizations appealed for an emergency injunction against Governor Newsom’s Covid restriction. At the time, Newsom prohibited indoor worship in certain areas and banned singing. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Kavanaugh and Barrett, upheld the ban on singing but overturned the capacity limits.

Gorsuch wrote a separate opinion, joined by Thomas and Alito, that continued his critique of the authoritarian and irrational deprivations of America’s liberty as Covid entered its second year. He wrote, “Government actors have been moving the goalposts on pandemic-related sacrifices for months, adopting new benchmarks that always seem to put restoration of liberty just around the corner.”

Like his opinions in New York and Nevada, he focused on the disparate treatment and political favoritism behind the edicts; “if Hollywood may host a studio audience or film a singing competition while not a single soul may enter California’s churches, synagogues, and mosques, something has gone seriously awry.”

Thursday’s opinion allowed Gorsuch to review the devastating loss of liberty Americans suffered over the 1,141 days it took to flatten the curve.”

Karl Sanchez via https://m.vk.com

via ZeroHedge

Anthony Fauci has admitted that government vaccine mandates he championed fueled vaccine hesitancy, and were ‘counterproductive.’

In a wide-ranging interview with the NY Times, the now-retired Fauci admitted; “Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this?”

“And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive,” he added.

Fauci’s comments come as fewer people are getting vaccinated for diseases that were once considered deadly in the United States, particularly among children’s vaccinations for measles, pertussis and polio.

As the Daily Mail notes, the percentage of kindergarteners in America who have taken their required immunizations, including the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) shot, fell to 93% for the 2021-2022 school year, dropping to 2% below the recommended levels for herd immunity, and well below vaccination rates in 2020-2021.

And though approximately 66 percent of US children aged five months were up to date for all childhood vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016 through 2019, that number declined to slightly over 49 percent by May 2020.

In all, US adults and adolescents have missed more than 37 million routine vaccinations during the Covid pandemic, according to an analysis of insurance claims from health consulting firm Avalere.

Many experts believe the Covid shot requirements fueled vaccine hesitancy that had been brewing in the US for decades. -Daily Mail

Fauci, who gave conflicting information in both public and private regarding the effectiveness of masks, and quashed dissenting opinions over the origins of Covid-19 when a prominent scientist suggested that it looked potentially engineered (at a lab the NIH was funding), is believed to be one of the architects of the federal mandates – such as those issued by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicated Services (CMS), and the DoD.

In 2022, a review of vaccine mandates worldwide found that they could exacerbate cynicism and mistrust of the government.

“Compulsory COVID-19 vaccination would likely increase levels of anger, especially in those who are already mistrustful of authorities, and do little to persuade the already reluctant,” reads the review, published in BMJ Global Health. “Two experiments in Germany and the USA found that a new COVID-19 vaccine mandate would likely energise anti-vaccination activism, reduce compliance with other public health measures, and decrease acceptance to future voluntary influenza or varicella (chickenpox) vaccines.”

And in December, Cornell University found that mandates ‘eroded public confidence’ in vaccines even further.

“While significant percentages of vaccinated Americans and Democrats said that a vaccine mandate would make them more likely to re-engage in various aspects of pre-pandemic social and economic life, many fewer unvaccinated Americans and Republicans said the same,” wrote the authors.

The federal mandates have since largely been struck down or rescinded amid multiple lawsuits – with President Biden’s order that all federal workers be vaccinated having been blocked in court last month, while the Supreme Court issued a similar block on the private workforce in early 2022, the Mail reports.

In the fall of 2021, Fauci repeatedly defended state and private industry mandates for masks and vaccinations: “When you are in a public health crisis, sometimes unusual situations require unusual actions. In this case, it’s things like mandating, be they masks or vaccinations.”

The top-down push to get people vaccinated reaffirmed millions of Americans’ feelings that their personal autonomy was under threat and must be rejected wholeheartedly.

This bred widespread anti-vaccine sentiment, as many people believed cynically that the government was flexing its muscles to an authoritarian extent.

Nothing so effective could reasonably be made free for all; why would the government force the shots on the public if they failed to prevent infection; they were developed on such an accelerated timeline that there is no way they can be safe and effective; and any effort by the government to sidestep individual liberty must be sinister.

Vaccine mandates fed all of those arguments. -Daily Mail

And because of it, “you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country,” said Fauci.

Kai Kisielinski¹*, Oliver Hirsch², Susanne Wagner³, Barbara Wojtasik⁴, Stefan Funken⁵, Bernd Klosterhalfen⁶, Soumen Kanti Manna⁷, Andreas Prescher⁸, Pritam Sukul⁹* and Andreas Sönnichsen¹⁰

• 1 Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgery, Clinical Medicine, Private Practice, Düsseldorf, Germany
• 2 Department of Psychology, Fachhochschule für Oekonomie und Management (FOM) University of Applied Sciences, Siegen, Germany
• 3 Veterinary Medicine, Wagner Medical Science Liason (MSL) Management, Blankenfelde-Mahlow, Germany
• 4 Department of Genetics and Biosystematics, Faculty of Biology, University of Gdańsk, Gdansk, Poland
• 5 Internal Medicine, Clinical Medicine, Private Practice, Moers, Germany
• 6 Institute of Pathology, Dueren Hospital, Dueren, Germany
• 7 Biophysics and Structural Genomics Division, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, India
• 8 Institute of Molecular and Cellular Anatomy (MOCA), Rhine-Westphalia Technical University of Aachen, Aachen, Germany
• 9 Rostock Medical Breath Research Analytics and Technologies (ROMBAT), Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, University Medicine Rostock, Rostock, Germany
• 10 Internal Medicine, Clinical Medicine, Private Practice, Gesundheit für Österreich e.V. (Health for Austria), Vienna, Austria

Background: As face masks became mandatory in most countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, adverse effects require substantiated investigation.

Methods: A systematic review of 2,168 studies on adverse medical mask effects yielded 54 publications for synthesis and 37 studies for meta-analysis (on n = 8,641, m = 2,482, f = 6,159, age = 34.8 ± 12.5). The median trial duration was only 18 min (IQR = 50) for our comprehensive evaluation of mask induced physio-metabolic and clinical outcomes.

Results: We found significant effects in both medical surgical and N95 masks, with a greater impact of the second. These effects included decreased SpO2(overall Standard Mean Difference, SMD = −0.24, 95% CI = −0.38 to −0.11, p< 0.001) and minute ventilation (SMD = −0.72, 95% CI = −0.99 to −0.46, p < 0.001), simultaneous increased in blood-CO2 (SMD = +0.64, 95% CI = 0.31–0.96, p < 0.001), heart rate (N95: SMD = +0.22, 95% CI = 0.03–0.41, p = 0.02), systolic blood pressure (surgical: SMD = +0.21, 95% CI = 0.03–0.39, p= 0.02), skin temperature (overall SMD = +0.80 95% CI = 0.23–1.38, p = 0.006) and humidity (SMD +2.24, 95% CI = 1.32–3.17, p < 0.001). Effects on exertion (overall SMD = +0.9, surgical = +0.63, N95 = +1.19), discomfort (SMD = +1.16), dyspnoea (SMD = +1.46), heat (SMD = +0.70), and humidity (SMD = +0.9) were significant in n = 373 with a robust relationship to mask wearing (p < 0.006 to p < 0.001). Pooled symptom prevalence (n = 8,128) was significant for: headache (62%, p < 0.001), acne (38%, p < 0.001), skin irritation (36%, p < 0.001), dyspnoea (33%, p < 0.001), heat (26%, p < 0.001), itching (26%, p < 0.001), voice disorder (23%, p < 0.03), and dizziness (5%, p = 0.01).

Discussion: Masks interfered with O2-uptake and CO2-release and compromised respiratory compensation. Though evaluated wearing durations are shorter than daily/prolonged use, outcomes independently validate mask-induced exhaustion-syndrome (MIES) and down-stream physio-metabolic disfunctions. MIES can have long-term clinical consequences, especially for vulnerable groups. So far, several mask related symptoms may have been misinterpreted as long COVID-19 symptoms. In any case, the possible MIES contrasts with the WHO definition of health.

Conclusion: Face mask side-effects must be assessed (risk-benefit) against the available evidence of their effectiveness against viral transmissions. In the absence of strong empirical evidence of effectiveness, mask wearing should not be mandated let alone enforced by law.

Read More:

Physio-metabolic and clinical consequences of wearing face masks—Systematic review with meta-analysis and comprehensive evaluation frontiersin.org

Authored by Marina Zhang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The COVID-19 recommendations hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and now artemisinin all have one thing in common: They are antimalarial drugs or have such properties.

Yet studies suggest that this may not be a mere coincidence; malaria and COVID-19 may be more similar than people may realize.

Malaria Versus COVID-19

From the outset, malaria and COVID-19 are very distinct diseases.

Malaria is a parasitic disease. An infection starts when an individual is bitten by a mosquito carrying a parasite from the Plasmodium genus. Upon infection, the parasite first goes to the liver and multiplies in liver cells. Then it migrates to the bloodstream, invades and proliferates in red blood cells, and causes these cells to expand and burst.

Common malaria symptoms such as fever, chills, and sweating occur during the blood-stage infection. Complications include anemia, and on rare occasions, cerebral malaria, liver failure, fluid buildup in the lungs, and acute respiratory distress syndrome.

COVID-19, on the other hand, is a viral disease. Infection occurs primarily through the inhalation of contaminated droplets. The virus invades the body through the nasal cavities, entering the upper and then lower respiratory tracts.

Inflammation of the lungs ensues as the body’s immune cells fight off the infection. The person’s oxygen levels start dropping as inflammation worsens in the advent of a cytokine storm, and the lungs become damaged. Some of the virus can also go into the bloodstream and invade other organs, causing systemic inflammation and damage.

Several Commonalities

While one mainly affects blood cells and the other primarily affects the lungs, both diseases are characterized by a strong inflammatory response early in the infection, according to a 2022 paper in Frontiers in Immunology.

Symptoms-wise, both infections from malaria and COVID-19 can lead to fever, fatigue, shortness of breath, diarrhea, and muscle pain.

If inflammation is prolonged, the body will experience a significant increase in cytokines, and individuals can become severely injured or even die.

The two diseases are also similar in that they both sequester iron, use the same receptors in their pathogenesis, and even share similar structures in their proteins.

Iron Storage

Both the Plasmodium parasite and the SARS-CoV-2 virus require iron to proliferate. Therefore, both the parasite and the virus need to store iron inside the ferritin protein within infected cells. High or increased levels of ferritin are therefore an indication of severe disease and inflammation.

Drugs that are capable of targeting iron storage or preventing proliferation may therefore be successful in treating both malaria and COVID-19.

Similar Receptors

The angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE-2) receptor is involved in both malaria and COVID-19 infections.

In COVID-19, the virus binds to ACE-2 to invade cells. ACE-2 is ubiquitous within the human body, present within at the very least:

• Lungs
• Blood vessels
• Muscles
• The gut
• Nerves
• Stomach
• Heart
• Kidneys
• Pancreas
• Testes
• Uterus

Organs that have a high number of ACE-2 receptors are therefore at a higher risk of COVID-19 infection.

The significance of ACE-2 in malaria is uncertain. However, one study, as well as the one published in Frontiers in Immunology, showed that people who have their ACE-2 receptors reduced due to genetic predispositions are more resistant to malaria.

According to the Frontiers in Immunology study, malaria parasites use the CD147 receptors on red blood cells to gain entry into the cell. The COVID-19 virus also uses CD147 in the absence of ACE-2 receptors. CD147 has also been linked to the formation of blood clots in COVID-19 infections.

Therapeutics that can target CD147 and ACE-2 may be successful in treating both malaria and COVID-19.

Similar Protein Structures

Additionally, both pathogens share a degree of overlap in their protein structures. The COVID-19 surface N protein has at least 40 percent structural similarity with important malarial proteins in charge of transport, attachment, and invasion.

This means that drugs that can target malarial proteins may also be able to target SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins.

Antimalarial Drugs Used in COVID-19

Early in the pandemic, many studies recommended antimalarial and anti-parasitic drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, ivermectin, and artemisinin as potential treatment options for COVID-19.These recommendations, however, soon received backlash, with one reason being that malaria and COVID-19 seem to be very different diseases.

But many doctors and studies found these therapeutics helpful in treating acute COVID-19. Professor Jose Luis Abreu, whose specialty is in plant science at The State University of Nuevo León, used the proposition of “parallelism between malaria and COVID-19” as an explanation for why antimalarial drugs such as ivermectin, artemisinin, and hydroxychloroquine may be applied to COVID-19 in his protocol.

Block COVID-19 Receptors and Proteins

In simulation studies, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and artemisinin can bind to SARS-CoV-2 N proteins, which have structural similarities with malaria proteins. In treating malaria, hydroxychloroquine and artemisinin have been shown to block malarial proteins from replicating and proliferating.

All three drugs can also bind to CD147 and ACE-2 receptors, as previously reported by The Epoch Times. These drugs can also bind to COVID-19 spike proteins directly to prevent viral attachment to cell receptors and also prevent viral proliferation by blocking proteins that take part in viral replication.

Read more here…

Dr. William Makis MD

Pilot Josh Yoder reports: “I’m being notified by passengers on a Southwest flight departing Las Vegas that the captain became incapacitated soon after takeoff this morning. He was removed from the flight deck and replaced by a non Southwest pilot who was commuting on that flight. This is now the fifth pilot incapacitation that I’m aware of in the past two weeks. I will post more details as they become available.” (click here)

5th pilot incident this month…

March 13, 2023 – Emirates Flight EK205 MXP-JFK diverted due to pilot illness hour and a half after take-off (click here)

March 11, 2023 – United Airlines Flight 2007 GUA-ORD diverted due to “incapacitated pilot” who had chest pains (click here)

March ?, 2023 – British Airways pilot collapsed in Cairo hotel and died, was scheduled to fly Airbus A321 from Cairo to London (click here)

March, 3, 2023 – Virgin Australia VA-717 flight Adelaide to Perth was forced to make an emergency landing after First Officer suffered heart attack 30 min after departure. (click here)

Authored by Jordan Schachtel via ‘The Dossier’ Substack,

Last Thursday marked the three year anniversary of the infamous “15 Days To Slow The Spread” campaign.

By March 16, yours truly was already pretty fed up with both the governmental and societal “response” to what was being baselessly categorized as the worst pandemic in 100 years, despite zero statistical data supporting such a serious claim.

I was living in the Washington, D.C. Beltway at the time, and it was pretty much impossible to find a like-minded person within 50 miles who also wasn’t taking the bait. After I read about the news coming out of Wuhan in January, I spent much of the next couple weeks catching up to speed and reading about what a modern pandemic response was supposed to look like.

What surprised me most was that none of “the measures” were mentioned, and that these designated “experts” were nothing more than failed mathematicians, government doctors, and college professors who were more interested in policy via shoddy academic forecasting than observing reality.

Within days of continually hearing their yapping at White House pressers, It quickly became clear that the Deborah Birx’s and Anthony Fauci’s of the world were engaging in nothing more than a giant experiment. There was no an evidence-based approach to managing Covid whatsoever. These figures were leaning into the collective hysteria, and brandishing their credentials as Public Health Experts to demand top-down approaches to stamping out the WuFlu.

To put it bluntly, these longtime government bureaucrats had no idea what the f—k they were doing. Fauci and his cohorts were not established or reputable scientists, but authoritarians, charlatans, who had a decades-long track record of hackery and corruption. This Coronavirus Task Force did not have the collective intellect nor the wisdom to be making these broad brush decisions.

Back then, there were only literally a handful of people who attempted to raise awareness about the wave of tyranny, hysteria, and anti-science policies that were coming our way. There were so few of us back in March in 2020 that it was impossible to form any kind of significant structured resistance to the madness that was unfolding before us. These structures would later form, but not until the infrastructure for the highway to Covid hysteria hell had already been cemented.

Making matters worse was the reality that the vast majority of the population — friends, colleagues, peers and family included — agreed that dissenters were nothing more than reckless extremists, bioterrorists, Covid deniers, anti-science rabble rousers, and the like.

Yet we were right, and we had the evidence and data to prove it. There was no evidence to ever support such a heavy-handed series of government initiatives to “slow the spread.”

By March 16, 2020, data had already accumulated indicating that this contagion would be no more lethal than an influenza outbreak.

The February, 2020 outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship provided a clear signal that the hysteria models provided by Bill Gates-funded and managed organizations were incredibly off base. Of the 3,711 people aboard the Diamond Princess, about 20% tested positive with Covid. The majority of those who tested positive had zero symptoms. By the time all passengers had disembarked from the vessel, there were 7 reported deaths on the ship, with the average age of this cohort being in the mid 80s, and it wasn’t even clear if these passengers died from or with Covid.

Despite the strange photos and videos coming out of Wuhan, China, there was no objective evidence of a once in a century disease approaching America’s shores, and the Diamond Princess outbreak made that clear.

Of course, it wasn’t the viral contagion that became the problem.

It was the hysteria contagion that brought out the worst qualities of much of the global ruling class, letting world leaders take off their proverbial masks in unison and reveal their true nature as power drunk madmen.

And even the more decent world leaders were swept up in the fear and mayhem, turning over the keys of government control to the supposed all-knowing Public Health Experts.

They quickly shuttered billions of lives and livelihoods, wreaking exponentially more havoc than a novel coronavirus ever could.

In the United States, 15 Days to Slow The Spread quickly became 30 Days To Slow The Spread. Somewhere along the way, the end date for “the measures” was removed from the equation entirely.

3 years later, there still isn’t an end date…

Anthony Fauci appeared on MSNBC Thursday morning and declared that Americans would need annual Covid boosters to compliment their Flu shots.

So much of the Covid hysteria era was driven by pseudoscience and outright nonsense, and yet, very few if any world leaders took it upon themselves to restore sanity in their domains. Now, unsurprisingly, so many elected officials who were complicit in this multi-billion person human tragedy won’t dare to reflect upon it.

In a 1775 letter from John Adams to his wife, Abigail, the American Founding Father wrote:

“Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.”

Covid hysteria and the 3 year anniversary of 15 Days To Slow The Spread serves as the beginning period of a permanent scar resulting from government power grabs and federal overreach.

While life is back to normal in most of the country, the Overton window of acceptable policy has slid even further in the direction of push-button tyranny. Hopefully, much of the world has awakened to the reality that most of the people in charge aren’t actually doing what’s best for their respective populations.

by Lorenz Duchamps via The Epoch Times

German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach speaks to the media to explain a new government plan to fundamentally reform Germany’s hospital system in Berlin, Germany, on Dec. 06, 2022. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Germany’s Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who once claimed that COVID-19 vaccination is free of side effects, admitted last week that he was wrong, saying adverse reactions occur at a rate of one in 10,000 doses and can cause “severe disabilities.”

On Aug. 14, 2021, Lauterbach said on Twitter that the vaccines had “no side effects,” further questioning why some Germans refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

During an interview on ZDF’s “Heute Journal” on March 12, Lauterbach was asked by anchor Christian Sievers about the claim he made in the summer of 2021, confronting the health minister with his previous tweet that stated the shots are virtually free of side effects.

Lauterbach responded that the tweet was “misguided” and an “exaggeration” he made at the time, noting that it “did not represent my true position.”

“I’ve always been aware of the numbers and they’ve remained relatively stable … one in 10,000 [are injured],” Lauterbach said. “Some say that it’s a lot, and some say it’s not so many.”

Lauterbach’s remark on vaccine adverse events came after the German network played a segment of several Germans who’ve been seriously injured after getting the shot, including a 17-year-old gymnast who previously competed in the German Artistic Gymnastics Championships before she was hospitalized for more than one year shortly after receiving the second dose of the BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

“What do you say to those who have been affected [by vaccine injuries]?” Sievers asked Lauterbach.

“What’s happened to these people is absolutely dismaying, and every single case is one too many,” Lauterbach responded. “I honestly feel very sorry for these people. There are severe disabilities, and some of them will be permanent.”

Steve Kirsch, executive director of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, did not agree with Lauterbach, but he commended the health minister for making “progress” when comparing his latest remark to his previous comments regarding the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

“The true rate of serious adverse events is approximately 100 times greater than the figures Lauterbach cited—’closer to 1 in 100 doses’ and ‘For death, it is ~1 in 1,000 doses,’” Kirsch said on Twitter.

By Oct. 31, 2022, the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut received a total of 333,492 individual case reports on suspected COVID-19 vaccine adverse reactions or vaccine side effects in Germany, according to official data (pdf) released in December 2022 by the medical regulatory body that researches vaccines and biomedicines.

“The number of individual case reports per month peaked in December 2021 and declined continuously during the summer months of 2022,” the federal health agency, which is subordinate to the German health ministry, stated in the report.

Despite these findings, the country’s health ministry website states, as of March 16, that “modern vaccines are safe and adverse effects only occur in sporadic cases.”

Lawsuits Pending

As the subject of post-vaccine injuries has started to be more widely covered by some German media outlets, lawsuits have begun to roll out against BioNTech, and also against other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.

BioNTech has denied all responsibilities, ZDF reported.

Vaccine manufacturers such as Pfizer and Moderna have immunity from liability if something unintentionally goes wrong with their vaccines, putting them in a very strong legal position.

“It’s true that within the framework of these EU contracts, the companies were largely exempted from liability and that the liability, therefore, lies with the German state, so to speak … with the federal states,” Lauterbach said.

Yet, in spite of this, the health minister noted that it would “definitely” be a good idea if biopharmaceutical companies would “show a willingness to help” those affected by vaccine adverse events, especially due to their profits being “exorbitant.”

“So, that wouldn’t just be a good gesture, we should expect it,” he said.

Lauterbach said the priority now is to facilitate the care of those suffering from post-vaccination syndrome. He added that he’s been “negotiating with the budget committee” to launch a program to help those injured.

“It’s a program I’d like to launch as soon as possible, and I’m in budget negotiations for this money. So it’s something that we also have to bring to fruition, it’s an obligation, and it would network the experts in this field in such a way that the probability of good therapy in Germany would grow,” Lauterbach said.

“Our understanding of adverse events is now getting clearer and clearer,” he added. “It should be possible in the future to identify those who are affected more quickly, so we can get them quicker help.”

Treating Vaccine Injuries

Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet said in a recent interview for EpochTV’s “Crossroads” that it was already known that the toxicity of the spike protein and another component of the COVID-19 vaccine could cause complications and adverse reactions shortly after the shots were being rolled out.

“Over the first six months after the rollout of COVID-19 shots, I had a whole gamut of patients with all kinds of problems they had not had before,” she said, adding that the only common denominator of these cases was that they all had the COVID-19 vaccines.

To help people suffering from vaccine injuries, the Truth for Health Foundation prepared an educational booklet explaining vaccine adverse reactions and treatment options, said Vliet, who also works pro bono as the president and CEO of the foundation.

The treatments include a combination of prescription medications, nutraceuticals, supplements, foods, neuroprotection, immune boosters, and also lifestyle changes, Vliet said, adding that she uses this combination approach to treat her patients, and has had positive results.

“One of the foundational medicines that has had enormous benefits for the patients I’m treating, for example, is hydroxychloroquine,” Vliet said, “because it’s anti-inflammatory, it’s an immune modulator, it’s anti-viral.”

“We’ve never in the history of the vaccination program worldwide, had an experimental shot that crosses the blood-brain barrier, gets into the brain itself, and the nervous system,” Vliet said.

“These COVID gene therapy shots do that,” she said. “They also cross the placental barrier … so it’s understandable why these experimental gene therapy shots are causing so much damage to developing babies in the womb, to the brain, and central nervous system in children and adults.”

Since doctors understand the mechanism of how the vaccines work, they can use existing medicines to treat adverse effects, Vliet explained.

Ella Kietlinska contributed to this report.

From NTD News

According to the results of December last year, excess mortality was recorded in Europe in all countries except Bulgaria and Romania.