Category: Mendacity O’ The Day

Pfizer Executive: ‘No, Haha!’ We Didn’t Test If COVID Vaccine Stopped Transmission of Virus.

Pfizer executive Janine Small admitted to the European Parliament with a laugh that the company did not test if its COVID-19 vaccine stopped transmission of the virus before the vaccine was put on the market. Apparently knowing whether a vaccine works isn’t important before forcing everyone to get it?

Small made the admission in a video tweeted by Dutch Member of the European Parliament Rob Roos. The Netherlands instituted a COVID-19 vaccine passport in late 2021, and Roos emphasized in the video how much Small’s admission undermines the Dutch government’s justification for the passport.

“If you don’t get vaccinated, you’re anti-social. This is what the Dutch Prime Minister and Health Minister told us,” Roos said. “You don’t get vaccinated just for yourself, but also for others—you do it for all of society. That’s what they said.” But that argument no longer holds, Roos explained. “Today, this turns out to be complete nonsense. In a COVID hearing in the European Parliament, one of the Pfizer directors just admitted to me—at the time of introduction, the vaccine had never been tested on stopping the transmission of the virus.”

Roos emphasized the importance of this admission. “This removes the entire legal basis for the COVID passport, the COVID passport that led to massive institutional discrimination as people lost access to essential parts of society,” Roos said. “I find this to be shocking, even criminal.”

The video then showed a clip of Roos asking Small in the European Parliament, “Was the Pfizer COVID vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market? If not, please say it clearly. If yes, are you willing to share the data with this committee?” Roos said he was asking in English specifically to avoid any misunderstanding on Small’s part.

Small was clearly uncomfortable answering the question—and for good reason. “Regarding the question around, um, when we knew about stopping immunization before, um, it entered the market—no!” Small exclaimed, with a nervous laugh. Apparently giving millions of people an untested vaccine is amusing?

Small then attempted to justify Pfizer’s actions. “These, um, you know, we had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.”

The speed of science or the speed of greed? Already, as of May 2021, Pfizer had made $3.5 billion of revenue on its COVID vaccine in just three months, almost a quarter of its total revenue, according to Yahoo News. Chinese Communist Party-owned Fosun Pharmaceuticals makes the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine in the U.S., according to Dr. Naomi Wolf.

Multiple studies recently have warned that the COVID-19 vaccines can cause serious injury and death. Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo just released an analysis showing the relative incidence of cardiac-related death increased 84 percent in men ages 18-39 within 28 days of mRNA vaccination. Ladapo recommended that young men not get the COVID vaccine.

Roos commented at the end of his video about Small’s admission, “This is scandalous. Millions of people worldwide felt forced to get vaccinated because of the myth that ‘you do it for others.’ Now, this turned out to be a cheap lie. This should be exposed.”

No, SCOTUS didn’t just rule against gun rights

Today it’s often difficult to determine when the mainstream media is being deliberately deceptive or is just incompetent. Whatever the case may be, they are routinely wrong.

Take for instance a recent ABC News headline reporting that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’ (ATF) bump-stock ban:

Supreme Court upholds bump stock ban in big win for gun safety advocates

The Supreme Court did no such thing.

In December 2018, the ATF published a final rule amending the code of federal regulations to declare that items colloquially known as bump-stocks fall under the definition of “machineguns” as defined in the National Firearm Act. As these items were not registered prior to when the federal government froze the sale of new machineguns in 1986, the rule made bump-stocks contraband.

Gun rights proponents across the country took exception to what many perceived as impermissible executive branch law-making. As a result, several cases challenging the new rule were filed in federal court. Rather than concerning the Second Amendment, at issue in these cases is the permissible scope of administrative rule-making and the extent to which administrative agencies should or should not be given deference in interpreting criminal statutes.

In the case Aposhian v. Garland, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit upheld the ATF rule, at which point the plaintiffs petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case in August 2021. Similarly, in Gun Owners of America, Inc. v. Garland, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the ATF rule, prompting the plaintiffs to petition the Supreme Court in March 2022. On October 3, the Supreme Court declined to hear either case.

First, denying cert in a case is not a ruling on the merits of that case. The decision not to take a case is not an explicit endorsement of a lower court’s ruling. In his dissent in Darr v. Burford (1950) Justice Felix Frankfurter explained,

The significance of a denial of a petition for certiorari ought no longer to require discussion. This Court has said again and again and again that such a denial has no legal significance whatever bearing on the merits of the claim. The denial means that this Court has refused to take the case. It means nothing else.

Second, there is good reason in this instance why the Supreme Court may want to take a wait and see approach to how the law in this area develops in the lower federal courts.

At present, another bump-stock case, Cargill v. Garland, is making its way through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In December 2021 the Fifth Circuit upheld the ATF rule in this case. However, following a petition by the plaintiff, in June the Fifth Circuit agreed to hear the case en banc (in front of the full court, rather than just a panel of circuit court judges).

Could the Supreme Court be waiting on the Fifth Circuit to rule en banc before entertaining a bump-stock case? That is a distinct possibility. What isn’t is that the Supreme Court has made a ruling on the merits of these important cases. Reporters should know better.

Standard practice for demoncraps and their organs. The “different bill” is actually Biden trying to promise he’ll somehow forgive student loans.

Things Go Way off the Rails During Joe Biden’s Trip to Puerto Rico

Joe Biden appeared in Puerto Rico on Monday to deliver remarks and to promise aid after the recent hurricane that struck the island. He also had some really head-scratching things to say. And while I realize that the president being senile and giving away your money is basically every other day of the week, the news is the news so let’s get to it.

Here was Biden’s opener, of which I can’t make heads nor tails of.

Based on his reaction, that was supposed to be a joke, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what the punchline was. Looking at Jill Biden’s face, it doesn’t appear that she could either. The president just says random, unfunny things and looks around, expecting people to laugh. Usually, they oblige, but this instance was especially odd because there wasn’t even a semblance of an actual joke told.

In the next bit of embarrassment, Biden decided to claim that he was “raised in the Puerto Rican community at home.”

This is one of those instances I’ve mentioned before where the president tries to say something that presents himself as everything to everyone. One day he will claim to have been a member of the Civil Rights movement and the next, he’ll say he got arrested with Nelson Mandela after fighting a guy named Corn Pop. Oh, and he once drove an eighteen-wheeler while attending shul more than Jewish people do. Of course, none of that is actually true, which is par for the course regarding anything Biden says.

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What’s interesting is how the blame gets assigned to the federal, state, or territorial level depending on where the Republicans are.

Do Republicans Cause Hurricanes?
The corporate media gears up to give DeSantis the Katrina treatment.

With the grim inevitability of Greek tragedy, three things always happen when a hurricane makes landfall in the United States. First, the storm will be touted by the corporate media as evidence that anthropogenic climate change presents an existential threat to humanity and the planet. Second, anyone who dares question the accuracy of this claim will be either ignored or denounced as a dangerous anti-science “denier.” Third, if the hurricane happens to hit a state with a GOP governor, he will be blamed for causing any resultant death and destruction.

In the case of Hurricane Ian, all three commenced more than 24 hours before the storm actually arrived in Florida. On Tuesday, CNN talking head Don Lemon contradicted Jamie Rhome — the acting director of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center — about the effect of climate change on the storm’s intensity. Rhome tried to stay on topic and cautioned Lemon against linking any single weather event to climate change. Lemon nonetheless insisted on providing this brilliant scientific analysis: “Well, listen, I grew up there and these storms are intensifying. Something is causing them to intensify.”

Also on Tuesday, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Deanne Criswell told White House reporters that she had concerns about the complacency of some Floridians who hadn’t experienced a major hurricane, but she characterized FEMA’s interaction with state officials as “excellent.” Predictably, Politico misrepresented the administrator’s comments in order to create a false narrative about Florida’s allegedly “lax response” to storm warnings. Later, a “reporter” hit Gov. Ron DeSantis with this: “FEMA Administrator Criswell said today that she acknowledged concerns about Florida’s, as it was said, ‘lax response’ to the storm so far.” DeSantis immediately shut him down:

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Give me a break. That is nonsense. Stop politicizing, OK? Stop it. We declared a state of emergency when this thing wasn’t even formed.… Honestly, you’re trying to attack me I get, but you’re attacking these other people who have worked very hard. So, that’s just totally false. I don’t think we have ever, certainly since I’ve been governor, declared a state of emergency this early.

Politico later executed a stealth edit, replacing “lax response” with a more accurate description of Criswell’s comments. If the reporter’s question sounds familiar, it’s not an illusion. The “lax response” trope has been used by the media for decades against GOP governors and presidents when no genuine fault can be found with their reactions to natural disasters. Remember when President George W. Bush was blamed for the Katrina disaster after routing more funds to Louisiana for civil works projects than any other state? Never mind that Louisiana public officials misappropriated much of the money that was meant to reinforce the levees.

Meanwhile, back in Florida, DeSantis was taking incoming fire from the Fourth Estate as the storm was about to make landfall. The Weekly Dish’s Andrew Sullivan was generous enough to offer this inspired insight: “DeSantis now being tested as a governor not a troll.” This is unusually trite for Sullivan. His effusions, while frequently vicious and sometimes a little crazy, are usually a lot more original. Where this storm is concerned, though, he has fallen in with the theme adopted by most of the corporate media during the past 48 hours — Hurricane Ian is a timely test of DeSantis’ leadership. Here’s an example of the genre from TIME:

Ron DeSantis is about to face the most consequential 72 hours of his political career.… DeSantis, however, remains largely untested. For three years, he’s been able to pick culture-war fights with teachers and Walt Disney World without the pesky distraction of serious governing. He doesn’t have a lot of the compassionate chits that his predecessors had stored up in advance.

If the author of this piece believes that DeSantis has been “largely untested,” he should consider leaving journalism. In reference to hurricanes, DeSantis dealt effectively with the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm that hit the Florida Panhandle just before he was elected in 2018. Moreover, he responded to COVID-19 more effectively than any other large-state governor in the country, despite Florida’s huge percentage of elderly — and therefore vulnerable — residents. He has rarely received credit for that by corporate media, which will doubtless bury any good news about his response to Hurricane Ian.

As bad as the media coverage has been on Hurricane Ian, however, the dumbest response to Florida’s latest storm came from Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). During a discussion with the renowned climate experts of Morning Joe, she delivered herself of this gem: “We just did something about climate change for the first time in decades. That’s why [Democrats] have to win this as that hurricane bears down on Florida. We’ve got to win in the midterms.” Thus, ipso facto, Republicans do cause hurricanes and DeSantis must get the Katrina treatment to prevent him and the GOP from destroying Gaia.