Category: Health & Medicine

From just a few weeks ago:
Scientists mystified, wary, as Africa avoids COVID disaster.

Hypothesis:
Standard operational virus ‘tactic’, become easier to transmit, but much less virulent. So, the new bug is already widespread in Africa for the past several months. People didn’t have any significant symptoms but getting it managed to immunize a large part of the population from the original and the Delta bug without anyone noticing.

Is Omicron More Contagious Than Delta? A Virus Expert Explains What We Know So Far.

A new variant named Omicron (B.1.1.529) was reported by researchers in South Africa on Nov. 24, 2021, and designated a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization two days later. Omicron is very unusual in that it is by far the most heavily mutated variant yet of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The Omicron variant has 50 mutations overall, with 32 mutations on the spike protein alone. The spike protein – which forms protruding knobs on the outside of the SARS-CoV-2 virus – helps the virus adhere to cells so that it can gain entry. It is also the protein that all three vaccines currently available in the US use to induce protective antibodies.

For comparison, the Delta variant has nine mutations. The larger number of mutations in the Omicron variant may mean that it could be more transmissible and/or better at evading immune protection – a prospect that is very concerning.

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SloJoe’s bureaucraps get stopped…again.

Judge strikes down Biden’s vaccine mandate for health care workers

A federal court halted President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers in 10 states.

“The scale falls clearly in favor of healthcare facilities operating with some unvaccinated employees, staff, trainees, students, volunteers and contractors, rather than the swift, irremediable impact of requiring healthcare facilities to choose between two undesirable choices — providing substandard care or providing no healthcare at all,” wrote U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp in a 32-page order Monday.

The 10 states impacted by the ruling are those that sued the Biden administration over the rule: Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

Biden’s Nov. 5 order applied to health workers in hospitals that receive federal funding through Medicaid or Medicare, with Biden arguing that the rule was needed to help slow the spread of COVID-19 among the nation’s health care workers.

But Schelp ruled the order likely exceeded Biden’s authority, giving the ten states a temporary victory as the case continues to wind its way through the system.

“Congress did not clearly authorize CMS to enact this politically and economically vast, federalism-altering, and boundary-pushing mandate, which Supreme Court precedent requires,” Schelp wrote.

The 10 states sued the administration shortly after the order was issued, arguing it encroached on states’ rights and would worsen health care worker shortages.

The ruling comes days after OSHA announced that it was suspending its enforcement of Biden’s vaccine mandate for private employers with more than 100 employees after it too was blocked by a federal court, which ruled the agency should “take no steps to implement or enforce” the regulation.

“OSHA is complying with the 5th Circuit’s stay,” a Department of Labor official said. “OSHA is not enforcing or implementing the [regulation] — so they are not engaging or offering compliance assistance.”

BLUF:
The co-opting of medicine by woke progressives could turbo-charge all that is dangerous about public health. AHE should worry any patient whose life, health and ease of mind depend on a doctor now focused on concerns other than the patient at hand.

The Pall of Politics Descends Upon American Medicine.

A new guidance document for medical professionals emphasizes critical race theory and social justice at the expense of patient care

Under new AMA guidelines, doctors’ bedside manner is to be replaced with an air of accusation

Politics, and in particular hard-left “wokeness,” is infecting American medicine’s bloodstream. The danger cannot be overstated. It threatens medical professionals, patients, medical science and America’s civic life. Like so many societal pathologies, this one seems to have turned septic during the COVID-19 pandemic. The most prominent symptom is a newly released document that is at once laughable and terrifying.

New Language for a New Orthodoxy

In October, two of the most powerful medical organizations in America—the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges—released “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” or AHE. Its 54 densely packed pages admonish American physicians to regiment their speech to conform with woke terminology. The document implores doctors to abandon ordinary expressions in favor of politically charged, politically correct circumlocutions.

Medical professionals are now expected to traverse a linguistic minefield, abandoning hundreds of familiar expressions and replacing them with tortured academic cadences. Failure to conform, the document implies, is a severe moral failing.

This is not merely replacing the simple with the sesquipedalian. The doctor’s every utterance must contain an air of accusation. When someone is ill, it is because someone else is to blame. Previously, a caring doctor might have told an African American patient that his lineage makes him especially vulnerable to diabetes. No more. In woke-speak, the word “vulnerable” is verboten. Now, the doctor must refer to the patient as “oppressed,” “made vulnerable” or “disenfranchised.” Someone, or some grotesque societal failing, is to blame for the patient’s higher-than-average risk of diabetes. The explanation for this particular lexical shift is representative of AHE’s tone and worldview:

Vulnerable is a term often used to describe groups that have increased susceptibility to adverse health outcomes. We even describe individual people as vulnerable or not, often based on socioeconomic status.

If we pause to examine our taken-for-granted narrative, we see that vulnerability can be understood in very different ways. In this case, as a characteristic of people or groups. But what if we shift the narrative from an individualistic lens to an equity lens?

In doing so, we begin to ask questions about the structural origins of vulnerability. Vulnerability is the result of socially created processes that determine what resources and power groups have to avoid, resist, cope with, or recover from threats to their well-being.

Instead of stigmatizing individuals and communities for being vulnerable or labeling them as poor, we begin to name and question the power relations that create vulnerability and poverty. People are not vulnerable; they are made vulnerable.

The entire document reads like final exam essays written by a student who forgot to study—endless strings of half-remembered vocabulary words assembled randomly in hopes that the professor will count the words but not read them. Every med student, every doctor in America must endure hundreds of such homilies and conform or be weighed in the balance and found wanting. Doctors must abandon the notion that a patient bears some individual responsibility for his or her health status. Whatever ails you, somebody out there did it to you. In the search for scapegoats, AHE taps into the fashionable academic catechisms of critical race theory and intersectionality and swears fealty to both.

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Biden to Suspend Vaccine Mandate for Fed Employees.

Details are thin, but Presidentish Joe Biden reportedly will suspend his vaccine mandate for federal workers.

According to a memo issued by the Biden administration, the “White House’s Office of Management and Budget is telling federal agencies they should hold off on suspending or firing federal workers for not complying with the vaccine mandate until after the holidays.”

This is a huge cave for an administration whose remaining anti-COVID effort is focused almost exclusively on the vaccine mandate.

Further lockdowns are out, according to one report. People have lost patience with social distancing and travel restrictions. And it’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that “Which famous person isn’t wearing a mask today?” has taken the place of “Who in Hollywood is secretly gay?” as America’s favorite gossip topic.

That leaves the mandate. So for the sake of public perception that Biden is doing something, no matter how ineffective or unconstitutional, he can’t let go of it.

But from here, it sure looks like Biden’s temporary suspension could well become permanent.

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It’s long, but you should read the whole thing.

Now you can see why the vaccines were a mistake

From the Guardian:

A first case in Europe of the new variant of Covid-19 has been identified in Belgium in an unvaccinated young adult woman who developed mild flu-like symptoms 11 days after traveling to Egypt via Turkey.

The patient did not report any links with South Africa or other countries in southern Africa. None of her family members have developed symptoms. The patient was said to have a high viral load at the time of diagnosis by researchers at the universities, KU Leuven and UZ Leuven.

This means it’s already everywhere. And it should be pretty obvious that the vaccines don’t work against this: Israel reported a positive case in a 32 year old woman who received her third shot two months ago.

The important thing to remember is that you don’t need a virus that evades 100% of the vaccine induced antibodies for the vaccine to fail. The vaxx developers are in full damage control mode on Twitter now, insisting that this is not necessarily a big deal. All evidence however suggests that the vaccines are going to fail against this variant. Of course you’ll still have some immunity against this variant from these vaccines, but there’s the problem: You always have some immunity. You already had some immunity from other corona viruses, but we know that some immunity isn’t going to do the trick.

If it evades most of your antibodies then it’s like sending off an army faced with overwhelming odds. These vaccines through original antigenic sin will prohibit your body from generating a more effective immune response. The spike protein now looks pretty much completely different and it’s now responsible for the majority of cases in South Africa, this took place at a speed far exceeding the rise of Beta and Delta.

Vaccinated people are now stuck with this mediocre immune response, that’s intended for a variant that no longer exists. This really looks like the scenario where you’re worse off being vaccinated than you are if you’re unvaccinated. And if this is somehow not yet the big one, the one that uses everyone’s highly identical immune response against the Wuhan version of the spike protein to its own advantage, then you can rest assured that when it grows dominant, it will be giving birth to descendants that will do the trick.

Let me grab an old study from Japanese scientists, who tried to answer the question: Under what circumstances do we see antibody dependent enhancement? That is, a situation in which the virus uses your overall vaccine induced antibody response to its own advantage, leaving you worse off than if you had never been vaccinated in the first place. They determined it’s pretty easy: You take Delta and you add these four mutations:

K417N, N439K, E484K and N501Y.

If you throw those four mutations into Delta, you have a version that uses your vaccine induced antibody response to its own advantage.

Does that ring a bell?

So let’s see:

-K417N: Bingo!

-N439K: No, but we have N440K which is a neighboring mutation and should perform the same trick of interfering with the antibodies.

-E484K: We have E484A, which means you have a mutation at the same spot, but resulting in a different amino acid, Alanine instead of Lysine.

-N501Y: Bingo!

In other words, its mutations look pretty much identical to what the Japanese scientists were warning would allow Delta to use your vaccine induced antibody response to its own advantage. Oops.

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“When in danger, When in doubt, Run in circles, Scream and shout!”

Quote O’ The Day

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before”
—demoncrap Rahm Emanuel

“It’s Coming” — New York Gov. Hochul Declares State of Emergency Due to Omicron Variant

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D for demoncrap) declared a state of emergency due to the new “Omicron” Covid variant spreading in Africa.

The declaration goes into effect on December 3 and gives the Health Department the power to limit “non-essential” procedures (will likely be enforced through the lens of equity) at hospitals.

“We continue to see warning signs of spikes this upcoming winter, and while the new Omicron variant has yet to be detected in New York State, it’s coming,” Hochul said……………….

South African medical association says Omicron variant causes ‘mild disease’

JOHANNESBURG: The new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease, without prominent syndromes, Angelique Coetzee, the chairwoman of the South African Medical Association, told Sputnik on Saturday.

The World Health Organization (WHO) identified on Friday the new South African strain as one of concern, as it is reported to carry a high number of mutations — 32 — which possibly makes it more transmissible and dangerous. The WHO has dubbed it Omicron, the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.
“It presents mild disease with symptoms being sore muscles and tiredness for a day or two not feeling well. So far, we have detected that those infected do not suffer loss of taste or smell. They might have a slight cough. There are no prominent symptoms. Of those infected some are currently being treated at home,” Coetzee said
The official noted that hospitals have not been overburdened by Omicron patients and that the new strain is not been detected in vaccinated persons. At the same time, the situation might be different for the unvaccinated.
“We will only know this after two weeks. Yes, it is transmissible, but for now, as medical practitioners, we do not know why so much hype is being driven as we are still looking into it. We will only know after two to three weeks as there are some patients admitted and these are young people aged 40 and younger,” Coetzee added.

The chairwoman also criticized the decision by some countries to ban flights from South Africa is premature as there is not enough information on how dangerous it is.

Following the reports about the new variant, the United States, the European Union, Canada, Israel, Australia and other countries have restricted travel from several southern African nations over the health concerns.

I recall someone on a BBS  joking about eventually having booster shots be a perpetual thing. Comedy; Daily becoming reality.

Fauci Prepares to Move the Goalposts—AGAIN

The only consistency there has been in the pronouncements of Dr. Antony Fauci, the public face of the pandemic since Donald Trump was president, is their inconsistency. Fauci is now saying that being “fully vaccinated” may mean getting a booster shot as well. Previously, Fauci said that being “fully vaccinated” meant receiving two shots of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines or a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Fauci says this is how you follow the science.

Fox News:

“People should not be put off by the fact that as time goes by and we learn more and more about the protection that we might modify the guidelines,” he explained. “That’s what we’ve been saying all along by follow the science, things change and you have to follow the data.”

But that booster shot still may not be enough. We may need boosters every six months or every year, according to “Follow the science” Fauci.

Fauci later said on ABC’s “This Week” that he hopes the booster shot will not wane the same way the initial regimens did, which would allow Americans to avoid more regular booster shots at either six months or even a year.

“We would hope, and this is something that we’re looking at very carefully, that that third shot with the mRNA not only boosts you way up, but increases the durability so that you will not necessarily need it every six months or a year,” Fauci said. “We’re hoping it pushes it out more.”

“If it doesn’t, and the data shows we need to do it more often, then we’ll do it, but we want to make sure we get the population optimally protected and you do whatever you need to do.”

The reason some of us need new flu shots every flu season is that the virus that causes the flu changes significantly from year to year. However, the coronavirus hasn’t changed significantly — not even the “variants” that have arisen in some areas. It’s basically the same animal with different disguises.

Fauci isn’t wrong when he says science means learning more about the virus, and the more we learn, the more it may become necessary to adjust our strategies to deal with it. What makes Fauci the absolute worst choice to continue to be the spokesman for any administration COVID policies is his inability to articulate the state of the knowledge we have regarding the coronavirus and what the government is doing about it.

It’s not just a matter of Fauci not knowing when to keep his mouth shut or when to stop talking. His failures have killed people and will continue to kill people, because few Americans trust what he says.

That’s a singular failure for which Joe Biden bears equal responsibility.

“Both people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who have not are required to wear face coverings indoors”
If that isn’t confirmation that the jab doesn’t work, I don’t know what is.

California’s Santa Cruz County mandates mask-wearing in private homes

An indoor mask mandate has been reinstated in Santa Cruz County, California, after a surge in winter coronavirus cases has led to increased hospitalizations.

The county health department is requiring that people wear face coverings in indoor settings, including in private homes. The mandate went into effect on Sunday at 11:59 p.m, after the county reported a seven-day average of 72 coronavirus cases per 100,000 people — placing it in the “substantial” transmission category, according to the CDC.

“Unfortunately, a potential winter surge appears to be a significant threat to the health and safety of our community,” Santa Cruz County Health Officer Dr. Gaill Newel said in a statement.

Both people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who have not are required to wear face coverings indoors. Business and governmental entities are being told to require their employees to wear masks and to post signage at points of entry for their indoor settings to alert the public of the mask requirement……………..

Hypocrisy O’ The Day

Hypocrisy, thy name be Fauci

Oh my: Fauci caught unmasking at indoor D.C. event this week?

We’ve all been waiting for a sign from the experts that the pandemic is really, truly over and it’s time to get back to normal.

I think we’ve found it.

This isn’t just a case of Fauci declining to follow his own public guidance. If true, he was breaking the law. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser lifted the city’s indoor mask mandate a few days ago but that policy won’t take effect until this coming Monday.

Incidents like Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry dinner and the double standard in masking at the Met Gala have led many Americans to believe that the elite view COVID rules as something for the great unwashed to follow, not for them personally. This Politico report about Fauci won’t change any minds:

Mask on, mask off. That [was] the name of the game for ANTHONY FAUCI at JONATHAN KARL’s book party Tuesday night at Café Milano. As gawkers tried to snap pictures of him indoors not wearing a mask, America’s doc would put it on and take it off depending on whom he was around. SALLY QUINN — who’s known Fauci since his days as a young NIH doctor, when he inspired a love interest in one of her erotic novels — asked him why he was at a party with a mask in hand, not on face. “I said, ‘You seem pretty ambivalent about your mask’ because no one else was wearing one,” Quinn told Playbook. “He said, ‘I just decided that if anyone came up that I didn’t know, I would put my mask on.’”

Quinn added that “paparazzi” were surrounding Fauci trying to get that “gotcha moment” of the Covid czar without a mask on. Guests had to show proof of vaccination to enter the party. “He was being safe,” Quinn said in his defense. “He knew everyone was vaccinated. If it was someone we knew, he would trust them, and if it was somebody else, he didn’t.” Another guest observed Fauci’s mask on/mask off dance, but said that the mask was firmly on when he came to the rescue of a guest who had collapsed. We reached out to Fauci via NIH but didn’t hear back Thursday night.

“I don’t need to take precautions because I’m acquainted with this person” is so stupid that I’m struggling to believe Fauci would say it, even though Quinn has no reason to lie. If he wanted to concoct an excuse for eschewing a mask, he could have said that he was recently boosted and therefore at little risk at the moment of being infected or of infecting others. That wouldn’t get him off the hook for breaking D.C.’s rules but it would have the virtue of being true. The idea that you don’t need to worry about being infected when you’re around someone from a different household because you know them personally is completely fatuous. The likely truth: Fauci unmasked around people whom he knew because he assumed they wouldn’t rat him out to the press. He masked up when speaking to people whom he wasn’t sure about.

Evidently he misjudged Quinn.

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BLUF:
Now Big Pharma, Fauci and Co. and their media shills say we need to take their boosters to keep ourselves protected (which we never really were). The boosters, however, will likely be as ineffective as the original failed shots. The CDC has recently approved a fourth shot for the vulnerable. This is an indirect admission on their part that the previous three shots have failed. Why in the world would anyone believe that the fourth injection will work?

The Covid vaccination travesty must be stopped now and paused until effective, reliable, and safe alternatives are found.

Fauci Finally Admits Vaccines Don’t Protect Against Serious Covid or Death

Last week Dr. Anthony Fauci made perhaps the most damning confession in the Covid vaccine saga. So far-reaching are the implications of his statement that the interview in which he made it may well prove a turning point in the fight against the vaccine fraud that is being perpetrated on the peoples of the world.

In a November 12 podcast session with the New York Times, Fauci was forced to admit the fact that the vaccines do not reliably protect their recipients from serious Covid or death.

Called upon to explain the data coming from Israel – a country with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world – Fauci said the following:

“They are seeing a waning of immunity not only against infection but against hospitalization and to some extent death, which is starting to now involve all age groups. It isn’t just the elderly” [emphasis added].

In other words, the vaccines’ protective efficacy wanes not only in regard to the threat of infection, but also in regard to severe Covid and death. Speaking about the effectiveness of the vaccines in countries with high vaccination rates, Fauci admitted:

“It’s waning to the point that you’re seeing more and more people getting breakthrough infections, and more and more of those people who are getting breakthrough infections are winding up in the hospital.”

Even though Fauci tries to palliate the hard impact of his answer in soft language, the harsh truth behind his words is painfully evident.

Fauci’s words amount to the admission that the vaccinated are getting infected and more and more of them are ending up in hospital where they keep succumbing to Covid at increasing rates.

This is what data from Israel and other highly vaccinated countries has indicated for some time now. In the United Kingdom, for example, between February and September of this year, 72 percent of all Covid-related deaths were among the vaccinated. In Scotland the situation was even worse: 80 percent of Covid deaths occurred among those who had been injected with the vaccines.

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Bureaucraps, inspiring confidence

FDA Says It Needs Until Year 2076 To Reveal Data Pertaining To Pfizer Vaccine Approval.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested Monday for the courts to give them until 2076 to review and fully release the documents pertaining to the approval of the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The FDA denied Sept. 9 a request for an expedited release of the vaccine’s approval records from a group of doctors and scientists, the Public Health Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT). The PHMPT has since filed a lawsuit against the FDA for failure to complete their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The agency had determined that there were a total of 329,000 pages that needed to be reviewed in order to fulfill the plaintiff’s FOIA request, and proposed that they would be able to “process and produce the non-exempt portions of responsive records at a rate of 500 pages per month.” The FDA said they would provide the plaintiff with prioritized documents and release the non-exempt portions of the records on a “rolling basis.” This rate of review places the FDA’s release of the documents at nearly 55 years.

“This rate is consistent with processing schedules entered by courts across the country in FOIA cases,” said the FDA, explaining that the plaintiff’s request for documentation within a 4-month timeframe would force the FDA to have to work through 80,000 pages per month.

Due to an inability to reach an agreement on a set disclosure schedule, the plaintiffs have called for a hearing to argue their case before a judge, according to The Epoch Times.

A ‘puzzling’ recent trend in the U.K. shows that the vaccinated are more likely to be infected with Covid than the unvaccinated.

 

Negative Vaccine Effectiveness Isn’t a New Phenomenon – It Turned Up in the Swine Flu Vaccine

The Daily Sceptic has for some time been reporting on the apparent negative vaccine effectiveness visible in raw U.K. health data. Despite some age ranges now showing that the vaccinated are more than twice as likely to get Covid as the unvaccinated, this is routinely adjusted out, leading UKHSA to un-intuitively claim that the vaccines are still highly effective even against symptomatic disease. A recent post by new contributor Amaneunsis explains the Test Negative Case Control approach (TNCC) used by authorities and researchers to adjust the data, and demonstrates that while a theoretically powerful way to remove some possible confounders, it rests on an initially reasonable-sounding assumption that vaccines don’t make your susceptibility to infection worse:

A situation where this assumption may be violated is the presence of viral interference, where vaccinated individuals may be more likely to be infected by alternative pathogens.

Chua et al, Epidemiology, 2020

Amanuensis then compares results between the two different statistical approaches in a Qatari study to explore whether violation of this assumption is a realistic possibility and concludes that the multi-variate logistic regression found in their appendix supports the idea that viral interference can start happening a few months after initial vaccination.

What other angles can we explore this idea through? One way is to read the literature on prior epidemics.

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OSHA Suspends the Implementation and Enforcement of Biden’s Vaccine Mandate

After a series of court rulings halting President Joe Biden’s vaccination mandate for private companies, OSHA has officially suspended the implementation and enforcement of the requirement. The mandate was scheduled to go into effect January 4, 2022.

“On November 12, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted a motion to stay OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard, published on November 5, 2021 (86 Fed. Reg. 61402) (“ETS”). The court ordered that OSHA ‘take no steps to implement or enforce’ the ETS ‘until further court order,'” the OSHA website states. “While OSHA remains confident in its authority to protect workers in emergencies, OSHA has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of the ETS pending future developments in the litigation.”

After a lawsuit was filed by a number of state Attorneys General, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay on November 6, 2021, and said the mandate has “grave statutory and constitutional issues.”

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6th Circuit Court ‘Wins’ Lottery to Hear Lawsuits Against Biden’s Vaccine Rule

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has won the lottery to hear legal challenges to the Biden administration’s vaccine rule that affects some 84 million workers.

The lottery was announced after multiple lawsuits against the administration were filed in several federal appeals courts. In a process resembling a Powerball drawing, a dozen ping pong balls, each representing one court, were placed into a wooden drum on Tuesday. The winning ball was drawn in Washington, D.C., by a selector from a judicial panel that oversees multidistrict litigation.

The Biden administration rule was formally issued on Nov. 5 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It requires employers with 100 or more workers to ensure their workers are vaccinated against COVID-19 or undergo weekly testing starting Jan. 4.

Lawsuits were filed in all 12 regional circuit courts

Lawsuits challenging the rule came in quick succession. Within 10 days, 34 lawsuits were filed, covering all 12 regional circuit courts and giving each of those courts one entry into the lottery.

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The rest of the article is an uninteresting rehash. The last paragraph before the break is what I wanted to point out.
A picture of a filled out vaccine card on your phone?
Please.
If that’s all that’s required, there is no mandate, but a charade.
Just like most security Kabuki theater.

Vaccine proof required as strict mandate takes effect in LA

Restaurant host Joey Tyler, right, verifies arriving patrons’ Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Records at French restaurant Petit Trois in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 5, 2021. A vaccine mandate that is among the strictest in the country takes effect Monday, Nov. 8, in Los Angeles, requiring proof of shots for everyone entering a wide variety of businesses from restaurants to shopping malls and theaters to nail and hair salons.

LOS ANGELES — People entering a wide variety of businesses in the city of Los Angeles began having to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination on Monday as one of the country’s strictest measures intended to slow spread of the coronavirus took effect.

The new rule covers businesses ranging from restaurants to shopping malls and theaters to nail and hair salons

At Blue Bottle Coffee in the Los Feliz neighborhood, a sign on the front door reminds patrons that they must show proof of vaccination if they want to eat indoors.

Manager Matthew Cadena said the morning rush was mostly smooth as customers handed over their vaccine cards or showed photos of them on their cellphones. Some patrons had put an image of their vaccine card on their phones’ home screen.

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This is a protease inhibitor, which is a class of drugs that were originally developed to fight the AIDS virus and have been adapted to other virus caused illnesses.

Pfizer Says COVID-19 Pill Almost 90% Effective Preventing Severe Illness, Death

Pharma company Pfizer announced on Friday that its experimental, antiviral COVID-19 treatment pill Paxlovid showed during testing that it’s almost 90% effective in preventing hospitalization and death in high-risk patients.

The company said when combined with a low dose of ritonavir and taken within five days of the onset of symptoms, it cut severe illness and death attributed to the coronavirus by 89%.

“Today’s news is a real game-changer in the global efforts to halt the devastation of this pandemic,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement.

“These data suggest that our oral antiviral candidate if approved or authorized by regulatory authorities has the potential to save patients’ lives, reduce the severity of COVID-19 infections, and eliminate up to 9 out of 10 hospitalizations.”

Pfizer said it’s now requesting emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, which would allow it to be distributed nationwide. If authorized, Pfizer’s would be the first COVID-19 treatment tablet on the market.

Paxlovid joins a coronavirus treatment drug from Merck, molnupiravir, in the federal review category. Regulators are presently assessing molnupiravir for emergency authorization, and British regulators authorized the Merck drug on Thursday.

“We have remained laser-focused on the science and fulfilling our responsibility to help healthcare systems and institutions around the world while ensuring equitable and broad access to people everywhere,” Bourla added.

Pfizer said its double-blind study examined a group of non-hospitalized, high-risk adults with COVID-19. In the trial, just six of more than 600 volunteers were hospitalized after taking Paxlovid — compared to 41 of 612 who were given a placebo.

Pfizer said no volunteer who took Paxlovid during the trial died, compared to 10 from the placebo group who did.

Well, as he’s seen no consequences for his lying…………

A Sea Change on Public Approval of Vaccine Mandates Is Occurring

Earlier today, RedState reported on the firing of a nurse for refusing to bend to COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Despite data that shows the vaccinated spread the virus at the same rate, first responders are being fired or laid off around the country in an ill-informed attempt to “protect” the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. That’s been the line from the federal government as well.

For most of this battle, those who support vaccine mandates have been able to claim that the public is behind them. But that appears to not be true anymore. A new poll from NBC News shows that a majority are now opposed to vaccine mandates.

You can bet that the reports of nurses, firefighters, and police officers being sent home are fueling this. These are workers that have been exposed to COVID-19 from the beginning, with many of them having highly effective natural immunity. Now, for no scientific reason whatsoever, they are being cast aside by the very people who lauded them as heroes early on in the pandemic. There’s something really gross about that, especially given the fact that they aren’t putting others at any more risk than a vaccinated person. You can bet that this shift in public opinion is directly connected to those stories being told.

There is simply no reason to punish the largely underpaid Americans who work long hours to help others with a mandate that makes no sense in the first place. How many people are going to die now due to staffing shortages in hospitals and on the streets of high-crime areas? There are reports of dozens of firehouses closing in New York City due to the mandates. And for what? To make some virtue-signaling politicians feel powerful? This entire thing is a disgrace.

Look, if someone wants to get the vaccine, I’m all for that. I’m not anti-vaccine. But it should be a personal choice. That’s even more true now given we have data showing that vaccine mandates do not protect others from contracting the virus. Not to mention those first responders have almost universal access to N95 masks. Do masks not work now? If they don’t, then what’s the point of mandates on that side of things?

Nothing makes sense because it’s not meant to make sense. This entire thing is about exerting tyrannical authority over people. That so many are standing up to say enough is heartening, and the fact that the public are now shifting in their favor is as well.