Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

> Government hides the truth, spreads FUD, investigators say...

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-meaning-of-the-fda-resignations/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v1
http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2006/2006-09-15-diseasemitigationcontrolpandemicflu.html

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/
https://brownstone.org/articles/lockdowns-fail-they-do-not-control-the-virus/
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628471/highly-vaccinated-israel-is-seeing-a-dramatic-surge-in-new-covid-cases-heres-why
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762

The Meaning Of The Recent FDA Resignations

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

How significant is it that the two top FDA officials responsible for
vaccine research resigned last week and this week signed a letter in
The Lancet that strongly warns against vaccine boosters?

This is a remarkable sign that the project of government-managed virus
mitigation is in the final stages before falling apart.

The booster has already been promoted by top lockdown advocates Neil
Ferguson of Imperial College and Anthony Fauci of NIH, even in the
face of rising public incredulity toward their “expert” advice. For
these two FDA officials to go on record with grave doubts – and their
perspective is certainly backed by the unimpressive booster experience
in Israel – introduces a major break in the narrative that the experts
in charge deserve our trust and deference.

What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about
the whole experience of taking away the control of health management
from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to
modelers and government officials with coercive power.

>From the first week of March 2020, the US embarked on a wild
experiment in virus mitigation, deploying a series of measures with a
sweep and scope that had never previously been attempted, not in
modern times and not even in ancient times. The litany of controls and
tactics is long. Many of these measures survive in most parts of the
US. The retail landscape is still filled with plexiglass. We are still
invited to sanitize ourselves when going indoors. People still mask up
in proximity to others. The “Karens” of the world are still actively
shaming and denouncing anyone suspected of non-compliance.

The vaccine push has been particularly divisive, with President Biden
actively encouraging “anger” at those who don’t get the jab, even as
he refuses to acknowledge the existence of infection-induced
immunities. In several cities, people who refuse vaccines are being
denied active participation in civic life, and a populist movement is
rising up that scapegoats the refuseniks as the only reason that the
virus continues to be a problem.

All these measures were deployed in waves of controls. It all began
with event cancellations and school closures. It continued with travel
bans, most of which are still in place. Sanitization and plexiglass
were next. Masks were rolled out and then mandated. The principle of
forced human separation governed social interactions. Capacity limits
indoors were a common feature. The US example inspired many
governments around the world to adopt these NPIs (non-pharmaceutical
interventions) and take away the liberties of the people.

At each stage of control, there were new claims that we’ve finally
found the answer, the key technique that would finally slow and stop
the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Nothing worked, as the virus seemed to
follow its own course regardless of all these measures. Indeed there
was no observable difference anywhere in the world based on whether
and to what extent any of these measures were deployed.

Finally came the pharmaceutical interventions, voluntary at first but
gradually mandatory, just as with each previous protocol began as a
recommendation until it was mandated.

At no point in these 19 months have we seen a clear admission of
failure on the part of government officials. Indeed, it’s mostly been
the opposite, as the agencies double down, claiming effectiveness
while citing no data or studies, while social media companies backed
it all by taking down contrarian posts and brazenly deleting accounts
of people who dare cite dissenting science.

The vaccine was the biggest gamble of all simply because the program
was so expensive, so personal, and so wildly oversold. Even those of
us who opposed every other mandate had hopes that the vaccines would
finally end the public panic and provide governments a way to back out
of all the other strategies that had failed.

That did not happen.

Most people believed that the vaccine would work like many others
before them to block infection and spread. In this, people were merely
believing what the head of the CDC said. “Our data from the C.D.C.
today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t
get sick,” Rochelle Walinsky told Rachel Maddow. “And that it’s not
just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.”

    “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these
vaccinations,”President Biden said, reflecting what was the common
view in the summer of 2021.

That of course turned out not to be the case. The vaccines appear to
have been helpful in mitigating against some severe outcomes but it
did not achieve victory over the virus. Israel’s surge in infections
in August was among the fully vaccinated. The same happened in the UK
and Scotland, and that precise result began to hit the US in
September. Indeed, we all have vaccinated friends who caught the virus
and were sick for days. Meanwhile, team natural immunity has received
a huge boost from a large study in Israel that demonstrated that
recovered Covid cases gain far more protection than is conferred by
the vaccine.

The fallback position then became the booster. Surely this is the
answer! Israel was first to mandate them. Here again, the problems
began to show, as yet another magic bullet of disease mitigation
failed. Then the inevitable headline came: Israel preparing for
possible fourth COVID vaccine dose. So think about this because there
is a sense in which the vaccines rank among the biggest failures: in a
matter of a few short months, we’ve gone from the claim that they
fully protect to they are pretty okay provided you get regularly
scheduled boosters forever.

Now to the striking resignation of two top officials at the FDA who
were in charge of vaccine safety and administration. It was the
Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Vaccines Research,
Marion Gruber and Phillip Kause.

They gave no reason for their departure, which is scheduled for
October and November.

The case is fascinating because 1) people rarely resign cushy
government jobs unless a higher-paying, higher-prestige job in the
private sector awaits, or 2) they are being pushed out. It’s rare for
anyone in a position like to to resign over a principled matter of
science. When I first read that they were going, I figured something
else was up.

These days, extremely weird things are going on within the Biden
administration. Even though his approval ratings are sinking, the
president has to pretend that he has all the answers, that the science
behind his mandates and virus war is universally settled, that anyone
who disagrees with him is really just a political enemy. He has gone
so far as to denounce, demonize, and legally threaten red-state
governors who disagree with him.

This is a deep problem for actual scientists working within the
bureaucracy because they know for sure that all of this is a pretense
and that the government cannot win this war on the virus. They simply
cannot preside over more false promises, especially when the whole of
their professional training is about assessing the safety and
effectiveness of vaccines.

So what can they do? In this case, it appears they had to get away
before they dropped a bombshell.

The bombshell is called “Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine
immune responses.” It appears in the prestigious British medical
journal The Lancet. The two top officials are among the authors. The
article recommends against the Covid booster shot that the Biden
administration, following Fauci’s advice, is suggesting as the key to
making the vaccines work better and finally fulfill their promise.

Fauci and company are pushing boosters because they know what is
coming. Essentially we are going the way of Israel: most everyone is
vaccinated but the virus itself is not being controlled. More and more
among those hospitalized and dying are vaccinated. This same trend is
coming to the US. The boosters are a means by which government can
save face, or so many believe.

The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree.
Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems.
They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well
as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say.
There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster,
and another and another.

The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it
under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations.
Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the
messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.

The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides.
They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants
expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune
responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect
adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time,
there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for
a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters
are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with
vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as
myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA
vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with
adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)

Bringing up such side effects is essentially a taboo topic. That this
was written by two top FDA officials is nothing short of remarkable,
especially because it comes at a time when the Biden administration is
going all in on vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, studies are showing that
for teenage boys, the vaccine poses a greater risk to them than Covid
itself. “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE
is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19
hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high
weekly COVID-19 hospitalization.”

>From the beginning of these lockdowns – along with all the masks,
restrictions, bogus health advice from plexiglass to sanitizer to
universal vaccine mandates and so on – it was clear that there would
someday be hell to pay. They wrecked rights and liberties, crashed
economies, traumatized a whole generation of children and other
students, ran roughshod over religious freedom, and for what? There is
zero evidence that any of this has made any difference. We are
surrounded by the carnage they created.

The appearance of The Lancet article by two top FDA vaccine scientists
is truly devastating and revealing because it undermines the last
plausible tool to save the whole machinery of government disease
management that has been deployed at such enormous social, cultural,
and economic cost for 19 months. Not in our lifetimes has a policy
failed so badly. The intellectual and political implications here are
monumental. It means that the real Covid crisis – the task of
assigning responsibility for all the collateral damage – has just
begun.

In 2006, during the early years of the birth of lockdown ideology, the
great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that if any of these
restrictive measures were deployed for a pandemic, the result would be
a “loss of trust in government” and “a manageable epidemic could move
toward catastrophe.” Catastrophe is exactly what has happened.

The current regime wants to point the finger toward the noncompliant.
That is no longer believable. They cannot delay the inevitable for
much longer: responsibility for this catastrophe belongs to those who
embarked on this political experiment in the first place.