Biden’s ridiculous free N95 mask offer
Nobody in the medical community is speaking out about how ludicrous this is. So I will.
Traditional ritual mask wearing
By Steve Kirsch | January 31, 2022
The Biden administration is giving out 400 million free N95 masks.
Here’s what they aren’t telling you:
- An N95 respirator will “work” for around 2 hours in a hospital or similar setting with filtered air
- An N95 respirator will “work” for around 30 min outdoors
So if 200M Americans receive two respirators each, they get around 4 hours of protection. And that only works if the respirators are fitted perfectly with no gaps and people are trained on their use. And as we noted before, even if everything was perfect, you aren’t likely to get anywhere close to 95% reduction in virions (because of the size of the particles and the rate of airflow into the respirator), and even with such a reduction, that’s unlikely to make the difference between getting infected and not getting infected.
In general, N95’s are ineffective with respect to protection against viral spread. Randomized studies show cloth and surgical masks do nothing. Zero.
Not surprising at all. If you read the WHO 2004 “Laboratory Biosafety Manual” (Third Edition) it says, “Surgical type masks are designed solely for patient protection and do not provide respiratory protection to workers.”
So it’s not like we haven’t figured that one out 15 years before COVID. It says surgical masks do not work. Period.
Yet, here we are 18 years later and the CDC and medical community are still pretty clueless.
Consider this quote from highly respected UCSF infectious disease Professor Monica Gandhi in a story about the Bangladesh mask study (which, despite the headlines, proved that masks don’t work at all as I’ve pointed out before):
The study results prompted Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, to switch from cloth masks. “I bought surgical masks for myself — pink ones,” she says.
See? You cannot make this stuff up. It is unbelievable how uninformed the doctors are. Professor Gandhi uses protection that even the WHO says does nothing (and so did that Bangladesh mask study).
And you are taking advice from her?!?!
Check out how much better N95’s are compared to surgical masks:
That’s right. Anyone with a working brain can see N95 masks are not effective at all. There is no measurable difference!
Pfizer, FDA Ask Court to Further Delay Release of COVID Vaccine Safety Data
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 31, 2022
Days prior to today’s scheduled release of a tranche of documents related to the Pfizer COVID vaccine, the pharmaceutical company asked a federal court to let it intervene before any information is released.
It’s the latest development in an ongoing court case that began with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021 by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT).
PHMPT asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release all documents related to its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine and full approval of the Pfizer-Comirnaty COVID vaccine.
Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on Jan. 6 issued an order requiring the FDA to release 12,000 pages of documents by Jan. 31 and an additional 55,000 pages per month thereafter, until the release of the nearly 400,000 pages of documents is complete.
Pfizer claims to support the disclosure of the documents, but asked to intervene in the case to ensure that information exempt from disclosure will not be “disclosed inappropriately.”
In a memorandum it submitted to the court, Pfizer said it:
“[S]eeks leave to intervene in this action for the limited purpose of ensuring that information exempt from disclosure under FOIA is adequately protected as FDA complies with this Court’s order.”
Attorneys for Pfizer also claimed while it was not asking the court to reconsider the Jan. 6 order, it would consider challenging the order at an unspecified later date, telling the court:
“Pfizer does not presently intend to move the Court to reconsider its January 6, 2022 order, but Pfizer is not in a position at this time to waive its ability to do so if circumstances change such that there is good cause at a later time to do so.”
Pfizer did not clarify what such a change of circumstances might entail.
Lawyers for PHMPT, in a brief submitted Jan. 25 to the court, asked Pittman to reject Pfizer’s motion and requested the judge ask Pfizer to clarify how, exactly, its intervention would help expedite the release of the documents, arguing that Pfizer:
“… provides no reason why it needs to intervene in this matter to render that purported assistance. Nor can Plaintiff discern why Pfizer needs to intervene in this matter to assist the FDA with expediting release of the requested documents—it can render this assistance without intervening.”
PHMPT, a group of more than 30 medical and public health professionals and scientists from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and UCLA, in September 2021 filed a lawsuit against the FDA when the agency denied its original FOIA request.
In that request, PHMPT asked the FDA to release “all data and information for the Pfizer vaccine,” including safety and effectiveness data, adverse reaction reports, and a list of active and inactive ingredients.
The first batch of documents released in November 2021, which totaled a mere 500 pages, revealed there were more than 1,200 vaccine-related deaths within the first 90 days following the release of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine.
Arguments regarding Pfizer’s motion are scheduled to be heard in court on Jan. 28, though as of this writing, no further updates regarding the case or this scheduled hearing have been publicly disclosed.
Pfizer represented by world’s third-largest law firm
Pfizer on Jan. 21 submitted two filings to the court: a motion to intervene in the case “for a limited purpose,” and an accompanying “memorandum of points and authorities” supporting the motion.
It remains unclear how Pfizer defines “inappropriately” or “for a limited purpose,” or why it waited two weeks after Judge Pittman’s order, and only days before the Jan. 31 scheduled release of 12,000 pages to file its motion.
Pfizer claims it was unaware of the case until executives read news reports about it in December 2021, despite the fact that the case garnered coverage from major news outlets, including Reuters, in November of that year.
Still, the company hired DLA Piper LLP, one of the world’s most high-powered law firms, to represent it. DLA Piper is headquartered in London and maintains offices in 40 countries.
In 2014, the firm had revenues totaling $2.48 billion, making it the third-largest law firm in the U.S. by revenue.
DLA Piper was the 12th largest donor to President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and the 9th largest donor to Hillary Clinton between 1999 and 2018.
Douglas Emhoff, spouse of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, was employed at the firm until 2020, earning $1.2 million in partnership income that year.
FDA supports Pfizer’s motion, requests extension
In a response to Pfizer’s motion, the FDA said it welcomed Pfizer’s “help,” claiming that this is “due to the unprecedented speed with which the Court has ordered [the] FDA to process the records at issue.”
In addition to supporting Pfizer’s motion, the FDA also requested an extension from the court that would further delay the scheduled release of the documents.
Aaron Siri of the Siri & Glimstad law firm, who is representing PHMPT in its lawsuit against the FDA, explained:
“The FDA now insists it must delay its first 55,000-page production until May 1, 2022 – four months after the Court entered its order.
“However, the FDA’s own papers seeking this delay make plain it can produce at a rate of 55,000 pages per month in February and March.”
The FDA claimed Pfizer is entitled to intervene in the case and the process of redacting the documents in question, due to the “Trade Secrets Act,” signed into law by President Obama in 2016, stating:
“FDA anticipates that coordination with Pfizer to obtain the company’s views as to which portions of the records are subject to Exemption 4, the Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1905, or other statutory protections will be a necessary component of the agency’s endeavors to meet the extraordinary exigencies of this case.”
However, according to The Gateway Pundit, the Trade Secrets Act is being misinterpreted by the FDA and Pfizer:
“[T]he protections provided under that law allow for an owner of a trade secret to sue in federal court when its trade secrets have been misappropriated and does not even imply that a company could intervene in a public records request through the FOIA.”
PHMPT, in its Jan. 25 brief, also rejected the FDA’s continued claim that it cannot adhere to the disclosure schedule Pittman ordered on Jan. 6, arguing “the FDA has more than sufficient resources to expeditiously produce the requested documents.”
Siri, on his blog, also questioned this aspect of FDA’s argument, writing:
“The FDA … attests that over the coming weeks, it will have 28.5 full-time people reviewing the documents. Working 7.5 hours per day for 20 business days per month, 28.5 people reviewing 50 pages per hour can review a total of approximately 213,750 pages per month.
“The FDA affirms it has already ‘allocated the equivalent of nearly 11 full-time staff to this project’ and that ‘a review speed of 50 documents per hour was within the normal range for document review in a complex matter’ in private practice; and here the 50 document per hour rate would be faster since there is only a need to review for personally identifying information (‘PII’) for most pages. Hence, if the FDA’s 11 full-time reviewers work only 7.5 hours per day and review 50 pages (not documents) per hour, the FDA could review over 88,000 pages per month in February and March. That is more than sufficient to produce the 55,000 pages per month currently ordered for these two months.”
Instead of complying with this court’s “reasoned order,” Siri Wrote, the FDA claims these 11 reviewers can only review a total of 10,000 pages per month.
What the FDA does not say, and what basic math shows, according to Siri, is that a rate of 10,000 pages a month for 11 full-time reviewers amounts to only 5 pages per hour.
Siri also questioned the FDA’s commitment to transparency and hinted at a cover-up, stating:
“The Court is, other than Congress, the only check on the FDA. In a free country, transparency is paramount, and the FDA has chosen to thwart transparency and the requirements of FOIA by anemically understaffing the office it maintains to respond to FOIA requests.
“It is also incredible for the FDA to claim that compliance here would harm its health policy objectives. Even if the FDA really does need to spend $4 to $5 million which … is an absurd overestimate, that is an inconsequential amount of its overall $3.41 billion discretionary budget.
“It is understandable that the FDA does not want independent scientists to review the documents it relied upon to license Pfizer’s vaccine given that it is not as effective as the FDA originally claimed, does not prevent transmission, does not prevent against certain emerging variants, can cause serious heart inflammation in younger individuals, and has numerous other undisputed safety issues.”
Siri said the FDA’s “potential embarrassment” over its decision to license the Pfizer vaccine must take a back seat to the transparency demanded by FOIA and “the urgent need and interests of the American people to review that licensure data.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
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Truckers blockade US-Canada border
Alberta dispatched heavily armed police to break up ‘unlawful’ protest
RT | January 31, 2022
Authorities in the Canadian province of Alberta have dispatched heavily armed police units to disperse the blockade of a border crossing with the US state of Montana by truckers opposed with Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
Scores of Canadian truckers blocked the border crossing between Coutts, Alberta and Sweet Grass, Montana over the weekend, as thousands of their colleagues descended on the Canadian capital of Ottawa to picket the parliament.
On Monday afternoon, surrounded by special units of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the truckers prayed and decided to open one northbound lane for local traffic and let anyone who wishes to leave do so, but voted to stand their ground. One of them vowed the “only way I’m leaving is in a [police] cruiser.”
Police are “not willing to negotiate,” one of the truckers told the outlet Rebel News, adding that by opening a lane, they were technically complying with a provincial law passed in 2020 to crack down on indigenous rights activists.
According to Coutts Mayor Jim Willett, about 100 trucks were blocking Highway 4 on the Canadian side, causing a miles-long backup on Interstate 15 in Montana. About 50-100 trucks have reportedly been stuck on the US side since Saturday.
The blockade is a protest against US and Canadian governments mandating that truckers must be “fully vaccinated” against Covid-19, which came into effect on January 15.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who is in Washington, DC for a meeting of US governors, denounced the blockade on Sunday as “causing significant inconvenience for lawful motorists” and insisted it “must end immediately.”
Kenney, a member of the United Conservative Party, also joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – a Liberal – in condemning the “Freedom Convoy” that drove across Canada last week and parked outside the parliament in Ottawa, demanding an end to vaccine mandates.
Trudeau claimed that he will not give in to “those who fly racist flags” or “engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans,” insinuating that an unidentified man photographed with a Nazi flag and three protesters who climbed onto the National War Monument disqualified the entire movement.
Kenney has said that the Coutts protest violates the Alberta Traffic Safety Act. Truckers have countered that opening up a lane for local traffic technically makes them compliant with both ATSA and the 2020 Critical Infrastructure Defence Act, passed after indigenous rights activists blockaded railways.
However, Mayor Willett told reporters on Monday morning that the RCMP was “getting impatient.”
Iran envoy: No IAEA access to new nuclear site in Isfahan before conclusion of JCPOA revival talks
Press TV – January 31, 2022
Iran’s ambassador to international organizations based in Vienna says the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will have no access to the country’s new nuclear site in the central city of Isfahan before the ongoing talks on the removal of US sanctions and revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal reach a definitive result.
Mohammad Reza Ghaebi made the remarks while speaking to reporters on Monday after the IAEA announced earlier the same day that Iran has informed the world body that it would move the production of centrifuge rotor tubes and bellows from TESA Karaj Complex to Isfahan.
He said the process “has not started yet,” adding, “The IAEA will be able to adjust its surveillance rules accordingly, although the information gathered through that surveillance process will remain in Iran and the IAEA will not have access to it until Tehran resumes its nuclear commitments under the JCPOA,” referring to the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The Iranian diplomat added that the IAEA report was a routine update of the agency that provides the “latest technical information on Iran’s nuclear activities to its members.”
In its Monday statement, the UN nuclear agency said its inspectors had installed surveillance cameras in a new workshop in Isfahan on January 24 to ensure the machines intended for the production of centrifuge rotor tubes and bellows were under monitoring but the production of the parts there had not started then.
The UN nuclear agency noted that the production of centrifuge rotor tubes and bellows at TESA Karaj Complex has ceased.
Back in December, Spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Behrouz Kamalvandi said that the country had allowed the IAEA to reinstall its surveillance cameras at TESA Karaj Complex only after the UN nuclear watchdog met Tehran’s preconditions.
Kamalvandi explained that Iran’s preconditions included technical and security examination of the new IAEA cameras, judicial and security investigations into the dimensions of the June attack against the facility, which damaged the previous cameras, and also the IAEA’s condemnation of such acts of sabotage.
Back in September, Iran refused to allow the United Nations’ nuclear agency access to a number of cameras that had been damaged during a terrorist operation targeting the TESA Karaj Complex, a centrifuge component manufacturing workshop in north-central Iran. The Islamic Republic’s refusal was based on the fact that the country needed to complete some legal-security investigations into the incident.
Somali court: Money confiscated from UAE plane in 2018 will not be returned
MEMO | January 31, 2022
A Somali court yesterday ruled that millions of dollars confiscated from an Emirati civilian plane in 2018 will not be returned, local media outlets reported.
According to reports, the Banadir Regional Court instructed the Central Bank not to release $9.6 million found in three unmarked bags aboard a Royal Jet plane that arrived at Mogadishu airport in April 2018.
The extent of the court’s jurisdiction on the government’s pledge to return the money is not clear and there has been no official comment from authorities.
The court’s decision coincides with the visit of the Somali caretaker Prime Minister, Mohamed Hussein Roble, to the UAE where he will hold talks with Emirati officials on bilateral relations.
It is unclear whether the money was intended for the military or to buy political leverage. Somalia’s relations with the UAE have been unsettled since June 2017 when the Emirates – along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain – launched a blockage on Qatar. Somalia was pressured to support one of two camps.
Somalia, initially supported Qatar, but officially decided to ally with the UAE and Saudi Arabia in September last year after extensive lobbying by Abu Dhabi.
But last month, Somalia rejected a UAE port deal with Ethiopia and the self-declared state of Somaliland, claiming that it undermines its unity, sovereignty and constitution. Saudi Arabia offered to mediate between Somalia and the UAE but no diplomatic moves were made.
Surveys Show That Democrats Can’t Let Covid Go
By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | January 31, 2022
In the early days of the pandemic, when we didn’t have much information, partisan differences in concern about Covid were relatively small. A Gallup poll from February of 2020 found that precisely 35% of U.S. conservatives and 35% of liberals were worried about the pandemic.
Since then, a massive partisan gap has opened up, with Democrats being far more concerned than Republicans. This gap persists to the present day.
While being greatly concerned about the disease was not unreasonable in the spring of 2020, when few people had immunity and excess mortality was high, the situation we face now is dramatically different. All adults have been offered a vaccine, and a significant fraction of the population has natural immunity.
More and more people can see it’s past time we got back to normal. Even one-time ‘Zero Covid’ advocates like Devi Sridhar admit the virus has been “defanged”. But in the U.S., Democrats can’t seem to let Covid go.
Their refusal to face reality is laid bare in two recent surveys: one by Morning Consult, which is summarised in the New York Times; one a join venture of Rasmussen Reports and the Heartland Institute.
Let’s take each one in turn. Here are two headline results from the first survey. Remember, the data were collected in January of this year – mere weeks ago.
83% of Democrats are still concerned about their children getting sick from Covid at school. 83%! This is despite the fact that Covid poses almost no risk to children; indeed, those aged 5–14 are more likely to die in a car accident on their way to school.
As a result of these ungrounded fears, a shocking 65% of Democrats want to go back to remote learning – something that has demonstrably harmed kids’ education, while yielding almost no benefit in terms of reduced transmission.
What about the second survey? Respondents were asked a series of questions about measures that could be taken against the unvaccinated. The results make for alarming reading indeed.
59% of Democrats would support a policy of confining unvaccinated people in their homes “at all times, except for emergencies”. 48% would support a policy to “fine or imprison” those who publicly question the vaccines’ efficacy. And 45% would support a policy of requiring unvaccinated people to live in “designated facilities or locations”.
Of course, polls can’t always be trusted. Yet as Philippe Lemoine observed, “even if we divide each number by 2, this is still completely insane…” Not least because the vaccines, as we’ve known for some time now, don’t stop transmission.
Note: I’m not claiming that Democrats are uniquely irrational; Republicans have plenty of biases and misconceptions of their own. But if after two years, you still don’t get that Covid isn’t a threat to children, I don’t really know what to say.
And make no mistake: what Democrats believe matters. They currently control the White House (in the world’s ‘most powerful country’), and remain disproportionately represented in U.S media and academia, including public health. Once Democrats let Covid go, the rest of us can too.
Do zero deaths in 2 years justify a vaccine mandate?
Apparently so! We live in very strange times, don’t we?
By Steve Kirsch | January 30, 2022
Credit to UCSF Professor Aditi Bhargava for bringing this particular UK FOIA request to my attention. I haven’t seen it anywhere else, so I thought I’d share it with you in case you missed it as well.
The request was:
Please supply deaths caused solely by covid 19, where covid is the only cause of death listed on the death certificate, broken down by age group and gender between feb 2020 up to and including dec 2021.
Here is the most interesting part of the full response which covered nearly two years since the very start of the pandemic: the number of young people in the UK who died solely from COVID:
Your chance of being killed from COVID is basically 0 if you are under 24 years old.
Therefore, based on this data, if you were a policymaker in the US, you’d want to mandate the vaccines for anyone under 24, right?
0 deaths in 2 years, yet vaccines are mandated for young people in schools and universities.
This is how insane these mandates are.
How can 0 deaths justify a state of emergency applied to people under 24? How can it justify mandating a vaccine?
As far as I know, not a single one of the 3,143 public health officials in the US has spoken out against vaccine mandates for people under 24.
FDA math
Want to know how the FDA justifies the vaccines?
Did you ever read the risk-benefit analysis FDA did for 5 to 11 year olds? It was based entirely on assumptions (not data), assumptions of incredible efficacy at preventing all sorts of covid-19 related harms, and on the adverse event side of the ledger, just one single AE (myocarditis). That’s it. No other risks.
And no use of actual data, because trials provided zero data on any of all the endpoints (benefits and harms) that they thought were important.
See PDF p.39 (section 9.5) of the FDA’s EUA memo on 5-11 year olds: https://www.fda.gov/media/153947/download.
Congress totally trusts the FDA no matter how bad their analysis is.
If you want to see a more realistic risk-benefit analysis, see Dr. Toby Rogers’ analysis. Want more proof? Read this article.
A tale of two cities
In the UK now, we have: masks gone, social distancing gone, work from home gone, care home restrictions gone, travel restrictions gone, VACCINE PASSPORTS GONE and the Coronavirus Emergency Act will not be extended.
In Santa Clara County, we have mandated masks, vaccines, etc. for everyone who works for the County.
Same virus, different policymakers.
Dr. Richard Pan introduces bill in California to close the personal belief exemption loophole
The very worst people in my opinion are the policymakers who actively force every last human being to take the jab by eliminating exemptions. For example, Dr. Richard Pan and his California State Senate bill to keep schools safe which is supported by:
- Los Angeles Unified Board President Kelly Gonez
- Los Angeles Unified Interim Superintendent Megan K. Reilly
- San Diego Unified Board Member Richard Barrera
- California Medical Association President Robert E. Wailes, M.D.
Nowhere in that article do you see any mention of a risk-benefit calculation. Never does he mention the number of lives he’s going to save with his bill. Never does he compute the number of deaths. It’s all fear-based policymaking with no math.
Which begs the question: Is there any policymaker with a working brain in the United States of America? Please identify yourself.