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48% Of U.S. Small Businesses Fear They May Be Forced To “Shut Down Permanently” Soon

By Michael Snyder | The Economic Collapse | December 10, 2020

What would the United States look like if we lost half of our small businesses? The reason I ask that question is because approximately half of all small business owners in the entire country believe that they may soon be forced to close down for good. Not even during the Great Depression of the 1930s did we see anything like this.  The big corporate giants with extremely deep pockets will be able to easily weather another round of lockdowns, but for countless small businesses this is literally a matter of life and death. Every day we are seeing new restrictions being implemented somewhere in the nation, and the politicians that are doing this are killing the hopes and dreams of countless small business owners. According to a recent Alignable survey, 48 percent of U.S. small business owners fear that they could be forced to “shut down permanently” in the very near future…

Based on this week’s Alignable Q4 Revenue Poll of 9,201 small business owners, 48% could shut down permanently before year’s end.

In fact, this number jumped from 42% just two months ago, demonstrating how several factors have converged to devastate small businesses: COVID resurgences, forced government reclosures, elevated customer fears, and a surge in online shopping at Amazon and other national ecommerce giants.

When a small business with only a few employees closes down forever, it never makes any national headlines.

But the truth is that small businesses are the heart and soul of our economy, and we are losing more of them with each passing day.

Here are some quotes from actual small business owners that took part in the Alignable survey…

  • “COVID has raised its ugly head again. I’m a caterer and I’ve had no work in November and my clients are cancelling for Dec. This is so sad. I have worked so hard to build my business the last 14 years. My business has gone from half a million to not even 200,000. This is devastating for any business.”
  • “COVID closings are killing this country! My business is on hold — no art walks or gallery openings, and I can’t even open my studio. Everything’s online.”
  • “Because therapeutic massage is so ‘up close and personal,’ I have only come back to about 40% of my previous clientele. I am afraid that the governor will shut us down again, which will be the end of my business. I also believe the ‘ruling elite’ does not care about small businesses.”

How would you feel if you spent years putting everything you had into a small business in order to make it successful, only to have the politicians come along and completely destroy it?

And every time a small business has to let workers go, it just makes the unemployment crisis in this country even worse.

On Thursday, we learned that another 853,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…

First-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 853,000, an increase from the upwardly revised 716,000 total a week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting 730,000.

I have been warning that the new lockdowns would make the numbers worse, and that is precisely what is happening.

And one expert that was interviewed by CNBC says that this is just the beginning…

“It looks like the unemployment losses are starting to stack up for the economy. It’s not going to be a good month,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank. “You’re starting the first week of the month on a bad note, and it’s probably going to be all downhill from here. It feels like the lockdowns are intensifying. It’s closer to reality for those forecasts that look for the economy to go negative in the first quarter.”

It is also important to remember that there are many Americans that have been unemployed for so long that they are no longer eligible to receive benefits.

One of those long-term unemployed workers is 35-year-old Sarah Groome…

For six months, she received unemployment benefits from the government – but those payments shrank as the programmes wound down this summer. Since October, she’s received nothing.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do financially,” she says. “I’m applying to jobs and I’ve probably applied to over 100 at this point and I’ve had one interview.”

“It’s scary,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

What do you say to someone in her position?

It’s heartbreaking to hear stories like that, and more people are being laid off with each passing day.

And as our new economic depression gets progressively deeper, an increasing number of Americans are becoming very desperate.

In fact, many have already become so desperate that they are turning to shoplifting…

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken – more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

“We’re seeing an increase in low-impact crimes,” said Jeff Zisner, chief executive of workplace security firm Aegis. “It’s not a whole lot of people going in, grabbing TVs and running out the front door. It’s a very different kind of crime – it’s people stealing consumables and items associated with children and babies.”

Everywhere we look, our society is starting to break down all around us.  Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits more than 70 million times this year, the number of homeless in New York City has reached an all-time record high, and civil unrest continues to erupt all over America.

No matter what happens politically, conditions are going to continue to deteriorate as we head into 2021.

Of course the mainstream media is boldly proclaiming that the new vaccines will pull us out of this tailspin and that life in America will soon return to normal.

You can believe the mainstream media if you want, but in the end the “hope” that they are promising will turn out to be a complete mirage.

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

December 13, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Reid Sheftall MD – Comprehensively Decoding the Viral Issue, Pt 1 of 2

Ivor Cummins | December 11, 2020

Super-smart Reid Sheftall MD has worked it all out – period. Here is part 1 of our comprehensive conversation – no stones unturned!

Note our Covid Chronicles Movie Kickstarter is here – please help us to make this most crucial movie – a time capsule for the future of our children! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…

If no like Kickstarter, can donate here and message “CHRONICLES”: https://www.tinyurl.com/IvorCummins

December 12, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

Virus Avoidance Is Not the Whole of Life

By Jenin Younes | American Institute of Economic Research | December 11, 2020

Lest you were hopeful that some semblance of normal life will return in 2021, either due to the development of vaccines or the pandemic fizzling out on its own, the New York Times and 700 epidemiologists have news for you. An article that appeared in the paper on December 4, 2020, entitled “How 700 Epidemiologists are Living Now, and What They Think is Next,” with the subheading “They are going to the grocery store again, but don’t see vaccines making life normal right away,” reveals that most in the profession, or at least the vast majority of those interviewed for the piece, believe that masks and some form of social distancing should continue for years, if not forever.

As an aside, I wonder how these scientists believe groceries arrive at their doorsteps, if not by another human being whose safety is, apparently, less worthy of consideration.

While a minority of epidemiologists interviewed for the article believe that “if highly effective vaccines were widely distributed, it would be safe for Americans to begin living more freely this summer,” these relative optimists are vastly outnumbered by those who think that life should not return to normal for many years, if ever. Indeed, only one third of the 700 plan to “return to more activities of daily life” once vaccinated. The others intend to severely restrict travel, gather only in small groups with close relatives, work from home at least part time, avoid crowded places, and wear a mask, all indefinitely, because they are concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine, as well as issues with respect to distribution and reluctance to get it.

One epidemiologist declares that “[b]eing in close proximity to people I don’t know will always feel less safe than it used to.”

I may not have a background in psychology or psychiatry, but I am fairly confident that before March of 2020, this mentality would have been recognized as some form of ailment of the mind warranting intervention. These epidemiologists implicitly embrace the principle that virus avoidance is a singularly important goal. If not life’s sole priority, it is certainly among its most crucial objectives.

This is a dogma that should be resoundingly rejected. As I (and many others) have written before, there is no reason to assign SARS-CoV-2 a special status as a killer virus, or to view it as significantly worse than many other of the world’s problems that typically go largely unnoticed by educated professionals in the developed world. Over the past year, around 1.5 million deaths worldwide have been attributed to SARS-Cov-2. On average, 1.35 million people die in traffic accidents, 1.7 million people die of AIDS, and 1.4 million of tuberculosis, each year (We know that the counter to this — that if we did not take extreme mitigation measures, the virus would spiral out of control and bodies would be falling in the streets — is not borne out by the reality).

Back to our 700 epidemiologists. Unfortunately, because of their profession – expertise in the incidence, distribution, and control of disease within a population– there is a danger that their ideas will be endowed with undeserved authority. Although not expressly stated, that is, presumably, the article’s objective: to encourage readers to conclude that, if this is what the experts are doing, perhaps I should, too. That is why the Times did not run an article about how 700 lawyers or baseball players or receptionists are living now.

I urge readers not to pay attention to the ideas propagated in that article. These epidemiologists are no better equipped to weigh the competing values that inform how one chooses to live during the coronavirus era than individuals are to make their own choices. To the contrary, we should entirely discount these epidemiologists’ opinions on the topic, as it appears that immersion in the world of infectious disease control has robbed them of perspective.

If you are under 70 and in reasonably good health, there is no reason to rearrange your existence and sacrifice activities that are crucial to your happiness and flourishing in the name of virus avoidance unless, perhaps, that was your lifestyle prior to 2020. And if the concern is others, one could devote resources to saving some of the twenty-five thousand people succumbing to starvation each day or the million children who die annually of malaria, with considerably less disruption to one’s life. It is puzzling that these epidemiologists, so concerned with the spread of coronavirus, have not chosen to devote their time and money to these causes.

Thankfully, more and more people appear to be reaching the same conclusion (including many of the politicians who have been exhorting people to stay home and shaming them for refusing to do so), as evidenced by the fact that only four percent fewer Americans traveled long distances for Thanksgiving than they did last year, and there has been increased resistance to illogical, disruptive measures such as closures of schools, playgrounds, and outdoor dining.

Of course, we are far from triumphing over the oppression inflicted upon us by politicians and so-called experts, but refusing to give into their absurd dictates is the only path to victory. The more of us who reject the idea that avoiding the coronavirus should inform virtually every aspect of life, the harder it will be for these epidemiologists to achieve their goal of making the new normal last forever.

Jenin Younes is a graduate of Cornell University and New York University School of Law. Jenin currently works as an appellate public defender in New York City.

December 12, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Austrian lawmaker tests cola for Covid and claims POSITIVE result returned shows testing is ‘worthless’

RT | December 11, 2020

An Austrian lawmaker tested a glass of cola for coronavirus during a fiery speech accusing the government of medical tyranny and denouncing government health ‘dictatorship’ – and the soda turned out to be Covid-positive.

Michael Schnedlitz, a member of Austria’s National Council and the general secretary of the right-wing Freedom Party, railed against the government’s screening program and other coronavirus measures while addressing his colleagues in parliament on Thursday. During his speech, Schnedlitz administered a rapid Covid-19 test on a glass of cola, showing his colleagues after a few minutes that the sugary carbonated beverage had tested positive for the virus.

He described the tests as “worthless” and said publicly funded Covid-19 testing was a “massive redistribution of tax money in the direction of the pharmaceutical industry.” He went on to accuse the government of “dictatorship light,” claiming “Austrians have been deprived of their basic rights, such as their civil liberties and the right to freedom of expression,” during the health crisis. The lawmaker said Covid-19 restrictions have led to bankruptcies, mass unemployment, and social and economic crises, and have “robbed” children of their education.

Schnedlitz’s comments received widespread praise on social media, but some took issue with his testing technique. According to Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, the Austrian lawmaker administered the test incorrectly, skipping an important step before checking the sample for the virus.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Time magazine celebrates medical authoritarianism, naming Fauci ‘guardian of the year’

By Helen Buyniski | RT | December 11, 2020

Time magazine has designated US coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci as a ‘guardian of the year,’ a new category that emphasizes his dystopian doomsday pronouncements. The message? Sit down, muzzle up, and fear what you’re told to fear.

Since the first reports of the novel coronavirus on American shores, Fauci has been front and center, scaring the life out of Americans with apocalyptic predictions of millions of deaths that – while they haven’t come to pass – have triggered devastating economic shutdowns. A recent survey found nearly two out of five US families planned to spend the next year in “survival mode,” having no choice but to put aside long-term goals in order to do whatever they can to make ends meet as the economy circles the drain.

It’s no coincidence that Fauci’s directives to “hunker down” for the much-hyped “dark winter” came ahead of the Christmas shopping season, when most retail businesses earn their way back into the black in order to make it through the following year. Fauci and his colleagues in the US health bureaucracy are facilitating the asset-stripping of America, whether or not they’re aware of it.

The Covid-19 czar’s opposition to the cheap, off-patent malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, according to some expert estimates. While the World Health Organization (WHO) terminated its trial of HCQ stating it showed no improvement over standard treatments, there is evidence of success from countries that used the drug to treat early symptoms of Covid-19 – and the US, where the drug was demonized and politicized, is among the top ten in terms of coronavirus-related deaths per capita. Fauci has pooh-poohed the cheap drug in favor of Remdesivir, itself a failed (but fantastically expensive) ebola drug – which the WHO has likewise admitted has little therapeutic potential against the coronavirus.

Indeed, Fauci has gotten every single “epidemic” in his 50-year tenure wrong. From suppressing drugs that were effective in treating AIDS-related pneumonia, resulting in some 17,000 deaths, to shilling for the swine flu vaccine that spawned a narcolepsy epidemic among vaccinated children in 2009, he has been persistently on the wrong side of history. He has lied under oath regarding documented side effects of the measles vaccine and foisted highly toxic AIDS drugs on healthy people under the guise of “pre-exposure prophylaxis” (PrEP). The career medical official has gallons of American blood on his hands.

Ironically, these characteristics would make him ideally suited to Time’s ‘person of the year’ designation – which has been awarded to the likes of Adolf Hitler, Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The man has always put profits before people, a characteristic which should preclude holding public office but which is praised in the sociopathic ruling class circles that anoint America’s ‘leaders.’

Many dystopian works of literature and film use the term “guardian” to denote secret police, and the term fits Fauci perfectly. The immunologist even undermined his own fearmongering when he all but admitted the “gold standard” PCR test used to diagnose Covid-19 is essentially useless – yet gleefully uses these bogus test results to terrorize the American population.

Time is far from alone in lionizing Fauci – indeed, the entire media establishment hangs on his every word. The editor of Yale University’s book of notable quotes declared Fauci’s “wear a mask” to be quote of the year – even though the official had, just a few months before imploring Americans to mask up, declared such a precaution unnecessary, and even detrimental.

Given the utter disaster 2020 has been for the US and many other countries, perhaps it’s fitting that Fauci should be selected to epitomize it. But with the rollout of barely-tested vaccines looming in the future, and the possibility that a “don’t call it a mandate” vaccination certificate will be a requirement to participate in what passes for normal life post-Covid-19, Americans should seriously reconsider placing their trust in this avatar of medical totalitarianism.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

NJ Lawmaker Wants MANDATORY Corona Shot For All Kids WITH NO EXEMPTIONS

By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 11, 2020

A State Senator in New Jersey wants the coronavirus vaccine made mandatory for all school age children, despite them being the least at risk group.

Middlesex Democrat Senator Joseph Vitale also wants to eliminate exemptions that have been used in the past to prevent their children from receiving shots.

“When it is that a vaccine is appropriate for children, I believe it ought to be included in that list of vaccines that are required for children,” Vitale told reporters.

“I’d like to incorporate it into the other vaccination bill that would require children to get vaccinated as a condition to entering school,” he added.

Vitale also says there is a separate effort underway to make the vaccine mandatory for University students in the state.

“It’s not complicated to decide whether or not to include a COVID vaccine as a condition of school,” he said, adding “The decision is going to be whether or not the vaccine is available, and if the science supports its efficacy.”

New Jersey currently mandates that children must have several vaccines in order to attend school, including MMR, polio, and chickenpox. However, thousands of children have been exempted from the shots, with parents citing religious beliefs.

There was an attempt last year by lawmakers to eliminate such exemptions and mandate the vaccinations across the board, but it failed when angry parents stormed the statehouse:

While New Jersey officials have stopped short of saying they will force everyone to get the vaccine, Governor Phil Murphy has signed an executive order that will see everyone who does get it automatically enrolled into a ‘New Jersey Immunization Information System’, a move that some have seen as a way of coercing people to take the shot.

Speaking to reporters, Sue Collins, co-founder of the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccine Choice said “Putting the cart before the horse and saying when it’s available everyone has to get it does not build trust.”

“No medical procedure should ever be mandated for anyone — especially something so new, with so many unknowns and no long-term knowledge at all,” Collins added.

Pushing back against the creep toward mandating the vaccine in the state, Republican Assemblyman Gerry Scharfenberger, has sponsored a bill to prevent it from becoming compulsory.

While he says he is not anti-vaccine, Scharfenberger says he cannot support mandating medication, and is responding to the concerns of constituents.

The developments in New Jersey come after a State Assemblymember in New York introduced legislation that would make it compulsory for residents to get vaccinated against coronavirus.

Democrat Linda Rosenthal said she introduced the bill because “there has been a “concerning uptick in dangerous anti-science, anti-vax rhetoric.”

As soon as the FDA approves the vaccine for children, there will likely be a torrent of states moving to add it to the compulsory vaccination list for school kids. Reports have suggested that Pfizer has begun conducting some tests of its vaccine on children, with Moderna also scheduling trials for tests on kids.

Currently, California, Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states that allow medical exemptions to vaccinations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

A further 30 states, including New Jersey, currently allow religious exemptions, with 17 more states still allowing exemptions for religious and personal or philosophical beliefs.

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

The Great Kary Mullis, inventor of the abused PCR test talks about Antony Fauci

Wardo Rants

Just so that people understand, Dr. Kary Mullis winds up dead just weeks before the Gates Foundation, World Economic Forum, and John Hopkins (Michael Bloomberg) School of Medicine held their “Event 201.”

December 11, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Naomi Klein: Gatekeeper Extraordinaire

Veteran journalist lines up alongside the mainstream, attacking “conspiracy theorists” and “covid denialism”.

By Cat Maguire & Colleen Maguire | OffGuardian | December 11, 2020

With a title like The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie, it appears Naomi Klein is trying too hard to recapture her prowess at defining a meme. Her buzz-concept, “Shock Doctrine,” is spot-on and rightfully successful. But her “Screen New Deal” about Silicon Valley technocrats fizzled.

And now she puts forth “Conspiracy Smoothie,” declaring the multitudinous “conspiracies” out there are just one big bizarro mashup, an “inchoate meta-scream.” The word “smoothie” defeats her purpose, though, because smoothies are healthy, yet she wants to brand alternative thinkers as sinister and unhealthy. Ha! This feckless meme won’t catch on with anybody.

To her credit, Klein offers a very good history and analysis of The Great Reset, as long as she stays within the precincts of critiquing Empire, such as:

… [T]he Great Reset is not a serious effort to actually solve the crises it describes. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create a plausible impression that the huge winners in this system are on the verge of voluntarily setting greed aside to get serious about solving the raging crises that are radically destabilizing our world.

But once she gets near taboo topics, Naomi goes batshit mainstream. Unlike alt “researchers” (her raised-eyebrow quotes), these subjects are “inchoate” for her because, like NIST who doesn’t know there were explosives on 9/11, she hasn’t gone looking. She even admits, “I’ve been doing my best to ignore it [“conspiracies”] for months.”

Rather than go off-reservation and investigate for herself, like a typical conspiracy denier, everything under the hood is automatically deemed “off-the-wall.” Alison McDowall will surely skewer Klein again as seen during this prickly exchange they had about The Great Reset. (See video at 13:25 to 17:00)

Klein’s most damning accusation is her reference to “truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.” Is Klein really this naive about the objectives and tactics of the Medical Industrial Complex?

Her anti-vaxx slur is a defamation against vaccine-activists, most of whom actually advocate for safe and effective vaccines — the existence of which, however, are questionable. Vaccine manufacturers have no incentive to make a safe product because they were granted legal immunity in 1986 by Congress.

Proof there exists a serious safety deficit in vaccines is the current running tab of $4.2 billion awarded to victims and their families in “Vaccine Court” from vaccine deaths and injuries.

Klein’s political bifurcation of conspiracy theories telegraphs an utter misreading of allies and issues:

And yet search for the term “global reset” and you will be bombarded with breathless “exposés” of a secret globalist cabal, headed by Schwab and Bill Gates, that is using the state of shock created by the coronavirus (which is probably itself a “hoax”) to turn the world into a high-tech dictatorship that will take away your freedom forever: a green/socialist/Venezuela/Soros/forced vaccine dictatorship if the Reset exposé is coming from the far right, and a Big Pharma/GMO/biometric implants/5G/robot dog/forced vaccine dictatorship if the exposé hails from the far left.

After channeling Cass Sunstein in the above paragraph, she asks readers if they are confused. No, Naomi, you are the one who is confused. You are the one who cannot recognize that most of these issues are not only scientifically legitimate, but many are important to and shared by global activists and professionals across the political spectrum. You are the one who is out of touch for not recognizing how and why these issues unite many diverse communities. Unlike the binary tribalism you attribute to the above players, their unity is transpartisan.

In Klein’s inventory of 2020 shock doctrines, it’s all the fault of the right side of the aisle. There is not an ounce of finger-pointing, for example, that the extreme failures of the lockdowns are almost wholly the result of diktats by petty Democratic tyrants (not to mention their over-the-top hypocrisy).

Shockingly, she fails to comment on the source of the epic silencing of anyone who questions Official Narratives. To wit, Big Tech and Big Media censors are fully aligned with Democratic agendas. As for the Left’s political-identity swamp, there is nary a mention of Mao’s Cultural Revolution USA-style that has ravaged our country.

The World According to Naomi is full of plutocrats, but they’re all right-wing. She goes on and on about workers rights and all the populist issues that Democrats traditionally stood for. Didn’t she get the memo that there’s been a tectonic shift? Doesn’t she realize that the entire force of the 1% has arrayed itself with the Democrats, a party that has now disgracefully abandoned what had been their deplorables base for decades.

If Bernie progressives, we-the-people patriots, the Yellow Vests, indigenous peoples, and all the rest of the world’s 99% would just join hands, we could create a powerful transpartisan movement to abort The Great Reset’s dystopian agenda. But this can’t happen by staying within the Democrats’ Big Tent as Klein does, which likewise ultimately aligns her with the Establishment no matter how much she critiques them from her influential, mainstream-left perch.

Invoking an ever-reliable inference to Trump Derangement Syndrome, she writes:

Is it all a plan, another kind of elaborate conspiracy? Nothing so elegant. As Steve Bannon kindly told us, the informational strategy of the Trump era has always been to “flood the zone with shit.” Four years later, we can see what this looks like in practice. It looks like far-left and far-right conspiracists sitting down over a tray of information-shit sandwiches to talk about how the Great Reset is Gates’s plan to use the DNA from our Covid-19 tests to turn the United States into Venezuela.

“It makes no sense,” she concludes. Yep, Naomi, if you don’t investigate beyond ad hominem analysis and if you seemingly strive for a token social-responsibility seat at the Davos table, your current worldview will only ever perceive genuine opposition to The Great Reset as an indigestible smoothie.

Cat McGuire and Colleen McGuire are twin sisters who are activists and writers. Cat lives in New York City where she works with Break The Spell, a public outreach group raising awareness about the Covid plandemic and the Great Reset. Colleen practiced law in New York City for 16 years and now lives in Greece.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Professor Harvey Risch Interview – Part 2

HCQ TRUTH BOMBS

This is the second part of our interview with the esteemed Professor Harvey Risch from Yale University. The interview, which covers a range of aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, took place on October 20. You are also invited to watch the first part, which was put online on October 24.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Flawed paper behind Covid-19 testing faces being retracted, after scientists expose its ten fatal problems

By Peter Andrews | RT | December 9, 2020

A publisher admitted it is urgently re-investigating research, following revelations that the PCR test it extols is defective, giving too many false-positives. The news comes as a new group plans a legal challenge over the checks.

Last week I reported on an astonishing review conducted by a group of senior scientists on a paper on which most Covid testing is based. It comprehensively debunked the science behind the Corman-Drosten paper, which described a protocol for using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique to detect Covid, finding 10 fatal flaws, including major failings in the operating procedure and potential conflicts of interest among its authors.

The team behind the review demanded that Eurosurveillance, the journal that published the original research, retract it at once, as in their view it clearly failed to meet proper standards. This is of vital importance because the Corman-Drosten paper laid the path for mass PCR testing as the main source of data on the coronavirus. Almost all case numbers, infection rates and even deaths attributed to Covid are based on PCR tests (and all the attendant lockdowns and restrictions on people), and a huge amount of them use the method set out in the Corman-Drosten paper.

But now, the organisation Retraction Watch have reported that Eurosurveillance is considering retracting the paper. In a statement, Eurosurveillance said that they were “seeking further expert advice and discussing the current correspondence in detail. We will, according to our existing procedures, evaluate the claims and make a decision as soon as we have investigated in full.’’ So no retraction yet, but it would not be surprising if one came soon.

Call up Guinness World Records

One of the 10 fatal flaws in the original Corman-Drosten paper was that it was unclear whether it had ever been subjected to proper peer review – before, that is, the panel of experts took it upon themselves to do so. The paper had been submitted on January 22 and published the very next day. Peer review, when it takes place, is normally a long, drawn out process with plenty of back-and-forth, even when it is being rushed as much as possible. That it could be done in a single day beggars belief.

But that is what the authors are asking us to believe, as they are still claiming that their article was “peer-reviewed by two experts on whose recommendation the decision to publish was made.’’ Eurosurveillance may want to consider submitting this feat to Guinness World Records as the fastest peer review of all time  – it may not be too late to get into the 2021 edition.

Taking the government to court

It is clear that the wars over PCR tests are hotting up, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. A new organisation in the UK, calling itself PCR Claims, has been set up to challenge in the courts the British government’s handling of PCR testing for Covid-19.

The organisation describes itself as a pro bono network of lawyers, life scientists, and business advisers led by Jo Rogers, a lawyer who runs Navistar Legal.

Rogers told RT.com: “The intention is to expose the controversy of the inappropriate use of PCR in the context of pillar 2 community testing and private sector lighthouse labs.

“PCR was not designed for mass testing because of the sensitivity and risk of contamination. There are serious flaws in many of the protocols employed, which were hurriedly put together, some without peer review. The operational false positive rate is unknown and therefore every positive test could be false, unless accompanied by clinical examination.”

As an example of errors with PCR, the group points to a recent case from Cambridge University. “Our first priority is to gather evidence of the harms from restrictions to life whose policies were driven by PCR test modelling and/or ‘case’ results,” Rogers said. “We believe the cases are a pseudo epidemic, as seen in other places around the world using PCR testing.

“Legal action is progressing and further instances will follow as we receive the evidence of harms. The gathering of that evidence is ongoing nationwide, as well as our raising awareness of errors and negligence.”

As someone who shares their deep concerns over these PCR tests, this is good news. At last, there is somewhere to go for expert legal counsel on the government’s persecution of free-born citizens. And thank heavens also for the stellar work of the entire peer review team for holding this bad science to account. If indeed it is retracted, it will be a major victory for those of us who can see through what Dr Mike Yeadon, one of the paper’s debunkers, rightly calls a “false positive pseudo-epidemic.”

Peter Andrews is an Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics.

December 10, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Billionaires’ ‘pandemic profits’ alone could pay for $3K stimulus checks to EVERY American – report

RT | December 9, 2020

American billionaires made so much money during the Covid-19 pandemic that their profits since March are enough to give every US resident a $3,000 check without cutting into their pre-virus wealth, a new report shows.

Over the last nine months, the 651 billionaires who call the US home have increased their wealth by a whopping $1.06 trillion, according to a report published Tuesday by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies. Far from being negatively impacted by the pandemic-related economic shutdowns, the country’s super-rich seem to have thrived amid the policies that have plunged so many ordinary Americans into poverty.

The billionaires’ wealth grew so much that they could cut “every man, woman and child in the country” a $3,000 stimulus check and “still be richer than they were nine months ago,” ATF executive director Frank Clemente said in a Tuesday press release.

The report tracked the fat-cats’ profits from March 18, the approximate start date of the economic shutdowns, through December 7. The vast majority accelerated their accumulation of wealth even as ordinary Americans saw their life savings slip through their fingers, losing jobs, businesses, and loved ones to the one-two punch of the coronavirus and the political response.

After nine months of raking in the cash, the billionaires’ total wealth had soared 36 percent to over $4 trillion – nearly twice the $2.1 trillion in wealth held by the poorest 50 percent of Americans.

The monstrous cash-pile amounts to double the two-year budget gap of all state and local governments, a figure estimated to reach $500 billion thanks to the devastating effects of the economic shutdowns on tax revenues. It even approaches the massive sum the federal government spends on Medicare and Medicaid – $644 billion and $389 billion in 2019, respectively, the report claims.

While most working- and middle-class Americans received a single stimulus payment of $1,200 as part of March’s CARES Act pandemic bailout, a promised second stimulus check has failed to materialize. The expanded unemployment program that doled out $600 per week to newly-jobless Americans came to an end in July, and while President Donald Trump issued an executive order to bridge the gap with a less generous $300 weekly payment, Congress has thus far refused to pass a second Covid-19 bailout package even as the rest of the bailout programs are set to expire at the end of the year.

One of the chief beneficiaries of the fiscal explosion has been Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune increased 63 percent since March as locked-down Americans turned to online shopping to meet their needs. The retail tycoon faced sharp criticism over his company’s alleged mistreatment of Amazon warehouse workers in the early days of the pandemic, but had he distributed his $71.4 billion windfall among Amazon’s employees, workers would have received $88,000 each while leaving their boss just as rich as he was before the coronavirus outbreak.

And Bezos, said to be the richest man in the US, wasn’t even the most blessed by Covid-19. That title goes to Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, whose wealth grew by an eye-popping 542 percent – from “just” $24.6 billion in March to $143 billion by December. Musk is about to get quite a bit richer, too, after his StarLink satellite company won a Federal Communications Commission auction to deliver bandwidth to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans.

Senate Democrats circulated a letter earlier this week demanding another $1,200 stimulus payment be part of the Covid-19 aid package currently being debated in Congress. The party has balked at a Republican-authored bailout proposal that would exclude individual payments and include a five-year liability shield for corporations – a measure Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders derisively dubbed a “get out of jail free card to corporations.”

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

How long does immunity to covid last?

By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | December 9, 2020

One of the fears of many people in relation to covid has been that the immunity that develops after infection is so short lived that the infection will just keep going around and around and re-infecting everyone (until everyone is dead, I assume).

Two pieces of evidence have been presented to support this belief. The first concerns a few cases of “re-infection” that have been broadcast widely in media, even though virtually all of these cases have been either completely asymptomatic or only very mildly symptomatic the second time around – a sure sign the the immune system still remembers covid and is doing its thing to stop it.

The second concerns the fact that antibodies fade after infection. This builds on a fundamental lack of understanding of how the immune system works. Although the actively antibody producing cells diminish after an infection, these cells (so called “plasma cells”) are not responsible for immune memory. That role is filled by special “memory B-cells”, that lie dormant in the body, waiting for the infection to reappear. When it does, they quickly spring in to action and produce massive numbers of new antibody producing clones.

Now, however, covid has been around for a while, and we’re starting to get some pretty good data on how long immunity lasts after infection. There is a pre-print up on MedRxiv about a study that sought to gain a deeper understanding of what sort of immune memory is produced after a covid infection.

Before we get in to the details of the article, let’s talk a little bit about immune memory, so everyone is on the same page. Immune memory is the ability of the immune system to remember a pathogen after a first infection (or vaccination), and thereby respond much more quickly and effectively upon re-infection. It is mediated by three main types of cell. The first is the already mentioned memory B-cell, which is basically a dormant version of the antibody producing plasma cells. The second is the “memory killer T-cell”, which is a dormant version of the regular killer T cell (a.k.a CD8+ T-cell). Killer T-cells specialize in finding virus infected cells and getting them to commit suicide in a way that prevents the virus from spreading further.

The third is the “memory helper T-cell”, which among many other functions regulates the function of the other types of immune cell. Both killer T-cells and B-cells cannot become fully activated until helper T-cells have become activated. The central function of T-helper cells is shown by AIDS (Aquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), a disease caused by the destruction of the T-helper cells by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) – without the T-helper cells, other parts of the immune system cannot become fully activated, and the immune system is not able to function effectively.

In case you’re curious, the reason B-cells are called B-cells is because they mature in the bone marrow, so the B is for Bone marrow. T-cells mature in the thymus, so the T is for Thymus.

OK, now you know enough to understand the results of the study. 185 people with confirmed covid-19 were recruited and had blood samples drawn. 92% had not required hospitalization, so only a minority had had severe disease. The ages of the participants varied from 19 to 81. The blood samples were collected from several different sites across the United States.

The results of the study were based on analysis of the participants blood. 79% of participants only provided blood at a single time point, which varied from six days post-infection to more than six months post-infection, while the remainder (21%) provided blood at multiple time points. In other words, this was not really a longitudinal study, since most participants only had their blood analyzed at a single point in time, although there was some longitudinal data. 41 participants provided blood samples at six months or longer after infection, and this is really the group we’re most interested in, since this is the group that can tell us if there is still a good level of immune memory six months after infection.

Let’s look at the results.

Among the 54 individuals measured at one month post infection, 98% had antibodies. Among the 41 individuals measured at six to eight months post infection, 90% had antibodies. As mentioned before, antibodies are produced by plasma cells, and although antibodies in the blood stream decline with time as the plasma cells start to disappear, there should still be memory B-cells present for much longer, which can quickly be activated upon re-infection. That’s why it’s actually more important to look at what’s happening with memory B-cells than with antibodies, if you want to know how long your body maintains the ability to mount an antibody response to an infection. So, what did happen with the memory B-cells?

The prevalence of memory B-cells increased at each time point measured up to five months post infection, at which point they reached a stable level. There was no sign of a decline in memory B-cells after the five month mark.

Next we have the killer T-cells. At one month post infection, 61% had detectable memory killer T-cells. At six to eight months, 50% had measurable killer T-cells. It was however only possible to test for these cells in 18 individuals at the six month mark, so the confidence interval is wide, and thus it’s really impossible to say exactly what the trajectory was between the one month and six month marks. What can be said though is that a large proportion of participants still had measurable killer T-cells at six months.

Finally we have the memory helper T-cells. 94% of those measured at one month had measurable helper T-cells. Among those measured at six to eight months, that number was 89% (again, this data is based on only 18 individuals).

So, what can we conclude?

First, it’s important to note that this study had some weaknesses. The first is that, with the exception of a minority of participants, the study was cross-sectional, not longitudinal. This means that we’re not comparing people with themselves over time, we’re comparing them with other people who happen to be at a different point in the time line. It would have been better to have longitudinal data for all participants. The second is that some of the groups studied were pretty small, which creates wide margins of error. Some of the data was based on less than twenty individuals, which is really a tiny number.

A third weakness is that this study isn’t looking at how many people get reinfected with covid after a certain amount of time, it is looking at biomarkers – in other words, it is using proxy data, which is clearly a less reliable type of information than seeing what is actually happening to people in the real world. It’s kind of like doing a statin study and looking at what happens to cholesterol levels instead of looking at how many people have died after certain time point.

Having said all that, it is clear from this study that there is significant immune memory at the six to eight month time point after infection. At six to eight months after infection, 90% of measured samples still had antibodies and T-helper cells specific for covid-19, and 50% still had measurable T-killer cells. If the decline continues linearly over time from what was seen in this study, then it is reasonable to assume that most people continue to be immune to covid after infection for at least a couple of years.

You might also be interested in my article about the number of years of life lost, on average, when someone dies of covid, or my article about whether face masks are effective against covid.

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

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