Author: Doug Santo

Geologist | Author | Photographer
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Congressman Chip Roy questioning Democrat Fleebaggers from Texas…

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Dental hygienists running our military

Related, Glenn Greenwald is doing some great work:

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Headline of the day, updated edition.

Biden Sacrifices Military Readiness Over Stats Showing Vaxxed People Are More Likely to Die from Bee Sting Than COVID

There are a lot of doozy’s out there today. Here are a few more winners:

Joe Biden Calls on States to Bribe Citizens to Get Vaccinated

Pelosi Cracks Down on Masks in Capitol, While Dems Allow COVID-Positive Illegals to Pour In

WHISTLEBLOWERS: Biden Admin Tried to Cover Up COVID Outbreak at Migrant Facility

Did the Texas Fleebagger Democrats Bring COVID to Washington From Biden’s Unprotected Border?

Petition to Major University Claims Birth Names on Diplomas Make Trans Students Unsafe

A couple more whoppers:

‘Goalposts keep on moving’! Biden denies ever saying the vaccinated don’t need masks, then says ‘that was true at the time’

How COVID’s ‘Evolving’ Mandates Kill Off ‘Settled Science’ as an Argument

And maybe my favorite “headline of the day” today:

Black Lives Matter threatens to make Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s life miserable unless he quits ‘all-white’ club

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Social media is garbage. The U.S. government should take action to break the monopolistic power of a few large companies that control speech in the digital public square

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1420876033084035086

The problem is the Democrats support censorship of conservative speech. The other problem is many Republicans are weak turds.

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At the intersection of Covid crazy and Green crazy

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1421052054672396288

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1421048167961964544

I support clean oceans. I don’t support crazy people who turn these issues into religious fanaticism.

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Democrat governance – New York City style. More Democrat policy failures. Failure seems to be celebrated in Democrat/media circles.

Bill de Blasio and the Decline of New York City

“…The New York renaissance that began with the election of Rudy Giuliani in 1993 and continued through the end of Michael Bloomberg’s three-term mayoralty two decades later was literally that. When babies were born in New York City, parents stayed if they could afford to instead of fleeing because they had to. An aging city suddenly turned younger. Areas that had lain fallow were reborn. Despite, or perhaps because of, the 9/11 attacks and the surge of citizen pride that accompanied them, the 2000s saw still more people flowing into the five boroughs. Half a million souls, to be exact; the population rose to 8.5 million.

New York might have been the most expensive city in the country to live in, a bastion of income inequality and every other sin of wealth that the young people who flooded to hipster Brooklyn to eat food twice as expensive as they would have paid for it anywhere else found time to worry over on their blogs — but as their presence indicated, it was the place to be.

And what of the decade dominated by Bill de Blasio’s eight years as mayor? When he leaves office in January 2022, the population of New York City will likely be around 8.25 million. He will not only leave office with the city in far worse shape than it was when he became its chief executive in 2014; he is the key cause of its renewed depopulation.

By almost every conceivable benchmark, even his own, de Blasio has failed. Take crime. Critics predicted that under his leader­ship, crime would skyrocket, and for a while it looked like we would have to eat our words as the crime rate continued to fall. In July 2019, de Blasio announced with great fanfare that the city had booked 40,000 fewer miscreants into jails that year than in the year he took office.

“The safest big city in America is ending the era of mass incarceration,” he said proudly. “For decades, we’ve been told we can only arrest and imprison our way to a safer city. Under my administration, New York City has proven that’s not true. Instead, we can keep fathers at home and kids in school and get even safer.”

By the end of 2019, the murder rate had risen by 7 percent, with other violent crimes also increasing at a comparably modest rate. Then, in 2020, everything went south. Shootings increased by 97 percent (that is not a typo), the homicide rate by 44 percent, the burglary rate by 42 percent, and the number of car thefts by 67 percent.

A year into his mayoralty, the city found itself awash in street dwellers, many of the newer indigents apparent opioid addicts who had moved into the city because it was an easy place to panhandle and because word had gone out that vagrancy would be tolerated. De Blasio accused the everyday New Yorkers who complained about the piles of garbage on Broadway and elsewhere of “fearmongering,” even as he increased spending on homelessness.

As usual, when you subsidize something, you get more of it — and in 2020, nearly 21,000 individuals were sleeping nightly in public shelters, an all-time high. When the vagrants are not in the shelters, they’re on the streets, sleeping or raging or rampaging, degrading the daily life of the city’s working residents and their children…”

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Biden’s policies have not been successful. This is an outline for Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms. The charts speak volumes.

Biden’s ‘Accomplishments’ So Far: A Troubling Tale In 8 Charts

“…after President Joe Biden supposedly “rescued” the country from the COVID-19 pandemic and promised that he’d bring the country together, how is the nation doing? Well, there are several indicators on the rise. Unfortunately, they are all indicators of trouble.

The news Thursday that the GDP gained 6.5% in the second quarter (the first full quarter since Biden signed his American Rescue Plan) is good. But it is well below economists’ forecasts. The Blue Chip Consensus forecast was above 9%, and other surveys pegged Q2 growth at 8.5%. It was also just barely above the gain in Q1 — which was before any of Biden’s policies had taken effect.

Still, other things are on the rise under Biden, too, many of them well above expectations.

The misery index is up, for example, so is inflation, pessimism, and financial stress. Illegal border crossings are up and murders are way up. Oh, and cases of COVID-19 — the disease Biden said he would slay — are increasing again.

Naturally, while taking credit for the good GDP number, the Biden administration is trying to pin the blame for all these other things on President Donald Trump. But how convincing can that be, when Biden ostentatiously broke with just about every one of Trump’s policies and did so in ways that had an immediate effect?

We’ve put together seven charts that help tell this story, starting with the inflation rate.

Even liberal economists were warning that Biden’s spending spree — coming after two historically large stimulus bills under Trump and long after the COVID recession had ended — would set off an inflation spiral. And what do you know? Energy costs, food costs, and the costs of most everything else are climbing at a rapid clip, despite promises from Biden that the current spike is transitory…”

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Covid data from other western countries sheds important light on the limitations of vaccines. This information seemingly ignored by American government experts.

Data on COVID-19 From Other Countries Presents a Puzzling Predicament for Our Health Experts

STACEY LENNOX:

“…The United States keeps data on COVID-19, but much of the tracking we should be most interested in now is what health care providers and patients report voluntarily. Vaccine breakthroughs and side effects rely on reports from providers and patients, so both are likely underestimates. The CDC decided not to collect data on all COVID-19 breakthrough infections, concentrating only on those that require hospitalization or those that are fatal.

The announcement Tuesday that the CDC was once again recommending masks for people indoors regardless of vaccination status was puzzling. However, the messaging on COVID-19 vaccines has been a disaster for months, and this appeared to be more of a punish-the-whole-class approach to encourage the unvaccinated to acquiesce.

Data from other countries that have been dealing with the Delta variant longer may provide another explanation. NBC News reported the following after CDC Director Rachel Walensky’s comments:

Federal health officials still believe fully vaccinated individuals represent a very small amount of transmission. Still, some vaccinated people could be carrying higher levels of the virus than previously understood and potentially transmit it to others.

Looking at Israel and the United Kingdom, the percentage of transmission that fully vaccinated individuals represent may not be so small. Israel used the Pfizer mRNA vaccine primarily, and the UK has used AstraZeneca, which uses similar construction to Johnson & Johnson in the United States. The Swiss Policy Institute (SPI) has been looking at data from both countries, and it appears the vaccine’s ability to prevent infection wanes rather quickly. The Pfizer vaccine’s ability to prevent mild infection has dropped from 95% to 40%.

Of more significant concern, on Tuesday, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported that the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing severe illness has fallen to 80% from 96%. Data released by the Israeli Health Ministry last week indicate that time since vaccination is a crucial measure, with a caveat:

Data released by the Health Ministry last week suggested that people vaccinated in January have just 16% protection against infection now, while in those vaccinated in April, the effectiveness was at 75%.

Doctors note that figures may not only reflect time that has passed since vaccination, but also a bias according to which those who vaccinated early were often people with health conditions and who are more prone to infection, such as the elderly.

UK researchers studied the Delta variant and found that both Pfizer and AstraZeneca had slightly lower efficacy in preventing symptomatic illness from COVID-19. Pfizer declined from 93.7% to 88%, and AstraZeneca fell from 74.5% to 67%. They did not look specifically at the date of vaccination as was analyzed in Israel. From these two data sets, as well as information from countries where vaccination rates are low, the Swiss Policy Institute concludes (emphasis the author’s):

Thus, the false promise of very high protection against “symptomatic infection”, found during official vaccine trials, was simply based on very high short-term serum antibody levels mimicking mucosal immunity. Conceivably, the pharmaceutical companies may even have known that this was just a (very lucrative) “flash in the pan” and not a lasting protective effect.

In contrast, protection against severe disease is achieved by lower serum antibody levels in combination with immunological memory (B cells) and cellular immunity (T cells). However, the Delta variant has already achieved partial immune evasion (as did Beta and Gamma, but not Alpha), and future coronavirus variants will likely achieve almost complete [vaccine] immune evasion.

Based on other data from Israel — which tracked recovered patients and did not require them to get vaccinated for a green passport — and recent studies, those who experienced COVID-19 appear to have the mucosal immunity vaccinated individuals do not, according to the SPI. While the researchers note that we seem to have decoupled COVID-19 infections from deaths, they note (emphasis the author’s):

In contrast, vaccination cannot achieve “sterile immunity” against infection and infectiousness. Thus, the whole idea of “vaccination certificates” has become obsolete – at least from a medical and epidemiological perspective – and should be rejected: the claim that it’s just “the unvaccinated” that are driving outbreaks – a claim made by many authorities – is simply false.

For instance, just this week [a] “fully vaccinated” Australian managed to pre-symptomatically infect about 60 people at a party in the United States. Many similar stories have already been reported in Europe and Israel : fully vaccinated people can easily transmit the virus even to large groups. Hence, imposing “vaccination certificates” or “green passes” may only serve a political purpose .

What the current vaccines seem to provide is therapeutic, not immunologic. Countries with high vaccination rates are not experiencing the same level of COVID-19 deaths that nations such as India or Russia are. However, Israel reports that fully vaccinated individuals are responsible for about 20% of transmission. An earlier study from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center estimated only about 20% of symptomatic people transmitted COVID-19 because spread is dependent on viral load, which peaks a few days after infection.

Any push to vaccinate children, low-risk young adults, and the recovered should end with this data. It appears it would be far better for large portions of the younger population to be exposed to COVID-19 and develop mucosal immunity, as seen in recovered patients. As researchers asserted early in the pandemic:

We are currently faced with the question of how the CoV-2 severity may change in the years ahead. Our analysis of immunological and epidemiological data on endemic human coronaviruses (HCoVs) shows that infection-blocking immunity wanes rapidly, but disease-reducing immunity is long-lived. Our model, incorporating these components of immunity, recapitulates both the current severity of CoV-2 and the benign nature of HCoVs, suggesting that once the endemic phase is reached and primary exposure is in childhood, CoV-2 may be no more virulent than the common cold.

Our health experts encouraged broad-based vaccine compliance rather than focusing on at-risk populations. They made promises that the vaccines are not bearing out. Rather than admit a mistake, they will push a false narrative for political purposes and put more restrictions on you and your children. When will they be forced just to admit that COVID-19 will be traveling with us for the foreseeable future?…”

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Drew Holden does some excellent work contrasting Dr. Fauci’s various statements about Covid and masks, etc.

Drew Holden presents a thread of coronavirus flip-flops he calls ‘Fauci vs. Fauci’

Too long to paraphrase here. Worth your while to click over for a good read.

Fauci is a political bureaucrat not a doctor of medicine. His expertise is talking and navigating his way through the forest of technical bureaucratese our low-level government officials have generated and that clogs the plumbing of American society. He is expert at his own preservation and advancement. Holden highlights some of the intellectual contortions Fauci has managed.

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More expert sciency science from the scientific experts

COVID-19 Virus Might Be ‘Just a Few Mutations Away’ From Evading Vaccines, CDC Warns

Why all the hype about vaccines then?

Idiots. We are governed by idiots.

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Democrat union in Democrat controlled state rejects Democrat governor’s Covid dictum

SEIU, California’s biggest state worker union, challenges Gavin Newsom’s vaccine order.

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Covid is politics facilitated by expert sciency science from scientific experts

Did Fauci Just Accidentally Let the Cat Out of the Bag on Recovered Immunity?

“…One of the most frustrating elements of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been the complete lack of attention given to recovered immunity. Health bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci rarely mention the fact that individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 infections likely maintain robust antibodies to protect against the virus for many months. These antibodies, along with T cells and B cells, may persist for years or even decades—or even a lifetime—based on what we know about other coronaviruses, including SARS. Yet Fauci and Co. are still urging everyone, whether or not they’ve been previously infected, to get the vaccine—a novel approach to infectious disease management.

The medical community, for the most part, has been remarkably incurious about recovered immunity, aided and abetted by Democrats, the legacy media (and their social-media fellow travelers) who have stubbornly refused to question public health officials about the topic. A Cleveland Clinic study (still in preprint, not yet peer-reviewed) of more than 50,000 caregivers found that infection rates for those who had recovered immunity and those who received the vaccine were essentially the same. In fact, none of the previously infected caregivers monitored during the study were reinfected. Not a single one.

The cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection remained almost zero among previously infected unvaccinated subjects, previously infected subjects who were vaccinated, and previously uninfected subjects who were vaccinated, compared with a steady increase in cumulative incidence among previously uninfected subjects who remained unvaccinated. Not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study. In a Cox proportional hazards regression model, after adjusting for the phase of the epidemic, vaccination was associated with a significantly lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection among those not previously infected (HR 0.031, 95% CI 0.015 to 0.061) but not among those previously infected (HR 0.313, 95% CI 0 to Infinity). [Emphasis added]

The study concluded that “Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination, and vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before.”

After pushback by the media and public health officials, the Cleveland Clinic hastened to advise people to ignore the data, ignore the science, and get the vaccine anyway…”

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Uncontrolled emotional alarmism is no way to run a country

Despite ‘Delta’ Alarmism, US COVID Deaths Are at Lowest Level Since March 2020, Harvard and Stanford Professors Explain

“…Far more people were dying from COVID-19 months ago as we were winding down restrictions than are dying today as some call to reinstate them…”

“…If you judged the US’s current COVID-19 situation only by the headlines, you’d come away thinking that we’re spiraling back into pandemic disaster. Localities like Los Angeles County and St. Louis have reimposed mask mandates on their citizens, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just revised its “guidance” to say that, actually, fully vaccinated individuals should still wear masks in certain situations. Meanwhile, mainstream media coverage of the rise of the “Delta variant” is soaked in alarmism.

Yet at the same time that all this alarm is mounting, the actual number of COVID-19 deaths is at a nadir. Harvard Medical School Professor Martin Kulldorff pointed this out on Twitter, writing that “In [the] USA, COVID mortality is now the lowest since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.”

He shared this graph from OurWorldInData which clearly shows how COVID deaths per million are at, relatively speaking, extreme lows. Far more people were dying from COVID-19 months ago as we were winding down restrictions than are dying today as some call to reinstate them.

Now, some would cite rising COVID-19 case counts or hospitalizations in certain parts of the country as evidence that the pandemic is indeed once again spiraling out of control. But many COVID-19 cases recorded as positive are either asymptomatic or come with very mild symptoms—especially the cases confirmed among vaccinated individuals—so high case counts are not necessarily proof of a serious problem. Hospitalizations are concerning, yes, but primarily insofar as they lead to high numbers of deaths, which, thankfully, is not the case so far with the Delta variant.

Others would say that deaths are a “lagging indicator” that come in several weeks after the increased spread of the disease. But the Delta variant has been spreading in the US for months now, and deaths have remained relatively flat, in part due to widespread vaccination.

“It is striking that COVID mortality is at such low levels despite the fact that we are seeing an increase in cases of late,” Stanford Professor of Medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya tells FEE. “By immunizing the elderly and many other vulnerable people, we have provided them with excellent protection against severe disease in case they get infected. Also contributing is widespread natural immunity from recovered COVID patients. Though cases may rise, deaths will no longer follow in proportion.  We have effectively defanged the disease with our successful vaccination rollout.”

So, there’s simply no reason to expect the long downward trend in deaths shown in the above graph to suddenly spike upwards. And we can’t make public policy based on worst-case scenarios.

That’s right: despite all the alarmism and clamor for renewed restrictions on our liberty, there’s not really been a resurgence in the state of the COVID-19 crisis itself…”

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Expert sciencey science from scientists with scientific expertise. Or in plain English, we are governed by idiots.

CDC justified new mask guidance based on vaccine study listed as failing peer review

“…Journal changes status of submitted India study from “reject” to “revise” after CDC highlights it

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited an unpublished study from India to justify its recommendation Tuesday that fully vaccinated people “wear a mask in public indoor settings in areas of substantial or high transmission” of COVID-19.

That study, which claimed the Delta variant produced an unusually large viral load in more than 100 vaccinated healthcare workers with “breakthrough infections,” was listed as having failed peer review in the journal Nature when the CDC cited it.

Archives of the study’s page on Research Square, a preprint server for unpublished research, show that it was marked “reject” on July 9 and remained so at least through the evening of July 26, Eastern Daylight Time.

That version was still live early Wednesday morning, the day after the CDC cited the study in its July 27 updated science brief, according to a Twitter user who posted a screenshot.

The “reject” status and review notes were removed by mid-morning and replaced with “posted,” suggesting Nature had approved the paper without revisions, which drew controversy on Twitter. The notes were quickly restored and status changed to “revise,” bearing the same date — July 9 — as the original “reject” status…”

Note also the flummoxy nonsense from what purports to be a scientific journal. The journal changed the status of the paper multiple times during the day when sunlight focused on it.

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Doug Santo