by Mackubin Owens
Not too long ago, a good friend of mine took umbrage at a Facebook post that compared a proposed “vaccination passport” to the requirement that Jews in Nazi Germany carry papers identifying them as such. As a Jew, my friend argued that such a comparison trivialized the horrors of the Nazi regime that culminated in the Holocaust.
My friend’s objection was justified. But this same individual has not hesitated to join the president of the United States in comparing the recent Georgia voting law to Jim Crow. Anyone who makes such a claim has no idea of what Jim Crow entailed. Second only to slavery, the Jim Crow era represents the darkest period in U.S. racial history, far darker than Reconstruction or the decade that followed.
Indeed, the racial oppression, segregation, and violence that prevailed throughout the South during the era of Jim Crow in many respects exceeded that of the period of slavery. At least during slavery, there were free blacks in the South who, while denied most civil rights, were protected by laws that left them free to go about their business unmolested and did not prevent commercial interactions between the races.
Jim Crow is usually lumped together with Reconstruction and the period that followed: the Compromise of 1877, during which the South was “redeemed” by the Democrats’ overthrow of the “carpetbagger” regime in the reconstructed South and the end of Republican governance. But even after federal protection of blacks in the South was withdrawn following the Compromise of 1877, blacks continued to vote and to hold political office. As C. Vann Woodward writes in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, for a decade, alternate approaches to race relations not involving disenfranchisement, segregation, and violence competed as attempts to address the race problem in the post-Civil War South. Indeed, during this post-Reconstruction period, blacks were making substantial economic, political, and social progress. This all came to an end with the Jim Crow era, which began in the late 1890s.
Jim Crow, especially in the decade after World War I, marked the high point of racism, not only in the South but also in the United States at large. Jim Crow was enabled by the triumph of progressivism and its corollary, “scientific” racism. Both shared the same intellectual roots and involved the explicit rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
The administration of Woodrow Wilson came down foursquare on the side of racism, dismissing most African Americans from the civil service and resegregating those few who remained. It sanctioned the rise of the “Second” Ku Klux Klan that far exceeded the power and influence of the short-lived Klan of Reconstruction. Segregation and repression of African Americans were enforced by the barrel of a rifle or the end of a rope.
To compare Georgia’s law, which seeks to achieve election integrity, to the dark period of Jim Crow is an abomination, pure and simple. It is a smear and a libel, not worthy of a reasonable person. But yet we have presumably respectable people, including the current occupant of the White House, making that claim.
The ludicrous claim that Republicans in Georgia want to reinstate Jim Crow is part of a broader false narrative. It acknowledges the racist past of the Democratic Party and its role in defending slavery and Jim Crow, even the racism of the Progressives like Woodrow Wilson. But, goes the argument, the parties subsequently changed places. The Republicans adopted a “Southern strategy,” which sought to appeal to the racism of white Southerners. Thus the Party of Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence became the party of racial bigotry.
The “Southern Strategy” narrative persists because it offers comfort to Democrats who wish to atone for their racist past. But it is false. According to this narrative, white Southerners decamped to the Republicans in response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The proof? Any political party that appeals to Southern white voters is racist because Southern whites are by definition irredeemably racist.
In addition to the blanket slur against white Southerners, many of whom worked within the limited political and social environment available to them, there are a number of other flaws with this argument. First, African-American voters began to shift to the Democratic Party during the era of the New Deal. They did so because they perceived it was in their economic interest to do so. Why didn’t the white Southern racists exit the Democratic Party then?
Second, many more Republicans than Democrats supported the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Why would those motivated only by race shift their support to a party that did not share their racist outlook?
Third, many former Democrats left the party because of its feckless foreign policy and continuing government overreach. I was raised in a Southern Democratic household. From 1968 through 1976, I voted for Democrats. Jimmy Carter turned me into a Republican. Race had nothing to do with my odyssey from Democrat to Republican.
Fourth, white Southerners continued to this day to vote for Democrats. Indeed, since 1964, many Southern states have voted for Democrats in presidential elections, including Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama.
Racism in the guise of both slavery and Jim Crow was at odds with America’s founding principles. If the principles of the Declaration are not universally true, then there is no logical reason not to pursue racist policies. The American tragedy represented by both slavery and Jim Crow is that we have often failed to live up to these principles. But there have always been Americans of good will—including many white Southerners—who have worked to bring American practice into line with American principles, no matter how imperfectly.
Which brings us back to elections. Elections are the lifeblood of a self-governing people. Accordingly, the integrity of the electoral process is of critical importance. People who persist in comparing Georgia’s efforts to ensure the integrity of the electoral process to Jim Crow—an evil, unconstitutional, and inhumane monstrosity—are engaged in slander, pure and simple.
– – –
Mackubin Thomas Owens is a retired Marine, professor, and editor who lives in Newport, RI.
Photo “Worker at polling counter” by Governor Tom Wolf CC 2.0.
The post Commentary: Election Integrity and the Jim Crow Slur appeared first on The Georgia Star News.
Skip The Scoop | Seek Understanding
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2221 | Morning Edition Hour 2 | Recorded October 12, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2221: We Are Witnessing The Collapse Of The Intellectual Financial Sphere.
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2220 | Morning Edition Hour 1 | Recorded October 12, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2220: Last PPI Before The Midterms; Julianne Murray On Taking Back Our Elections.
The Democrat Party Establishment Once Again Rolls Over And Shows It’s Ugly Underbelly | “Racist remarks in leaked audio of L.A. council members spark outrage, disgust” | The Los Angeles Times
Those of us who have left the Democrat Party, the party of the Ku Klux Klan, the party of Jim Crow Laws, the party of Tammany Hall, seditious infiltration of a corrupt FBI, race baiting, and Trump Derangement Syndrome, have been telling the public what really goes on behind the scenes in Democrat strongholds for time immemorial. Now and then, the general public gets a peek behind the curtain.
The Los Angeles Times first reported a profanity-laced recording of Los Angeles council members mocking people in racist terms. So what’s new?
“Martinez and the other Latino leaders present during the taped conversation were seemingly unaware they were being recorded as Martinez said a white councilmember handled his young Black son as though he were an “accessory” and described Councilman Mike Bonin’s son as “Parece changuito,” or “like a monkey.”
Racist remarks in leaked audio of L.A. council members spark outrage, disgust | Los Angeles Times
William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness’ (EXCLUSIVE) | Variety
In this exclusive excerpt from William Shatner’s new book, “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder,” the “Star Trek” actor reflects on his voyage into space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Then 90 years old, Shatner became the oldest living person to travel into space, but as the actor and author details below, he was surprised by his own reaction to the experience. . . .
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness’ (EXCLUSIVE) | Variety
Could Jupiter’s Icy Moon Harbor Life? | The Atlantic
Cynthia Phillips was mesmerized when she saw the latest pictures of her favorite moon. Here at last was a fresh look at Europa, an icy satellite of Jupiter. The moon resembles a truffle drizzled haphazardly with strips of melted white chocolate, as if the universe had rushed to finish a baking-show challenge. The images gave us a new sense of Europa’s topography, its collection of ridges and troughs appearing more intricate than ever. The lighting was different this time, Phillips told me, and the shadows brought out dramatic shapes in the terrain.
The images were taken by a Jupiter-observing spacecraft as it swept past Europa last week, coming within just 222 miles (358 kilometers) of the frozen surface. Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, immediately reached for the Europa globe on her desk and began comparing the real-world views with the topography stretched over the plastic orb. The last probe to come this close to Europa was disposed of in 2003, when NASA deliberately plunged it into Jupiter’s atmosphere after the mission started running low on fuel. “We haven’t seen Europa’s surface in this level of detail for 20 years,” Phillips said.
Europa might be the best place to search for life elsewhere in the solar system. Scientists are almost certain that beneath the Jovian moon’s frozen surface is a salty ocean with more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. And such a watery subsurface environment could provide a comfortable home for small Europan life forms.
[Read: Jupiter’s frozen moon is studded with 50-foot blades of ice]
Two years from now, another NASA spacecraft will depart for the Jupiter system, specifically designed to study Europa. The probe will swing past the moon dozens of times, sometimes coasting just 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface. Each pass will bring scientists closer to understanding the workings of this celestial truffle and its mysterious interior. Beneath that frosty coating could be the answer to one of our biggest questions: Is there life anywhere else in the universe?
Europa is enveloped in a thick coat of water ice. (Some other moons in our solar system have ice made of methane and nitrogen—the cosmos is a weird place.) The criss-crossing lines visible in the new pictures are actually cracks and fissures in that frozen exterior. Scientists suspect that they’re caused by the stretching and squashing that Europa experiences as it orbits giant Jupiter. The moon’s terrain is sprinkled with chemical compounds such as sodium chloride and magnesium sulfate—more commonly known to Earthlings as table salt and Epsom salt—and they could indicate briny waters below.
A close-up view of Europa’s textured surface (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SWRI / MSSS
Scientists got their best evidence that a Europan ocean might exist two decades ago, when that earlier NASA spacecraft detected a magnetic connection between Europa and Jupiter that could easily be explained by the presence of a salty, global sea. This deep into the solar system, Europa’s underground ocean wouldn’t feel the warmth of the sun; it would stay liquid because of Jupiter’s gravitational tugging. In recent years, telescopes have detected signs of plumes of water vapor spewing out of the cracks and into space. Scientists believe that Europa’s ocean could be as old as the moon itself, about 4 billion years or so, which would give life plenty of time and a stable environment in which to evolve, Phillips said.
[Read: Europa’s mysterious glow]
The data suggest that Europa has a rocky mantle—the layer between the moon’s crust and core—and when rock and water come together, magical things can happen: Chemical interactions between them are known to produce hydrogen-rich materials for tiny creatures to metabolize. “On our own planet, hydrothermal systems at the seafloor provide energy for communities of microorganisms,” Samantha Trumbo, a planetary scientist at Cornell who studies icy ocean worlds like Europa, told me.
The upcoming NASA mission, named Clipper—a nod to the speedy, lightweight vessels favored by 19th-century merchants—will study nearly every bit of the Europan surface. If it gets lucky, the spacecraft could fly through some plume particles, take a sip, and analyze the contents. Alyssa Rhoden, a planetary geophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute who studies Europa, is most excited about a Clipper instrument designed to detect warmer-than-usual spots on the moon’s surface. “When you look at Europa’s surface, you can see a lot of pits where the surface seems to have dropped down a little bit, places where the surface has been disrupted,” Rhoden told me. “We think that that’s happening from heating coming from below.” That signature could simply indicate the presence of melted bits of ice near the frigid crust—or it could mean a roiling sea has floated toward the surface, perhaps bringing any tiny inhabitants with it.
[Read: Exploring the oceans of the outer solar system]
The Clipper mission is not meant to find definitive proof that life exists on Europa, only explore whether the moon has the right conditions and chemistry to make life possible. Evidence of life will require more missions, guided by Clipper’s data, that could land on the Europan surface and drill into the ice. NASA is also searching for life elsewhere in the solar system, notably on Mars, where a rover is collecting samples from a dried-up river delta. But Europa is a more tantalizing target, and so are the other ocean moons sprinkled across the solar system, such as Enceladus and Titan, which orbit Saturn, and Triton, around Neptune. The Mars mission is designed to search for signs of fossilized life that existed several billion years ago, when water once flowed on the planet. “It’s quite possible that Mars could have had life in the past, in a warmer-weather era, and it’s possible that there are subsurface pockets on Mars that could have remnants of this living biosphere,” Phillips said. “But on somewhere like Europa, life could exist there now.”
And what might humanity, by way of carefully engineered machines, find on Europa, once we’ve figured out which melty bits to inspect? “I would love for there to be Europan whales swimming around in that ocean,” Phillips said with a laugh. But alien life, if it exists, is likely to be small and simple. Energy sources are limited in the Europan depths, and scientists don’t think the environment can support the development of more complex organisms, Phillips said. Still, even the discovery of a single microbe would mark an explosive event in human history. It would mean that life had managed to spring up in two different places around the same star—in a universe absolutely brimming with stars. If it happened more than once here, in our own solar system, it’s likely happened elsewhere in the cosmos, around someone else’s sun. This is why scientists are so eager to catch a glimpse of Europa, and prepare as much as they can for the exploration to come. “We all want it to be water,” Rhoden said. “We all want it to be a cool plumbing system in the shell with lots of activity, and someday we’ll get down there and find little Europan sea urchins clinging to the bottom of the ice.”
Nightly News Rebroadcast | October 11, 2022 | Video: 26 Minutes 13 Seconds
In a filing to the Supreme Court on Oct. 11, the Justice Department urged the court to reject a request from former President Donald Trump to intervene in the dispute over classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. Actress Angela Lansbury, the star of the mystery series “Murder, She Wrote,” has died at 96.
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2219 | Evening Edition | Recorded October 11, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 59 Seconds
Episode 2219: The Numbers Don’t Lie With Biden’s Approval; We Are Following In The Tracks Of Germany With Our Energy Dependence.
Cuba: Tactics of repression must not be repeated | Amnesty International
Following a new wave of island-wide protests in Cuba over the past several days, there are worrying indicators that the authorities are repeating the repressive tactics they used for decades and also during the crackdown on protesters on 11 July last year, said Amnesty International today.
“In the latest wave of protests that have lasted several days, Cubans are exercising their simple but historically repressed rights to freedom of expression and assembly. Alarmingly, it seems the authorities are repeating the tactics of repression they used last year to detain and silence protesters, hundreds of whom remain in prison,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International.
“The international community must condemn the cycles of repression we are seeing in Cuba in the strongest possible terms. It is unacceptable for authorities to keep intimidating, threatening, detaining, stigmatizing, and attempting to silence anyone who demands necessities like electricity, food, and freedom.”
Since the start of protests in late September, Amnesty International has received reports of on-going internet interference, deployment of police and military, including cadets, to repress the protests, and arbitrary detentions.
Starting on the evening of 29 September, the Cuban authorities appear to have intentionally shut down internet access throughout the country. The internet outage lasted for at least two consecutive nights.
Cuban authorities control the country’s only telecommunication network and have often restricted internet access during politically sensitive times or moments of protests.
Alarmingly, it seems the authorities are repeating the tactics of repression they used last year to detain and silence protesters, hundreds of whom remain in prison.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International
Amnesty International has heard that the latest internet outages have made it hard for families to communicate following the passage of hurricane Ian, at a time when many people have had their homes damaged. They have also impacted the ability of independent human rights observers, including Amnesty International, and independent journalists to document the human rights situation in the country. Journalist Luz Escobar told Amnesty International that her internet was cut three nights in a row, impacting her ability to work, and that as of 4 October, several other journalists working at her independent online newspaper, 14 y medio, were without internet.
Amnesty International’s Crisis Evidence Lab has also analysed several videos that did not appear online before these protests. One video which Amnesty International analysed was filmed on Street 41, at the corner of 66 in Havana, Cuba, and appears to show the deployment of plain-clothed military cadets, armed with baseball bats, chanting pro-government slogans, including “I am Fidel.”
Another video, which also first appeared online in the context of the protests, and which is consistent with other videos Amnesty International has verified from the protests, appears to also show cadets with baseball bats chasing and then detaining protesters.
The Cuban authorities have developed a sophisticated machinery for controlling any form of dissent and protest, as previously documented by Amnesty International. While state security officials often carry out surveillance and arbitrary detentions of critics, the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution (local members of the Communist Party who collaborate with state officials and law enforcement agencies) also provide the state with information about, what is considered, “counter-revolutionary activity.” “Acts of repudiation” – demonstrations led by government supporters with the alleged participation of state security officials – are also commonplace and aimed at harassing and intimidating government critics.
While communication with Cuba remains stunted due to internet interference, Justicia J11, a group established following the crackdown on protesters in July 2021 – has reported 26 detentions since 30 September, mostly of young people and artists, 19 of whom they reported remained in detention as of 4 October 2022.
Cuban authorities criminalized nearly all those who participated in the protests in July 2021, including some children, but flatly denied any human rights violations, and placed the blame for the economic situation almost exclusively on the US economic embargo. Similarly, on 2 October 2022, President Díaz-Canel downplayed the widespread nature of the latest protests and suggested that a minority of “counter-revolutionaries” with connections outside Cuba, had carried out “acts of vandalism such as blocking roads or throwing rocks” and would be dealt with with the “force of the law.”
Background
Following the passage of hurricane Ian, the electricity has been cut in multiple parts of the island, adding to the frequent electricity outages in recent months. NASA night-time light data showed a significant decrease in lights between 23 September, before the passing of Ian, and after, on 30 September.
Electricity outages have exacerbated violations of economic and social rights in the country, as in recent months Cubans have had to line up for many hours to buy food and other necessities, in the context of widespread food shortages.
The recent protests have occurred just 14 months after the similar widespread protests on 11 July 2021, which were followed by a crackdown on dissent. Hundreds remain imprisoned for the 11 July protests, including three prisoners of conscience: artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Pérez, as well as leader of the non-official opposition, José Daniel Ferrer García. Other prisoners of conscience named by Amnesty International at the time were released on the condition of going into exile.
The post Cuba: Tactics of repression must not be repeated appeared first on Amnesty International.
Peer Reviewed Study: 94 Percent of Vaccinated Patients With Subsequent Health Issues Have Abnormal Blood | National File
Last Updated on October 5, 2022
Physicians in Italy evaluated the blood of 1,006 patients who had received at least one dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and found “foreign matter” long after vaccination, according to a new study. Their results were published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research in August 2022, the Epoch Times reported.
The three surgeons who conducted the study — Franco Giovannini, M.D., Riccardo Benzi Cipelli, M.D., and Giampaolo Pisano, M.D.— examined freshly drawn blood of over 1,000 patients using direct observation under microscopes in order to evaluate the blood.
In the study, Italian doctors used optical microscopy, or regular light microscopes, to examine the blood. According to the Epoch Times, light microscopy provides a direct image of what is under the lens. This is not the case with electron microscopy. With optical microscopy, doctors are able to better understand a patient’s health by examining blood cell shape, as well as whether they are aggregated (clumped together), in order to make determinations.
In their 60-page, peer-reviewed study, the Italian physicians detailed case studies based on their observations.
Of the 1006 patients, 426 were men and 580 were women. 141 subjects received just one dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, 453 received two doses, and 412 had received a booster shot (three doses in total) at the time of the blood draw. The patients ranged in age from 15 to 85, with an average age of 49.
All 1,006 patients were seeking medical treatment because they were not feeling well, presenting with a wide variety of health issues. On average, the patients whose blood was examined had been vaccinated about one month prior.
Of the 1,006 patients, just five percent — or 58 individuals — had blood that looked normal and healthy.
The doctors were able to examine the blood of 12 of the patients before they had received any COVID-19 vaccine injections. At that time, prior to vaccination, all 12 of those patients were found to have normal, healthy blood, the researchers reported.
Side-by-side pictures of a patient’s blood before and after vaccination revealed stark differences. Prior to vaccination, the red blood cells are separate from each other and are round, while the blood drawn after vaccination revealed red blood cells that are deformed. Furthermore, the cluster in coagulation around visible “foreign material” that was not present before.
The foreign material appeared to collect into structures, at times forming crystals, while other times forming long tubes or fibers, researchers reported.
Two shapes repeatedly noticed by the Italian doctors were “crystal-like chunks and tube-like lengths.”
The researchers could not confirm that what they were seeing was graphene, though they did point out that graphene can aggregate into shapes similar to those they observed. If graphene was indeed assembling into structures within the bloodstream, it could be a cause of clotting.
Graphene is a form of carbon that occurs when the atoms are arranged in hexagons, making a flat crystal, like a sheet. In this form, carbon behaves chemically like a metallic compound.
Graphene has been used in nasal-delivery flu vaccines, though it has not been listed as an ingredient in Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccinations. The researchers were unable to test for graphene, and while they could not determine the cause of the abnormal blood observations, they felt their findings needed to be shared with the medical community.
RELATED: Japanese Surgeon Calls for End to COVID Vaccine Booster Program in Letter to Prominent Medical Journal
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2218 | Morning Edition Hour 2 | Recorded October 11, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 59 Seconds
Episode 2218: Inflation is Like Trying To Stuff The Toothpaste Back Into The Tube; Colorado Sec of State Sent Postcards To About 30,000 Noncitizens Encouraging Them To Register To Vote.
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2217 | Morning Edition Hour 1 | Recorded October 11, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2217: What We Are To Expect With Populism Nationalism On The Ballot This November; Ronna McDaniel On Which States We Must Focus On To Protect The Vote.
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2216 | Evening Edition | Recorded October 10, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2216: Where To Become A Poll Watcher; What We Are About To See With Oil In The Coming Winter.
Nightly News Rebroadcast | October 10, 2022 | Video: 25 Minutes 46 Seconds
More than a dozen people were killed in Ukraine on Oct. 10 following the biggest and broadest Russian attack since the early days of the war. A parent says a Northern Virginia high school prepared students for Columbus Day by erasing the explorer’s history.
Why Democrats are Switching Sides – Kari Lake | Awaken With JP
In this video Kari Lake talks about why more and more Democrats are considering voting Republican in the upcoming elections…
‘Waking Up the Sheep’: Texas Siblings Sound Alarm on Hospital COVID Treatment Protocols After Death of Mother
Carolyn Carroll with grandkids. (Courtesy of Clover Carroll)
Though every attempt to petition for their mother’s COVID-19 treatment was met with “strange behaviors and attitudes” by hospital staff, Clover and Jodi Carroll recalled what their mother often affirmed when they were growing up: “Carrolls never quit.”
On July 5, 2021, Carolyn Carroll was admitted to a Texas hospital where she died on Aug. 1, 2021, at the hands of what Clover and Jodi allege to be the hospital’s protocols used to treat COVID-19.
For siblings, Carolyn’s story is representative of what they called “medical tyranny” that has been forced on “thousands of people across the country.”
However, Clover and Jodi maintain they aren’t victims.
“Victims ask why this is happening,” Clover told The Epoch Times. “Survivors ask what they can do about it.”
Today, Clover and Jodi both participate in the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation (FFFF), an organization that has gathered over 250 of these stories through its COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project to build an online database of testimonies.
Clover’s marketing agency, New Story Media, has joined with FFFF to document “as many stories as possible.”
“We are pivoting everything that we are doing to wake up the sheep—and I don’t mean that as a derogatory term,” Clover said. “The sheep are the people who just don’t know, and the wolves are those who don’t want to know and are fighting to keep others from knowing.”
Their story of administrative wolves circling a federally reimbursed COVID-19 death is one of many that have surfaced in the last two years, leaving those who have lost loved ones in hospitals to question whether they died of COVID-19 complications or the protocols used to treat the disease. . . .
FDA Approves First COVID Treatment for Young Children Despite Alarming Risks | Epoch Times
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the first COVID-19 drug for children under the age of 12–remdesivir, which has always been a controversial drug. Now, with its use in infants and young children, is the controversy over remdesivir already gone?
Previously, the drug was only approved to treat adults and adolescents over the age of 12 years old and weighing at least 40 kilograms. On April 25, the FDA expanded remdesivir’s approval to treat newborns and infants over 28 days of age and weighing 7 pounds (3 kg). This is the first FDA-approved COVID-19 treatment for infants and children.
This FDA authorization is for two categories of children with confirmed COVID-19 infection:…
Remdesivir’s Pediatric Clinical Trial Data Are Astonishing
In order to obtain the FDA’s authorization, Gilead Sciences, Inc. published data from a clinical trial called CARAVAN, which was jointly conducted by research centers in different countries.
Unlike many trials with double-blind control groups, this clinical trial was very simple in design, as there was no control group. In addition, the total number of children participating in the trial was only 53.
The trial discovered that in this small population, 72 percent of the children experienced various adverse events, such as shortness of breath and rash; and nearly 21 percent experienced serious adverse events, including three deaths. The study emphasized that serious adverse events were not considered to be directly related to the drug, and that deaths were caused by other diseases.
Nevertheless, during the clinical trial, children were not allowed to receive any other drugs at the same time. What caused the serious adverse events in 21 percent of the children, besides remdesivir? If no reasonable explanation is given, and the possibility is simply denied, it is hard not to believe that these serious adverse events were not related to the drug.
FDA Approves First COVID Treatment for Young Children Despite Alarming Risks | Epoch Times
Minnesota doctor embattled with state board over COVID treatment gets Johnson backing for governor | Just The News
Dr. Scott Jensen, the Minnesota physician who has faced several state medical board investigations — including for prescribing Ivermectin for COVID-19 patients — has gotten a key endorsement in his gubernatorial bid from Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson.
The Jensen campaign said Tuesday in announcing the endorsement that Johnson has been a leading figure investigating the business dealings of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden as well as “fighting for health freedom and holding the establishment accountable.”
Johnson has called Jensen a “health freedom hero” and is encouraging Minnesotans to get behind the doctor’s gubernatorial run, the campaign said.
Jensen told Just the News in January that he has faced five licensing investigations in 17 months and that the most recent one regarding information about his Ivermectin patients was “crossing a line” by invading their medical privacy.
Jensen said at the time he thought the board inquiries were political and that constant disputes spurred him to run as a Republican candidate for governor.
“I think what’s happening is the Board of Medical Practice has been weaponized for political purposes by people who don’t agree with my positions politically,” he said.
The winner of the GOP’s Aug. 8 primary will face Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Gov. Tim Walz, who is running unopposed within his party in his bid for a second term.
Waltz has a significant fundraising advantage over his GOP rivals.
He had roughly $1 million in first quarter contributions and $4.1 million on hand, according to local TV station Fox 9.
The news outlet said the amount in his campaign bank account is three times as much money as his seven Republican challengers have combined.
Jensen led the GOP field in first quarter fundraising with $774,393 on hand and $256,391 in contributions.
He is also a former state senator and in February won the statewide GOP caucus night straw poll. Jensen is the only GOP gubernatorial primary candidate to name a running mate, former NFL offensive lineman Matt Birk, according to Fox 9.
Wanton War on Early Covid Treatment | Townhall
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
By blocking early treatment for Covid, liberals have pushed our society into unprecedented government controls. These include mandatory masking of children as young as 5, vaccine passport requirements for entering restaurants, and even a long-running moratorium on eviction of delinquent tenants.
In the mindset of politicized health authorities, medications approved as safe for many decades are suddenly more dangerous than a hunting rifle. Bureaucrats are interfering with access to early treatment by safe medication, and Republican governors have not stood up for early access.
Early treatment is the path to overcoming the coronavirus pandemic. Medications such as hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin are available over-the-counter in poorer countries such as Vietnam and many Central American nations, while wrongly blocked here.
Last year the Leftist war on early treatment focused against HCQ, preventing most Americans from using it upon the onset of Covid symptoms. Many Americans then checked into hospitals thinking they would get lifesaving care there, and instead never left alive after being denied medications.
Three times this year attorney Ralph C. Lorigo has won court decisions forcing New York hospitals to allow dying Covid patients to receive ivermectin, and all these patients then made miraculous recoveries. “The moral of this story is you have to be proactive with your health,” attorney Lorigo said.
Other families have learned the hard way that hospitals block care recommended by their trusted family physician. Vaccinated people are being hospitalized so the importance of early treatment applies to all Americans, vaccinated or not.
What You Need to Know About Early At-Home COVID Treatment | Dr. Mercola
In this interview, Dr. Peter McCullough discusses the importance of early treatment for COVID-19, and the potential motivations behind the suppression of safe and effective treatments.
McCullough has impeccable academic credentials. He’s an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, a full professor of medicine at Texas A&M College of Medicine in Dallas. He also has a master’s degree in public health and is known for being one of the top five most-published medical researchers in the United States and is the editor of two medical journals.
Early Outpatient Treatment Is Key for Positive Outcomes
McCullough has been an outspoken advocate for early treatment for COVID. In August 2020, McCullough’s landmark paper “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 Infection”1 was published online in the American Journal of Medicine.
The follow-up paper is titled “Multifaceted Highly Targeted Sequential Multidrug Treatment of Early Ambulatory High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Infection (COVID-19)”2 and was published in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine in December 2020.
Perhaps one of the greatest crimes in this whole pandemic is the refusal by reigning heath authorities to issue early treatment guidance. Instead, they’ve done everything possible to suppress remedies shown to work, whether it be corticosteroids, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) with zinc, ivermectin, vitamin D or NAC.
Patients were simply told to stay home and do nothing. Once the infection had worsened to the point of near-death, patients were told to go to the hospital where most were routinely placed on mechanical ventilation — a practice that was quickly discovered to be lethal. Many doctors also seemingly panicked and refused to see patients with COVID symptoms.
“I’m glad that I personally always treated all my patients,” he says. “I wasn’t going to have the virus slaughter one of my senior citizens. And it is, I think, terrible that none of our major academic institutions innovated with a single protocol. To my knowledge, not a single major academic medical center, as an institution, attempted even to treat patients with COVID-19.
But I did use my publication power, and my editorial authority, and my position in internal medicine and some specialty medicine to publish the breakthrough paper called ‘The Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Ambulatory Treatment of COVID-19’ in the American Journal of Medicine.
It was an international effort, both community physicians and academic physicians. And to this day, that is the most frequently downloaded paper in the American Journal of Medicine.”
Early Treatment Guidelines Have Saved Millions of Lives
In December 2020, McCullough published an updated protocol, co-written with 56 other authors who also had extensive experience with treating COVID-19 outpatients. The article, “Multifaceted Highly Targeted Sequential Multidrug Treatment of Early Ambulatory High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Infection,”3 was published in the journal Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine, of which McCullough is the editor-in-chief.
“That paper, today … is the most frequently downloaded paper from BET Journal,” McCullough says. “It also is the basis for the American Association of Physician and Surgeons COVID early treatment guide.4
We have evidence that the treatment guide has been downloaded and utilized millions of times. And it was part of the early huge kick that we had in ambulatory treatment at home towards the end of December into January, which basically crushed the U.S. curve.
We were on schedule to have 1.7 to 2.1 million fatalities in the United States, as estimated by the CDC and others. We cut it off at about 600,000. That still is a tragedy. I’ve testified that 85% of that 600,000 could have been saved if we would have had … the protocols in place from the start.
But suffice it to say, the early treatment heroes, and you’re part of that team Dr. Mercola, has really made the biggest impact. We have saved millions of lives, spared millions and millions of hospitalizations, and in a sense, have brought the pandemic now to a winnowing close.”
While the World Health Organization and national health agencies have all rejected treatments suggested by doctors for lack of large-scale randomized controlled studies, McCullough and other doctors working the frontlines took an empiric approach. They looked for signals of benefit in the literature.
“We didn’t demand large randomized trials because we knew they weren’t going to be available for years in the future,” McCullough says. “We didn’t wait for a guidelines body to tell us what to do or some medical society, because we know they work in slow motion. We knew we had to take care of patients now.”
A Global Collusion to Harm Patients
When you look at how comprehensive and intense the censoring and suppression of early treatments were, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than this was a strategy aimed at securing emergency use authorization (EUA) for COVID gene therapies.
To get an EUA, there cannot be any safe and effective alternatives, and since the COVID shots are using a brand-new, never before used technology, making sure there were no effective treatments available was crucial for the success of the roll-out of these shots. Prestigious medical journals like The Lancet were even caught colluding with the drug industry, publishing a completely fabricated study on HCQ, showing it was dangerous. As noted by McCullough:
“What’s so interesting is how airtight the collusion was. It was extraordinary. Look at The Lancet paper [on HCQ]. You had a doctor from Harvard, a company called Surgisphere that had data, you had the reviewers at Lancet, the associate editor and the editor at Lancet. How could they all collude together to publish a falsified paper?
When that paper came out, we looked at it. I was checking the literature very carefully. [As editor-in-chief of two medical journals] I’ve reviewed more papers and analyzed more data, I think, than anybody in the game. And I can tell you, I looked at that paper and in two seconds, I knew it was fake. I mean, I do this every day.
I’m also the senior associate editor for the American Journal of Cardiology. That’s the most venerated journal in our entire field. And I can tell you that a paper like that would never get past my editorial desk because it was so obviously fake. It was a huge sample size that we knew was not possible at that time. And it was people in their 40s hospitalized with astronomical mortality rates.
It was just no way that was legit. And The Lancet let that hang up there for two weeks, scaring the entire world against hydroxychloroquine — which turns out to be one of the safest and most effective widely utilized in people with COVID-19. And when they took it down, it was unapologetic.
My interpretation of this is that was very intentional. What happened with ivermectin’s use in the ICU was also very intentional and a collusion … Dr. J.J Rashtak had used it in hundreds and hundreds of patients in Florida and published in CHEST, one of the best pulmonary journals, that ivermectin reduced mortality.
Yet to this day, hospitals across the United States flat out refuse to use ivermectin. Desperate patients and families have to get court orders to order these doctors to use ivermectin. So, there’s a mass mentality of almost intentionally harming patients.
There’s absolutely no grounds for doctors and administrators … to deny patients ivermectin. There is a global collusion, specifically in U.S. hospitals, to cause as much harm and death as conceivable. It’s beyond belief … These cases where the families had to get court orders to force the doctors and administrators to administer a simple generic drug, these are going to be case studies in medical ethics for decades to come.”
The Goal = Mass Vaccination
As for why patient harm was a desirable thing, McCullough believes the end goal was to secure the rollout of a mass vaccination campaign. All the propaganda we’ve been fed over this past year and a half points in that direction.
“Propaganda is the dissemination of false or misleading information by people of authority in a collusional manner. And that’s exactly what’s going on. We have a propagandized campaign for mass vaccination. There’s no doubt about it. It’s actually very overt … And believe me, there are hundreds of millions of people under the propagandized spell that the COVID-19 vaccine is going to deliver us from this crisis.”
What we do not know for sure is why the World Health Organization and governments around the world want a needle in every arm. Why are they so eager, so relentless in their push to inject everyone with this novel gene therapy that turns your body into a toxic spike protein factory?
The intent to vaccinate everyone is such that health authorities are not even acknowledging the fact that staggering numbers of injuries and deaths are occurring shortly after these injections. They’re even letting children die from these shots without any hint of slowing down the rate of injections. Why?
Our Next Task: Dispelling Vaccine Propaganda
While we’ve made great strides in circumventing censorship and getting the information out about early treatment, we still face a tremendous challenge, and that is dispelling the misinformation and confusion that surrounds the COVID shots.
Very clearly, there’s massive collusion to suppress the truth about these gene therapies as well. Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA vaccines, recently spoke out about his concerns, and not only did YouTube ban the interview, but Wikipedia also erased his name from the historical section of the mRNA vaccine.
They clearly want everyone to believe that these shots are similar to, and even superior to, conventional vaccines. They absolutely do not want you to think of them as gene therapy, which is what they are. Even Malone himself has made this distinction.
Malone is more than a little concerned about the coercion going on to get people to take these injections. He’s also pointed out that there’s no comprehensive system in place to prospectively capture side effects, despite the fact that the manufacturers bypassed at least 10 to 15 years’ worth of safety studies, including toxicological studies. This too appears entirely intentional. Again, the question is why?
“They had no system to catch the complications, but even worse, they had no plans for safety. They had none of the traditional mechanisms for risk mitigation … [such as] critical event committees, Data and Safety Monitoring Boards, IRBs or Human Ethics Committees.
The public should know these are the structures that we have in place in biomedical research. I’ve led two dozen Data Safety Monitoring Boards. The co-sponsors of the U.S. vaccine program are the FDA and the CDC.
It’s their obligation to have in place, from the very beginning, a Clinical Event Committee, Data Safety Monitoring Board, and a Human Ethics Committee [and provide] regular updates, because these committees are supposed to be identifying signals of harm, and then make recommendations to the sponsors about how to make the program safer.
This was the fiduciary responsibility of the FDA and the NIH. Again, this is going to go down in regulatory history as one of the most colossal blunders of all time. How can you do the largest clinical investigation in the history of medicine and have no safeguards? You have no mechanisms to protect Americans from what could happen with the vaccine program?”
Why Were Standardized Safety Protocols Omitted?
As for the motivation or reason for ignoring virtually all standardized safety measures, McCullough says:
“There has been such a suppression of early treatment … and a complete propagandized campaign for social distancing, wearing masks, promoting fear, suffering, hospitalization and death. And to prepare the population for mass vaccination, the last thing they wanted to do is have anything that could potentially restrict the population that would be taking the vaccine.
And so, I don’t think they actually wanted any safety safeguards. I thought their goal, from the very beginning, was to try to railroad every single individual with two legs [into getting the shot]. The most important moniker was a needle in every arm.
When those billboards went up in every city in the United States, the stakeholders — which are the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, and then Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson outside the United States, and AstraZeneca — they meant business.
When they say needle in every arm, that’s not a joke. It’s not a needle in every arm for whom it’s appropriate, or a needle in every arm for medically indicated. No, it’s a needle in every arm of every human being. They mean it, and I think Americans should be frightened.”
A Crime Against Humanity
What we’re experiencing is really a crime against humanity, and hopefully the responsible individuals will ultimately be held accountable and found guilty of such a charge. As noted by McCullough:
“How could one possibly have a large clinical investigation, ask individuals to sign consent, and then provide no safety mechanisms, really provide nothing with respect to safety of individuals? Everything about the vaccine is about safety. The reports that have accrued are so voluminous that if the stakeholders wanted to make the case that the vaccines are safe, they should make it with data.
They don’t, they simply say the vaccines are safe. And the medical societies are just as complicit. If you go to the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, they say the same thing, “The vaccine is safe.” Within those organizations also, there’s a large swathe of individuals who are going to have to answer [for their actions].”
The Spike Protein Is Not a Cure; It’s a Disease Agent
As of June 18, 2021, we have 387,087 adverse event reports filed with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including 6,113 deaths, a large portion of which occurred within days of injection, and 6,435 life threatening reactions.5
We also have very good evidence to suggest this is a gross undercount, in part due to general underreporting, and in part due to VAERS refusing to accept reports — particularly those involving deaths — and scrubbing reports that have already been filed. So, these already alarming numbers likely only represent the tip of the iceberg.
“We have red hot problems, like children and young adults developing myocarditis, inflammation of the heart. I just saw such a patient yesterday,” McCullough says. “These are proven cases. This is not make believe. This is for real.
So, you may ask the question, how in the world could this happen? Well, the first element of this happening is the vaccines as they exist today, either messenger RNA, or adenoviral DNA, the mechanism of action is not safe. The mechanism of action poses a biologic danger.
These vaccines all trick the body into making the spike protein of the virus. The spike protein itself is pathogenic. It’s actually what makes the virus dangerous. It was the object of gain-of-function research. So, it has a dangerous mechanism of action. Why? Because the spike protein is produced in an uncontrolled fashion. It’s not like a tetanus shot where there’s only a certain amount of protein that’s injected.
This is an uncontrolled quantity of spike protein. Probably each person is different, so may have [lower] production of it. They have very little symptoms after the vaccine, they’re fine.
Hopefully that’s the majority of individuals, but there are unfortunate individuals that must have massive amount of spike protein, and that spike protein ravages the body wherever the spike protein is locally made, and we do know the messenger RNA and the adenoviral DNA gets distributed in all the organs.
So if messenger RNA is up in the brain and we start producing spike protein in the brain, we cause local brain injury. There are now well-described neurologic injury cases with the vaccine. Many of them. In the heart, it causes myocarditis and cardiac injury. In the liver, it causes liver injury, in the lung, lung injury, in the kidney, kidney injury.
And very importantly, the spike protein damages endothelial cells and causes blood clotting. So, blood clotting, the dreaded complication of the infection itself, is now caused by the vaccine. Everything we’ve found out about the vaccine since its release has been bad.”
What Can We Expect to Happen in the Future?
Beyond the acute injury phase, there’s the very real possibility of long term health hazards. If you make it past the first couple of months without significant problems, you’re still not out of the woods. My main concern is the possibility of paradoxical immune enhancement (PIE), also known as pathogenic priming, or antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which essentially results in a cascade of immunological overreactions that wind up killing you.
The autumn and winter of 2021 will be our first “trial by fire.” We’ll just have to wait and see how many fully “vaccinated” people end up succumbing to the seasonal flu and other infections. That’ll give us a benchmark for how prevalent PIE might be. When asked what he predicts for the future, McCullough says:
“We’re so busy with the acute toxicity to the vaccine. We’re just absolutely overwhelmed, so, it’s hard to imagine in three to six months where we will be … There are hints right now that the messenger RNA doesn’t break down in a few days, that the natural disposal systems that we have for the messenger RNA doesn’t work [for the synthetic mRNA].
Now, we don’t know about the adenoviral DNA. I have a more favorable view of the adenoviral DNA products in the sense that maybe the body … can fight that off and dispose of it. The Johnson & Johnson, per number of injections, has the fewest complications. And most Americans think just the opposite because of that misdirection activity.
I think the vaccine stakeholders intentionally picked on Johnson & Johnson in order to distract attention away from the terrible safety events we’ve seen with Pfizer and Moderna. The vast majority of all the devastation we’ve seen is with Pfizer and Moderna …
When you generate a really strong antibody response, it’s actually more pathogenic. The belief is it’s more pathogenic than the natural infection, because we’re seeing syndromes in vaccine victims that are way worse than getting COVID-19 itself. I mean, the syndromes are actually horrendous.
I have seen neurologic blindness, cervical myelitis, cerebellar syndrome. It’s absolutely awful. It’s depends where the messenger RNA goes … and everything I can put together biologically, and what I see clinically, is that vaccines aren’t going to work but for a few months …
After the first shot of mRNA, one is actually more susceptible to COVID-19. This has been shown time and time again. My first rash of patients with post-vaccination COVID-19 in my practice was always after the first injection. The theory here is that the body has been hit with the messenger RNA, the spike protein is generated, it’s damaging some endothelial cells, and there’s an immature library of antibodies that are being formed.
And those antibodies, instead of protecting against the next exposure to COVID-19, they actually facilitate entry. That’s called antibody-dependent enhancement, and I think there is evidence for that … As for what we can expect long-term, that’s anyone’s guess.”
Long Term Risks Are Unknown
Before COVID came along, the FDA required vaccine makers to provide 24 months’ worth of data before they’d allow it. This was truncated down to two months for the COVID shots. So, anyone who says the shots are safe long term is lying because no such data exists to prove this.
“The consent form says, ‘We don’t know if this is going to work, we don’t know if it’s going to last, and we don’t know if it’s going to be safe.’ They say that. So, anybody who takes the vaccine is going to have to think about this and understand that we don’t know anything beyond two months.
Given all the short-term risks, if there are any long-term risks, it is absolutely compounding this unknown. What I know based on the literature right now is there could be a risk given the narrow spectrum of immunologic coverage … There could be such a narrow immunity that more virulent strain could overwhelm it …
The most recent variant is the Delta variant. That’s the weakest of all the variants and the most easily treatable. But if someone, let’s say a nefarious entity created a more virulent virus, it could easily be designed to scoot past a very narrow immunity that hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, will be keyed to with narrow immunity.”
DNA Changes, Cancer and Chronic Illness Are Possible Effects
McCullough also discusses the risk that these mRNA injections might become permanently incorporated into your DNA by way of reverse transcriptase.
“There now have been enough studies to suggest there is some reverse transcription — that in fact the RNA creates DNA and then DNA gets permanently put into the human genome,” he explains.
“We know this from the natural infection. The T-Detect test actually checks the T-cells when it tracks the DNA. This is a commercial test you can get if you had COVID-19, and it looks for minor chromosomal re-arrangements that code for cell surface receptors on T-cells.”
The question is, if the synthetic mRNA or adenoviral DNAs in fact create permanent changes to the genome, what effects will that have? Could it promote cancer, for example? McCullough cites a recent paper indicating the spike protein might in fact affect two important cancer suppressor genes.
“This is disturbing because we’re using novel genetic material and it’s possible that they’re oncogenic. We know some other viruses are oncogenic, including Epstein-Barr virus. So, when that paper hit, we said, ‘Oh no, are we setting up people for cancer risk of solid organ cancers, like breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, et cetera.
It is a sick feeling what we’ve learned there. We do understand now that there must be cell damage that’s occurring with this spike protein inside cells. And that if it’s not turned off, that that spike protein generation could end up with some type of chronic disease.
There are elements of the spike protein that are similar to prions that occur in neurologic disease, for instance. There may be intracellular changes as the body keeps cranking the spike protein which you’re not supposed to crank, that causes other problems in cells …
Future development of heart failure comes to mind, gastrointestinal illnesses, pulmonary fibrosis, neurodegenerative diseases. We could be on to the start of a whole new genre of chronic disease in America due to this mass experimentation of genetic products in the human body.”
Impossible for Vaccination Program to Improve Disease Curve
In a sane and rational world not laboring under some hidden agenda to kill off a portion of the population, these shots would have only been rolled out to the highest-risk individuals. The rest of the population would have been excluded from the experiment.
Remember the COVID injection trials conflated absolute and relative risk. Pfizer claimed its mRNA shot was 95% effective, but that was the relative risk reduction — the absolute risk reduction was actually less than 1%.6 As noted by McCullough, healthy adults under 50, teens and children have a less than 1% chance of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, so they don’t have a medical need for it.
“You can’t make less than 1% smaller and have it be clinically meaningful. That’s the reason why the vaccine program will never have an impact on the epidemiologic curves. Dr. [Ronald] Brown from Canada has done the analysis. It’s impossible.
Someone sent me an email the other day [saying], ‘Dr. McCullough, don’t you think that the pandemic is being favorably impacted by the vaccination program?’ The answer is no. We look at the clinical trials. There’s less than 1% absolute risk reduction. It means that, mathematically, it’s impossible for mass vaccination to have a favorable impact on the population.”
COVID Shot May Raise Your Risk of COVID Death
What’s worse, McCullough cites data showing that those who have gotten the shot and end up with COVID-19 anyway have far higher rates of hospitalization and death.
“The CDC was so overwhelmed [with adverse reports], they gave up. God knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans got vaccinated and got COVID-19 anyway. It looks just like regular COVID. In the data they had, it was a 9% risk of hospitalization and then a 3% risk of death.”
What this means is that, by taking the injection, you trade in a 0.26%7 risk of death, should you contract COVID-19, for a 3% risk of death if you get infected. If you’re younger than 40, you’re trading a 0.01%8 risk of death for a 3% risk.
The Way Forward Demands We Just Say No
If you want to hear more of what McCullough has to say, you can find his podcast, The McCullough Report, on America Out Loud. Every week, he talks to medical experts from different countries to get a range of perspectives and innovative approaches. In closing, he notes:
“My personal view is that I think the vaccine program has been a disaster. We should have just treated COVID-19 as an illness. We should never have shut down the schools or anything else. None of this wearing masks. We should have just treated the acute problem, and we would have gotten ourselves out of the pandemic.”
As for how we move forward, first of all, we need to stop the acute injury, and that means we need to stop taking these COVID shots. Beyond that, we’ll need to experiment to determine the best ways to block the damage done by the spike protein, for however long that is produced and stays in circulation.
“If there’s any mother who’s concerned about their child developing myocarditis, the way to avoid it is just don’t bring your child to a vaccination center,” McCullough says.
“Everyone is just going to have to learn to say no. We cannot be harmed by the vaccine if we just decline it. And the vaccine is completely elective. The CDC, the NIH, FDA, they’ve all said it’s elective. You don’t have to take it. Those agencies, by the way, they’re not taking it.
So, nobody has to take it. And everyone who is in a school or a university, or a workplace where they’re saying you have to take it, or say you have to take it for travel, the answer is no you don’t. You do not have to take it for travel. And yes, you can show up to work without the vaccine. And yes, you can show up to school without the vaccine.
These are forms of intimidation and almost every one of these institutions actually hasn’t written a policy. And if they don’t have a policy that’s been vetted with fair exemptions, that’s just intimidation. That’s like saying you can’t show up to work with a blue tie. If I want to wear a blue tie, I’m going to show up to work in a blue tie.
I think Americans are going to have to have that type of backbone in order to break this wave of propaganda, [this] ill intent that’s levered on the American people. I know so many people who are cowering … The fear is extraordinary …
If we had a Data Safety Monitoring Report in place, they would have been having emergency meetings at the end of January 2021, and said, ‘You know what? What we’re seeing is not good.’ We can actually calculate what’s called the competence interval.
When we exceed a competence interval for risks above a certain risk limit, we call it, and that [competence interval was exceeded] on January 22, 2021. Yet here we are, five months later. This will go down in history as the biggest medical biological product safety catastrophe in human history, by far. There’s nothing close … You can imagine how many heads are going to roll when this thing ultimately comes to its finality.”
What You Need to Know About Early At-Home COVID Treatment | Dr. Mercola
Joe Rogan’s ‘Emergency Podcast’ Questions YouTube’s Censorship of Content Showing Ivermectin as an Effective COVID Treatment
Last week Joe Rogan did an “emergency podcast” with evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, Ph.D. and critical care specialist Dr. Pierre Kory on how they are being censored by YouTube for discussing the benefits of using ivermectin to treat COVID.
Weinstein, host of the DarkHorse Podcast, told Rogan that YouTube “demonetized” his channels, removed some of his videos and issued warnings for content that mentioned ivermectin, labeling it “spam” and “deceptive medical information.”
YouTube’s message is “drop the science and stick to the narrative — or else,” Weinstein tweeted.
YouTube just demonetized both DarkHorse channels, wiping out more than half our family income. Their message: Drop the science and stick to the narrative—or else.
No, YouTube. Review *this* video.#CensorshipKills, belts tighten, incomes can be replacedhttps://t.co/XodZq0gApu
— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) June 29, 2021
Weinstein told Rogan ivermectin is an effective antiparasitic drug that’s been given to 4 billion people worldwide. The World Health Organization considers ivermectin an essential medicine that’s safe for kids, Weinstine said.
Ivermectin was discovered in the 1970s by Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Ōmura and American parasitic biologist William C. Campbell. Their discovery won them the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology.
The drug has successfully treated millions of people with River Blindness, a disease caused by parasitic worms that ultimately leads to blindness. It’s also proven effective against Lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease spread by mosquitoes.
Kory told Rogan that ivermectin also works for diseases such as the Zika virus, Dengue, HIV, West Nile and influenza.
Mounting evidence highlights its effectiveness against COVID, too, said Kory.
An independent meta-analysis published in June in the American Journal of Therapeutics found patients treated with ivermectin had a 62% reduction in COVID deaths.
Kory said:
“You’d save two out of every three people that you treated. That’s the minimum of what ivermectin is capable of because not in every trial were they treated early. When you look at the early versus late, they do so much better.”
COVID patients given ivermectin early on had about an 80% reduction in hospitalizations and death, said Kory.
Another study published in February in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases found that nearly 85% of patients in Mexico that were given ivermectin as part of a multidrug therapy recovered from COVID within two weeks.
Weinstein and Kory both agree ivermectin could have saved millions of lives, but doctors were told not to use it.
Listen to the full interview here:
The post Joe Rogan’s ‘Emergency Podcast’ Questions YouTube’s Censorship of Content Showing Ivermectin as an Effective COVID Treatment appeared first on Children’s Health Defense.
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2215 | Morning Edition Hour 2 | Recorded October 10, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2215: Why Governor Races Matter; Oil Prices Continue To Climb.
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2214 | Morning Edition Hour 1 | Recorded October 10, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2214: Katie Hobbs Fears Debating Kari Lake; MAGA Continues To Lead In Polling; Mortality Rates Spike Among Men 18-39 Following Inoculation.
Dr. Paul Marik Speaks About The Silencing of Doctors Who Want to Speak Out About the COVID Vaccines | Video: 48 Minutes 54 Seconds
My friends who believe the vaccine are safe have told me they would reconsider their position if any of their doctors came out against the vaccine.
I told them that doctors are afraid to speak out because they will lose their ability to practice medicine if they challenge the mainstream narrative.
They find that too hard to believe.
So I wanted to interview a doctor who is very highly respected and who is not an “anti-vaxxer” to explain it to them.
The medical community had to fabricate patients, not reveal their names to Dr. Marik, in order to strip him of his ability to practice medicine.
In this video, Paul describes the methods used to silence doctors who choose to speak out.
This is why few doctors challenge the status quo. That’s wrong. That’s why they created tenure in universities to prevent abuses like this.
~ Steve Kirsch
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2213 | Saturday Edition Hour 2 | Recorded October 8, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2213: The Establishment Fears What Is Happening In Arizona; Secretaries Of State Are Under Attack Across The Country.
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2212 | Saturday Edition Hour 1 | Recorded October 8, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2212: Fear-Mongering Of Nuclear Fallout And Executive Orders On Collecting Data; Is El Paso Texas The New Ellis island.
Ron DeSantis says Biden should get ‘honorary’ drug cartel membership for border policies | New York Post
Migrants from Haiti heading to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents to request asylum in El Paso, Texas on May 17, 2022.
Go Nakamura for New York Post
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that President Biden’s border policies would secure him “honorary” membership in a Mexican drug cartel.
Speaking at an unrelated press conference in Okaloosa County, DeSantis panned Biden for allowing a Trump-era border control measure to end and argued that the country’s southern perimeter has come undone.
“He is violating his own oath of office by allowing massive numbers of people to come across the border illegally,” DeSantis said. “Those border communities are just getting killed down in southern Texas with everything coming in.”
DeSantis said porous borders are accelerating America’s fentanyl crisis and that narcotics are flowing over the border unchecked.
“Biden should be given an honorary membership in the Mexican drug cartels,” he said. “Because nobody has done more to help the cartels than Biden with his open border policies.”
Enacted in March 2020 amid a worsening pandemic, Title 42 barred asylum seekers from gaining entry to America from the Mexican border.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ruled that the restriction was no longer warranted on health grounds and recommended that it end.
Vancouver’s safe drug-use sites are wrenching to see. California should open them anyway | Los Angeles Times
Medics with the Vancouver Fire Rescue Services attend to a man who overdosed on drugs in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
VANCOUVER, Canada — In the coastal cold of a Vancouver morning, nine people crowded at the door of the Insite safe injection center, itching for it to open so they could shoot heroin and fentanyl inside.
Around their huddle on this two-block stretch of East Hastings Street, hundreds of people, the majority habitual drug users, were crushed together in tents and chairs, on discarded rugs and under wet tarps. Some were sprawled on the sidewalk, motionless and unconscious. One man repeatedly hurled a hatchet at the pavement.
Open-use drug havens such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin and L.A.’s skid row have become notorious and contentious, but those places have nothing on East Hastings, part of a neighborhood called Downtown Eastside. In every direction, there were needles in arms and butane lighters melting chunks of fentanyl, heroin and meth — the stench of burning chemicals was unavoidable. For many residents and business owners in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, only a block away, East Hastings means theft, garbage, graffiti and a near-constant blare of sirens.
I came to Vancouver to see what can be learned as we debate safe consumption in California, where more than 6,000 people die each year from overdoses. Think about that. Six thousand is the roughly number of Californians who die each year from traffic accidents and firearms combined. Across the U.S., one person dies every five minutes from an overdose. In California, on average, 16 perish daily.
Federal indictment tossed after ex-DEA supervisor says Latinos ‘typically’ supply drugs in Chicago | Chicago Sun-Times
Dirksen Federal Courthouse, 219 S. Dearborn St. | Rich Hein/Sun-Times
Federal prosecutors have made the rare move of seeking dismissal of a three-year-old drug indictment following testimony from a former Drug Enforcement Administration supervisor who said drugs in Chicago are “typically trafficked by Latino people.”
The comments seemed to stun defense attorneys and catch the attention of U.S. District Judge John Blakey, who on Friday agreed to toss charges pending since 2019 against Leonel Hernandez-Rodriguez, Feliberto Flores-Ramos, Charlie Dotson and Francisco Carranza-Rosales.
The unusual move came more than a month after Keith Billiot, who is now retired but worked as a supervisory special agent for the DEA, testified about his role in the case during a March evidentiary hearing. He later walked back his comment following intense cross-examination, telling the judge race was “irrelevant” to the DEA’s work.
Billiot explained during the hearing what had led him to believe Flores-Ramos and Dotson had been involved in a drug deal Jan. 31, 2019. After naming other factors, including the behavior of the suspects, Billiot went further, according to a court transcript.
“In the city of Chicago for the five-and-a-half years that I worked here, typically — not always, but typically it is people of Latino descent are the ones that are supplying people of African American descent or Caucasians, or whatever,” Billiot said, according to the transcript. “But it’s the — the fact of the matter is that the drugs come up from Mexico or come in from Colombia but they come through Latino countries into the cities throughout the U.S. and therefore they’re typically trafficked by Latino people. So all of that, when you put all of that together, it indicated a narcotics transaction to me.”
Defense attorneys in the case — Thomas Anthony Durkin, Gal Pissetzky, Michael Leonard and Robert Rascia — all moved to strike Billiot’s testimony. Blakey said he’d strike the comment about race and added, “I’m going to permit vigorous cross examination on the issue, so fire away.”
Billiot could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney John Lausch, said that, “after reviewing the matter internally, we decided that moving to dismiss the indictment was the best course of action in this case.”
A criminal complaint in the case said law enforcement saw Flores-Ramos leave a home in the 6500 block of South Kenneth the afternoon of Jan. 31, 2019, holding his hand against the left side of his jacket in a way that suggested he was hiding something.
It said Flores-Ramos then got in a Dodge Caliber and traveled to 63rd and Kilbourn while investigators followed. The Dodge parked behind a white Buick sedan, Flores-Ramos got out and climbed into the Buick’s passenger seat with his hand still pressed against his jacket, according to the complaint.
Dotson was allegedly in the Buick’s driver’s seat.
Investigators soon drove toward the Buick and parked next to it, records show. After ordering Dotson and Flores-Ramos out of the car, authorities said they spotted an open bag filled with what turned out to be $34,000 cash on the front passenger floorboard. The feds also said a closed backpack in the back seat later turned out to contain a kilogram of cocaine.
The other defendants were found at the home on South Kenneth, where the feds say they also found eight kilograms of cocaine and $600,000 cash in a dishwasher.
Flores-Ramos admitted after his arrest that he’d gone to sell cocaine to Dotson, according to the complaint.
Still, during the March hearing, Billiot found himself defending his comments about the ethnicity of typical drug suppliers in Chicago. He noted he’d also pointed out other key factors in the investigation.
“So it was not the mere fact — and to be quite honest with you, I’m offended by the whole racism thing,” Billiot told Durkin. “It was not the fact that a Latino person met with a Black person. Absolutely not. Is that clear enough, sir, please? Can we get beyond that please?”
“I started with the probable cause that we developed upon your client and went all the way through the chain of events, sir,” Billiot continued. “That’s including the car, the car is running, the lights are off. Why would that be, sir? So I painted the picture of the entire probable cause that we saw, all the — the things that we saw. We didn’t generate those things. The client — the defendants here did but I simply testified as to what we saw. There is no racism involved in this.”
Blakey also questioned him about the comment, asking whether the ethnicity of the defendants played any role in his decision-making.
“It’s irrelevant,” Billiot eventually told the judge. “Someone’s ethnicity — the clearest way for me to say this is someone’s ethnicity is irrelevant to us in all respects.”
But Billiot pushed back once more against Durkin, telling the defense attorney, “this inference of racism is so phony.”
“You know nothing about me,” Billiot said. “Nothing. For you to infer that I’m a racist, I’m the godfather of an African-American child. She is — she is the daughter of a police officer and soldier who is one of my closest friends.
“There is nothing racist about what we do or how we do it. Nothing.”
Feds find major drug-smuggling tunnel at US-Mexican border | New York Post
Federal officials announced that they’ve discovered a drug tunnel equipped with electricity and a rail system on the California-Mexico border.
AP
A sophisticated drug-smuggling tunnel equipped with a rail system and electricity was discovered near the US-Mexico border in California on Friday, authorities said.
The subterranean passage, one-third of a mile long, linked Tijuana to a warehouse near San Diego’s Otay Mesa border, federal officials announced Monday.
The tunnel also had ventilation systems and reinforced walls and is 61 feet deep and 4 feet in diameter.
As part of the bust, 1,762 pounds of cocaine, 164 pounds of meth and 3.5 pounds of heroin were recovered.
Six people were charged with cocaine trafficking, and two of those six were also charged with meth and heroin trafficking, authorities said.
Authorities ultimately uncovered the tunnel after they pulled over vehicles they saw coming and going from a home and the warehouse. During those traffic stops, boxes of drugs were found, prosecutors said.
Homeland Security memo: Drug cartels control human trafficking corridors to Biden border | Just The News
As border patrol agents brace for another massive surge, a new Homeland Security Department memo acknowledges that drug cartels control the human trafficking corridors to America and are profiting from the porous southern border under President Joe Biden.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody released the memo, saying it lays bare the cost of Biden administration policies suspending the Remain in Mexico Policy and terminating Title 42 public health authority.
“This is a shocking discovery,” Moody said. “It contradicts what the Biden administration has been telling the American people and shows that the Mexican drug cartels are profiting off the mass migration of unvetted immigrants to fund an increase in violence at the border.”
Attorneys general from multiple states have sued the administration over terminating both policies, including Texas AG Ken Paxton and Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, who recently argued before the Supreme Court asking it to require the administration to follow the law and reinstate the MPP.
“We are in the midst of a national opioid crisis and the deadliest drugs are being smuggled into our country from Mexico,” Moody said in a statement. “President Biden knows this, yet he continues to double down on his terrible immigration policies knowing full well these policies are emboldening and enriching the very drug cartels who are profiting off the deaths of thousands of Americans.”
China and Mexican Drug Cartels Helped Murder 339,849 Americans and Most Politcians Do Not Care | The Gateway Pundit
The numbers are stark and terrible–339,849 Americans (mostly under 50 years old) died from a drug overdose since 2018. Here are the numbers according to the CDC:
Year and Number of Deaths:
2018 67,367
2019 72,151
2020 93,331
2021 107,000
Last year, for example, almost twice the number of Americans died from drug overdose–e.g., fentanyl and opiods–than were killed in the Vietnam War. When you add up the numbers from 2018 to 2021, we had 3 times the fatalities then from the deaths in Vietnam and Korea alone.
You do not have to be a math genius to understand that 294 Americans are dying each day from the drugs that are produced in China and smuggled across the U.S./Mexico border courtesy of Mexican drug cartels. To put this in perspective, 220 Marines were killed by a terrorist bombing in Beirut, Lebanon in in October, 1983. That attack awakened Americans to the reality of Middle East terrorism.
Where is the outrage now? The American public has been bamboozled into feeding a war in Ukraine and spending billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on weapons that are being captured by the Russians or siphoned off by Ukrainian gangsters to be sold on the black market.
I am not trying to spin up support for a war against China. But our refusal to hold the Chinese accountable for their production of synthetic narcotics is fueling a lethal drug abuse crisis in the United States. Sober College provides a genuine sobering summary:
Often referred to as “legal highs,” synthetic drugs are made by chemists who avoid legal repercussions because of their ability to alter formulas and avoid arrest. By changing the formula to include compounds that are not listed among banned drugs, individuals are able to abuse synthetic drugs that cause effects similar to those caused by illegal drugs, and without fear of legal consequences. Since the compounds of synthetic drugs are constantly changing, it is nearly impossible to compile a complete list of them. Although some synthetic drugs have recently become illegal, the ever-changing formulas constant influx of new substances are a cause for concern and have made it difficult to stop the growing epidemic.
We should not spend one more dime in Ukraine or on the military until we have secured our southern border. The bloodbath from drug overdose is only part of the story of carnage ravaging America. Drug gangs in the major cities ruled by Democrats are plugging each other and unsuspecting civilians every day. Yet, the American public keeps swallowing the lie that we need to back overseas military adventures while blood is filling our streets and destroying families here. If you do not see the sickening absurdity of this then you have no heart.
The post China and Mexican Drug Cartels Helped Murder 339,849 Americans and Most Politcians Do Not Care appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Horrific moment TV journalist sobs over body of her anti-drug prosecutor husband after he was gunned down on their HONEYMOON in Colombia just hours after she revealed she was pregnant | Daily Mail UK
Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci (left) was celebrating his honeymoon with his wife Claudia Aguilera (right) in the island of Barú near the Colombian city of Cartagena when a man shot him dead Tuesday. (Instagram)
- A suspect in the murder of Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci was seen leaving a shop where a jet ski was rented to carry out Tuesday’s killing
- Pecci was in Colombia to celebrate his honeymoon with his journalist wife Claudia Aguilera when two men walked up to them and shot him twice
- The suspect and his accomplice raised suspicions when they returned the jet ski after using it for only 15 minutes of the allotted 30 minutes
- Colombian authorities have offered a $488,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the man who appeared in the shop’s surveillance video
This is the devastating moment a newlywed TV journalist broke down over the body of her prosecutor husband after he was assassinated while honeymooning on a Colombian beach.
Marcelo Pecci, 45, was shot dead in front of his wife Claudia Aguilera in Isla Barú outside the Caribbean city of Cartagena on Tuesday.
The execution took place moments after Aguilera, who worked for television network Unicanal, and Pecci, who has been waging a war on drug cartels, announced they were expecting a baby.
The high-profile couple, from Paraguay, had just uploaded a photo to Instagram of themselves embracing on the sand behind a pair of baby sneakers.
‘The best wedding gift is… life bringing you closer to the most beautiful testimony of love,’ Aguilera wrote on her account.
Aguilera told Colombian law enforcement investigators that the two suspects approached them on the beach at the Decameron Hotel and did not say a word before one of them shot Pecci, once in the face and once in the back.
DEA Quietly Removes Narco-Busting Aircraft From Mexico As Drug Overdoses Skyrocket | Daily Caller
As overdose-induced deaths skyrocket to record highs in the U.S, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has quietly relocated a plane fundamental to anti-narcotics operations in Mexico, according to Reuters.
The DEA plane was moved to Texas after Mexican officials revoked its parking spot, according to an anonymous U.S. government official and two security sources, Reuters reported. The move coincides with new data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that shows over 100,000 Americans have died of drug overdoses in 2021, which is a 15% increase from 2020 and a 30% increase from 2019 driven largely by the use of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
China is the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked into the U.S., and the drug is often smuggled into the country at the southern border, according to the DEA. Border officials have seized record amounts of fentanyl from traffickers in 2022.
The plane’s removal impacts the U.S.’s ability to combat organized crime inside the country, which could delay the extraditions of high-ranking cartel leaders, according to Reuters. The DEA has had an aircraft based in Mexico since the early 1990s to help carry out anti-cartel operations and transport both U.S. and Mexican agents in critical raids.
“It will bring things to a halt,” one of the security sources told Reuters. “We can’t drive through parts of Mexico, it’s too dangerous.”
The plane’s relocation is the latest blow to joint operations between the U.S. and Mexico to fight drug smuggling, Reuters reported. Relations have deteriorated since Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in 2018.
Texas mom who laced baby’s milk with drugs will only serve probation | New York Post
Mom Laced Milk
A Texas mom who admitted to spiking her baby’s milk with hydrocodone to kill the infant and poison her other child will not serve any time in prison.
Sapphire Elizabeth Araujo, a 37-year-old from El Paso, was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to complete 80 hours of community service Tuesday, news station KFOX reported.
Araujo admitted to crushing up hydrocodone pills and mixing it into her then-5-month-old’s milk and feeding it to the baby, the outlet reported.
The mother sat through one day of testimony in the trial before accepting a plea deal from the district attorney that spared her any additional time behind bars.
She pleaded guilty to charges of reckless injury to a child and criminal neglect.
Her pregnancy counselor testified that “she had reached a place of hopelessness” at the time of the drugging and that she was struggling with mental health issues, KTSM reported.
She also intended to poison her then-2-year-old before killing herself and the baby because she was feeling overwhelmed, according to KTSM.
Drug Overdose Deaths Rise Nearly 15% in Joe Biden’s First Year as President | Breitbart
Deaths from drug overdoses increased by 15 percent in President Joe Biden’s first year of office, according to new data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 107,000 people in the United States died from drug overdoses in 2021, according to data — over 80,000 of which died from opioids.
Deaths from fentanyl continue to grow as Biden pursued open border policies, allowing more drug smugglers into the United States.
The growth of fentanyl crossing the border from Mexico skyrocketed in 2021 as seizures of the deadly drug at the border quadrupled.
China primarily manufactures fentanyl and it is then flown into Mexico where drug cartels traffic it into the United States.
Former Honduran President Hernandez Pleads Not Guilty to US Drug Charges
Honduran police officers escort Juan Orlando Hernandez, center, to Toncontin International Airport (TGU) in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on April 21.Photographer: Tomas Ayuso/Bloomberg
The former president of Honduras wants to call former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama as well as convicted Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman as defense witnesses against US drug charges.
Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was a head of state from 2014 until January, appeared in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday to plead not guilty to engaging in an 18-year drug-trafficking conspiracy. After the arraignment, Hernandez’s lawyer Raymond Colon spoke to reporters outside the courthouse and proclaimed his client’s innocence.
Colon said Guzman, the former head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel who is now serving a life sentence in the US, could be called to testify that he never met or dealt with Hernandez. Trump and Obama would say that Hernandez was a strong ally in the fight against drug trafficking, the lawyer suggested.
“They acknowledged his activities and my client was the first president to enforce or agree to the extradition of individuals in Honduras that were trafficking narcotics,” Colon said “We need to bring that out and maybe that’s our way out of a life sentence.”
Denise Francine ‘Fran’ Boyd Andrews, a drug counselor whose battle with addiction inspired a book and HBO miniseries, dies
Denise Francine “Fran” Boyd Andrews worked on street outreach, HIV education and outreach, overdose counseling and case management at Bon Secours Health System. (Amy Davis / XX)
Denise Francine “Fran” Boyd Andrews, whose desperate, determined, despairing — and ultimately triumphant — battle with drug addiction was chronicled in the Emmy Award-winning HBO miniseries “The Corner” died Tuesday in her Parkville home after a brief illness. She was 65.
The cause of her death is unknown.
Mrs. Andrews’ life took her from the shooting galleries and flophouses of Baltimore’s Franklin Square neighborhood to a bed in a rehabilitation facility and ultimately, the Hollywood red carpet.
Her first husband died from a drug overdose. Her 2007 wedding to her second husband, Donnie Andrews, who inspired the character of Omar Little on the HBO series, “The Wire,” was chronicled on the front page of the New York Times. The couple later spoke at Harvard University.
“Don’t let nobody tell you what you can’t do,” Mrs. Andrews said often. “You can turn your life around.”
Even after she’d accomplished so much and helped lift up many members of her family, Mrs. Andrews’ life continued to be marred by tragedy. In 2012, she lost her eldest son to a drug overdose and her second husband to a fatal tear in his artery.
But Mrs. Andrews never stopped fighting. She worried over and cared for and tried to find resources for the clients she counseled at the Bon Secours Health System, whether she was on the clock or not. She refused to lose.
Despite his grief, Stanley Boyd couldn’t help laughing when he talked about the woman he called “my big little sister.” Though Stanley Boyd was four years older than Fran, he said he looked up to her.
“She could do anything,” her brother said. “Despite all the trials she had in her life, she affected so many people.”
Utah Was Warned Racial Rationing of COVID Drugs Was Illegal. It Did It Anyway. | The Washington Free Beacon
Utah public health officials were warned that allocating COVID drugs based on race violated federal law, but did so anyway with the backing of the Biden administration, emails and documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.
Utah’s points-based system for prioritizing COVID patients, which allocated more points for being non-white than for having congestive heart failure, troubled two law professors specializing in bioethics. They informed the doctors who designed the system in September 2021 that it was probably illegal.
“The use of non-white race really set off alarm bells,” Teneille Brown, a professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, said in an email.
The “consensus among legal academics,” Brown’s colleague Leslie Francis added, is that a system like Utah’s would “violate federal law.”
This piece is based on materials obtained via a third-party public records request and shared with the Free Beacon.
The doctors Brown and Francis emailed were part of the state’s Crisis Standards of Care workgroup, assembled by the Utah Hospital Association at the behest of the health department. When COVID surged in November 2020, the health department asked the group to develop a system for allocating scarce therapies. The group conceded its approach hadn’t been “reviewed legally.” But, they assured the law professors, it did have the blessing of the Biden administration.
The Department of Health and Human Services “has lauded our approach,” said Mark Shah, the director of Utah’s Disaster Medical Assistance Team and a member of the group. In February 2021, Shah’s colleague Brandon Webb presented the race-based allocation system to HHS, according to power point slides reviewed by the Free Beacon. HHS subsequently listed the system as a “promising practice” for other states to consider.
Such race-conscious policies proliferated throughout the pandemic, sparking both moral outrage and legal scrutiny. Like Utah, Minnesota and New York prioritized non-white residents for moncolonal antibodies. Vermont did the same for vaccines. Some states, including Utah and Minnesota, scrapped their policies in the wake of political backlash—and amid threats of legal action from conservative nonprofits.
The emails suggest Utah was ground zero for many of these schemes. The state initially defended its system by invoking guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, which lists race as a risk factor that can qualify patients for monoclonal antibodies. But according to the emails, it was Utah that inspired that guidance in the first place.
“The FDA reviewed our Utah Risk Score and used it as precedent for including ‘race and other risk factors’ as qualifiers,” Shah told the group in June 2021. Minnesota in turn used that precedent to justify its own allocation system.
The emails reflect the race-conscious consensus that has taken hold of medical bureaucracies across the country. As that consensus has consolidated at every level of government, it has emboldened public health officials to flout anti-discrimination law, which they assume won’t be enforced.
The gap between law and policy widened with the pandemic, which provided an emergency pretext for suspending civil rights. Nondiscrimination, the emails suggest, was seen as an obstacle to crisis management.
“I’d prefer just using the ‘we’re too busy trying to save lives during the surge’ excuse,” Webb, an infectious diseases specialist at Intermountain Healthcare, emailed his colleagues after some back and forth with the law professors.
That utilitarian mindset extended to Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox, who in January 2022 told health officials to modify the allocation system, a spokesperson for the governor said—but only after it became clear that the drugs weren’t reaching minorities. The problem wasn’t that the system discriminated by race; it was that the discrimination didn’t work.
“Despite the inclusion of race and ethnicity,” the spokesperson told the Free Beacon, “communities of color did not receive monoclonal antibodies proportionate to their share of COVID-test positives.”
“I’m frankly surprised that this has not yet been subject to a legal challenge,” Webb wrote the law professors. He added that in 2020, the group asked “the Office of Civil Rights” for guidance on the use of race but didn’t receive a response.
It is unclear to which office Webb was referring. A draft copy of the group’s inquiry includes no date or letterhead, and Roger Severino, HHS’s director of civil rights at the time, said it never came across his desk.
“Had this been brought to my attention,” Severino told the Free Beacon, “I would have told them they risked violating Title VI and would have merited my office investigating them had they gone through with such explicit race based rationing.”
Reached for comment, Webb said Shah was the one who sent the inquiry. Shah did not respond to a request for comment.
The group, which developed the system in November 2020, took for granted that all racial minorities should receive special treatment. It borrowed heavily from an allocation system used by the Cleveland Clinic, which prioritized African Americans for monoclonal antibodies. The “only knock” against that system, Webb wrote the group, is that “it only gives disparity weighting to black race rather than recognizing elevated risk associated with other race/ethnicities.”
Utah’s system was based on an analysis of 20,000 COVID patients between March and October 2020. Though some minorities are at higher risk than others, according to the state’s own data, the analysis lumped all of them together, comparing hospitalization rates between “white” and “non-white” Utahns.
The result was a “risk score calculator” that gave “non-white race or Hispanic/Latinx ethnicity” two points—more than it gave hypertension, chronic kidney disease, or shortness of breath. Utahns needed to score a certain number of points to be eligible for monoclonal antibodies.
The calculator was first used by the Intermountain hospital system, which employed many members of the group, including Webb and Shah. By September 2021, it was causing controversy among COVID-stricken patients.
“We have been forced into a defense of the scoring system as now constituents are reaching out to elected leaders asking why they are not eligible,” lamented Kevin McCulley, the Preparedness and Response director for the health department.
As pushback mounted, the department’s main concern was semantic rather than substantive. Officials spent days wordsmithing an online “self-screening tool” based on the calculator, in part to ensure it didn’t run afoul of progressive sensibilities.
“Latinex should have the ‘e’ removed (Latinx),” Matthew Plendl, a member of the health department, said of an early draft.
Some exchanges read like parodies of progressive racecraft, with officials attempting to sort out who would count as “non-white.”
The calculator lets “someone select more than one race category,” noted Jenny Johnson, a member of the health department’s communications team. “Would this mean anyone who marks ONLY White would not meet the criteria? And those who mark at least one race category that is not White does meet the criteria?”
Particularly vexing was the status of Hispanics.
“Someone with a high level of cultural competence should help us wordsmith this,” McCulley wrote his colleagues. “Is your race Non-white or Hispanic/Latinex Ethnicity? I don’t think Hispanic is a race.”
The post Utah Was Warned Racial Rationing of COVID Drugs Was Illegal. It Did It Anyway. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.
BORDER TOWN USA: Nashville Trio Moved Mexican Cartel Drugs Across Nation | Breitbart
A trio from Nashville pleaded guilty to smuggling millions of dollars worth of fentanyl and heroin into Texas and then on to several U.S. cities for a Mexican drug cartel. The group moved multiple drug loads from the border region to their final destination in Tennessee before being arrested by authorities last year.
This week, two U.S. citizens, 23-year-old Liz Jomayra Diaz-Colon and 30-year-old Elias Herrera appeared before a U.S. District Court Judge in McAllen, Texas, where they pleaded guilty to drug trafficking conspiracy charges. Another member of the group, 30-year-old Jonathan Guemez, pleaded guilty to a similar charge in December.
The drug loads seized by investigators are valued at more than $1.6 million, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas revealed. It remains unclear how many drug loads the group was able to move before they were arrested. Court documents do not name the drug cartel the smugglers worked for.
Nightly News Rebroadcast | October 7, 2022 | Video: 27 Minutes 06 Seconds
The Uvalde school district suspended its entire school police force on Oct. 7, months after the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 people. New York City Mayor Eric Adams is declaring a state of emergency over the influx of illegal immigrants arriving on buses from border states.