New Hampshire Can Blaze The Trail To Plentiful Carbon-Free Energy thumbnail

New Hampshire Can Blaze The Trail To Plentiful Carbon-Free Energy

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By Center For Security Policy

As energy prices continue to crush families and businesses, the future looks bleak for northern New England and its heavy reliance on carbon-belching fossil fuels.

But there’s a bright spot up ahead. This summer, Governor Chris Sununu signed into law House Bill 543, an act “establishing a commission to study nuclear power and nuclear reactor technology in New Hampshire.” That culminated a multi-year effort on the part of local New Hampshire citizens, activists, and elected officials to meet the state’s challenges in energy security and environmental stewardship.

Given the plights of neighboring Vermont and Maine, which shut down their nuclear plants and have no major carbon-free energy solutions in sight, the commission’s work could make the Granite State a net exporter of clean electricity.

The initiative has support across the spectrum, from environmentalists who see nuclear energy as a vital bridge toward more sustainable alternatives in the future, to political conservatives.

Valerie Gardner, co-founder of the California based Climate Coalition and Managing Partner of Nucleation Capital, said “the wording of NH HB 543 is very smart, direct and no-nonsense and it should be a model for every state in the nation!”

Karen Testerman of Franklin, who is challenging Sununu from the right in the September primary, worked with Grafton County Commissioner Omer Ahern Jr., to bring nuclear energy experts to the state. Their goals: to explore both the necessity of keeping Seabrook Station, northern New England’s last nuclear power plant and the largest generator in the six-state electrical grid, operating for its entire useful life; and to explore next generation nuclear technology to go online well before Seabrook’s license expires in the year 2050.

Those experts included Steve Curtis and Tom Dolan, who traveled throughout the state to brief citizens and leaders about the economic and national security benefits of nuclear power and the need for America to embrace spent nuclear fuel as a new sustainable source of energy. They stirred interest in the promising concept of recycling spent nuclear fuel in next-generation fast reactors – for which America has a domestic supply equivalent to 250 years of clean, carbon-free power – sitting unused on reactor sites nationwide, including at Seabrook, and in Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont.

“As a grassroots state, we in New Hampshire realize we can’t wait for others to take care of our challenges,” said Testerman.  “By presenting the issue to the House Science and Technology Committee members, and through radio outreach on New Hampshire’s Common Sense radio program, we became the catalyst to initiating the potential pathway to energy independence,” she said.

The initiative could supply everyone on the New Hampshire grid with clean electricity and make the state a major exporter of planet-friendly power to its neighbors.

The primary sponsor of the legislation was Representative Keith Ammon. His legislative approach received applause by advocates of clean energy nationwide.

Gardner, of the Climate Coalition, explained that New Hampshire is not alone in studying the benefits of nuclear for clean energy. “Michigan is already there, and WY, IN, WV, AL, WI, IL and CT have already repealed bans and/or passed pro-SMR” bills,” she wrote, referring to state-level actions meant to explore the next generation nuclear revolution.

With the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington slow-walking recommendations to embrace a carbon-free future with next-generation reactors and recycled spent nuclear fuel, New Hampshire’s new commission has the potential to make a historic difference for the state and the nation.

AUTHOR

Tommy Waller

Executive Vice President, Center for Security Policy.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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CFACT Brings ‘Energy Reality’ to Television, Radio, Social Media and in Movies!

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By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

CFACT constantly speaks pro-energy truth to green anti-energy propaganda.

Any given day you’ll catch CFACT’s team on TV, the web, social media, radio, movies… you name it.

Institutional leftism has grown so prevalent, it takes an unrelenting voice of reason, creatively utilizing media of all kinds to compete and win through.

Unrelenting is a fine word to describe CFACT.

Watch Marc Morano, the force behind our award-winning Climate Depot news and information service, take to the screen to debunk myths about EV’s and China on Centerpoint TV.

Hear me take on Biden’s outrageous “30×30” land grab on VCY America Radio.

Listen to Gabriella Hoffman expose the absurdity of banning Canadian imports of game birds on her District of Conservation Podcast.

Check out the crowd that gathered to watch CFACT’s feature film Climate Hustle 2: Rise of the Climate Monarchy in Dallas!

In August, CFACT went over 50 million monthly viewers on social media!

CFACT has been warning about radical attempts to wreck America’s energy economy since 1985.  Sadly, our words have proven all too prophetic.

I’m proud of the ability of CFACT’s staff to unrelentingly out debate the Left every day, on EVERY form of media at our disposal.

©CFACT. All rights reserved.

World’s Most Lethal Virus the Spanish Flu, Revived by Fauci’s Mad ‘Scientists’ thumbnail

World’s Most Lethal Virus the Spanish Flu, Revived by Fauci’s Mad ‘Scientists’

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By MERCOLA Take Control of Your Health

National Institutes of Health Scientists Have Recreated World’s Deadliest Flu Virus

Evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 being the product of gain-of-function (GoF) research. Indeed, attorney Tom Renz will soon release the results of a major legal investigation, which he claims will demonstrate — beyond a reasonable doubt — that SARS-CoV-2 was created as part of a GoF project.1

Whether the outbreak was accidental, intentional or the result of negligence, the end result is the same — devastation of health, commerce, finance and civil life worldwide for years on end.

Now imagine what might happen if something like the Spanish flu got out — or worse, a turbo-charged, genetically engineered version of it. Incomprehensible as it may seem to the average person, scientists in the U.S. and Canada have resurrected this devastatingly lethal virus and, not surprisingly, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) are involved.

Mad Scientists Are Testing Recreated Spanish Flu on Monkeys

As reported by Renz, August 19, 2022:2

“… this is so absurd that I am just starting with the reference document because I am concerned no one will believe it. Here it is: ‘Spanish Flu GoF.’3 Yes, that is right, Fauci and crew are now actively performing gain-of-function (GoF) work and infecting primates with the Spanish Flu … Here is a quote from the document:

‘… Influenza virus A/South Carolina/1918 (H1N1) was generated by reverse genetics and handled in biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) containment at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML).

Sequences of the 1918 influenza viral segments were based on data reported under GenBank accession numbers DQ208309, DQ208310, DQ208311, AF117241, AY744935, AF250356, AY130766, and AF333238.

1918 influenza virus was cultured using Madin-Darby canine kidney … cells. MDCK cells were grown in minimum essential medium … supplemented with 5% fetal bovine serum … and 1 L-glutamine …

A passage 2 (P2) virus stock was prepared using MEM supplemented with 0.1% bovine serum albumin (BSA) … 1 L-glutamine, and 1 mg/mL N-tosyl-L-phenylalanine chloromethyl ketone (TPCK)-treated trypsin …

This stock was used for animal inoculation. The mouse 50% lethal dose (MLD50) for this stock was determined previously to be 103.2 PFU; this value was confirmed prior to the use of the stock for macaque infection.’

I frankly do not care to debate the nuance of whether the recreation of generally extinct virus ‘generated by reverse genetics’ using pieces and parts of other animals qualifies as GoF; what I care about is that we have recreated the Spanish Flu and are experimenting with it on other animals.”

Spanish Flu ‘Not Lethal Enough’

As noted by Renz, the scientists appear frustrated by the fact that their reverse engineered Spanish flu virus — even at the highest doses tested — was not lethal enough to kill the two macaque species selected for the experiment.

Macaques were therefore deemed “not ideal for the development and testing of novel pandemic influenza-specific vaccines and therapies,” necessitating “other physiologically relevant nonhuman primate models.” Renz continues:4

“… given the result of the previous coronavirus GoF, can ANYONE possibly argue GoF work on the Spanish Flu is a good idea? Even the simple recreation of the disease demonstrates an incredible lack of respect for the disaster created by the coronavirus GoF.

So you may be asking, what moron could possibly be oblivious enough to support GoF work on the Spanish Flu while the world is still dealing with the nightmare that is COVID? The answer should not be surprising … NIH and NIAID are involved.

Apparently Fauci does not mind what he did with funding the creation of COVID and is at it again. You might also note the vaccine development crew’s involvement. A foundational point in this article is that the newly recreated Spanish Flu is not dangerous enough. Here is a pull-quote:

‘However, 1918 influenza was uniformly nonlethal in these two species, demonstrating that this isolate is insufficiently pathogenic in rhesus and Mauritian cynomolgus macaques to support testing novel prophylactic influenza approaches where protection from severe disease combined with a lethal outcome is desired as a highly stringent indication of vaccine efficacy.’

This means that these people are arguing that we need to make a more dangerous version of the Spanish Flu so they can make ‘better’ vaccines for it … despite the fact that until they recreated it, it likely no longer existed in nature.”

As noted by Renz, elected officials really need to answer the question, “Why is this kind of research allowed to continue on your watch?” Why are we reverse engineering the most lethal viruses the world has ever seen — after they’ve already been eradicated?

The argument that we need to create dangerous viruses “just in case” Nature comes up with something similar, so we can create vaccines for said viruses in advance, simply doesn’t hold water. Stop creating these monstrosities, and we won’t need the vaccines! This is science gone mad, and it must be stopped.

Besides, what are the chances that a virus would emerge naturally that just so happens to perfectly match the virus we now have a vaccine against? The entire premise is irrational from start to finish. It’s biowarfare research and nothing else

The Intentional Cover-Up of SARS-CoV-2’s Origin

Fauci, former NIH chief Dr. Francis Collins, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak and other members of the scientific community have spent the last two and a half years actively stifling debate about the genesis of SARS-CoV-2.

And, coincidentally, most of them have clear-cut connections to bat coronavirus GoF research and/or the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which appears to be the lab from which the virus somehow escaped.

So, it appears those who insist SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin, despite all the evidence to the contrary, are doing so because they don’t want risky virological research to be blamed for the COVID pandemic. That would “blow their cover” and raise questions about the sanity of funding such research.

Some may be so enamored with their chosen careers, they cannot imagine doing anything other than tinkering with pathogens. For them, pulled funding is a threat to their livelihood. But for others, the underlying incentive may be more nefarious. Like I already said, there’s really no reason for this kind of research other than the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

Whatever incentive any given player may have had, what’s clear is that Fauci, Collins, Daszak and many others intentionally undermined efforts to get to the bottom of where SARS-CoV-2 came from.

Corrupted Science

Attesting to this corruption of science is Jeffrey Sachs, Ph.D., professor of economy at Columbia University, a senior United Nations adviser and chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, convened in June 2020.

Sachs originally assigned Daszak to lead and organize the COVID-19 Commission’s task force to investigate the virus’s genesis (one of 11 task forces under the COVID Commission). Sachs ended up dismissing Daszak from the task force in June 2021, after he realized just how serious Daszak’s conflicts of interest were,5 and that Daszak was lying to him.6

Eventually, he realized Daszak wasn’t the only rotten apple in the bunch. Other members of The Lancet Commission’s COVID Origins task force were also working against their mandate to investigate the pandemic’s origin. The final straw came when Sachs sacked Daszak and several task force members suddenly attacked him for being “antiscience.”

Shortly thereafter, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request brought previously hidden NIH documents to light, and Sachs realized that those who were attacking him also had undisclosed ties that made their ability to get to the truth doubtful at best. At that point, in September 2021, he disbanded the whole task force.

Lack of Transparency Breeds Mistrust

In mid-May 2022, Sachs published a frank opinion piece in the journal PNAS,7 together with Neil Harrison, calling for a truly independent inquiry into the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

In their article, Sachs and Harrison argued that while transparency on the part of Chinese authorities would be “enormously helpful,” much may be gleaned from information found in U.S.-based research institutions that were working with Wuhan-based institutions, including the WIV. Yet such material has not been disclosed for independent analysis. Here’s an excerpt:8

“This lack of an independent and transparent US-based scientific investigation has had four highly adverse consequences. First, public trust in the ability of US scientific institutions to govern the activities of US science in a responsible manner has been shaken.

Second, the investigation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has become politicized within the US Congress; as a result, the inception of an independent and transparent investigation has been obstructed and delayed.

Third, US researchers with deep knowledge of the possibilities of a laboratory-associated incident have not been enabled to share their expertise effectively. Fourth, the failure of NIH, one of the main funders of the US–China collaborative work, to facilitate the investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 has fostered distrust regarding US biodefense research activities.

Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs performed in Wuhan was part of an active and highly collaborative US–China scientific research program funded by the US Government (NIH, Defense Threat Reduction Agency [DTRA], and US Agency for International Development [USAID]), coordinated by researchers at EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), but involving researchers at several other US institutions.

For this reason, it is important that US institutions be transparent about any knowledge of the detailed activities that were underway in Wuhan and in the United States. The evidence may also suggest that research institutions in other countries were involved, and those too should be asked to submit relevant information …”

Sachs and Harrison go on to name a number of U.S. institutions that need to come clean about their work, including the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), the University of North Carolina (UNC), the University of California at Davis (UCD), the NIH, NIAID and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

All of these agencies and institutions have conducted and/or collaborated on research that may be able to solve the mystery, but instead of transparently sharing their data, they’ve merely declared that they’ve “not been involved in any experiments that could have resulted in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.”

Blanket Denials Are Not Good Enough

As noted by Sachs, before we can believe such claims, we need to be able to confirm their veracity, and that requires independent analysis of all the data.

“Blanket denials from the NIH are no longer good enough. Although the NIH and USAID have strenuously resisted full disclosure of the details of the EHA-WIV-UNC work program, several documents leaked to the public or released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have raised concerns,” Sachs and Harrison wrote.9

“These research proposals make clear that the EHA-WIV-UNC collaboration was involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented SARS-like viruses and was engaged in their manipulation within biological safety level (BSL)-2 and BSL-3 laboratory facilities, raising concerns that an airborne virus might have infected a laboratory worker.

A variety of scenarios have been discussed by others, including an infection that involved a natural virus collected from the field or perhaps an engineered virus manipulated in one of the laboratories.”

Suspicious ‘Coincidences’ Abound

Sachs and Harrison go on to discuss the problem of an unusual furin cleavage site (FCS) in SARS-CoV-2 that makes it more transmissible and pathogenic than related viruses.

While it’s not yet known how this feature came to be within SARS-CoV-2, whether by natural evolution or intentional insertion, “We do know that the insertion of such FCS sequences into SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal (‘DEFUSE’) that was submitted to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),” Sachs wrote.

That particular DARPA proposal was never funded, but as noted by Sachs, “we do not know whether some of the proposed work was subsequently carried out in 2018 or 2019, perhaps using another source of funding.”

“Information now held by the research team headed by EHA, as well as the communications of that research team with US research funding agencies, including NIH, USAID, DARPA, DTRA, and the Department of Homeland Security, could shed considerable light on the experiments undertaken by the US-funded research team and on the possible relationship, if any, between those experiments and the emergence of SARS-CoV-2,” Sachs and Harrison wrote.10

“We do not assert that laboratory manipulation was involved in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, although it is apparent that it could have been. However, we do assert that there has been no independent and transparent scientific scrutiny to date of the full scope of the US-based evidence.”

In an August 2, 2022, Current Affairs interview,11 Sachs again reiterated that he believes the NIH and allied scientists colluded to impede The Lancet Commission’s investigation, for the simple reason that the virus was the result of U.S. research.

Indeed, aside from what Sachs brought up in his PNAS article, there are patents spanning decades to suggest that’s true (see “Patents Prove SARS-CoV-2 Is a Manufactured Virus“).

Sachs also opened up about his concerns and misgivings in an August 20, 2022, interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (video above). He admits believing in the zoonotic spillover theory early on, only to, over time, come to change his mind as he realized he was being lied to, over and over again.

Today, he believes the lab-leak theory is the most likely explanation for the pandemic — and that the U.S. government, the NIH, the NIAID and the rest are suppressing the truth for the simple reason that they’re responsible for its creation, even if only in part.

Final Thoughts

To circle back to where we started, is it really prudent to reverse engineer the Spanish flu virus, and further tinker with it to make it even more lethal — all in the name of vaccine development?

Think back over the past few years. Mull over the deaths — an estimated 18 million from COVID-19 alone12 — the suicides (deaths of despair), the lost businesses, lost education years, the loss of freedoms and Constitutional rights, the COVID jab injuries, and the massive wealth transfer that has occurred.

All of that may have been because of this kind of mad science. Do we really want to repeat it in the future, but with a far more lethal pathogen? Most sane persons would say no. It’s time for legislators to take definitive steps to ensure mankind is not wiped out by scientific hubris.

Sources and References

EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

What Drugs Have the Highest Risk of Causing Suicidal Thoughts? thumbnail

What Drugs Have the Highest Risk of Causing Suicidal Thoughts?

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By Kevin Morris Delphi Behavioral Health Group

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) reports that suicide is the 12th leading cause of death in the United States and that an estimated 1.2 million suicide attempts took place in 2020 alone. Our society must deal with this problem, but we have to know where to look. While many contributing factors are associated with attempted suicide or suicidal thoughts, one that deserves special consideration is drug use. Here’s what drugs have the highest risk of causing suicidal thoughts.

Who Are the Culprits?

Deciding which drugs have the highest risk of suicidal thoughts is tricky. This is because many illicit drugs affect the central nervous system (CNS), which is how the brain communicates with the rest of the body. CNS depressants work by slowing down or suppressing this messaging process. CNS depressants include benzodiazepines, opioids, sedative drugs, and even alcohol. Other drugs known as CNS stimulants work in the opposite way to CNS depressants by increasing central nervous system activity in the brain and the body. Stimulants include cocaine, crack, ecstasy, methamphetamine, and prescription stimulants, such as Adderall and Ritalin. Next to these, there’s marijuana, which is sort of a wild card drug because it can produce stimulant and depressant effects.

While it might sound like we’ve gone down the list of all available drugs rather than a list of drugs that cause suicidal thoughts, the reality is all these drugs, and many others, can lead to suicidal thoughts. Each of these drugs manipulates the central nervous system. As a result, they can influence our emotions, our cognitive decision-making, and our awareness. Additionally, underlying factors or mental health conditions can increase the possibility of experiencing suicidal thoughts from drug use.

Concerning Findings

With that said, it’s still true that certain drugs carry a higher potential for suicidal thoughts. While it is an oversimplification to associate stimulants or “uppers” with happiness and depressants or “downers” with sadness, the reality is that even uppers can cause severe depression, which can lead to suicidal thoughts. However, statistics show that most suicidal thoughts or acts are more commonly linked with depressants use. For example, a 2020 study revealed that suicidal drug overdoses ranked highest when people used opioids or barbiturates. Following those drugs, the third-ranking included antidepressant drugs. It is ironic that the medications that seem to carry a high risk for suicide and/or severe depression are, in fact, antidepressants. While benzodiazepines can treat anxiety-related depression, most instances of depression are treated with antidepressant medications, generally belonging to either the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) class, though there are other less commonly used antidepressants as well.

Brand names that belong to these classes include drugs such as Cymbalta, Celexa, Prozac, and Zoloft. These drugs are more effective in treating depression than other options because they work in very specific ways to regulate serotonin in the body, which results in a stabilized mood. According to a study examining the link between SSRIs and suicidal thoughts, there is no clear connection between the two for adults. However, there was a higher risk of suicidal thoughts for children and adolescents. Researchers recommended that clinicians closely monitor and follow up with patients who use the medications they prescribed. In fact, this is exactly what we see in advertisements for antidepressant medications. The ads state the risk of the potential for depression and suicidal thoughts, followed by a warning to contact a doctor right away if these symptoms occur.

What to Do

Part of the controversy centered around the safety of antidepressant use concerns whether suicidal thoughts are pre-existing conditions of antidepressant drug use or if they are actually caused by taking the drugs. Additionally, mixing antidepressants with other drugs can create risks that can be detrimental to mental health. This information should not deter anyone from getting medical treatment for suicidal thoughts or depression-related symptoms. However, we can use it to educate ourselves about just how complex the problem is and what drugs to pay close attention to as we maintain our mental health and the mental health of others around us.

Sources

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. (n.d.). Suicide Statistics. Retrieved https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/

Delphi Health Group. (n.d). Guide to Drug Addiction: Symptoms, Signs, and Treatment. Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/addiction/

Medical News Today. (2018 Oct 9). What is Central Nervous System (CNS) Depression? Retrieved https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/314790

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Guide to Alcohol Detox: Severity, Dangers, and Timeline. Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/alcohol/detox/

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Stimulant Addiction. Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/stimulants/

Healthline. (2019 May 6). Is Weed a Depressant, Stimulant, or Hallucinogen? Retrieved https://www.healthline.com/health/is-weed-a-depressant

Vox. (2018 Jun 15). Depression and Suicide Risk are Side Effects of more Than 200 Common Drugs. Retrieved https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/14/17458726/depression-drugs-suicide-side-effect

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). A Guide to Dual-Diagnosis Treatment. Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/treatment-guide/dual-diagnosis/

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.). Guide to Cocaine Addiction and Treatment. Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/stimulants/cocaine/

JAMA. (2020 Mar 23). Incidence and Lethality of Suicidal Overdoses by Drug Class. Retrieved https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2763226

NIH. (2010 Sep 3). Antidepressants and Suicide Risk: A Comprehensive Overview. Retrieved https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034101/

Delphi Health Group. (n.d.) Mixing Alcohol and Antidepressants – Can You Do It Safely? Retrieved https://delphihealthgroup.com/alcohol/and-antidepressants/

NIH. (2012 Jan). Suicide and Antidepressants: What Current Evidence Indicates. Retrieved https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353604/

Medical News Today. (2017 Dec 14). What is Prozac (fluoxetine)? Retrieved https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/263773

NHS. (2021 Dec 8). Cautions- Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). Retrieved https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/talking-therapies-medicine-treatments/medicines-and-psychiatry/ssri-antidepressants/considerations/#:~:text=Interactions%20with%20other%20medicines,known%20as%20%22serotonin%20syndrome%22.

Navy SEALs Are Fighting For Religious Exemptions To Vaccine Mandates, And The Battle Is Far From Over thumbnail

Navy SEALs Are Fighting For Religious Exemptions To Vaccine Mandates, And The Battle Is Far From Over

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By The Daily Caller

  • U.S. Navy SEALs continue fighting in the courts to obtain religious exemptions to the military’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccination while the Biden administration lets exemption requests stack up, unaddressed.
  • Legal experts argue that the administration’s argument to national security no longer applies in light of changing CDC guidelines.
  • “The Constitution, federal law, and DOD regulations all protect religious liberty in the military, and our courts have repeatedly reminded us that there is no [COVID-19] exception to the Constitution,” Mike Berry, senior counsel at the First Liberty Institute that is representing the SEALs, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Some Navy SEALs’ case for religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccination trudges along in the Fifth Circuit court as defense leaders remain wedded to the Biden administration’s military vaccine mandate.

Pandemic restrictions have loosened significantly in most sectors, with federal guidelines changing to reflect the lessened threat of the virus, but the Department of Defense (DOD) continues to maintain that vaccination is critical to ensure readiness of the armed services. It will take continued litigation to convince the military to respect religious accommodation laws that would prevent thousands of service members from facing discharge or confinement to low-skill jobs, the SEALs’ attorneys told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The law is on our side. The Constitution, federal law, and DOD regulations all protect religious liberty in the military, and our courts have repeatedly reminded us that there is no (COVID-19) exception to the Constitution,” Mike Berry, senior counsel at the First Liberty Institute that is representing the SEALs, told the DCNF.

First Liberty filed suit in November 2021 on behalf of 26 Navy SEALs and other Special Warfare personnel against the Biden administration, arguing that the mandate violates servicemembers’ right to free exercise of religion.

In January, a Texas judge, relying on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), temporarily blocked the Navy from considering vaccination status when making assignment decisions for the plaintiffs. The case reached the Supreme Court in March when the Biden administration asked the court to reverse the ruling, and the court granted a partial stay to the order.

“Generally, military members are required to follow orders, but in this case, the military has shown sheer hostility toward religious exemptions rather than using the least restrictive means possible. In its effort to be draconian, the military refused to even recognize the now proved science of natural immunity,” Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert told the DCNF.

Out of the 3,375 sailors who have requested religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine as of Aug. 24, only 46 have been approved, according to Department of Defense data. So far, the Navy has recorded 105,277 COVID-19 cases and 17 deaths.

“Did the Navy, in good faith, apply the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in these cases, or did they predetermine that they were going to deny all religious accommodations?” R. Davis Younts, an Air Force reservist and attorney representing several military members seeking religious exemptions, told the DCNF. Referring to the latter possibility, he claimed, “It’s clear that they did, and I think the facts continue to bear that out.”

The military needs to consider exemption cases individually instead of stonewalling requests or issuing blanket denials that no longer reflect the Biden administration’s own COVID-19 guidance, Younts added. The compelling interest of the military to require vaccination — that COVID-19 posed a direct threat to military readiness — no longer exists.

Sailors, soldiers and airmen, many of whom have years of highly-specified training and experience under their belts, remain in limbo while court cases play out, unable to receive promotions or continue their training, Younts explained. Thousands of service members may be dragooned out of a force that is already falling vastly short of its recruiting goals amid blatant threats of war from foreign powers.

“We’re being treated like pariahs,” he said.

The only way forward is continued litigation and “individual military members taking a stand,” Younts said, adding that any policy change among DOD leaders is unlikely.

“This is a public interest issue with significant implications … that has to make a difference,” he added.

Virginia on Tuesday joined 21 other states in filing an amicus brief, dated Aug. 29, supporting the religious liberty of Navy SEALs and other U.S. Navy members to seek vaccine exemptions. The Biden administration has asked the court to give the military “extraordinary” deference in its decision to mandate and enforce vaccination, undermining the fundamental liberties of Navy service members, according to the brief.

“Navy SEALs are some of our best and brightest, willing to sacrifice their lives to protect our freedoms. Those who have filed religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine deserve to be heard and taken seriously,” Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said in a statement.

The states argued that they have effectively managed COVID-19 within their borders without infringing on religious liberties, and the government should be able to do the same. They decried the administration’s “overreaching and flawed claims of legal authority.”

“The Administration’s near-blanket refusal to grant religious exemptions is not credible … its denial in this case is not entitled to deference,” the brief stated.

“The evidence strongly favors the sailors. The Navy’s own testimony indicates that their decision was based on politics. There is no military or scientific justification for their assault on religious freedoms,” Gohmert said.

However, the Supreme Court had argued that the previous injunction overstepped the judiciary’s authority by overturning an order of the Executive made in an apparent effort to safeguard national security.

“RFRA does not justify judicial intrusion into military affairs in this case. That is because the Navy has an extraordinarily compelling interest in maintaining strategic and operational control over the assignment and deployment of all Special Warfare personnel — including control over decisions about military readiness,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote in the concurring opinion.

A substantial number of the military’s elite positions, including Navy SEALs and fighter pilots, are seeking an exemption from the vaccine mandate, and some of those individuals intend to change careers if they can’t escape. https://t.co/iwZJKWSzzz

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 11, 2021

Discharges for sailors seeking religious exemptions have been postponed pending the court case, according to the Navy. Of those who either did not seek exemptions or whose requests were denied, 1,533 have been separated with honorable characterization of service.

The Navy and the White House did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

MICAELA BURROW

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Pentagon Ignores Biden Admin Order To Stop Testing Unvaccinated For COVID-19

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Here’s How Much The Federal Government Has Spent Studying Impact Of Sex Change Meds We’re Already Giving Kids thumbnail

Here’s How Much The Federal Government Has Spent Studying Impact Of Sex Change Meds We’re Already Giving Kids

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By The Daily Caller

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent at least $17,576,200 since 2008 researching the impact of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, NIH records show, drugs that are already widely administered to children who identity as transgender.

Researchers used NIH funds to study the impact these medications have on bone density and strength, reproduction, immunity, cardiometabolism and mental health, along with several other issues. Most of these grants were issued after 2017 as interest in the subject grew, although some date back as early as 2008.

Although researchers are still learning about the long-term effects of these drugs and whether they actually help reduce depression and suicide rates for youths, they are already widely administered to children who identify as transgender; the Gender Identity Development Service at Tavistock in the U.K., the largest pediatric gender clinic in the world, has referred about 1,000 patients to endocrinologists to be assessed for puberty blockers, a spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The NIH gave the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles more than $7.7 million in grants for a project studying the impact of puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones on children as young as 8, according to various documents reviewed by the DCNF.

The study aims to determine whether early medical interventions for youths reduce the health issues that disproportionately impact transgender people, including anxiety, depression, substance abuse and suicide. Researchers observed 391 patients aged 8 to 20 at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and the Benioff Children’s Hospital; 90 went on puberty blockers and 301 went on cross-sex hormones, researchers reported.

“Ultimately, we aim to understand if early medical intervention reduces the health disparities well known to disproportionately affect transgender individuals across their lifespan,” researchers wrote. “The lack of data supporting medical interventions for transgender youth, combined with a shortage of providers knowledgeable of the complex psychosocial risk factors facing these young people, contributes to a health disparity and public health crisis of considerable magnitude.”

An activist who goes by Billboard Chris drew attention to the NIH grants online, highlighting the young age of some of the participants in this taxpayer-funded study.

To transgender Americans of all ages, I want you to know that you are so brave. You belong. I have your back. pic.twitter.com/mD4F0m3rU1

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 31, 2022

Researchers in this observational study have been collecting data on existing models of care for trans-identified youths for about a decade in response to an Institute of Medicine report calling for further research on the subject, according to the study. The NIH contributed $7,748,467 to the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in several separate grants for this project since 2015, according to the NIH website.

When undergoing medical sex change procedures beginning at an early age, children are administered puberty-blocking drugs then eventually put on cross-sex hormones such as testosterone or estrogen. The FDA has warned of a possible link between puberty-blocking drugs and serious symptoms like vision loss, and researchers in this study note the link between the drug and diminished bone density.

The drugs that are used to halt healthy puberty for transgender children have an official on-label purpose of delaying precocious puberty in young children, and they have also been used to chemically castrate sex offenders. Marci Bowers, a famous transgender surgeon, has publicly admitted that “every single child who was truly blocked at Tanner stage 2 [around 9 to 11 years old] has never experienced orgasm.”

Activists and medical professionals justify the administration of these drugs to children by claiming that, without them, transgender youths will commit suicide. Researchers have said that receiving these treatments in youth can reduce the risk of suicide and depression in numerous methodologically flawed studies which failed to control for confounding variables, failed to find causality and in some cases were funded by transgender activists groups and pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs themselves, according to multiple DCNF investigations.

The DCNF calculated the sums of grants the NIH gave for projects specifically examining the effects of medications administered as part of the gender transition process; its funding of transgender-related research generally is far more expansive.

The NIH, the project’s contacts and the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

LAUREL DUGGAN

Social issues and cultural reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

LGBTQ+ Activists Aim to Unseat DeSantis because he wants children to learn their ABC’s not their LGBT’s thumbnail

LGBTQ+ Activists Aim to Unseat DeSantis because he wants children to learn their ABC’s not their LGBT’s

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By Royal A. Brown III

“Our students should go to school to learn their ABC’s, not their LGBT’s.” — Florida Lt Gov. Jeanette Núñez

The LGBTQ+ community in Florida are a very small minority yet they think their attempts to indoctrinate our children with their thinking and behavior is a winning political issue. They think they should have special rights and privileges because of their sexual orientation. They are upset over Parents’ Rights being inculcated into law in Florida.

One just needs to have attended Polk County Public School Board meetings since last December as well as being aware of the plethora of Gay Pride proclamations passed by the school board. Most Polk county City and County Commissioners realize Governor DeSantis is right with his focus that we should be educating not indoctrinating our children.

Governor DeSantis is not a villain but is doing what the vast majority of parents and voters want him to do.

Parents do count and should be involved in the education not indoctrination of their children.

Among the 45 Goals of Communism read into the Congressional Record in 1962 are the following five (5) pointedly designed to take over our schools:

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents

Charlie Crist is a bought and paid for Marxist protégé’ who has stated publicly “Thank God for Joe Biden”.

Every God loving, law abiding, conservative Florida voter knows Crist must be defeated and Gov DeSantis re-elected as our Governor on November 8th, 2022.

DeSantis targeted LGBTQ Floridians like no previous governor. Now they’re working to defeat him

Zac Anderson – USA TODAY NETWORK – FLORIDA

Zander Moricz started his freshman year at Harvard last month, but he’s still keeping an eye on Florida after clashing with Gov. Ron DeSantis throughout the last year.

The first gay student body president at Pine View School in Sarasota County, Moricz led a student walkout at the school to protest HB 1557, which was derided by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. He later sued to overturn the law signed by DeSantis.

Now Moricz is working to derail DeSantis’ reelection bid from his Harvard dormitory room in Cambridge, Mass. He plans to rally the 2,000 members of an activist group he organized in Florida and nationwide in opposition to DeSantis’ reelection campaign.

“As November approaches the 2,000 of us will be doing everything in our collective power to ensure Charlie Crist is our governor and DeSantis is not put in a position of power in any way ever again,” Moricz said, referencing DeSantis’ Democratic opponent.

That type of commitment to unseating DeSantis highlights the intense emotions the governor has stirred up over the last year with a steady stream of policies impacting Florida’s LGBTQ community. No governor in recent decades has centered his political agenda on LGBTQ issues more than DeSantis.

When Florida students headed back to school last month, DeSantis took to Twitter to tout his efforts to rid classrooms of alleged “transgender ideology.”

The governor then repeated one of his favorite refrains over the last year, saying schools will “educate children. Not indoctrinate them.”

A few weeks later, DeSantis’ Lt Gov. Jeanette Núñez told a crowd in Miami that “Our students should go to school to learn their ABC’s, not their LGBT’s,” according to the New York Times.

DeSantis has drawn national attention for actions on everything from transgender sports and health care to what school officials can say about sexual orientation and gender identity. He is leaning into that record in the final months of his reelection campaign against Crist.

Read the full article.

©Royal A. Brown III. All rights reserved.

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New Study Shows Wearing Disposable Mask Did More Harm Than Good thumbnail

New Study Shows Wearing Disposable Mask Did More Harm Than Good

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By The Geller Report

And still, it won’t make a bit o difference or propel immediate policy changes. They are forcing our children to mask in schools. We are in the throes of a stealth, brutal takeover.

New Study Shows Wearing a Disposable Mask Did More Harm Than Good

By: Daniel, Civil Deadlinee, September 2, 2022

Do you recall when the “Patron Saint of Wuhan” declared to the country that masks were not needed? Do you remember when the same Dr. Anthony Fauci advised Americans to wear one, even two, or even three masks at that time?

You’re not the only one if you’re one of the millions who were completely perplexed by the random counsel given by the renowned immunologist of the country. Even other scientists have refused to follow Fauci’s advice. It now seems that Fauci’s advise to wear a mask might have made things worse.

Actually, using a disposable mask does very little to block the transmission of a virus like COVID-19. These masks, however, contain “four times the acceptable carcinogen exposure levels,” according to a verified new study. You did read that right.

This confirmed study indicates that the disposable face mask releases dangerous levels of titanium dioxide (TiO2). Have you bothered to notice what type of mask many schools are still mandating their students wear, “all day long?”

Virtually every school child still ordered to wear a mask is wearing a disposable one. Dozens of renowned scientists have exposed the health risks of continuously covering our mouths with a mask. The study says the TiO2 levels quadrupled the acceptable exposure levels.

But liberal bureaucrats and so-called “medical professionals” are still insisting masks must be worn, even in the craziest of circumstances. Once again, the same clowns who order us to “follow the science” are defying the science. This is medical malpractice.

Children are rarely susceptible to the COVID-19 virus. Requiring them to wear a mask during their learning time is not only useless, it’s medically dangerous. So, why do they continue to make kids wear masks? It’s all about compliance. The radical liberals thirst for compliance.

They ordered Americans to get a hastily approved vaccine or give up their jobs. They’ve written policies and made recommendations that are worthless. In fact, it appears that their “mask-wearing decrees” could kill you. Masks do not work against the spread of the virus.

But they certainly work to indoctrinate the masses into compliance. The game isn’t to protect Americans. It’s to teach us to be quiet and comply. We must do as the “Patron Saint of Wuhan” says. He “is science!” It turns out Fauci is more of a “blowhard” than he is a patron saint.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: Embalmers Have Been Finding Numerous Long, Fibrous Clots That Lack Post-Mortem Characteristics

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Ethics of Playing God: Designing our Children with Gene Editing Technology thumbnail

The Ethics of Playing God: Designing our Children with Gene Editing Technology

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

A recent article in Nature Biotechnology reports on the risks and benefits of the therapeutic use of CRISPR-Cas9 “gene scissors” technology. A comment on the article in the Jerusalem Post explains, “CRISPR – an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” – allows genetic material to be added, removed or altered at particular locations in the genome… [The researchers at Tel Aviv University found] that while the CRISPR genome-editing method is very effective, it is not always safe and that sometimes, rearranging pieces of DNA compromises genomic stability, possibly triggering cancer in the long run.”

So what ethical issues are raised by this technology?

Good ethics depends on good facts. Broadly defined, the human genome is the DNA, including genes, which constitutes each of us. We will pass on some of our genes to our descendants and manipulating these, which is possible with CRISPR-Cas9, is an unprecedented ethical issue, because it means we can attempt to design our children and their descendants.

We also have somatic cell genes, some of which can produce disease. These can also be changed with CRISPR-Cas9 technologies used as medical treatment, but the changes are not inheritable. This is the type of intervention discussed in the Nature Biotechnology article, where the main ethical issue, as with all new medical interventions, is whether the benefits of the treatment outweigh its risks and harms.

“Genetic scissors” technologies, such as CRISPR-Cas9, are a relatively recent and an ethically controversial addition to the exploding field of reproductive technologies, because, as explained, they can be used to “design” a human embryo and its descendants. To understand the ethical issues they raise in this respect, we need to locate them in a broader reproductive technology context, rather than simply viewing them in isolation.

Once upon a time, before the late 1970s, there was only one way that a new human life could come into existence: sexual intercourse between a fertile woman and a fertile man. Many couples saw the life they created as a gift from God and, whatever their child’s characteristics, loved and accepted them without question.

Unconditional parental love

The widely accepted societal value was that parents should love their children unconditionally, simply because they were their children. Women, especially, carried this value of parents’ unconditional love for their children for society as a whole.

A woman who abandoned her child was condemned much more forcefully than a man. Think of the young man from a wealthy family, who impregnated a maidservant, being shipped off by his parents to the colonies to “sow his wild oats”, while the maidservant was left destitute and caring for the child. People sometimes regarded the man, somewhat admiringly, as “clever” to escape responsibility, while the woman was shamed and scorned even more than just for being pregnant out-of-wedlock, if she abandoned or failed to care for the child.

One reason surrogate motherhood was met initially with such condemnation was that it overtly contravened the societal value, carried largely by women, of a parent’s unconditional love for their children. In short, this value was based on an assumption that a woman automatically and unconditionally bonded to the children to whom she gave birth; it was unthinkable that a woman would intentionally become pregnant with a prearranged plan to give up her baby as the recognition of surrogacy instantiated.

The reproductive technology revolution

The reproductive technology revolution changed not only the reality of having no option other than sole reliance on Nature to conceive a child, but also, for many people, their values governing reproduction. The most dramatic herald of this revolution was the birth in the United Kingdom in 1978 of Louise Joy Brown, the first “test-tube” baby. It is estimated that now more than eight million babies have been born worldwide using in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

Louise Brown was conceived from her father’s sperm and her mother’s ovum in a laboratory. Sexual intercourse was no longer the only way to transmit human life and interventions on the in vitro embryo, the earliest form of human life, were now possible.

This opened up the possibility that we could now choose our children, rather than loving them unconditionally just because they were our children, and, as time went on, we could increasingly intervene to design them according to the characteristics of the child we wanted.

CRISPR-Cas9 and subsequent developments of this technology are the most recent means for undertaking such design.

CRISPR-Cas9

CRISPR-Cas9 was discovered in 2012 and is best imagined as a molecular scissors. Scientists can use it to edit the human genome. Sometimes those genes are harmful or damaged. CRISPR-Cas9 allows the scientist to cut out such sequences of DNA and to insert replacement genes.

An ethically important distinction between genes in the germline and in somatic cells needs to be kept in mind. Changes to somatic cell genes are not inheritable and while such interventions can raise important ethical issues, they are not of the same kind or seriousness as those raised by changes to genes in germline cells.

Alterations to the genes of an embryo will be passed on to all descendants of that embryo. This type of intervention constitutes pre-empting evolution as the agent of genetic change. When there was no possibility of intervening intentionally to alter the human genome, which is estimated to have evolved over up to six million years, there was almost universal agreement that it would be wrong and unethical to do so. Many jurisdictions, including Australia, had laws prohibiting altering a human embryo’s genes in any way that would be inheritable. (That law has now been repealed.)

The consensus was that the human genome was the common heritage of humankind that must be held unmanipulated by us on trust for future generations.

By 2015, scientists were actively lobbying to change this view. An invitation-only meeting in Atlanta was attended by around 400 participants to discuss what the future position on altering the human germline should be.

Harvard geneticist George Church and his colleague, social psychologist Steven Pinker argued powerfully for allowing this research to proceed. They relied heavily on the technologies’ promise of doing great good in eliminating devastating genetic diseases. I argued against allowing this with respect to germline genes, a position on which I have since modified my views to a strictly limited extent. Pinker’s conclusion was that if bioethicists, such as myself, opposed this research, society should not prohibit it. Rather, it should get rid of the bioethicists. He won the argument. With certain controls, the research has gone forward.

So, why did I argue against intervening on the human germline?

My long preamble to this article situates the questions we need to ask about CRISPR-Cas9 in the larger context of the extraordinary development of reproductive technologies. This is necessary if we are to keep its use within ethical parameters.

IVF enabled the development of these technologies, because having a human embryo in a test-tube makes it much easier to manipulate it. If IVF, itself, is immoral and unethical, then genetic interventions on embryos become much more difficult and for some purposes impossible. The leading opponent of IVF, the Catholic Church, teaches that IVF is immoral because in separating the unitive and procreative characteristics of the passing on of human life through sexual intercourse, it unavoidably offends human dignity. However, its view is widely challenged.

Multitudes of thorny ethical problems have been raised both by IVF, itself, for example, the respect required for the transmission of human life outside the body of a woman, an issue we had not faced before IVF, and by the deluge of technological interventions and social changes to which IVF gave rise.

I will not discuss those here; rather, I will identify some of the specific ethical concerns raised by CRISPR-Cas9 when it is used to alter genes of the germline. Some of these concerns are common to many reproductive technologies, not just CRISPR-Cas9.

Ethical concerns raised by CRISPR-Cas9

First, let us find where we can agree. Everyone wants to eliminate or reduce suffering. The scientists wanting to use CRISPR-Cas9 to change an embryo’s germline genes want to eliminate horrible genetic diseases, such as Huntington’s chorea, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and so on. They make a distinction between therapeutic or curative germline interventions with CRISPR-Cas9 and enhancement ones, altering genes, for example, to augment intelligence or sporting ability, or to change eye colour, height, and so on. They argue for allowing the former, if not the latter.

But no matter how worthy their intentions, scientists would be designing or redesigning a human being. Transhumanists see this as creating a human utopia of the future. They speak of “unmodified humans” as inferior beings and foresee a future of immortality made possible by the genetic modification of genes responsible for aging. Do all humans, however, have a right to come from unmodified natural human origins and should this right be absolute or should some strictly limited exceptions be allowed?

The American Jewish philosopher, the late Hans Jonas, put it this way. “Every human being has a right to their own unique ticket in the great genetic lottery of the passing on of human life. A right not to be designed. A right to live their life as a surprise to themselves.”

German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has pointed out that the designed person is not free, because freedom requires us to have non-contingent origins to enable us to go back and recreate ourselves from scratch.  Moreover, they are not equal to the designer, because the designed entity is never equal to the designer. This analysis takes the issues raised by designing our progeny beyond concern just for the individual who is designed. It has political implications, because two of the pillars of democracy are respect for every individual’s freedom and accepting that everyone is equal.

To return to the earlier discussion of unconditional parental love as a personal and societal value, wanting to design one’s child to enhance them sends the message that “you were not perfect enough as you were naturally, we needed to improve you to conform to our specifications for us to accept and love you.”

Australian bioethicist Robert Sparrow from Monash University has raised another issue. He pointed out that just as our laptops and iPhones become obsolete models as the technology continuously improves, so earlier conceived children will be obsolete compared with their later designed siblings. What would this do to family cohesiveness and harmony?

A central, ubiquitous characteristic of the worldwide fertility Industry, which mostly markets reproductive technologies, is its overwhelmingly adult-centred focus and almost complete failure to place the future child at the centre of the decision-making. This is understandable: adults make the decisions to use reproductive technologies. The fertility industry is estimated to be worth US$8 billion each year in the US and $15 billion worldwide and continues to expand rapidly.

Child-centred decision-making

Child centred decision-making would ask, among many questions: can we reasonably anticipate, if this person were here and able to decide for themselves, that they would consent to what we are planning to do?

Child centred decision making would also look at the risks and harms of the technology to the child. Even if the technology were used only for therapeutic purposes, there are substantial risks, including unknown ones. For example, some genes exhibit a complex phenomenon called pleiotropy – one gene can code for multiple different proteins, possibly up to one thousand. Moreover, depending on its placement in the genome, the gene may function differently and a gene inserted with CRISPR-Cas9 might not position correctly. The presence of risk is not, however, an insurmountable ethical obstacle, it can be managed and an ethically acceptable risk/benefit ratio achieved.

Larger ethical questions raised by CRISPR-Cas9 at the societal level include treating our children as products or things that we own – as “somethings” not “somebodies”, a phenomenon called “reification” – rather than unique individual human beings with respect to whom we have obligations, but not rights to design.

Conclusion

The possibility of eliminating or treating dread diseases with “genetic scissors” technologies must not blind us to the ethical risks and harms involved.

It is very difficult, as I know from personal experience, to say to a scientist, who only wants to do good, “No, you must not change a seriously harmful gene in an embryo’s germline”. My concern about allowing such changes includes the precedent this would create that it is ethically acceptable to genetically-design a human being and where that would lead.

When CRISPR-Cas9 therapeutic interventions that do not involve inheritable changes, such as the ones discussed in the Nature Biotechnology article, are used to treat serious debilitating disease, they raise important ethical issues and concerns, but not the one of designing a human being and their descendants. They should be governed under the generally applicable medical research ethics principles, especially with respect to risk-harm/benefit calculations.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Gattaca, the brilliant dystopian sci fi film about a future in which all children are supposed to be genetically engineered. The hero is an “in-valid”, a rare human who was naturally conceived. At one point he reflects, “I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the colour of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science.”

CRISPR could make such a future possible, at least for those who can pay for it. Before we arrive there, we need to ask many more questions about the ethical dilemmas genetic engineering is creating.

An earlier version of this article first appeared in News Weekly.

Abortion, the Workplace, and Life thumbnail

Abortion, the Workplace, and Life

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By The Catholic Thing

John Grondelski: Employers are beginning to offer paid abortions and even out-of-state transportation to have them. It’s about cash not compassion.

As Catholics in the United States mark Labor Day, two key elements of Catholic social thought deserve our attention: the intersection between the right to life and work.

Until now, the abortion debate has largely been a political one, played out in terms of legality in the legislatures and – for almost fifty years – the courts.  In the wake of Dobbs, however, expect at least part of the debate to shift from politics to economics, as certain pro-abortion actors leverage financial incentives to tilt the debate in a capitalist society that, occasionally, likes to appeal to “social justice.”

Since Dobbs, leading companies have tripped all over each other to announce that they would happily fund their employees’ abortions, even to pay for travel to states allowing prenatal killing if it were banned where they were located.  Not a few corporations pressured state legislatures against considering pro-life legislation.  New Jersey’s Governor Phil Murphy and California’s Governor Gavin Newsom have even been touting their states as destinations for businesses to relocate to, not because of their oppressive tax structures but because both had “codified” abortion-on-demand through birth.

A standard trope of pro-abortionists is that abortion-on-demand is essential to the advancement of women because, bereft of “reproductive health care and control,” females are inherently disadvantaged economically.  That claim, of course, collides directly with the mythology of abortion as “health care.” But when health is defined even more expansively as something as vague and subject to manipulation as “financial health,” the alleged “benefits” of abortion can be rationalized by almost anything.

No one, of course, lays out the truth in its bare-naked obscenity: it is markedly cheaper for a company to abort babies than to provide maternity and subsequent child healthcare, along with the immediate parental and long-term sick leave, annual leave, school leave, and schedule accommodation that follow from having babies.

Abortion-funding firms will undoubtedly insist their policies are driven by their “commitment to choice,” without allowing it to be seen that their bottom lines are likely more friendly to certain “choices.”

One suspects that the companies that are so ready to devote such economic “generosity” to terminating pregnancies (i.e., killing babies in the womb) would vehemently protest if they were required to cover maternity care with the same liberality in order to create a truly equal “choice” environment.

That’s why it’s critical that both of our main political parties be challenged to create true family-friendly/child-friendly economic policies going forward.

Social justice cannot be achieved apart from the protection of the most basic of social and individual rights, i.e., the right to life.  Different political philosophies notwithstanding, virtually all thinkers must agree that the absolute sine qua non of any society is to protect its members’ basic rights.

That first axiom involves two corollaries: that the society identify who its members are (and not feign epistemological agnosticism about the status of the unborn or others in conditions of dependency) and understand what rights are “basic.”  Even an utter materialist like Thomas Hobbes admitted there is no more basic right upon which everything else depends than existence.  You might even say, as our American bishops have, that it’s “pre-eminent.”

Catholics, therefore, need to jump-start that social justice debate.  With Roe gone, the Constitutional obstacles to reframing that discussion are out of the way. But the alternative narrative needs to be rearticulated in a society that hasn’t heard it clearly for almost half a century.

We forgot that liberals like Mark Hatfield, William Proxmire, and Harold Hughes were pro-life because they rightly recognized that the protection of the life of the unborn was a civil rights issue, arguably the civil rights issue of our time.

Reframing that debate requires asking why women’s economic advancement is deemed contingent on abortion.  Is it because, in the economic world, women could not advance qua women because they were not men, i.e., because they became pregnant, because they had and wanted to raise children, and because they wanted career paths that adapted to those realities rather than expecting those realities to adapt to their jobs?

Is the largesse of today’s “we’ll pay for your abortion” corporations just the expression of a kind of company’s vision of its female employees as “misbegotten males?”

The decade following the end of schooling (high school or college) is usually marked by “putting away childish things” (I Cor 13:11) and transitioning to permanence in life.  That usually meant finding a job, moving into one’s own living space, then getting married and having children.

Our current economic configuration – including “we’ll pay for your abortion” corporations – is undermining that “work/life balance.”

Jobs often at minimum wages and maximum expectations make economic independence increasingly difficult to attain, delaying marriage and parenthood.  Indeed, many of the same woke corporations will pay female employees to freeze their eggs to delay pregnancy, as if one is as ready to be a mom at 45 as at 25.

Maybe Professor Henry Higgins was really secretly a modern HR professional in a woke Fortune 500 Corporation when in My Fair Lady he asked: “why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

You may also enjoy:

Robert Royal’s Our Labor Day

Hadley Arkes’ Justice Byron White and Abortion

AUTHOR

John M. Grondelski

John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views herein are exclusively his.

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2022 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Why Nuclear Power Is [Quietly] Making a Big Comeback All Around the World thumbnail

Why Nuclear Power Is [Quietly] Making a Big Comeback All Around the World

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By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

From California to France to Japan and beyond, nuclear power is all the rage suddenly.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that California Gov. Gavin Newsom was spearheading an eleventh-hour effort to pass legislation to extend a lifeline to Diablo Canyon, a 2,250-megawatt nuclear plant that supplies some 8 percent of the energy produced in the Golden State.

Under pressure from lawmakers and environmental activists, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) agreed in 2016 to decommission Diablo when its operating licenses expire in 2024 and 2025. But in light of the recent energy policy environment, California lawmakers had second thoughts.

On the very final day of the legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill that will extend the plant five more years.

This is a sharp turn for Newsom, who had long intimated that the Diablo Canyon plant should be closed.

“I just don’t see that this plant is going to survive beyond 2024, 2025. I just don’t see that,” Newsom said while running for governor in 2016. “And there is a compelling argument as to why it shouldn’t.”

California is hardly alone in giving nuclear power a second look.

Belgium is one of several European nations looking to extend set-to-expire licenses to keep nuclear plants operational. France, meanwhile, has proposed building up to 14 new nuclear plants in the coming years. Japan, which shuttered its nuclear reactors following the 2011 Fukushima crisis, now wants to restart up to nine reactors. Meanwhile, Morning Brew reports that the UK, Poland, and the Czech Republic are all unfurling plans to build new nuclear reactors.

Nuclear power is suddenly in again, and it’s not hard to see why. Natural gas prices have skyrocketed globally. In the United States, natural gas prices recently hit a 14-year high, but that’s nothing compared to Europe, where they recently hit an all-time high and are the equivalent of $600/barrel oil prices.

This has sent shockwaves throughout Europe, where businesses are reporting five-fold year-over-year price increases.

There is now little debate that Europe is in the middle of a full-blown energy crisis, in no small part because the nations pursued a “green” energy agenda that shifted from domestic production (especially in fossil fuels and nuclear power) and led to a reliance on natural gas imports from Russia, which have been disrupted by the invasion of Ukraine and Russian geopolitics.

The situation in California is different than that in Europe, but there is also a clear reason the state is second-guessing its decision to shut down its single largest power station—namely, its battered energy grid.

California grid operators last week warned of blackouts and encouraged citizens to “set thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, avoid using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, and turn off unnecessary lights.”

This is nothing new in California, which has an extensive history of blackouts even though it has one of the lowest per capita energy consumption rates in the country (largely due to its mild climate).

The reason for this isn’t complicated. California is seen as a green energy success story, and in some ways it is. Earlier this year, on one mild May day, California produced enough renewable electricity to meet 103 percent of demand, setting a new record.

The problem is some of these energy sources are intermittent. On most days renewable energy production falls well short of consumer demand, which is why roughly half of California’s electricity is still produced by natural gas—which is getting quite expensive as noted above.

But the real problem is energy supply.

California’s energy grid is already stretched, which means that suddenly aborting nuclear power is a recipe for disaster. As even progressive California lawmakers concede, Diablo Canyon generates more than 8 percent of all of California’s electricity, and accounts for 17 percent of carbon-free production.

If you think California’s blackout problem is bad now—and it most certainly is—try abruptly losing 18,000 GW·hrs of electricity annually and see what happens … after adding a million more electric vehicles to the economy, all of which must be charged with electricity, when the state’s ban on gas-powered vehicles goes into effect.

As NPR notes, the twist over Diablo Canyon is noteworthy because the Golden State is the birthplace of the anti-nuclear movement in the United States. Environmentalists for years have opposed nuclear power, “primarily from fears about nuclear waste and potential accidents as well as its association with nuclear weapons.”

As Fukushima shows, these fears are not entirely unfounded. Nuclear accidents do occur (albeit rarely). Nuclear plants do create radioactive waste. There are clear tradeoffs to nuclear energy.

Where environmentalists go wrong, however, is to think tradeoffs are unique to nuclear power and fossil fuels. The fact is ,all energy production comes with tradeoffs, and proponents of so-called “green energy” have a nasty habit of overlooking these tradeoffs.

Your neighbor with a “green means go” sign in his yard might point out that your F-150 guzzles a gallon of gasoline for every 25 road miles, but he probably ignores that it took tens of thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions to produce the battery that charges his Tesla. (And don’t even tell him where the cobalt in the battery comes from.)

Your aunt might proudly talk about the new solar panels on her roof, but probably doesn’t know that even on utility scale solar power has a carbon footprint higher than nuclear power, or that solar panels produce literally tons of toxic waste.

Your niece at Columbia might talk about how important it is to become a “zero emission” economy. But she probably doesn’t realize the environmental costs, let alone the economic ones, of getting there—which include mining 34 million metric tons of copper, 50 million tons of zinc, 40 million tons of lead, 5 billion tons of iron, and 160 million tons of aluminum (give or take).

The point is clear: all energy production comes with tradeoffs. Many might believe that politicians are uniquely capable of weighing the pros and cons of energy tradeoffs, but both economics and our own eyes reveal this is untrue.

Facing what many environmentalists say is a climate apocalypse, did it make sense for European governments to scrap nuclear plants—one of the cleanest forms of energy in existence—and important fossil fuels from Russia, a country hostile to freedom and historically inclined toward authoritarianism?

Similarly, did it make sense for California to scrap nuclear power in its quest to become a “100 percent zero-emission” economy?

Clearly the answer to these questions is no. The reality is politicians do not have any special knowledge when it comes to deciding which tradeoffs make the most sense, which might explain why a world abundant in energy is suddenly facing an energy crisis unlike any it’s seen in generations.

So while we should be grateful that so many politicians, environmentalists, and countries are finally recognizing the benefits of nuclear power, we should also be asking why we gave them such broad power in the first place.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Covid-Industrial Complex: ‘We’ve Created 40 New Billionaires’ of which 15 are Chinese Citizens thumbnail

The Covid-Industrial Complex: ‘We’ve Created 40 New Billionaires’ of which 15 are Chinese Citizens

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By The Geller Report

“We’ve created an interest group to keep the pandemic going. Their argument is ‘we’re keeping people safe when in fact we’re just keeping the anxiety going.”

By Giacomo Tognini

Shortly after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, markets collapsed and economies around the world plunged into recession. At the same time, hundreds of billionaires fell from the ranks of Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list, capturing a snapshot of the pandemic’s impact on the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest people.

One year later, things couldn’t be more different: a record 493 new billionaires joined the list this year, propelled by a red-hot stock market and unprecedented economic stimulus. Among those newcomers are at least 40 new entrants who draw their fortunes from companies involved in fighting Covid-19.

Li Jianquan & family

NET WORTH: $6.8 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: CONSUMER PRODUCTS

CITIZENSHIP: HONG KONG

Jianquan’s Winner Medical made billions of masks and millions of protective overalls and gowns for healthcare workers fighting the virus.

Stéphane Bancel

NET WORTH: $4.3 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: MODERNA

CITIZENSHIP: FRANCE

Bancel is the CEO of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna, which had its Covid-19 vaccine authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on December 18, 2020.

Liu Fangyi

NET WORTH: $4.2 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: MEDICAL EQUIPMENT

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Liu Fangyi is the founder and chairman of Intco Medical, a manufacturer of personal protective equipment including gloves, face masks, isolation gowns and hand sanitizer.

Uğur Şahin

NET WORTH: $4 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: BIONTECH

CITIZENSHIP: GERMANY

Şahin is the CEO and cofounder of BioNTech, which he started alongside his wife and chief medical officer Özlem Türeci. BioNTech partnered with Pfizer to make the first vaccine authorized by regulators in the U.S., a milestone announced by the FDA on December 11, 2020.

Yuan Liping

NET WORTH: $3.6 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CANADA

Yuan Liping received a 24% stake in vaccine maker Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products after divorcing the firm’s chairman Du Weimin in 2020. The company signed a deal with British pharma titan AstraZeneca in August to make at least 100 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine.

Hu Kun

NET WORTH: $2.5 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: MEDICAL EQUIPMENT

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Hu Kun is the chairman of Shenzhen-listed Contec Medical Systems, which makes a range of medical equipment including pulse oximeters and pulmonary devices used to check lung conditions.

Chen Xiao Ying

NET WORTH: $2.4 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: HEALTH INFORMATION

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Chen Xiao Ying is an investor in e-commerce giant Alibaba’s online healthcare arm Alibaba Health Information Technology, which signed a deal with Chinese vaccine maker Sinovac in September to develop a digital platform for Sinovac’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout.

Dai Lizhong

NET WORTH: $2.4 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: MEDICAL TESTING

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Dai Lizhong is the chairman of diagnostics firm Sansure Biotech, which makes Covid-19 tests and had its diagnostic kits authorized by the FDA in May 2020.

Karin Sartorius-Herbst

NET WORTH: $2.4 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: BIOPHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: GERMANY

Ulrike Baro

NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: BIOPHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: GERMANY

Karin Sartorius-Herbst and her sister Ulrike Baro own stakes in German biopharma outfit Sartorius AG, founded by their great-grandfather Florenz Sartorius in 1870. Sartorius provides lab supplies for Covid-19 testing and assists vaccine manufacturers in the development process.

Timothy Springer

NET WORTH: $2.2 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: BIOTECH

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Springer is an immunologist and professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School; he was a founding investor in Moderna in 2010 and owns a 3.5% stake.

Gong Yingying

NET WORTH: $2.1 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: HEALTH IT

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Gong Yingying is the founder and chairwoman of Chinese healthcare tech firm Yidu Tech, which used its AI and big data technology to help the hard-hit city of Wuhan conduct contact tracing and coordinate its emergency response.

Weng Xianding

NET WORTH: $2.1 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: MEDICAL DEVICES

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Rao Wei & family

NET WORTH: $1.2 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Rao Wei and Weng Xianding are the chairman and majority shareholder, respectively, of biomedical firm Shenzhen New Industries Biological Engineering, which makes a number of Covid-19 diagnostic tests.

Sergio Stevanato

NET WORTH: $1.9 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: MEDICAL PACKAGING

CITIZENSHIP: ITALY

Stevanato is the majority owner and chairman emeritus of Stevanato Group, a medical packaging manufacturer that’s supplying glass vials for several Covid-19 vaccines as well as plastic parts for diagnostic tests.

Noubar Afeyan

NET WORTH: $1.9 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: BIOTECH

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Afeyan is the chairman and cofounder of Moderna and the founder and CEO of Massachusetts-based life sciences venture capital firm Flagship Pioneering, through which he owns shares in a dozen publicly traded biotech companies.

Carl Hansen

NET WORTH: $1.8 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: BIOTECH

CITIZENSHIP: CANADA

Hansen is a former college professor at the University of British Columbia and the founder and CEO of Canadian biotech firm AbCellera, which partnered with Eli Lilly on a promising antibody treatment for Covid-19 that was authorized by the FDA in November.

Juan López-Belmonte López & family

NET WORTH: $1.8 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: SPAIN

López-Belmonte López chairs Spanish pharma company Rovi, which inked a contract with Moderna in July to fill and package hundreds of millions of doses of its Covid-19 vaccine at Rovi’s factory in Madrid, Spain.

John Oyler

NET WORTH: $1.8 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: BIOTECH

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Oyler is the CEO and cofounder of Beijing-based drugmaker BeiGene, which signed an agreement with biotech outfit Singlomics Pharmaceuticals in August to develop, manufacture and sell Singlomics’ antibody treatment for Covid-19.

Robert Langer

NET WORTH: $1.6 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: BIOTECH

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Langer is a chemical engineer and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the eponymous Langer Lab; he owns a 3% stake in Moderna, which he helped start in 2010.

Ren Jinsheng & family

NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Ren Jinsheng is the founder and chairman of pharmaceuticals supplier Simcere Pharmaceutical Group, which increased its production of antiviral drugs arbidol and zanamivir in response to higher demand in the hopes they could help treat Covid-19.

Arvind Lal

NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: MEDICAL DIAGNOSTICS

CITIZENSHIP: INDIA

Lal is the executive chairman of Indian diagnostics chain Dr. Lal PathLabs, which offers Covid-19 tests at its clinics and collection points throughout India.

Prathap Reddy

NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: HEALTHCARE

CITIZENSHIP: INDIA

Prathap Reddy is the founder and chairman of Indian hospital chain Apollo Hospitals Group, which launched more than a dozen post-Covid recovery clinics in October for patients suffering long-term effects from the disease.

August Troendle

NET WORTH: $1.5 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICAL SERVICES

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Troendle is the CEO and founder of Cincinnati-based contract research firm Medpace, which helps pharmaceutical companies run clinical trials for Covid-19 drugs and also offers testing services at its labs.

Liang Yaoming

NET WORTH: $1.4 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: DIAGNOSTICS

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Liang Yaoming chairs clinical testing company Guangzhou Kingmed Diagnostics Group, which processed tests for Covid-19 at its facilities throughout China.

Itaru Tanimura

NET WORTH: $1.4 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: HEALTHCARE

CITIZENSHIP: JAPAN

Tanimura is the founder of Tokyo-based online medical services provider M3, which offers its AI-powered image analysis technology to remotely diagnose Covid-19 by looking at medical images; the firm also ran clinical studies for Moderna’s vaccine at its facility in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Keith Dunleavy & family

NET WORTH: $1.4 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: HEALTH IT

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Dunleavy is the founder of cloud-based healthcare data analytics outfit Inovalon, which is working with the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to administer Covid-19 vaccines using its software platform.

Alan Miller & family

NET WORTH: $1.3 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: HEALTHCARE SERVICES

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Miller is the founder and executive chairman of healthcare services provider Universal Health Services, which conducts testing for Covid-19 and treats patients at its network of hospitals across the U.S.

Cao Xiaochun

NET WORTH: $1.3 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Cao Xiaochun is the cofounder and director of pharmaceutical contract research outfit Hangzhou Tigermed Consulting, which supported clinical trials for CanSino’s Covid-19 vaccine.

Xiong Jun & family

NET WORTH: $1.3 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Xiong Jun chairs biopharma company Shanghai Junshi Biosciences, which worked with Eli Lilly to co-develop antibody treatments for Covid-19.

Zhu Tao

NET WORTH: $1.3 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Qiu Dongxu

NET WORTH: $1.2 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CANADA

Yu Xuefeng

NET WORTH: $1.2 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CANADA

Mao Huihua

NET WORTH: $1 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CANADA

Zhu Tao, Qiu Dongxu, Yu Xuefeng and Mao Huihua are cofounders of Tianjin-based vaccine manufacturer CanSino Biologics, which received conditional approval for its one-shot Covid-19 vaccine from Chinese regulators in February.

Premchand Godha

NET WORTH: $1.2 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: INDIA

Godha chairs Mumbai-based generic drug manufacturer Ipca Labs, which had an FDA import ban softened in March 2020 to allow it to export the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine to the U.S. The drug was initially touted as a potential Covid-19 cure before the FDA discouraged its use in July.

Feng Yuxia

NET WORTH: $1.1 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Feng Yuxia is the president of Beijing-based contract research organization JOINN Laboratories, which helped conduct clinical studies of potential Covid-19 treatments in the disease’s early epicenter of Wuhan, China.

Li Wenmei & family

NET WORTH: $1.1 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: MEDICAL EQUIPMENT

CITIZENSHIP: CHINA

Li Wenmei is the cofounder and general manager of diagnostic test supplier Guangzhou Wondfo Biotech, which makes a range of Covid-19 tests.

M.Satyanarayana Reddy

NET WORTH: $1.1 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: INDIA

He is the founder and chairman of Hyderabad-based drugmaker MSN Group, which started producing a low-cost version of the Covid-19 antiviral favipiravir in August.

Jack Schuler

NET WORTH: $1.1 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Schuler is the former president of healthcare multinational Abbott Labs and the owner of a 7% stake in diagnostic firm Quidel Corp., which was one of the first companies to receive FDA approval for its Covid-19 tests in March 2020. He’s also an investor in privately owned Inspirotec, which is developing technology to identify the presence of Covid-19 in the air.

Yu De-Chao

NET WORTH: $1 BILLION

SOURCE OF WEALTH: PHARMACEUTICALS

CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES

Yu De-Chao is the founder and chairman of Chinese biopharma outfit Innovent Biologics, which is developing a potential antibody treatment for Covid-19.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Birth Rates Collapse—All Cause Mortality Rates Surge In Heavily Vaccinated Countries thumbnail

Birth Rates Collapse—All Cause Mortality Rates Surge In Heavily Vaccinated Countries

/in , , , , /by

By The Geller Report

Excess death is up and Birth rates are down in every heavily vaccinated country

This does not prove it the vaccine is responsible but certainly warrants a serious investigation

— Jake Shields (@jakeshieldsajj) September 2, 2022

Birth rate have dropped in Germany, Taiwan, Switzerland, the UK, Sweden, Hungary, and more…read more here

MATHEMATICIAN IGOR CHUDOV POINTS OUT BIRTH RATES

Birth rates in heavily vaccinated countries are dropping precipitously. That seems concerning to us peasants.

This past June, California live births dropped 6.4% compared to June 2021.

Here’s the chart of the year-on-year change in live births by month. It shows changes in live births for the same months spaced a year ago. For example, the change in California live births, comparing June of 2021 to June of 2022, is a drop of -6.4%.

More frightening news about fertility and the mRNA shots, this time from Singapore

Births are plunging EXACTLY on schedule, nine months after mass Covid vaccinations

By: Alex Berenson, September 1, 2022;

Singapore knows how to make its people behave.

The Asian city-state is famously uptight. It punishes criminals with caning and has prohibited chewing gum since 1992. (Do not under any circumstances deal drugs in Singapore; a 41-year-old man was sentenced to death after being caught with two pounds of cannabis in 2018.)

So when Singapore told its nearly 6 million residents to be vaccinated against Covid, it had very high compliance.

What is particularly interesting – though unsurprising – is how well Singapore stratified vaccine administration by age. As the chart below shows, in a few weeks in June and July 2021, nearly every Singaporean adult between 20-39 – childbearing age, essentially – received their first Covid vaccine jab.

The incredibly rapid uptake of vaccines among young Singaporean adults offers a natural experiment in the effect of mRNA shots on fertility. (Roughly 98 percent of all the jabs Singapore gave were mRNA from Pfizer or Moderna. Chinese vaccines used traditional inactivated virus technology made up the rest.)

You will not be surprised at this point to learn that Singapore publishes comprehensive figures on births and deaths every quarter.

Like other East Asian countries, Singapore is suffering severe baby bust. The average woman in Singapore has fewer than 1.2 children, barely half the birth rate needed to avert a long-term decline in population.

As low as the birth rate was, though, it had remained stable for a decade. Even Covid did not meaningfully change the number of births – 39,259 in 2019, 38,590 in 2020, and 38,672 in 2021.

In the first two months of 2022, Singapore received welcome news. Births actually rose about 7.5 percent.

Then came March. Again, Singapore began mass mRNA vaccinations of women (and men) of childbearing age in June 2021; March 2022 is exactly nine months later.

In March, the increase in births abruptly reversed. Between March and June 2022 – the most recent month for which figures are available – Singapore has recorded about 1,000 fewer live births compared to 2021, a decline of 8.5 percent. The drop has been consistent each month.

By itself, a four-month decline in birth rates in a single small country might not be cause for serious concern, despite the striking timing.

But Singapore is far from alone.

For example, Sweden has reported a similar decline this year, with a similarly close connection to vaccinations last year. It is hard to imagine two countries more different ethnically and geographically than Sweden and Singapore. They even had diametrically opposed Covid lockdown policies. Yet both are seeing the same drop in fertility.

Not panicking is important here.

The decline in births that countries like Singapore are seeing is large by historical standards. But it has lasted only a few months, and it comes against the backdrop of a long-term decline in fertility rates. Further, not every country has seen them.

In addition, the mRNA shots are known to cause disruption in menstrual cycles and declines in sperm counts that can last for several months. It is possible that those changes alone account for the entire drop, and that if and when they reverse birth rates will return to baseline. It is possible birth rates are already returning to baseline, since births by their nature are a lagging indicator of fertility.

Keep reading…..

Last week New Zealand set a record for the most deaths (all cause mortality) in one week in our recorded history.

One of the highest mortality rates in the world.

And no one is talking about it.#nzpol pic.twitter.com/vTfrCDFwxF

— Fubadu (@foo_4_thought) August 26, 2022

“The decline in births that countries like Singapore are seeing is large by historical standards. But it has lasted only a few months, and it comes against the backdrop of a long-term decline in fertility rates. Further, not every country has seen them.

In addition, the mRNA shots are known to cause disruption in menstrual cycles and declines in sperm counts that can last for several months. It is possible that those changes alone account for the entire drop, and that if and when they reverse birth rates will return to baseline. It is possible birth rates are already returning to baseline, since births by their nature are a lagging indicator of fertility.”

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸Alex Berenson with Joe Rogan🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

“There’s a Bigger.. issue that no one will talk about..and that is what is happening to ALL CAUSE MORTALITY and to BIRTH RATES in Countries that used these mRNA and DNA covid Vaccines very heavily.”@joerogan @AlexBerenson #excessdeaths pic.twitter.com/7f6WC1LHaC

— Resist! (@LardelliP) September 1, 2022

This just in: this June of 2022, California live births dropped 6.4% compared to June of 2021. Here’s the chart of year-on-year change in live births, by month. It shows changes in live births for the same months spaced a year ago. For example, change in California live births, comparing June of 2021 to June of 2022, is a drop of -6.4%.

Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2022

Yearly All-Cause Mortality shows that in 2020 the first of the ‘pandemic’ children did not die more often than expected. However that changed in 2021. Why? pic.twitter.com/gUJI24lJlf

— Ben (@USMortality) August 24, 2022

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

U.S. Covid-19 Deaths in 2021 Far Surpasses 2020’s – When There was No Vaccine

New UK government data shows the COVID vaccines kill more people than they save

Leading Vaccine Scientist: Covid Vaccines Are Killing One in Every 800 Over-60s and Should Be Withdrawn Immediately

Leading Pathologist Speaks Out About Dangerous COVID Vaccine Effects

FDA Approve COVID Vaccine for 6-month-old Babies Despite Data Proving Vaccinated Children Are 30,200% More Likely To Die Than Unvaccinated Children

Birth rates plunged in heavily vaxxed countries

Highest Vaccinated Counties Have Worst Birth Rate Drops

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Queerest of Myths: The Rainbow was Created by God as a Symbol of ‘Hope’, not the ‘Sin’ of Gay Pride thumbnail

The Queerest of Myths: The Rainbow was Created by God as a Symbol of ‘Hope’, not the ‘Sin’ of Gay Pride

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By Dr. Rich Swier

“‘Never again will floodwaters kill all living creatures; never again will a flood destroy the earth.’ Then God said, ‘I am giving you a sign of my covenant with you and with all living creatures, for all generations to come. I have placed my rainbow in the clouds. It is the sign of my covenant with you and with all the earth. When I send clouds over the earth, the rainbow will appear in the clouds.’” — Genesis 9: 9-14

We have done many columns exposing myths used to push a particular agenda. One of the queerest myths is the use of the rainbow by the LGBTQ+ community to symbolize pride and equality.

The truth is that the rainbow was created by God after the great flood and first seen by Noah and his family. The rainbow in the clouds was a symbol of hope that civilization would begin anew in His Image.

Genesis 9: 15-17 read,

“[A]nd I will remember my covenant with you and with all living creatures. Never again will the floodwaters destroy all life. When I see the rainbow in the clouds, I will remember the eternal covenant between God and every living creature on earth.” Then God said to Noah, “Yes, this rainbow is the sign of the covenant I am confirming with all the creatures on earth.”

A Professor from Bethlehem College & Seminary named Dieudonné Tamfu wrote in a July 18th, 2015 article titled What Does the Rainbow Mean for Gays?,

What do you think of when you see the rainbow flag?

Most likely, you think of homosexuality or the wider LGBT movement. Gilbert Baker, the man credited with pioneering the celebratory rainbow flag flying over the gay movement, recently lauded his craft, noting that it’s something beautiful. He answers those who think it’s not, saying, “The rainbow’s in the Bible. It’s a covenant between God and all living creatures.” According to Baker, the God of the Bible knows the struggle of gays and lesbians, and that is where he finds hope.

God does indeed know the internal and social battles of gays and lesbians, but the question is, Does he approve of their practice? Would God approve of their use of the rainbow to symbolize this movement?

The Supreme Court’s decision on gay “marriage” has made the rainbow symbol ubiquitous. Those who celebrate so-called same-sex marriage are painting social media with rainbow colors. Even the White House was lit up the with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.

God designed the rainbow to symbolize something far greater and far more glorious than homosexuality, and if those in the homosexual community truly understood and embraced the symbol they are waving in their hands, they would experience true freedom and peace. [Emphasis added]

Read more.

God’s hope is that the sinner will repent his sins and embrace the Glory of God in the highest.

As Christians we are taught to hate the sin but love the sinner. It is our duty as Christians to save those who sin against the Father.

Britannica defines the seven deadly sins, also called seven capital sins or seven cardinal sins, in Roman Catholic theology as, (1) vainglory, or pride, (2) greed, or covetousness, (3) lust, or inordinate or illicit sexual desire, (4) envy, (5) gluttony, which is usually understood to include drunkenness, (6) wrath, or anger, and (7) sloth.

Many times we find some and even all of these deadly sins in individuals. The homosexuals are especially prone toward vainglory, lust, envy, and wrath.

It is time for those who promote homosexuality to understand that they are facing the wrath of God the Father.

Revelation 4:1-4:

“Then as I looked, I saw a door standing open in heaven, and the same voice I had heard before spoke to me like a trumpet blast. The voice said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must happen after this.” And instantly I was in the Spirit, and I saw a throne in heaven and someone sitting on it. The one sitting on the throne was as brilliant as gemstones—like jasper and carnelian. And the glow of an emerald circled his throne like a rainbow. Twenty-four thrones surrounded him, and twenty-four elders sat on them. They were all clothed in white and had gold crowns on their heads.”

Revelation 10:1-2

“I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, surrounded by a cloud, with a rainbow over his head. His face shone like the sun, and his feet were like pillars of fire. And in his hand was a small scroll that had been opened. He stood with his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land.”

Do not wave the rainbow flag unless you understand that it is a symbol of hope to stop your evil behaviors and sinfulness. It is a symbol of salvation. Embrace it or your soul will be damned—for ever.

And thus ends the lesson for today.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: What the “peace symbol” really means

Experts Blame Green Energy Policies for Europe’s Full-Scale Energy Crisis: ‘A warning to the U.S.’ thumbnail

Experts Blame Green Energy Policies for Europe’s Full-Scale Energy Crisis: ‘A warning to the U.S.’

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By The Geller Report

We are watching the villainous Left deindustrialize our societies, under the guise of climate nonsense. All while they fly around the world in private jets, which emit far more green-house gasses into the atmosphere. The Green Movement is a total assault on capitalism, our freedom, and our entire way of life. It’s implementation will cause significant economic decline and instability in countries throughout the world. Furthermore, if this movement is not stopped, you can expect massive instability in your cities and your towns, and your communities in the years ahead.

I warned Europe of the danger of relying on Russian energy while restricting their own production.

The Biden Administration needs to end its war on American energy, or we could face the same dangerous result.

— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) September 1, 2022

Experts blame green energy policies for Europe’s full-scale energy crisis: ‘A warning to the US’

By Fox News, September 1, 2022

Green energy policies in Europe designed to rapidly shift the continent away from fossil fuel dependence have contributed to soaring power prices in the region.

The European benchmark index measuring future electricity prices increased to a record $993 per megawatt hour (MWh) on Monday, days after prices in France and Germany surged 25%, according to European Energy Exchange data compiled by Bloomberg. By comparison, the average price of electricity in the U.S. hit $129 per MWh in June, federal data showed.

The energy crisis has forced consumers to cut back on power consumption, industrial production declines and energy rationing across the continent. The European Union Council (EU) scheduled an emergency meeting of EU energy ministers slated for next week in response to the market conditions.

AUTHOR

Geller Report Staff

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Watch Prestigious NYC School Director Touts ‘Sneaking’ Her Political ‘Agenda’ into Classrooms thumbnail

Watch Prestigious NYC School Director Touts ‘Sneaking’ Her Political ‘Agenda’ into Classrooms

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By Project Veritas

‘Disrupt Wherever I Can’ … ‘I Felt Like a Double Agent’ … ‘Huge Contingent’ of White Boys ‘Are Just Horrible’.

*CLICK HERE TO TWEET THE VIDEO*

Project Veritas released a second video in its newly launched Education Series today exposing a senior administrator at a prestigious New York City private school.

Jennifer Norris, who is employed by Trinity School NYC as its Director of Student Activities, was recorded admitting how her current leadership role facilitates her goal of promoting politics in the classroom.

Here are some of the highlights from today’s video:

  • Jennifer Norris, Director of Student Activities, Trinity School NYC: “I just keep trying to disrupt wherever I can. And now that I’m in this position, I have so many opportunities to do that.”
  • Norris: “I don’t hide how I feel, but I can’t pretend I’m [not] promoting an agenda even though I clearly am with all the stuff I’m doing.”
  • Norris: “There’s always groups of teachers who want to do these [activist] things, but the administration just wouldn’t let us. So, we’ve been just sneaking things in [through] the cracks.”
  • Norris: “When I first started there [at Trinity School NYC], I hid my whole life. I felt like a double agent or something.”
  • Norris: Trinity School NYC is “definitely a school where conservatives would not feel comfortable.”

You can watch the full video HERE.

This is the second educator that Project Veritas has exposed just this week.

How many more people like Jennifer Norris and Jeremy Boland are out there?

Stay tuned for more Secret Curriculum videos coming soon…

*CLICK HERE TO TWEET THE VIDEO*

EDITORS NOTE: This Project Veritas expose is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Mystery Deaths’ Now Killing 3x More People Than COVID thumbnail

‘Mystery Deaths’ Now Killing 3x More People Than COVID

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By MERCOLA Take Control of Your Health

Emerging statistics on excess mortality rates paint an alarming picture. Far more people died in 2021, after the rollout of the COVID shots, and in 2022, than during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. I will review some of those shocking statistics — which are mirrored around the world — in a moment.

But while rational people look at these figures and ask themselves what the most apparent and likely cause behind this sudden rise in deaths of working-age adults and younger people might be, mainstream media are trying to divert your attention from the elephant in the room — mass injection with experimental gene transfer technology — to anything and everything but that.

Lockdowns Blamed for Excess Deaths

In an August 18, 2022, article,1 Telegraph science editor Sarah Knapton blames the “unexplained excess deaths” on “the effects of lockdown.” She writes:2

“Figures for excess deaths from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that around 1,000 more people than usual are currently dying each week from conditions other than the virus.

The … Department of Health has ordered an investigation into the figures amid concern that the deaths are linked to delays to and deferment of treatment for conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Over the past two months, the number of excess deaths not from Covid dwarfs the number linked to the virus …

Dr. Charles Levinson, the chief executive of Doctorcall, a private GP service, said his company was seeing ‘far too many’ cases of undetected cancers and cardiac problems, as well as ‘disturbing’ numbers of mental health conditions.

‘Hundreds and hundreds of people dying every week — what is going on?’ he said. ‘Delays in seeking and receiving healthcare are no doubt the driving force, in my view.’”

Cardiovascular Problems Kill in Record Numbers

ONS data released August 16, 2022, show excess deaths in England and Wales were, as of August 5, 14.4% higher than the five-year average, which works out to 1,350 more deaths per week than normal, Knapton reports.3 As you can see in the graph4 below, COVID is only involved in a small number of those deaths.

View Chart: Excess Deaths in England and Wales.

In all, non-COVID deaths are now more than three times that of COVID-related deaths. According to the U.K. Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, a majority of these excess deaths were “preventable heart and stroke and diabetes-related conditions.”

However, while lack of routine health care — people avoiding seeing their doctors for fear of COVID or due to various restrictions — may well have played a role, cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks and strokes are the primary side effects of the jab as well.

A Look at US Mortality Data

The identical trend is also seen in the U.S. In Part 1 of a three-part series,5 The Ethical Skeptic — self-described as a former intelligence officer and strategies for nations facing corruption challenges — reviews data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics showing “stark increase trends beginning in the first week of April 2021.”

“This date of inception is no coincidence, in that it also happens to coincide with a key inflection point regarding a specific body-system intervention in most of the U.S. population,” The Ethical Skeptic notes.

He describes how, at the very end of May 2021, an “odd signal” developed in his COVID tracking models. This odd signal came in the form of an ICD death code (International Classification of Diseases code) called R00-R99, which stands for “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified.” In other words, deaths from undetermined causes.

As a result of this odd signal, he started tracking these R00-R99 deaths, along with 11 other ICD-10 (the 10 stands for 10th revision, which is the most recent), such as suicides and overdoses, as well as a statistic called “Excess non-COVID natural cause deaths.” The data The Ethical Skeptic used for his models were derived from three primary databases:

  1. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Weekly Counts of Deaths by State and Select Causes, 2014-20196
  2. The CDC’s Weekly Provisional Counts of Deaths by State and Select Causes, 2020-20227
  3. The CDC’s Wonder: Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2018 through Last Month – Query by Constraint Engine8

CDC Is Scrubbing Death Records

Non-COVID mortality saw a mild uptick in October 2020, an effect The Ethical Skeptic attributes to “the systemic damage which the SARS-CoV-2 infection and virus spike protein can produce in the human body. An erstwhile COVID delayed death if you will.”

The noticeable explosion of non-COVID deaths didn’t occur until Week 14, 2021, and “by the end of 2021 it had become abundantly clear that U.S. citizens were not just dying of COVID-19 to the excess, they were also now dying of something else, and at a rate which eventually became higher than that of COVID itself,” he writes.

Disturbingly, he discovered that death records were inexplicably being redacted and deleted during a very crucial time period — Weeks 4 through 20 in 2022. “It is hard to envision a scenario explaining this 52,000-record data tampering across the most at-risk weeks … of 2022, as not constituting malicious obfuscation of U.S. citizen mortality data,” he writes.

Deep Dive Into US Death Statistics

His article is chockfull of charts for those who want to take a deeper dive into the statistics, but here are some extracts of his findings:

“The charts of particular concern … include the charts featuring stark post MMWR Week 14, 2021 rises in mortality. Specifically, they are

  • Excess non-COVID natural cause, 5+ sigma
  • Cancer and lymphomas, 9+ sigma
  • Other respiratory conditions, 2 sigma
  • Nephritis/Nephrotic syndrome, 4 sigma
  • Septicemia, 2 sigma
  • Heart diseases and ailments, 2 sigma
  • All other ICD-10 tracked natural cause deaths, 4 sigma

… While there are indeed increases in deaths incumbent inside the other ICD-10 codes, those increases appeared to plausibly conform to their same arrival patterns for 2020 as well. In other words, they appeared to be heavily Covid-related in their dynamics, both before and after the Week 14 2021 inflection.

Of particular concern, are those deaths which relate to body-wide regulatory systems as opposed to specific organs or causes. In other words, cancer and lymphomas, heart, autonomous myocarditis/pericarditis/conductive disorders, injuries to the liver and kidneys, etc.

These are not only the canaries in the coal mine in terms of pathology, but may serve to indicate as well that a pervasive systemic disruption is at play inside the average U.S. citizen human physiology, especially over the last 71 weeks. These are the death groups which exhibit the most stark trend of increase post MMWR Week 14, 2021 …

[Let] us for a moment also review the compelling rationale behind the MMWR Week 14 2021 inflection date. This date is a critical matter of concern for no small reason. Its derivation is no coincidence. The ‘Doses and Deaths Comparison Chart’, Exhibit B below, outlines why.

View Chart: Weekly Arrival Comparative Between V Doses and Excess Non-Covid Natural Deaths.

Exhibit B — The MMWR Week 14, 2021 inflection date also happens to correspond to the fastest velocity in administered vaccine doses inside the U.S. population. The red line is Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Mortality extracted from the data behind Exhibit E below.”

According to The Ethical Skeptic, three types of death record codes in particular are signaling “population-wide systemic health disruption,” and those are: “Excess malignant neoplasm and lymphoma” deaths (coded C00-C97), “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified” deaths (R00-R99) and “Excess non-COVID natural cause” deaths. All three trend very sharply against historical baselines.

For example, cancer and lymphoma deaths are now at a 9+ Sigma level, although it could potentially be higher. According to The Ethical Skeptic, 43,935 death records relating to “potential myocarditis, cancer, pericarditis, conductive, nephrosis, liver, and/or lymphoma deaths” have been removed from the CDC data sets, and as of his writing of that article had not been put back in or reassigned to another ICD code.

“That is 7% of the total deaths for the period in question, and possibly 15 to 25% of these highly concerning death ICD-10 groups’ trend data — missing. Even absent this data however, the entailed trends are alarming,” he writes.9

US Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Deaths

The Ethical Skeptic continues:10

“Finally, we end with the most important chart of all — the chart which indicates deaths which are not from accidents, suicide, addiction, assault, abuse, despair, disruption, nor COVID-19. The Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Mortality chart which we began monitoring on May 29th 2021. What I called then, the ‘What the hell is this?’ chart.

As one can see, we have lost 349,000 younger Americans to something besides COVID and non-natural death, during the period from 3 April 2021 to 13 August 2022.

The current rate of mortality in this ICD categorization, is around 5,000 – 8,000 per week … which exceeds most weeks of the COVID pandemic itself (save for the absolute peak periods). By now, if all these mortality excesses were indeed a holdover from COVID-19 itself, they should have already begun to tail off. Unfortunately, they are not only not tailing off, in many cases they are still increasing.

View Chart – All Non-Covid Natural Deaths – Wk 32 (13 wk Lag Adjusted)

Exhibit E — Excess Non-COVID Natural Cause Deaths are at an all time high as of MMWR Week 32 of 2022. 349,000 U.S. citizens have died of some additional factor since MMWR Week 14 of 2021. The current rate of excess mortality represents a five-week average of 5+ sigma in excess (hedging conservatively for lag).

Accordingly, and without a shadow of a doubt, we have established that right now there exists a problem in terms of U.S. citizen health and mortality. One which is differentiated from COVID-19 itself, and began in earnest MMWR Week 14 of 2021.”

COVID Jabs Impair Immune Function

Kenji Yamamoto with the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Okamura Memorial Hospital in Japan has also sounded the alarm, specifically highlighting the COVID jabs’ ability to impair your immune function. In a commentary published in the Virology Journal June 5, 2022, Yamamoto noted:11

“Recently, The Lancet published a study12 on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and the waning of immunity with time. The study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals …

The decrease in immunity can be caused by several factors such as N1-methylpseudouridine, the spike protein, lipid nanoparticles, antibody-dependent enhancement, and the original antigenic stimulus …

As a safety measure, further booster vaccinations should be discontinued. In addition, the date of vaccination should be recorded in the medical record of patients … In conclusion, COVID-19 vaccination is a major risk factor for infections in critically ill patients.”

It’s important to understand that when your immune function is impaired, you become vulnerable to all kinds of infections and disease, including cancer. As such, the COVID jab may well be responsible for any number of diseases resulting in death.

A Not-so-Comforting Fact Check by Reuters

A recent Thai study13 found teenagers, aged 13 through 18, who received two doses of Pfizer’s mRNA jab suffered a variety of heart problems. A Reuters “fact check” notes:14

“A study of 301 teens in Thailand found mild and temporary heart rhythm changes after a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine among one in six teenagers, not one-third as social media posts claim. The study also saw possible signs of heart inflammation in just seven of those teens with rhythm changes and confirmed myocarditis in only one of the seven.”

Should we throw a victory parade over the fact that the jab causes heart problems in JUST 1 in 6 teens? Really?! Whether it’s 1 in 3 or 1 in 6, this is not “good news” and surely not worthy of the dismissive tone used by Reuters. As reported directly from the study in question:15

“The most common cardiovascular effects were tachycardia (7.64%), shortness of breath (6.64%), palpitation (4.32%), chest pain (4.32%), and hypertension (3.99%). Seven participants (2.33%) exhibited at least one elevated cardiac biomarker or positive lab assessments.

Cardiovascular effects were found in 29.24% of patients, ranging from tachycardia, palpitation, and myopericarditis. Myopericarditis was confirmed in one patient after vaccination. Two patients had suspected pericarditis and four patients had suspected subclinical myocarditis. Conclusion: Cardiovascular effects in adolescents after BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccination included tachycardia, palpitation, and myocarditis.”

Millennials Died at Staggering Rates in Late 2021

I recently interviewed Ed Dowd, a former equity portfolio manager for BlackRock and hedge fund “guru,”16 but have not yet posted it. In early March 2022 he shared disturbing CDC mortality statistics by age group on Steve Bannon’s War Room.17

During the fall of 2021, Millennials, aged 25 to 44, had an 84% increase in excess mortality. “It’s the worst-ever excess mortality, I think, in history,” Dowd told Bannon. Between the summer and fall of 2021, 61,000 Millennials died who otherwise wouldn’t. To quote Dowd:18

“Basically, Millennials experienced a Vietnam War in the second half of 2021. 58,000 people died in the Vietnam War, U.S. troops [over the course of 10 years], so this generation just experienced a Vietnam War [in 6 months] …

We’ve had 1.1 million excess deaths since the pandemic began, many of which occurred in the second half of [2021] …

I think this is the smoking gun: that the vaccines are causing excess mortality in all age groups … So, I’m going to put a word out there. It’s an old word but it should be re-introduced into the conversation. It’s called democide: Death by government. So the government, through the mandates has killed people …

If you’re on Wall Street and you still think Pfizer and Moderna are good buys, I’ve got news for you: there’s some catalysts coming that are probably not going to be good for holding those stocks.”

The following pdf was posted on Dowd’s GETTR account, March 11, 2022.19 (A GETTR user called MiloMac also reproduced Dowd’s findings using public CDC data, creating additional graphs.20)

View Infographic: The Millennial generation suffered its worst-ever mortality last fall chart.

The Elephant in the Room

In a March 15, 2022, commentary and follow-up on Dowd’s revelations, Steve Kirsch wrote:21

“I called Ed to clarify where he got the chart and then looked for verification of this. I found the verification. Then I verified that the deaths couldn’t be explained by the COVID delta variant. OK, so what caused all the deaths? The only explanation is the vaccine because the deaths are so massive.”

Kirsch posted a WhatsApp conversation with Marc Girardot, a French-American biotech innovator, who believes the COVID jab may, in some people, age their arteries by as much as 50 years in just a few months. If true, that could certainly trigger rapid onset of cardiovascular disease leading to early death.

View Marc Girardot’s Embalmer Conundrum “AHA” Moment

Teens and Young Adults Die at Higher Rates in New Zealand

In an August 16, 2022, Substack article,22 independent journalist Alex Berenson (a former New York Times reporter and novelist) highlighted COVID jab statistics from New Zealand,23 which includes observed post-jab deaths. He explained:

“New Zealand’s Ministry of Health publishes regular and detailed reports on COVID vaccine safety, including specific lists of adverse events it has received. As part of the reports, the ministry also counts all deaths of people who have received the jabs in the previous 21 days …

New Zealand has a national COVID immunization registry and a national death registry, so the records and matching should largely be accurate … The ministry breaks down the deaths by age, ranging from 0-9 through over 80.

It then compares the actual number of people who died in the three weeks after the shots to the ‘expected’ number. That figure is simply the number of deaths demographers would have expected over a random three-week period based on actuarial tables estimating mortality …”

In summary, between February 19 and April 30, 2022, people over the age of 30 had lower than normal death rates in the 21 days’ post-jab, but people younger than 30 (ages 10 to 29) for some reason died at higher rates. (The lack of observed deaths in the under-10 age group is likely due to reporting lag.)

View Chare: Table 7: Observed-versus-expected deaths by age group from any cause, up to 21 days after Comirnaty dose 1, 19 February 2021 to 30 April 2022

According to the health ministry, the slightly elevated deaths in the under-30 group is likely due to “chance.” And as noted by Berenson, “the ministry does not provide any information on the causes of death in any age range, so it is impossible to determine whether myocarditis or other cardiac conditions played a major role in the higher-than-expected figures.”

While these data are nowhere near as alarming as some others, it’s still a red flag that something odd is happening. Young people who should have decades of life left are dying.

And it’s worth noting that New Zealand, just like the U.S. claims there are NO potential safety issues with the jabs — not a single one — despite thousands of serious injury reports.24 Considering the age group that is dying at a higher than normal rate — teenagers and young adults in their 20s — even a small increase ought to be taken very seriously, but is not.

To end where we started, which is the more likely culprit in these deaths? Past lockdowns temporarily preventing routine medical care, resulting in chronic diseases that kill even young people within a couple of years? Or the mass injection of experimental gene transfer shots that have never been used in humans before?

Sources and References

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercola column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Junk Science Alert: Scientific American Claims that Male/Female is a Myth Invented by Enlightenment Bigots thumbnail

Junk Science Alert: Scientific American Claims that Male/Female is a Myth Invented by Enlightenment Bigots

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Is binary sexuality really a way of subjugating women?

Sexual dimorphism—one of the most fundamental concepts in human biology—is a myth invented by 18th century bigots.

That is the wild claim made by Scientific American last week in a tweet thread promoting its new documentary series, “A Question of Sex”.

“Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex—the male—and considered the female body an inferior version of it,” read the sixth tweet in the thread. “The shift historians call the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”

Sex is always complex, medical anthropologist @Karkazis says. “It’s not just complex in the context of intersex … Our bodies are far more variable than our categories. Part of what’s happened is people become slotted into this binary framework.” (5/7) pic.twitter.com/LE98mX5qGT

— Scientific American (@sciam) August 24, 2022

The same claim was repeated in the documentary episode linked to in the tweet, but without historical evidence to substantiate it.

To be sure, there are academics who support junk science with junk history. Karen Harvey, now at the University of Birmingham, has argued that male and female are political categories invented as part of a patriarchal plot to suppress women. “As political theorists were increasingly invoking a potentially egalitarian language of natural rights in the 18th century,” she wrote in The Historical Journal, “’woman’ had to be defined as qualitatively different from men in order that political power would be kept out of women’s reach. Science mediated a political debate over people’s rights, demonstrating that there were indissoluble differences within the human race which justified inequitable access to power.”

In fact, sexual dimorphism has been a fundamental assumption of Western civilisation from time immemorial, not least because of the Bible’s binary portrayal of sex from Genesis to Revelation. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them,” the Bible’s first chapter reads.

Call the Bible’s authors and its medieval custodians “bigots” too, if you like—but the West’s notion of sexual dimorphism long predates the 1700s.

Scientific American’s absurd claim is the latest, greatest example of junk science. It is a stark reminder that empiricism and wokeism cannot coexist in the same universe.

Justifiably, the outlet became an object of scorn and derision online for its efforts to wokeify the field of biology.

Excuse the metaphor, but Scientific American’s agenda is as subtle as dogs’ balls.

They have zero interest in the scientific outlook of Georgian-era Europeans. Their documentary episode had one goal: to displace science and common sense with transgender talking points.

Their article included the oft-repeated claim that 1.7 per cent of the population is intersex—that is, have sexual characteristics that are both male and female.

Of course, intersex people should be included in, not ostracised by, society. They deserve protection from medically unnecessary “corrective” cosmetic surgeries, which has not always been the case.

But it’s also true that intersex people should not be co-opted to validate transgenderism, as Scientific America is here attempting. Intersex is a medical condition that in the vast majority of cases has nothing to do with LGBT identities, rainbows, flags or pride marches. Sadly, people with this genetic deformity are all too often used as a battering ram for wokeness.

Moreover, the 1.7 percent figure—said to be “as common as red hair”—is wildly inflated. If true, it would mean that half a million Australians are intersex. It would mean that six million Americans are confused when they look between their legs.

According to evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, intersex people actually comprise 0.018% of the population. The 1.7% estimate comes from Anne Fausto-Sterling, a sexologist with an ideological axe to grind. She defines intersex as anything that deviates from a supposed “Platonic ideal” of sex—which even includes, for example, a penis that falls outside of a 2.5cm and 4.5cm range at birth.

In fact, as psychologist Leonard Sax has explained,

Many reviewers are not aware that this [1.7%] figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female.

Even without these helpful insights, we know that there is no “spectrum” of gametes. Every person is born with either small gametes (sperm) or large gametes (ova). Sexual dimorphism lies at the basis of human reproduction because of this single, immovable, irrefutable fact.

But who cares about stuffy old science? There are woke points to be scored, and Scientific American is on the leaderboard.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Romancing The All Electric Vehicle thumbnail

Romancing The All Electric Vehicle

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Going somewhere for the holiday weekend?  Not if you live in California and drive an electric vehicle, you’re not.  California issued an emergency alert asking people not to charge their EVs because the power grid can’t handle the demand.  This from a state that is moving to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles. So how’s this going to work when the internal combustion engine is gone, natural gas appliances are banned, and everyone has to rely on electricity for getting around, heating their homes, and washing their clothes.  The short answer is: it’s not.  The numbers don’t add up.  But that’s the bright green energy future into which your insane leaders want to take you.

Here’s one thing that will happen in that future.  Everyone will have smart meters and the government will simply order the power cut off whenever it feels like it.  Don’t believe me?  It’s already happening.  How did you like the story out of Denver this week, where 22,000 households were locked out of their thermostats and couldn’t adjust their air conditioning when it got hot?  No car, no A/C, no appliances, whenever the government decides it’s time to control your behavior.

Colorado and California are among the states that have adopted green energy mandates.  Hate to break it to you, folks, but green energy is just not up to the job.  The numbers don’t add up.  That’s why Illinois is already looking for ways to adjust its green energy mandates and escape the trap.  They figure they can’t attract business to the state without being able to demonstrate they will have reliable energy supplies in the future.  That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard out of Illinois politicians for a long time.

Since I’m the skunk at the garden party, let me ask this:  What is all this sackcloth and ashes supposed to accomplish?  If I were a cynic, I would say the goal is wealth and power for a tiny elite that is personally heavily invested in green energy stocks, something I’ve reported on before.  I could also say it’s about controlling the people, reducing their standard of living to make them poor, cutting America down to size in the world, waging Marxist war on capitalism, putting the globalists in control of your happiness, and degrowth and depopulation.

I’ve heard all these things and they sound plausible to me.  But let’s take the entire exercise at face value, shall we?  Leaving fossil fuels in the ground and making the transition to green energy will stop climate change and keep the planet from burning up, right?

There’s only one problem. Over 1,100 scientists and professionals from around the world just signed a declaration stating in no uncertain terms there is no climate emergency.  “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” they said.  “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming.”  So, anyone who tells you ‘the science is settled’ and the planet is burning up is lying to you for their own selfish purposes.  There are real costs to green energy policies, the scientists went on, and the cure – getting rid of fossil fuels – will be worse than the disease.  They criticize the unfounded beliefs that dominate media narratives and call for getting back to real science.

Emergency directives and smart meter shut-offs aside, let’s suppose you do manage to get your EV out of your garage this weekend.  You have some other things to worry about.  Your EV could explode at any moment.  Hyundai and Kia just issued warnings.  They recommend parking your EV outside so it doesn’t burn your house down.  The town in Connecticut with the electric bus fire this summer has gone back to diesel-powered buses.

If you’re on the road, good luck finding a charging station, and hope it works when you find one.  A police department in England is finding its EVs can’t reach some emergencies because the emergencies are too far away and the batteries run down before they can get there.  In 2019, a police officer in California could not pursue a suspect because the officer’s EV ran down.  The suspect got away.

If you’re driving an EV because you feel guilty about damaging the environment with fossil fuels, here’s something else to feel guilty about:  pulling lithium out of the ground for your EV battery generates lots of carbon emissions, toxic wastewater, and other environmental damage.  Indigenous peoples and governments in Latin America are wising up to this and are moving to clamp down on lithium mining.  How will the numbers add up when more people in producing areas revolt?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for progress.  I had halogens for years, but I love my LED lamps.  But here’s what I’m not for:  chasing unicorns and rainbows, turning everything upside down just because some people take it on faith the planet is burning up.  And I’m not for blindly pursuing supposed solutions without ever giving a thought to what they will really cost or what new problems they will create.  And I’m not for financially self-interested government officials telling us we have to ‘press the accelerator’ on the green energy transition when the numbers obviously don’t add up.  I’m not for the inmates running the asylum.  Take your romanticism and shove it!  Get real and keep your hands off my thermostat and my life.   Kapish?

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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Take Action: Activate Your Church Register and Vote to Advance Biblical Values! thumbnail

Take Action: Activate Your Church Register and Vote to Advance Biblical Values!

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By My Faith My Faith Votes

Jason Yates, CEO of My Faith Votes in an email wrote:

Here’s an exciting opportunity for you to roll-up your sleeves and help the churchgoers at your church register and vote to advance biblical values.

On Sunday, September 18, 2022 churches across the nation are participating in the 4th annual National Voter Registration Sunday.

This is an effort led by churchgoers who desire to see 100% of their church congregation vote in every election from the local to the federal level.

90 million Christians in America are eligible to vote, but as many as 15 million are not even registered to vote.

With the Midterm Elections just weeks away, now is the time to have all hands on deck.

PARTICIPATE IN NATION VOTER REGISTREATION SUNDAY

Together, we can help change the statistics of Christian voter turnout by participating in a national day of civic engagement in our churches.

In this link you will find a comprehensive National Voter Registration Sunday free toolkit containing all the resources and instructions you need to approach your pastor or church leadership and to host a successful voter drive at your church.

Please keep in mind:

  • All of these tools are non-partisan and do not endorse a political party or candidate.
  • Your church can use all or some of the materials that best meet your needs.
  • The registration drive can be held in person OR online
  • As a member of your church body, there is no one better positioned to advocate for civic engagement in the voting process than you!

We pray these materials can help you activate others in your church to civic engagement and reveal the incredible opportunity we have as Christians to use our votes and biblical truth as a conduit for good in our communities.

PARTICIPATE IN NATION VOTER REGISTREATION SUNDAY

United. We Stand.

©My Faith Votes. All rights reserved.

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