Tuesday, November 29, 2022

End the Vaccine Mandates The time has come for the Biden administration to follow the science/ City Journal

One year ago, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an interim final rule requiring 15 types of health-care facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding to ensure that their more than 10 million employees were vaccinated against Covid-19. This was one of multiple Biden administration mandates covering, in addition to medical workers, private employees at large firms (the OSHA mandate covering 84 million workers), federal contractors (one-fifth of the national workforce), 3.5 million federal employees, and Head Start employees, contractors, and volunteers. The administration designed these mandates to force American workers to choose between vaccination or their jobs. Federal courts have enjoined all of them except for the medical-worker one, which the Supreme Court allowed to continue. The administration withdrew the OSHA rule for private employees after the Court found that it exceeded OSHA’s statutory authority to address workplace hazards.

Now a coalition of 22 states, led by Montana attorney general Austin Knudsen, has made a convincing case for repealing the medical-worker vaccine mandate. The states, relying on a section of the Administrative Procedure Act that gives “an interested person the right to petition for the issuance, amendment, or repeal of a rule,” have filed a petition seeking repeal with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and CMS (the part of HHS with primary responsibility for overseeing the Medicare program and the federal role in the Medicaid program).

Many of these states had previously challenged the rule as part of two separate lawsuits—one led by Missouri and the other by Louisiana. District courts in Missouri and Louisiana each found the rule defective and preliminarily enjoined enforcement. The government applied for an emergency stay of those injunctions, and the Supreme Court consolidated the two separate cases. A 5–4 Court majority concluded that the statute gave the HHS secretary authority “to promulgate, as a condition of a facility’s participation in the programs, such ‘requirements as [he] finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services in the institution.’” That authority would include measures to prevent transmission of communicable diseases and infections within those facilities.

The Court stayed the two district court injunctions, thereby allowing enforcement of the mandate while litigation to resolve the cases moved through the lower courts. That litigation continues in the district courts. In doing so, the Court relied on a finding by the HHS secretary that “a COVID–19 vaccine mandate will substantially reduce the likelihood that healthcare workers will contract the virus and transmit it to their patients.”

The new petition rehashes several legal arguments that, regardless of their merits, were made to and rejected by the narrow Supreme Court majority. But the petition is more effective in arguing that changed scientific circumstances undermine the HHS secretary’s justification that vaccinating staff protects patients. It claims that the medical evidence supporting the mandate was weak when the rule was issued and has become even less convincing as newer, more transmissible variants have become the predominant circulating viruses.

The rationale for imposing the mandate was that vaccines would protect medical workers from becoming infected and that, even if they were infected, vaccines would make them less likely to transmit the virus to residents and patients at medical facilities. But the initial vaccine trials were primarily focused on determining whether the vaccines protected against symptomatic Covid-19 infection, not against all transmission. They did not account for post-vaccination, mild, or asymptomatic infections, nor did they study secondary transmission.

In addition, the trials were conducted before the advent of newer, more transmissible viruses. By August 2021, nearly all U.S. cases were the newer Delta variant, which was associated with diminished effectiveness of vaccines against infection and illness, leading to increased numbers of breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people and onward transmission to others.

Furthermore, it has long been apparent that protection against infection, regardless of the variant, wanes with time after vaccination. By six to 12 months post-vaccination, protection against infection is half or less of the protection in the first one to two months.

The Delta variant remained prevalent in November 2021 when CMS issued the vaccine mandate but was on the way to being supplanted by the far more transmissible Omicron and its subvariants. By December, Omicron was predominant and led to a rapid rise in daily case numbers in the U.S., even among the vaccinated. And the CDC had already acknowledged over the summer of 2021 that “[a]nyone with Omicron infection, regardless of vaccination status or whether or not they have symptoms, can spread the virus to others.”

By the time the Supreme Court issued its January 2022 decision allowing the vaccine mandate to be imposed, the vaccines had little or no effectiveness in limiting Covid infection and onward transmission.

The government does not dispute the vaccines’ waning effectiveness. In a September 2022 hearing before the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (sitting en banc) that dealt with the federal employee mandate, the administration’s attorney said that when the mandate was issued last year, vaccines were thought to be effective against Covid-19 transmission and would protect employees from getting infected. “The fact is that the science has changed,” he conceded. “There are new variants and that particular rationale is somewhat eroded, but there are still significant rationales at play here in terms of preventing serious illness for federal employees, which has a clear nexus to the federal workplace in terms of productivity and efficiency.”

While protecting employees themselves from serious illness may or may not suffice for the purposes of a federal employee mandate (the Fifth Circuit has not ruled yet), it does not satisfy the statutory authority cited by the Supreme Court in upholding the medical-worker mandate to issue requirements “necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services in the institution.”

While I would hope that medical workers get vaccinated to protect themselves from serious Covid illness, it is now hard to justify forcing them to do so in the name of patient protection. More effective infection-control measures are now being utilized in medical facilities.

Continuing a vaccine mandate on pain of employment termination risks worsening nationwide medical staffing shortages. Hospital systems across the nation are experiencing shortages of physicians, nurses, technicians, respiratory therapists, and other hard-to-fill jobs. On average, 25 percent of the nation’s nursing homes report insufficient numbers of nurses and aides, and in many states the percentage is higher. Twenty-four states report that 30 percent or more of their facilities lack adequate staffing, and the top four states (Alaska, Minnesota, Maine, and Wyoming) exceed 60 percent.

Moreover, continuing a nationwide mandate ignores the fact that state and local governments—which historically and under the Constitution’s principles of federalism have been the locus of public health decision-making—are better able to assess local conditions and determine the most appropriate policies for limiting disease transmission in their facilities. Similarly, private institutions can and have imposed mitigation measures, including vaccine mandates, for their facilities when conditions warranted them.

The time has come for HHS and the Biden administration to follow the science and retract all vaccine mandates still being adjudicated in various federal courts. The federal government’s legal authority to impose any of them has always been dubious, and now there is no longer any scientific or medical justification for such autocratic and potentially counterproductive measures.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

CHD meeting in Brussels, with speakers Mary Holland, Catherine Austin Fitts, Orsolya Gyorrfy, Wolfgang Wodarg, Sucharit Bhakdi, Michael Palmer and me

https://childrenshealthdefense.eu/eu-issues/watch-the-replay-hands-off-our-children-brussels-belgium-november-12-2022/

 My talk lasts 16 minutes, is last, and starts at 3 hrs. 44 minutes.

White House allocates $475 million to medical centers to push bivalent boosters, when they don't work and do maim.

The US government continues to bribe medical institutions to force vaccines on hapless patients.  When will the courts finally judge this to be a crime, given what we already know about the shots?  What is wrong with Congress that it allows taxpayer money to be spent this way?  Congress approved $4.5 trillion to be spent on the 'pandemic response' by last December and what has it gotten us?

$5 billion was spent on the rotten bivalent boosters, and for what? They don't work, and they do maim.  Now $475 million is going to health centers, where the administrators will require the shots to be pushed on every patient who walks through the door, presumably as a condition of the grant.  And this is happening as one medical center after another is looking at going under, since patients no longer want their help.  Hospitals that made tons of money when the federal gravy was flowing are now in the red.  The Cleveland Clinic for example, lost over a billion dollars in the first half of 2022.  They will be looking for more federal largesse, and if it is conditioned upon vaccinating the hordes, so be it.

As Catherine Austin Fitts often says, we are the ones paying for the noose being slipped around our necks.


White House renews COVID-19 vaccination push: 3 updates

The White House aims to reinvigorate national COVID-19 vaccination efforts through a six-week campaign announced Nov. 22. 

The vaccination campaign will focus on seniors, communities hit hardest by COVID-19 and those living in rural areas. The White House has also allocated $350 million for community health centers and $125 million for community-based organizations to help increase the pace of vaccinations. 

The White House is also tapping the healthcare workforce to encourage vaccinations for older Americans. On Nov. 21, a group of the nation's leading medical societies — including the American Medical Association and American Academy of Family Physicians — encouraged members "to use every interaction with patients as an opportunity to make strong vaccine recommendations."  

Vaccination efforts have lagged nationwide since updated boosters were made available in September. Only 11.3 percent of people ages 5 and up have received the omicron-tweaked booster, according to CDC estimates

Three more updates on COVID-19 vaccines: 

1. New bivalent boosters are effective at preventing severe COVID-19 and offer a modest increase in protection compared to past monovalent boosters, according to the first real-world data available on the shot's efficacy, which the CDC published Nov. 22. Protection from the bivalent doses — which contain genetic material from the original coronavirus strain and BA.4/BA.5 — also increased with time due to waning immunity of the original monovalent doses, the CDC said. 

2. Anthony Fauci, MD, urged Americans to get vaccinated during his final White House COVID-19 briefing Nov. 22. He is slated to leave his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in December. 

"So, my message and my final message — may be the final message I give you from this podium — is that: Please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you're eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community," he said. 

3. Updated boosters will offer "some protection, but not the optimal protection" against omicron subvariants BQ.1.1 and XBB, according to Dr. Fauci. Despite the spread of these subvariants, which are capable of evading immunity from vaccines, Dr. Fauci said he does not anticipate a winter surge of the same magnitude as last year's.

"We're hoping that [with] a combination of people who've been infected and boosted and vaccinated, or people who've been vaccinated and boosted and not infected, that there's enough community protection that we're not going to see a repeat of what we saw last year at this time," he said.

Monkeypox name change due to Biden administration--not African nations--to "reduce stigma and racism." New cases down to 5% of the new case rate in August

The Biden administration pushed the WHO to change the name of monkeypox to reduce racism.  Hello?  Are we stigmatizing monkeys?

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/who-lands-on-new-name-for-monkeypox.html

The World Health Organization will rename monkeypox "MPOX" in an effort to destigmatize the virus amid growing pressure from senior Biden administration officials, Politico reported Nov. 22. The name change could be announced as early as Nov. 22. 

The WHO announced the possible name change over the summer to reduce stigma and racism surrounding the virus. 

According to Politico, the Biden administration was concerned the stigma surrounding the virus's name was negatively impacting the vaccination campaign that started over the summer. 

The U.S. has recorded nearly 30,000 infections of MPOX, according to the CDC. But with the availability of vaccinations, cases have fallen from a high of more than 400 cases per day over the summer to fewer than 20 cases per day nationally.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

The social media-USG collusion censorship case moves forward: Jen Psaki also will have to testify

https://www.conservativereview.com/jen-psaki-loses-court-battle-judge-orders-her-to-testify-about-biden-admin-role-in-social-media-censorship-2658764103.html

Judge Doughty was the judge who first ruled on October 21 that Psaki and Dr. Anthony Fauci must testify for the lawsuit.

"After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath," Schmitt said after the October ruling.

"It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that," he added. "We’ll keep pressing for the truth."

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley opined that there was evidence to support the contentions made in the lawsuit.

"The concern for free speech advocates is that there is a type of censorship by surrogate, that Democratic leaders and other groups have used social media to silence opposing voices, and you've had a number of people who’ve been banned on social media or had tweets taken down that have been proven correct," Turley said.

"The government is not allowed to do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly," the legal scholar said about possible collusion between the government and social media companies.

In July, the Biden administration was forced to turn over emails related to censorship social media as a part of the lawsuit. Critics said the emails proved that the White House participated in a campaign to shut down free speech.

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki lost a battle in court after a federal judge ordered her to testify about the White House's role in censorship on social media.

Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana issued the decision on Monday.

Doughty denied a motion by Psaki's attorney's asking to block a court order for her testimony and said there was public interest in "determining whether First Amendment free speech rights have been suppressed."

The lawsuit was filed by Republican Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana on the basis that high-ranking officials in the Biden administration had censored free speech on social media platforms "under the guise of combating misinformation."

Judge Doughty was the judge who first ruled on October 21 that Psaki and Dr. Anthony Fauci must testify for the lawsuit.

"After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath," Schmitt said after the October ruling.

"It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that," he added. "We’ll keep pressing for the truth."

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley opined that there was evidence to support the contentions made in the lawsuit.

"The concern for free speech advocates is that there is a type of censorship by surrogate, that Democratic leaders and other groups have used social media to silence opposing voices, and you've had a number of people who’ve been banned on social media or had tweets taken down that have been proven correct," Turley said.

"The government is not allowed to do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly," the legal scholar said about possible collusion between the government and social media companies.

In July, the Biden administration was forced to turn over emails related to censorship social media as a part of the lawsuit. Critics said the emails proved that the White House participated in a campaign to shut down free speech.

Thursday, November 3, 2022

Kangaroo Kourt: Kristina Borjesson featured an hour of my hearing, demonstrating what a bizarre prosecution it is.

In this first hour of the second day of hearings held by the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine in the matter of their suspension of Dr. Meryl Nass’s medical license, Dr. Nass, under questioning by her lawyer, describes a Kafkaesque series of events that led to her being charged with incompetence, fraud and various other unethical activities related to her treatment of three covid patients, and to the suspension of her license.

During her testimony, Dr. Nass reveals that the three patients had no complaints about their treatment and will be testifying on her behalf before the Board. This and other information revealed in this hour raises serious questions about the integrity of both the Board of Licensure in Medicine and the hearings.

https://rumble.com/v1qi4rw-no-patient-complaints-yet-charges-of-incompetence-dr.-nass-hearing.html

or

https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-no-patient-complaints-yet-charges-incompetence-dr-nass-hearing/5797630

James Corbett and I sounded off about the state of the world and what to do about it

https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/shows/good-morning-chd

or

https://rumble.com/v1ra3u8-good-morning-chd-episode-170-the-biosecurity-state.html

Interview with Nadya Swart of BizNews, Nov. 1

 

 
 
Podcast on BizNews Radio: