"Hybrid" education, CDC just discovers ventilation, and the balancing of benefits and costs by public health. First posted Aug 8, updated since

 Covid has brought out the finest in government mismanagement.  Now it is being applied to schools.

Does anyone believe the notion that students will be safer attending school two and a half days a week, instead of five? Who dreamed this up? Do they think if your child inhales 1/2 as much virus, or uses the public bathrooms half as often, they will be appreciably safer? Do the schools think that a "deep cleaning" (whatever that is, since it was never specified) even done daily, is going to stop viral transmission? There are no data that say it will.

“Hybrid" schooling still prevents parents from going back to work, so it does serve the purpose of reducing economic activity.  In other words, it perpetuates the economic crash that the lockdowns initiated.  This, by the way, has a very adverse effect on lots of children.

One school I heard about is planning to build plexiglass partitions around each desk, on 3 sides, with 6 feet between the children.  I think they are also cancelling lunchroom, recess, music and sports.  Some are requiring masks all day, even on kindergartners.

The 6' distance rule is a totally arbitrary creation invented by CDC, after their prior 3' rule, combined with inadequate PPE recommendations, did not adequately protect healthcare workers during the Ebola epidemic. See my 2014 post on this. There is no science to support it. You heard me right.  It is invented out of thin air, an expensive charade, to make everyone think that Covid risks can be controlled. But, only with extreme measures...like halving classroom size and ruining the economy. The World Health Organization, however, thinks 1 meter (i.e., 3 feet, or to be precise, 39.37 inches) for social distancing is sufficient:  

"Maintain at least 1 metre (3 feet) distance between yourself and others. Why? When someone coughs, sneezes, or speaks they spray small liquid droplets from their nose or mouth which may contain virus. If you are too close, you can breathe in the droplets, including the COVID-19 virus if the person has the disease."

If the WHO is correct, then our classrooms can safely accommodate all the students who wish to attend, and we don't need the new "hybrid" system.

Most schools are stuck with inadequate ventilation systems. Their students and teachers will be exposed to viral transmission via aerosols (small particles containing virus that can remain suspended in air for hours). But only rarely is this discussed. Fixing schools' air handling systems might be more valuable than keeping children' desks 6 feet apart.

UPDATE March 7:  For the first time, on February 26, 2021, it was reported that CDC advised better ventilation to reduce the risk of Covid, for example by opening windows. Duh! And now CDC recommends opening windows to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.  Why did it take our premier public health agency a year to inform us that opening windows reduces exposure to aerosolized indoor Covid virus?  Were they afraid the truth might reduce nonsensical mask wearing outdoors?  Or that it might reduce Covid cases?

We are supposed to think the extreme measures being imposed are going to solve the transmission problem. However, kids will be kids, no matter what rules are imposed. Their masks will do nothing, if they even stay on. They will find ways to play with each other. We can't turn them into robots, and we should not be trying. 

UPDATE Aug 12:  45,000 Maine families were polled about returning their children to school.  Some results:

"while 60 percent of parents believe their schools can implement state-required measures to prevent the coronavirus’ spread, less than 40 percent of parents had faith that students would adhere to the rules. Just 34 percent thought students would be able to avoid congregating, 35 percent thought they would be able to avoid physical contact, 35 percent thought they would maintain social distancing and 38 percent thought students would wear masks in school."

So why are our political leaders imposing an inhumane 'hybrid' experiment on parents, teachers and children?  
Can we please have some common sense regarding schools?

As of July 14, only ONE child in Canada had died from Covid. As of July 19, only 29 Americans under age 14 had died of Covid. UPDATE Aug 10: The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that 86 US children have died from Covid, while 20 states report no child deaths through July 30.

Between 110 and 188 American children died yearly from influenza in the past four years. CDC estimates the actual numbers may be 2.5 times higher.


So far, Covid has been a rare disease for children. I read in two places that a) 50% and b) 70% of children who died from Covid had a preexisting condition. Multiple studies that have examined child to child, and child to adult transmission of Covid, are published in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics, They found that spread of Covid by children is a rare event. The review concludes:

"Almost 6 months into the pandemic, accumulating evidence and collective experience argue that children, particularly school-aged children, are far less important drivers of SARSCoV-2 transmission than adults. Therefore, serious consideration should be paid toward strategies that allow schools to remain open, even during periods of COVID-19 spread. In doing so, we could minimize the potentially profound adverse social, developmental, and health costs that our children will continue to suffer until an effective treatment or vaccine can be developed and distributed or, failing that, until we reach herd immunity."

Public health is supposed to be about balancing risks and benefits, and choosing interventions that will clearly provide a net overall benefit. Hybrid schooling is not a public health measure. It’s just another degrading and expensive charade.

While some children and teachers will no doubt get Covid in schools, and a few will die, that is what happens in life. Some students and teachers die each year from flu, or pneumonia, and other viruses.  We can't stop this.  We should stop pretending that we can. 

And we should admit that an untested and unprecedented educational experiment, the "hybrid" school, is unlikely to provide students an education comparable to the past.

Once children have been exposed to Covid, the vast majority (probably 99+%) will have asymptomatic disease or a mild case.  And then they will be immune, and then we can relax our fear for them.  Isn't that a better outcome?

Either keep children locked up at home, or send them back to a regular school program, in which the risk to children and teachers exists, but is very low. 

Can we follow the facts, and have an honest discussion about this?

UPDATE Aug 13:  Scotland is sending its children back to regular school this week, without masks. The rest of the UK will also be reopening regular schools. "New York City is poised to be the only one of the country’s 10 largest school districts to open schools for the start of the 2020-2021 school year." As of Aug 28, things seem to be going well.

UPDATE Aug 28:  An Aug 25 British Medical Journal article (current name is BMJ) reviewed the 6 foot distancing rule, and produced 4 key messages:

1. Current rules on safe physical distancing are based on outdated science
2. Distribution of viral particles is affected by numerous factors, including air flow 
3. Evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 may travel more than 2 m through activities such as coughing and shouting
4. Rules on distancing should reflect the multiple factors that affect risk, including ventilation, occupancy, and exposure time

The NY Times and I expose the sleazy company making anthrax vaccine, smallpox vaccine and 3 Covid vaccines for the US market, for Johnson and Johnson, Astra Zeneca and Novavax

Emergent BioSolutions/EBS is the company whose products you don't want injected in you.  So what if the company claims they can make a billion doses of Covid vaccine a year. Doses of usable vaccine?  

EBS has been making Covid vaccine for Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson, which designed a Covid vaccine but is not actually manufacturing it.  J and J's Covid vaccine was "authorized" but not approved or licensed by FDA last week.  

While the FDA authorization letter didn't specify this, the NY Times discovered and the WaPo also reported that last week FDA withheld its authorization for the specific vaccine lots manufactured by EBS.  

J and J just struck up a partnership with Merck to also produce the vaccine, presumably as a late replacement for the failing EBS product.

The FDA authorization only hints that authorization was withheld for some manufacturing facilities, by saying:

The manufacture of the authorized Janssen COVID‑19 Vaccine is limited to those facilities identified and agreed upon in Janssen’s request for authorization. 

EBS is 99% about getting those fat government contracts, and 1% about making usable products.  And frighteningly for all of us, they have contracts to make a total of 7 drugs and vaccines for Covid.

I reviewed the entire sad history of Emergent Biosolutions in my talk for the National Vaccine Information Center's 5th International Conference last October.  My talk and all the others can now be viewed for free, here.

The NY Times has published two exposes on this company today.  Please be sure to read these articles before deciding to accept any of their products. The NYT articles are:

A Who’s Who of Revolving-Door Influence at Emergent BioSolutions

and

How One Firm Put an ‘Extraordinary Burden’ on the U.S.’s Troubled Stockpile

"The shortage of lifesaving medical equipment last year was a searing example of the government’s failed coronavirus response. As health workers resorted to wearing trash bags, one Maryland company profited by selling anthrax vaccines to the country’s emergency reserve...

Emergent, led by Robert Kramer (bottom right), has long dominated the national stockpile’s budget with its anthrax vaccines. Dr. Nicole Lurie (top right) unsuccessfully tried to scale back the investment during the Obama years. Her successor, Dr. Robert Kadlec (top left), was a Trump appointee focused on bioterrorism. Sales remained high through the pandemic.Credit...

UPDATE March 8:  Biden Cancels Visit to Vaccine Maker After Times Report on Its Tactics

The White House scrapped a trip to a vaccine plant in Baltimore run by Emergent BioSolutions after a New York Times investigation into the company.

Lockdowns loosening. But the lack of honest and accurate data means we are subject to lockdown tightening as well.

New cases, hospitalizations and deaths attributed to Covid have dropped drastically over the past 8 weeks.  The best place to view these numbers has been the Covid Tracking Project, begun by volunteers but then funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and others.  The Project scraped state and municipality level data from wherever it could get them, and was found to provide more complete and accurate information than either the CDC or the Johns Hopkins tracking website.  Johns Hopkins in Baltimore is the university with the highest amount of federal funding in the US.

Four states announced reductions in their lockdown measures last week. According to Justthenews.com:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this week said that he would soon allow Texas to reopen "100%," including with a rescision of the state's mask mandate he imposed last year...

In Mississippi, meanwhile, Gov. Tate Reeves announced similar rollbacks, including a removal of the state's mask mandate and no capacity limits on businesses... 

Following the announcements of the two Republican governors. Connecticut Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont also announced he was pulling back on some COVID rules, including capacity limits in businesses as well as bans on sporting events. Lamont said he will permit amusement parks to open in the near future as well. The state's mask mandate will remain in place, however.

And in Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey declared his intent to implement the "next phase of business and safety protocols," including lifting capacity limits on businesses and permitting the conditional return of major sporting events. 

Masks and "social distancing" are still required, the governor said in his announcement.

In a February12 blog post, I explained how the CDC is able to adjust up or down the numbers of cases and deaths from Covid, using a variety of different methods. Three of those methods were: changing the cycle threshold in PCR tests, changing the availability of federally provided tests, and the hand-coding of deaths ascribed to Covid.

For example, the WaPo noted on March 4, 

"The average number of tests being conducted every day in America has plummeted by 33.6 percent since January, according to the Covid Tracking Project... The country’s rolling daily average of tests conducted peaked on Jan. 15 at approximately 2,270,000 tests. Since then it has dipped as low as 1,290,000 on Feb. 21, probably affected by the winter storms. By Wednesday, the average had increased slightly to 1,510,000...In Michigan, the number of tests conducted fell to about half the level in November. Several test providers in South Carolina began limiting the hours they offer testing. Prisma Health, a South Carolina nonprofit organization, recently said on Twitter that it would no longer operate community testing sites."

Unfortunately, the Covid Tracking Project will permanently shut down its data collection on March 7.  I fear that this could possibly lead to even greater manipulation of the Covid statistics by federal agencies. One unpleasant possibility is that a future increase in cases (either real or manipulated) might be justification to impose even stricter lockdowns than we have so far seen in the US.

UPDATE:  Despite the fall in cases, the plan just passed by Congress is to spend $50 billion on testing and track and trace.  And an effort to scare the public about not testing enough has commenced.  Why now, when cases have plummeted and vaccines are in good supply?  

We know why.  Cases of severe disease will continue to drop, because more and more of the population are immune, either from the disease or from the vaccines.  But falling cases equates to a fall in the government's ability to control us.  Tracking and tracing cases, when most spread is via the community and therefore untraceable, is a fantasy.  But tracking us 24/7 may be the future reality.

Hypocrisy: Pfizer CEO's Israel visit cancelled because he is not fully vaccinated/ Jerusalem Post

He didn't want to cut in line?  Then how did he get the first shot?  They think we will believe anything!  From today's Jerusalem Post--Meryl

Bourla said in December that he has not yet received the vaccine yet because he does not want to "cut in line."

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF   

MARCH 6, 2021 15:34

   

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla introduces US President Joe Biden as the president toured a Pfizer manufacturing plant producing the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine in Kalamazoo, Michigan, US, February 19, 2021.

(photo credit: REUTERS/TOM BRENNER)

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has cancelled his expected visit to Israel after it turned out he was not fully vaccinated against coronavirus, N12 reported Friday.

The report noted that Bourla, as well as members of the delegation that was meant to accompany him during his visit, have not received the second dose of the vaccine.

As a result, it was decided to delay the visit by several days, which also posed a logistic challenge because of the upcoming Israeli elections. 

Bourla said in December that he has not yet received the vaccine yet because he does not want to "cut in line," and would wait until his age group is next in line for getting vaccinated. As such, he has received the first dose, but not the second one yet. 

Pfizer did not respond to The Jerusalem Post's request for comment.

"Generous" Contract Research Organization in Colombia claims it worked for free to sink ivermectin. JAMA played along with the charade

Finally, after dozens of positive studies, one got published in which the authors claim ivermectin does not help Covid patients.  But it actually did help them, although the benefit missed statistical significance.

Let's drill down.  First off, Covid19Crusher has written a good summary of some of the methodological problems of the study. I won't repeat them.

Let me give you the background.  The study was performed at the Center for the Study of Pediatric Infectious Disease (CEIP) in Cali, Colombia, and supposedly CEIP paid the costs.  That in itself is surprising.  A pediatric research center doing unfunded adult research?  But then, the researchers disclose other funding from GSK, Janssen (J and J), Sanofi and one author disclosed payments from Gilead.

When I went to the website of CEIP, it looked like a contract research organization: a healthcare company that does clinical research for pharma companies.  The home page opens with a come-on seeking subjects for a Covid-19 vaccine trial.

On another page (below), you see the pale logos of the Center's clients, which include Bristol Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. This is not the kind of business that performs unfunded research.  

This study also enrolled patients late, and slowly.  It involved first a physician phone call to ascertain eligibility and then a nurse visit to draw blood.  Patients were finally enrolled and given their medication only when a third contact was made by another nurse visit to their home.  Unnecessary delays appear to have been built into the protocol.

The study protocol was considerably changed in the middle of the study, which is normally unacceptable.

The placebo changed in the middle of the study.  The medicine came as a liquid, and the first placebo was sugar water, so there was would have been unblinding of subjects based on the taste of the medication. The content of the second placebo was not described in the text.

The study pharmacist is said to have given all enrollees (during a 16 day period) ivermectin, during which none received the placebo, in error.  These subjects were pulled from the study.  Was this done to reduce the study's power so it did not achieve statistical significance?

Finally, there might have been an effort to overdose patients.  The normal dose of ivermectin is 150-200 mcg/kg.  Patients may get this dose on alternate days or daily for up to 5 days to treat Covid.  Although the subjects in this study were all outpatients with reportedly mild disease at onset, they received an ivermectin dose of 300 mcg/kg daily for 5 days.  While ivermectin is considered a very safe drug, it is normally given as a single dose or only two doses for its pre-Covid indications.  It is here being used at a higher dose than ever approved for any indication, for 5 days (a prolonged dosing duration, which has only been in use a few months) and so this study seems like a high dose experiment.  In any event, there was no reported harm to the patients. And a few other ivermectin studies have tested the 300 mcg/kg dose.

UPDATE March 13:  Dr. David Scheim has posted a preprint that also criticizes this study. He notes that ivermectin was an over-the-counter drug in Colombia, and that up to 50,000 blister packs and bottles of ivermectin liquid were sold per month in the state of Valle del Cauca, where the trial was conducted, during the trial period.

While ivermectin can have clinical effects lasting a month or more, the trial only required that subjects had not received ivermectin during the preceding 5 days.  Might some of those who received the sugar water placebo purchased their own OTC ivermectin?

Supporting this notion is the fact that the adverse event rates in the drug vs placebo group were almost identical.

The takeaway message is that this is simply a dreadfully conducted study, from which no conclusions can be drawn.

Some hidden entity had this study done, and managed to get it published in the JAMA despite its obvious failings. It definitely lacks the caliber of a paper published by the JAMA. Whoever was working behind the scenes to fund and publish this study has not been disclosed by the authors or by the JAMA.  JAMA seems to have been remarkably incurious about the study's provenance, especially after the NEJM and Lancet were exposed for publishing fabricated studies on Covid drugs last year.

This looks like another crude attempt to sink a drug that has shown phenomenal efficacy in the fight against Covid. 

UPDATE March 6:  Apparently right on cue, one day after the above study was published, FDA warned against the use of ivermectin for Covid.  How much information do you need before you figure out that our public health agencies are in fact working to harm us and keep the pandemic going?

UPDATE March 11: A local pharmacist refused to fill a prescription I wrote for ivermectin for Covid, citing the FDA warning above.  Despite the fact the FDA web posting lacked any force of law or regulation. The pharmacist did inform me that for the past year she has been instructed to evaluate the prescribing of the chloroquines and azithromycin to be sure they are not being used for Covid. Is this public health turned upside down, or not? Are your public health agencies working for or against you?

Bill Gates' U Washington lackies publish a new paper claiming HCQ doesn't work. Let me count the ways they may have fixed the result

 1.  Bill Gates has poured lots of money into the University of Washington and its Global Health department and its Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).  Global Health and IHME share a new building provided them by BMGF, away from the campus but close to BMGF headquarters. Four years ago, BMGF gave them $489 million dollars, after founding the Global Health department ten years earlier. And why not?  He gets to control the world's public health narratives with that money. And, apparently, much of the University of Washington as well:

"Through a generous gift and endowment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and complementary Washington State resources, the UW Department of Global Health was established in 2007, bridging the schools of Medicine and Public Health, with a mandate to harness the expertise and interdisciplinary power of all 16 UW schools and colleges." 

The Merriam Webster dictionary says a mandate is:

1. : an authoritative command
especially : a formal order from a superior court or official to an inferior one
2. : an authorization to act given to a representative 

You might want to read more about the IHME's frauds and its close relationship to Bill Gates.  Journalist Tim Schwab did a wonderful expose on the IHME in December, in The Nation. Its subtile is:

Thanks to the Microsoft founder’s support, the IHME can make its own rules about how to track global health. That’s a problem.

2.  The University of Washington (with researchers from many departments, which is no surprise given BMGF's mandate) began last spring to study the early outpatient use of hydroxychloroquine.  Their paper, "Hydroxychloroquine with or without azithromycin for treatment of early SARS-CoV-2 infection among high-risk outpatient adults: A randomized clinical trial" is a study in corrupted science.  The research was of course funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Most of the many authors work for the University of Washington.  Several have or had financial relationships with Gilead, which is the maker of Remdesivir.  One author went to work for Gilead after completing the research.  

Hydroxychloroquine was considered the chief (and perhaps only) competitor to Remdesivir for treating Covid when the research was started.  Had hydroxychloroquine been an approved drug for Covid, Remdesivir would have been unable to receive an Emergency Use Authorization from FDA, because a licensed drug already existed. However, despite its lack of efficacy (according to the WHO and others), its backing by Tony Fauci and a group of 16 Gilead-supported experts on his NIH Covid Treatment Guidelines panel led to Remdesivir being given an EUA and later a full license.

Furthermore, if a licensed drug like hydroxychloroquine was generally known to be highly effective as an early treatment for Covid, there would have been no need for the tens of billions of dollars invested in Covid vaccines, nor for everyone to be vaccinated.  Bill Gates is very heavily invested in vaccines and new drugs for Covid.  The availability of an old generic drug for Covid would have cost him $billions.  The fact that treatment exists, and so far has worked well regardless of which viral variant you are treating, is a secret that must be continuously suppressed.

3.  Here are some ways the study made sure HCQ failed.  The patients did their own nasal swabs, took their own temperatures, even obtained their own 6 lead EKGs. The entire study was done remotely,   via telemedicine. How valid were the diagnoses, swabs, temperatures, EKGs etc?

4.  Treatment drugs were sent by courier to the patients, while it was acknowledged by the authors that "kit shipment increased the time from screening to study medication initiation. This may have affected measurement of the virology outcome since a large proportion (34.2%) had already met the definition of viral clearance at enrollment."  In other words, more than a third of patients were not early in their course, or perhaps did not even have Covid, since there was no virus at the time they enrolled.

In addition to enrolling more than 1/3 of subjects who were not early cases, the study administrators note that meds were delayed in getting to patients.  This is a second great way to turn an early treatment study into a delayed treatment study, when the drug is known to be less effective.

5.  While the BMGF funded the trial, and funded the University that conducted the trial, apparently that was still not enough to assure the results Bill Gates wanted.  So two employees of the BMGF, not listed as authors, are acknowledged as having "provided input and guidance."

6.  In the "Declaration of competing interests" section of the study, there is a note that author Anna Bershteyn received "personal fees from Gates Ventures." While the article provides her sole affiliation as SUNY Syracuse, in New York state, Dr. Bershteyn is actually listed on their website as an assistant affiliate professor at the same Global Health/U Washington department funded by BMGF.  Furthermore, her field is not hydroxychloroquine, but rather lipid nanoparticles for vaccines. She is not an MD, so what was her role in this?

7.  Participants were "recruited through social media or at local sites."  I recall that Stanford Professor John Ioannidis was beaten up last April for recruiting subjects through social media. Why is this a reasonable way of getting random subjects when BMGF does it?

8.  PCR test cycle thresholds were "less than or equal to 40." Hopefully everyone now knows that cycle thresholds above 30-35 have high false positive levels.

9.  There were insufficient "clinical endpoints" in the study so the study was ended prematurely.  The authors called this "operational futility" and "the decision was made to terminate the trial."  Thus the entire published study has to do with a secondary endpoint, whether HCQ speeded recovery, as the main issue the study was designed to examine was jettisoned.  There were a very small number of subjects in each arm, about 50, which made it easy to get rid of statistically significant findings with a little massage. 

10.  Actually, HCQ did speed recovery, despite the authors claiming it didn't.  They admit, "In the Cox model compared to the control group, clearance for the HCQ group was 62% faster... and the HCQ-Azithromycin group tended to faster clearance..."

But two post hoc analyses (not planned prior to conducting the study and examining the data, and such analyses are usually frowned upon) were performed.  Only when baseline viral load was added as another factor, were the study authors able to make the benefit of HCQ no longer statistically significant.

11. The authors congratulate themselves for this poorly performed and analyzed study--using the word rigorous twice and robust once in their Discussion section. Then they beg for new drugs to defeat the pandemic, saying "it is essential to continue to search for interventions that could alter the course of early disease" and "we must continue to search for therapies that reduce morbidity and transmission."  They never say that perhaps if they had reached people earlier with hydroxychloroquine and done a true early intervention study, viral clearance would have been even better than 62% faster in the HCQ arm, which is what the study found but brushed aside. Would they ever admit we already had that sought-after intervention, which they themselves showed altered the course of disease?

12.  So, when you control the statisticians, you have no fear of criticism for post hoc analyses, and you have the ability to shut down a trial early when it is giving you an answer you don't want to see, you can make the benefit of hydroxychloroquine seem to disappear. Just like magic. Bill Gates' Modus Operandi is there for all to examine.

And here is Bill himself warning us that vaccines could be ready relatively quickly, but it would take two additional years to know about their safety.  Seems he is okay with us shouldering that risk.

Vaccine double dose leads to cardiovascular collapse

A 91 year old man received his 2nd dose of Covid vaccine twice on the same day, by mistake.  The person administering it had not noticed he had the wrong last name.  He then quickly became hypotensive, went into shock and was immediately hospitalized.  He had been due to return home from his rehab facility the next day.

His daughter said he had been very tired after the first dose, leading to a fall.

While over 1,000 deaths have been reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event (voluntary) Reporting System (VAERS), run jointly by  CDC and FDA, CDC has claimed that not a single death could be "conclusively linked" to the person's Covid vaccination.

I think CDC will have a hard time saying this reaction was not due to a vaccine overdose.

Vaccine passports won't stop at vaccines

Please read this twitter thread and think about how we are being herded into the vaccine clinics, the privacy- destroying track and trace system, and how all the 'privileges' of a normal life can be turned on and off for us once we accept these digital "passports."

It has to stop here, and it has to stop now.

https://mobile.twitter.com/pedwards_phil/status/1367228333948362761

Is Warp Speed ever a good idea? Not at this vaccination center

Mass vaccination centers are run on speed.  In Oakland, California 6,000 shots per day were administered.  In an 8 hour day, that is one shot every 5 seconds.

Do you think mistakes will be made?  Who fills the syringes?  Who gives the shots? Are they tired?  Newly trained?  At one every 5 seconds, who can check that they are all administered correctly?  Do you really want to get injected with a new product when everyone involved in developing, producing and administering it has been going as fast as they can?

In Oakland, California it was discovered that over 3,000 recipients got the wrong dose.

Conference of Catholic Bishops advises congregants to avoid the Janssen/ J and J vaccine due to fetal tissue use/WaPo

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/02/archdiocese-new-orleans-johnson-vaccine/

On Tuesday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urged Catholics to avoid taking the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine and to choose alternatives from Pfizer or Moderna instead because Johnson & Johnson used cells derived decades ago from an abortion to create the vaccine.

The bishops’ recommendation follows a similar one from the Archdiocese of New Orleans last week and a recommendation from a Food and Drug Administration expert panel over the weekend approving the Johnson & Johnson shot. “The archdiocese must instruct Catholics that the latest vaccine from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson is morally compromised as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in development and production of the vaccine as well as the testing,” the Archdiocese of New Orleans said in a statement Friday.

FDA's EUA for Johnson and Johnson's vaccine *excluded* authorization for the anthrax vaccine company's Covid vaccine/ WaPo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/02/merck-johnson-and-johnson-covid-vaccine-partnership/

"Most of Johnson & Johnson’s partners disclosed to date are contract manufacturing companies, but now it is moving to team with larger drug companies that have seen their own vaccine projects delayed or fizzled.

The manufacturing process is time-consuming: Johnson and Johnson ferments large batches of its vaccine in vats at a contract manufacturing facility in Baltimore operated by Emergent [the anthrax vaccine manufacturer, Emergent BioSolutions], as well as locations in the Netherlands and India. That brewing step takes two months.

Emergent received commitments of $628 million from the Trump administration in June to expand capacity at its Baltimore plant for coronavirus vaccine production. It then received contracts worth $615 from Johnson & Johnson in July." [Yes, readers, this company received $1.243 Billion dollars to produce J and J's vaccine, but it hasn't produced yet.]

"But eight months later, the undisclosed number of J&J vaccine doses produced at Emergent are not available for public distribution. Emergent still has not been authorized to produce Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine under the FDA emergency use authorization, the New York Times first reported Tuesday. An administration official said Emergent’s Baltimore production line is expected to be approved in the next few weeks..."

Emergent Biosolutions has made billions of dollars over the past 22 years by producing sole source products and failing to deliver them, pleading and receiving extra dollars to get their factories up to speed. It seems they decided to try that trick again. Will Biden and J and J fold?

And from the NYT:

"The F.D.A.’s authorization for emergency use, granted late Saturday, covered the Dutch production lines and the Grand Rapids bottling operation. In about two weeks, federal regulators are expected to decide whether to amend that authorization to include the other plants, according to the two people familiar with Johnson and Johnson’s operations. Until then, they said, supply will be uneven and limited."

Washington Post conceals the fact that Johnson and Johnson's vaccine is a DNA vaccine which must enter the cell nucleus to produce mRNA, and might potentially bind to our DNA

Below, I have extracted some useful info from the WaPo article regarding Merck's entry into the manufacturing of J and J's vaccine, and the cost to taxpayers.

Below that I include the upper part of WaPo's detailed graph of how the vaccine works.  But the graph failed to include the most important steps.  DNA from the viral vectored vaccine must enter the nucleus of the cell, where the nuclear machinery transcribes it into messenger RNA.  The mRNA then leaves the nucleus and is translated to spike protein. Was this done to prevent the public from noticing that DNA from this vaccine might potentially link to human DNA? Note that the word "harmless" is used twice in the graph.

Merck will help make Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine as rivals team up to help Biden accelerate shots

By 

Christopher Rowland and 

Laurie McGinley

March 2, 2021 at 8:21 p.m. EST

"The administration will pay $268.8 million to Merck to upgrade multiple plants to the necessary safety standards to produce Johnson & Johnson vaccine, from fermentation in vats to final finish and filling in vials. The Biden administration and the companies did not disclose the number of doses Merck would produce for Johnson & Johnson...

Merck said Tuesday it would use the federal emergency money for vaccine-related upgrades as well as enhancements for production of unnamed drug treatments...

Johnson & Johnson said Merck’s involvement would permit it to go beyond the 100 million doses it has pledged to provide the United States under a $1 billion contract, but it did not provide any specifics...

The U.S. government paid the company $2 billion for development and clinical trials and preorders at a price of $10 per dose just days after it received emergency authorization from federal regulators...

Welcome to Snitch Nation: From kids to parents, it’s a race to rat out your (former) loved ones before they get you first/ RT

Opinion by Helen Buyniski on RT

"In the grand tradition of divide and conquer, the ruling class has set in motion a fool-proof way to keep us from uniting against the Great Reset and attendant restrictions on human freedoms – dupe us into snitching on each other! In order to achieve the proper level of blanket obedience, it’s important that ordinary people trust the government unquestioningly – and fear and hate those who don’t. This is best accomplished by discrediting and distancing the target population from all non-approved information sources, whether that’s Grandma down in Florida or their favorite alt-media YouTube channel. The target must be informed in no uncertain terms that they’re in the midst of an ‘infodemic’ – a deadly (if invisible and intangible) swarm of ideas that must be resisted at all costs by keeping one’s eyes and ears firmly fixed on the news networks, lest one fail to keep up with the ever-shifting New Normal. 

One of the first stateside images of the Covid-19 pandemic to outline that ‘normal’ in New York City showed a group of people walking innocently down the street while their neighbors, standing on their fire escape and looking down, yelled at them for failing to “social distance” adequately. The implication – as NYC gradually and then rapidly saw its Covid-19 numbers climb – was that the group of friends walking had failed to put the needs of the community above their own. The more New Yorkers could be like the man on the fire escape, the better. But without the necessary “perception management,” the people screaming on the fire escape would get bottles (and possibly bullets) thrown at them. 

Nobody likes a snitch – at least, no one did back then. And who could forget Los Angeles’ mayor Eric Garcetti, delivering his threat against businesses that chose not to heed his draconian lockdown? Not only would they have their water and electricity shut off, he said, but anyone who called in to report businesses operating illegally would get some money for their efforts. Stumbling over the well-known aphorism about snitches and stitches, he joyfully declared that, now, “Snitches get rewards!” Rather than inspiring a legion of snitches to rise up, however, he was mocked ferociously. 

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio similarly crashed and burned when he debuted a snitch hotline for the city, receiving a litany of dick-pics and Hitler memes instead of the photos of city residents failing to social distance that he’d asked for. Their “perception” hadn’t been adequately managed. 

But it’s been a year since those abortive early efforts. Other municipalities have continued to push the snitch-line as a useful police-state tool, noticing that as lockdowns drag on, people become more desperate for companionship, willing to settle for a conversation with anyone – even the police officer who’s come to haul your neighbor away for thinking impure thoughts about Bill Gates. These interactions offer a tiny nugget of human companionship to sweeten the fundamentally antisocial act of sending the authorities after an innocent neighbor. 

One trick has been to interrogate children. Kids in Vermont were asked – away from their parents – whether they’d been part of a “multi-family gathering” for Thanksgiving. If they answered yes, they were ordered to self-isolate for 14 days – or seven days if they were willing to submit to an invasive Covid-19 test. Never mind that they’re warping those kids’ brains for life, duping them into ratting out their own family, or that young children are almost always symptomless with Covid-19, can’t you see there’s a war – er, a pandemic – on?! 

The proprietors of Snitch Nation have also learned that financial incentives are ideal where moral incentives don’t exist, and states like New York and Massachusetts quickly realized that trying to overcome people’s natural aversion to snitching needed some help. New York began offering $75,000 yearly salaries to contact tracers who’d done little more than pass a free online course offering some unusual definitions of “autonomy” (hint: it ceases to exist when someone fails to obey quarantine rules). 

The contact-tracing course (which I took) offers more than the usual training in Orwellian ‘newspeak’, however. The chirpy-voiced instructor reminds the aspiring contact tracer that they are not under any circumstances to warn their friends or family if someone they know is infected, even it if means allowing their 80-year-old grandma to go risk her life playing bridge at the house of someone who just got out of the hospital being treated for Covid-19 and is still not well. One’s loyalty can be only to the state. Shame! Shame! Shame! 

As more Americans wake up to the fact that merely getting their double-dose of vaccine is not going to set the US on a path to normality – not unless 70, or is it 90, or maybe 100 percent of the rest of the country gets it – they’re going to need someone to blame, and it better not be the vaccine companies. After all, they’re already indemnified! The US can expect a heavy-handed scapegoating campaign aimed at shaming family, friends, and neighbors who harbor a healthy distrust towards a scientific establishment that changes its mind on a weekly basis. 

And the media world is pushing Snitch Nation with all its might. Journalists like Brandy Zadrozny at NBC and Taylor Lorenz at the New York Times have made it their business to pry into the private lives of private citizens whose only ‘crimes’ are having the ‘wrong’ opinions, while another news anchor reported recently from a Florida supermarket, describing the shoppers’ maskless nonchalance as if it was a genocide being conducted in real-time. Wrongthink about politics and Covid-19 has merged to the point where anyone expressing a deviation from the official line regarding the pandemic is shrieked at, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style, as a Trump supporter and set upon by the harpies of social media. 

In such a climate, then, it’s no surprise there are so many Americans eagerly calling up the FBI and DHS to report their parents, uncles, sisters, and other family members who participated in the January 6 demonstration at the Capitol, whether they were there to “riot” or merely to protest, whether or not they actually made it into the building or merely stood outside marveling at the ineptitude of their government. Told their loved ones had been hopelessly radicalized by a dangerous cult and could have killed someone, they were led to believe their act of betrayal was one of love. No doubt the world is sick of Orwell references by now, but the torture facility in 1984 was called the “Ministry of Love” for a reason. Texas teenager Jackson Reffitt turned his father in to the police before the man even attended the rally or told anyone in the family about it, insisting that he “just wanted someone to know” about it. The younger Reffitt was subsequently thrown out of his family’s home by his devastated mother and sisters, whom he admits were “absolutely ruined about the news from what I did.” But that brief flicker of remorse was crushed with the huge amount of money the young man subsequently raised via GoFundMe – a whopping $147,229 as of Thursday. No longer saddled with student loans, car bills, or insurance costs, Reffitt has learned a chilling lesson about loyalty and values, as has everyone watching him swell with pride on CNN: family loyalty is not required to get through life, as long as one maintains a slavish, unwavering devotion to the police state. 

Copycats have already started turning in their own relatives and even ex-boyfriends, figuring they have nothing to lose (aside from their dignity, which isn’t fetching much on the market these days). Given the rapidly expanding class of ideas deemed ‘anathema’ over the last year, the rank and file of Snitch Nation can only be expected to grow. Should the rest of us fail to act – to remind our own loved ones that ratting out their neighbors for an extra piece of chocolate is fundamentally wrong on multiple levels – we can expect reinforced echo chambers, a further collapse in interpersonal relations, and an iron-fisted, jello-brained rule by a hopelessly alienated populace incapable of having a civilized discussion unless they already agree on every topic to be discussed beforehand. All those who engage in wrongthink will be branded with a scarlet letter and shown the door – no exceptions."