Some brief notes on end of the day news and opinion … with teasers.
If you’re looking for informed legal opinion on the growing threat to First Amendment freedoms, look no further than civil liberties advocate Jonathan Turley:
Turley On Free Speech Immunity: YouTube Bans Channels Airing Criticism of Vaccines
[Youtube] is now openly engaged in viewpoint regulation to force users to view only those sources that are consistent with the corporate agenda. Facebook banned misinformation on all vaccines seven months ago and Twitter regularly bans those questioning vaccines.
These companies are being encouraged by many on the left to expand censorship.
Faculty and editors are now actively supporting modern versions of book-burning with blacklists and bans for those with opposing political views. Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll has denounced the “weaponization” of free speech, which appears to be the use of free speech by those on the right. So the dean of one of the premier journalism schools now supports censorship.
Free speech advocates are facing a generational shift that is now being reflected in our law schools, where free speech principles were once a touchstone of the rule of law. As millions of students are taught that free speech is a threat and that “China is right” about censorship, these figures are shaping a new society in their own intolerant images.
In one critical hearing, tech CEOs appeared before the Senate to discuss censorship programs. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, but then pledged to censor more people in defense of “electoral integrity.”
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Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal also warned that he and his colleagues would not tolerate any “backsliding or retrenching” by “failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.” He demanded “the same kind of robust content modification” from the companies – the new Orwellian term for censorship.
Several items re legal issues and Covid. First, a general article about natural immunity. The author is absolutely correct in his thesis. The effectiveness of natural immunity versus vaccines is a bedrock of modern immunology. Sooner or later a court will be confronted with this question. The refusal of the Covid Regime to acknowledge natural immunity simply gives their entire vaccine game away—it’s transparently irrational and anti-science, thus inviting closer examination of the motives behind it. Because it’s a standing challenge to the regime’s legitimacy, natural immunity is a political problem:
Why "Natural Immunity" Is A Political Problem For The Regime
I’ll admit I haven’t followed Thomas Renz’s Covid lawsuit closely, although its premise has fascinated me. Today there are two articles about the lawsuit which also highlight data points that we raised earlier today. Renz’s use of the CMMS databases seems very shrewd to me. The data, as he acknowledges, isn’t ironclad, but it’s extremely suggestive and points a way forward that seems legally viable. The data he’s been receiving from insiders at CMMS applies to the high risk 65+ population, so it’s not a complete look at vaccine related deaths. However, it points strongly to the concealment of the true death toll:
Nearly 50k Medicare patients died soon after getting COVID shot: whistleblower
A whistleblower has provided government data documenting 48,465 deaths within 14 days of COVID-19 vaccination among Medicare patients alone, according to medical freedom rights attorney Thomas Renz.
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In his presentation, Renz expressed his appreciation for whistleblowers who were coming forward to provide the public with such important information from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (CMS). He described the CMS database as the largest available in the U.S. for the study of COVID-19 trends because it contains the data of approximately 59.4 million Medicare beneficiaries.
One slide showed that the number of “persons who died within 14 days of a COVID-19 vaccine” equated to 19,400 for those younger than 81 years old, and 28,065 for those 81 and over, totaling 48,465 deaths.
“This is raw data,” Renz explained. “There’s no analysis.” And, he emphasized, these death numbers are from less than 20% of the U.S. population.
A second article approaches the Covid Regime from the standpoint of its standard treatment: Remdesivir. Again, the results aren’t definitive, but seem probable enough in the direction they indicate that the lawsuit should go forward:
26% of those prescribed Remdesivir for COVID died, according to Medicare database
According to attorney Thomas Renz, 25.9% of those prescribed Remdesivir for COVID-19 are recorded as having died in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) database. CMS data indicated that of 7,960 beneficiaries prescribed Remdesivir for COVID‐19, 2,058 beneficiaries died. Forty-six percent of those fatalities occurred within 14 days of Remdesivir treatment.
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For the public’s further consideration of Remdesivir’s safety, Renz has pointed out that a Remdesivir Clinical Trial Final Report has shown that about a quarter of patients experienced serious adverse events from the drug. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that “serious adverse events were reported in 131 of the 532 patients who received Remdesivir (24.6%).”
Renz noted on his website that this data “has been withheld by the government from our citizens.” He added, “This begs the question … Why is this the protocol in American hospitals? Does this appear ‘safe and effective’ to you?”
Remdesivir is currently the only Food and Drug Administration-approved drug for the treatment of COVID-19, as the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel continues to recommend against the use of hydroxychloroquine, and will neither recommend for or against Ivermectin.
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Renz’s report of the CMS data is not the first to find a high mortality rate with the use of Remdesivir. The drug was dropped from a clinical trial for Ebola in 2018 after it was found that it had the highest death rate of the four drugs being tested, Dr. Bryan Ardis shared in a videotaped interview by an international legal group that is investigating human rights violations by governments during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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It was after the FDA issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the use of Remdesivir on May 1, 2020, that Ardis told the Corona Investigative Committee that America suffered the highest death rate from COVID-19 in the globe.
“Before May 10, the United States had a lower coronavirus death rate than other high-mortality countries, but after that date, all six of the other high-mortality countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) had lower death rates than the United States,” according to an October 2020 report from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP).
In addition, there was a continued failure to demonstrate any life-saving benefit of the drug. In October 2020, just before the FDA granted the drug final approval, a World Health Organization study found the drug didn’t decrease mortality or hospital stays.
On the other hand, Remdesivir has been a big money maker. It’s the difference between cost/benefit analysis and risk/benefit analysis.
Finally—Trump.
Conrad Black has a very worthwhile article today on the likelihood of a Trump comeback:
Democrats Repeat the Mistakes of 2016
Anti-Trump and NeverTrump Republicans won’t help Democrats. America and the world should start preparing for Donald Trump’s return.
Black presents what he describes, basically, as the Establishment’s terms for allowing Trump back into the political process: a humble acknowledgement that Zhou won the election. That demand, says Black, runs up against the immovable object of reality:
The acid test being unwisely applied to Trump’s acceptability as a rehabilitated candidate is his humble acceptance of the legitimacy of the election of Joe Biden as president.
There are two serious problems with this criterion, ... The first problem with the requirement of full recognition of the unassailability of Biden’s legitimacy as president is that former President Trump and his scores of millions of supporters don’t accept that that is true. The second problem is that it probably is not true.
There are more serious concerns about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election than any in the history of the country except the Hayes-Tilden contest of 1876.
This leaves the Dems with an increasingly weak hand:
All of this leaves the Democrats relying on anti-Trump or at least non-Trump Republicans to impose upon the Republican presidential candidate selection process for 2024 an unacceptable condition. …, the obvious but rigorously unrecognized facts are 1) Trump can take the nomination of his party easily if he so wishes, and 2) the unspeakable shambles of the incumbent administration is making his return to office simpler and more probable every day.
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The great effort to stamp out any questioning of the legitimacy of the last presidential election has failed. The attempt to perpetuate the Trump-hate smear and legal harassment campaign is sputtering to an end, even as the John Durham inquiry, advancing at the speed of wet cement on a slight grade, has begun its indictments of those responsible for turning the intelligence services and the FBI into arms of the Democratic National Committee-Clinton campaign dirty tricks division. The fantasy that Trump’s support is eroding or that his comparative silence does him anything except good, will probably be vaporized at the first encounter with the voters.
The daily failures of the Biden Administration show no signs of letting up, nor does the damage from unsustainable levels of illegal immigration, intolerable levels of urban violent crime, aggressively rising inflation, the COVID Tower of Babel, and constant pressure from America’s foreign enemies as the Biden regime stumbles from continent to continent. Such an inexorable procession of failures drives masses of voters into the arms of the chief political alternative, with increasing disregard for the fineries of the alternative president’s sense of etiquette.
… America and the world should start preparing for Trump’s return. As Bismarck said of Disraeli, “Das ist der Mann.” He is not easily recognizable as the standard-bearer of the Grand Old Party, but in these steadily more distressed circumstances, he is the man.
Emerald Robinson asked some interesting questions on the 2020 election.
And has a post on the fbi that surprised me.
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/
Mark,
I can barely keep up with your output (and still maintain a life), but I wanted to point out this rather fascinating piece by a substack brother of yours: El Gato Malo. It makes a very interesting case that Moderna's Covid vax was in the works long before Covid was a thing here.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/were-some-folks-a-little-too-prepared