Happy Friday, C&C team! In today’s roundup: reporters cover up a Boston Marathon jab injury; more sudden and unexpected celebrity deaths; Bill Gates says some funny stuff about the jabs at the WEF; Canada’s booster numbers are down; Australia’s excess deaths are up; the USDA acts for bathroom equity; Twitter’s board has a key change; the FDA admits its optimal decisions could have been more optimal; a very British covid scandal; DeSantis extends bans on post-employment lobbying; the feds consider relaxing credit scoring for government-backed mortgages; and Sri Lanka and Pakistan have some bad luck after an unpopular vote.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

💉 Last October, Meghan Roth collapsed after the Boston Marathon, but the exact reason why was not made public at that time. After a long silence, Meghan has now gone public. It turns out, don’t be shocked, she says the cause was a vaccine injury. The 34-year-old lifelong marathoner told Alpha News she had taken the J&J shot 15 days before the race, in order to avoid having to deal with the testing requirement.

“All I’m saying is this is what happened to me. If you are an athlete, maybe just be careful of running an event too closely to getting vaccinated. Or, here’s what happened to me, at least you have the information to at least be able to make your own decision,” Roth explained.

Roth said in the days that followed her shot she noticed some changes. “I was a little bit like, ‘why is my heart rate so high, especially in taper weeks when my mileage is reduced so much?’” she wondered. Then after the race started, “all of a sudden I just went fuzzy. I don’t even remember hitting the ground. It happened so sudden and the next thing I knew I was waking up in the ambulance,” Roth said.

Roth’s heart had stopped, a sudden cardiac arrest. Two nurses who happened to be nearby kept her alive with CPR until an ambulance arrived. Roth said that she’d told reporters who interviewed her about the event that she was concerned about the vaccine but, you’re probably not going to believe this, her comments about the jabs never appeared in print.

It’s like the reporters didn’t want to report, or weren’t allowed to report, the vaccine’s involvement in her injuries.

💉 There were three more sudden and unexpected celebrity deaths yesterday: actor Ray Liotta (66), Depeche Mode icon Andy Fletcher (60), and Hall of Fame drummer Alan White (72).

White is reported to have died “after a brief illness.” Fletcher died “of natural causes.” Liotta “died in his sleep” in the Dominican Republic while filming a new movie.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of these hardworking artists.

🔥 Bill Gates, of COURSE, attended this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he has been outgassing his pie hole again. Apparently he’s an expert on vaccine science because he finagled the rights to the source code for Windows out of his developer business partner back in the day.

Anyway, the first thing Gates opined about was vaccine passports, which apparently are now “out.” Speaking on a WEF panel, Gates, looking thoughtful and throwing his hands up in frustration, ventured that “the idea of checking if people are vaccinated; you know, if you have breakthrough infections, what’s the point?”

Yes, Bill, that’s the point: there is no point.

So I guess this means we can question vaccine passports on Facebook now without going to virtual jail?

Then Gates made some other interesting comments — as an expert on pandemics — about how pathetic the current vaccines are. I am not making that up. Chuckling ruefully, he complained, “we should have much better therapeutics … as we do come up with vaccines, we want vaccines that are infection-blocking and long-duration, which, today — you know, the vaccines have saved millions of lives — but they DON’T, uh, have much in the way of duration, and they’re not, they’re not good at infection blocking.”

No duration? Not good at preventing infection? How DARE he! Anti-vaxxer! Hesitant! Science denier!

Here’s a fact about the world we live in: He who has a checkbook is an expert on whatever subject he says he is.

📉 Canadians aren’t exactly snapping up their fourth booster shots, for some reason. It’s not even close. Fourth booster uptake in Canada is scraping the bottom of the pie chart.

📈 On the other hand, in Australia 2021-2022 excess deaths are off the chain, far, far over the normal baseline range. For some reason, a LOT of Australians are dying from non-covid illnesses. So weird.

Oddly, the excess deaths track the timing of the rollout of booster shots Down Under. I’m just saying. It’s a covid coincidence.

🔥 The USDA has announced an exciting new program this month! It’s supposed to prevent “discrimination” against LGBTQI++ kids. The gist is that elementary and secondary schools will be required to let boys in the girls’ bathroom and showers, or their federal meal funding grants will be snipped off, just like … well, you know.

In a May 5th press release, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said the Department is totally committed to probing, er, “rooting out” discrimination. Vilsack explained, “we must recognize the vulnerability of the LGBTQI+ communities and provide them with an avenue to grieve any discrimination they face. We hope that by standing firm against these inequities we will help bring about much-needed change.”

Religious schools can “apply for” a waiver. No waivers will be offered to public schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like the “Porky’s” script writers are running the FDA?

🔥 Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who has been on the company’s board of directors since 2007, and was Twitter’s CEO from mid-2015 until he resigned, resigned from the board of directors yesterday without comment. Technically, he didn’t resign, but he did not seek re-election to the board at the annual meeting, which is effectively the same thing.

🔥 Yesterday the Hill ran a story headlined, “FDA Chief Admits Slow Response to Formula Shortage.”

FDA Commissioner Robert Califf admitted to a House committee yesterday that the agency had made a number of mistakes that worsened a nationwide shortage of baby formula. Califf admitted the FDA was “too slow, and some decisions in retrospect could have been more optimal.” More optimal! Nobody needs to get fired over this, see, because the decisions WERE optimal; they just could have been MORE optimal.

But don’t worry! Vilsack PROMISED to update the agency’s food safety division to ensure American babies never starve because of imperfectly optimal government regulation again.

Representative Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee, snapped at Visack, “I don’t understand how the FDA can justify three months to respond to this crisis. I expect to learn why the FDA did not move heaven and earth in an attempt to get the Sturgis plant back up and running as soon as possible.”

Me, too.

Despite widespread news reports claiming it would be back online soon, Abbott’s Sturgis manufacturing plant remains shuttered. Should be any day now, optimally.

🔥 NewsMax reported a story yesterday headlined “UK ‘Partygate’ Report Blames Culture of Johnson’s Office.”

British folks have been peeved for some time about whistleblower reports exposing top politicians in that country who frequently frolicked at boozy unmasked parties throughout the lockdowns. Wheee! The disclosures led to an official government investigation, which released its final report this week.

The commission investigated sixteen (16) get-togethers attended by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his staff in 2020 and 2021 while everyone else in the U.K. was barred from socializing under covid restrictions. The events, which clearly could have been more optimal, included “bring your own booze” parties and regular “wine time Fridays” in the prime minister’s 10 Downing St. office at the peak of the pandemic.

The report expressly contracts Johnson, who’d previously promised British lawmakers that NO parties were ever held at Downing Street, and he never broke ANY covid rules. Whoops!

But don’t worry! Boris should have made more optimal decisions, that’s all. A public official defending the prime minister explained, “The prime minister himself … recognizes there were of course failings and therefore there’s got to be some changes to the way the place is run.” Things are going to get a lot more optimal, never fear.

According to the article, a separate police investigation resulted in 83 people being fined, including Johnson — making Boris the very first British prime minister ever found to have broken the law while holding office. A fine record.

I can’t imagine why British people would be upset about something like this. Rules are for the little people, as Americans know full well. Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi could not be reached for comment.

It will be interesting if this leads to Johnson’s removal, which would make him yet another covid over-reach casualty.

🦸‍♂️ Governor DeSantis signed a bill yesterday that bans state lawmakers and judges from lobbying Florida’s government until six years after their last date of public employment. The new law extends a previous two-year ban on official lobbying.

🚀 *THE MINORITY REPORT* 🚀

🔥 Issues & Insights ran a story yesterday headlined, “This is the Worst Possible Time for The FHFA to Mess With Lending Standards.”

The magazine explained that the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is considering a proposal to ban the use of traditional, long-standing credit scoring in favor of a more equitable and more forgiving new standard. This would only be for mortgages underwritten and guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, meaning taxpayers.

What could possibly go wrong? Something about 2008 is tickling my memory but I can’t quite grasp hold of it.

🚀 Connecting a few more dots. I’ve previously reported about Sri Lanka and Pakistan over the last week or so. Both countries are facing massive civil unrest. Sri Lanka is failing as a nation state, its starving citizens literally burning politicians out of their homes. Pakistan, a nuclear power, is coming apart at the seams. Both countries have one more thing in common: they both abstained from the vote to sanction Russia in the U.N., after being warned by the U.S. State Department not to do so.

They defied the U.S. and now they are experiencing some bad luck.

Guardian, April 6th: “Sri Lanka Facing Imminent Threat of Starvation, Senior Politician Warns.”

MSN, May 25th: “Pakistan On the Boil as Imran Khan’s ‘March to Chaos’ Continues, Army Deployed in Islamabad.”

Gee, it’s a nice country you have here. Sure would be a shame if anything bad happened to it. Sub-optimal.

Have a fabulous Friday! I’ll catch you all back here tomorrow morning for the weekend edition. Till then, stay caffeinated.

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