☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Monday, December 20, 2021 ☙ FAILURE 🦠

An Omicron injection-failure roundup; the Administration "pivots"; Biden warns of another dark winter; Senator Warren made a bad treaty; a federal judge nixes Purdue's opioid settlement, ...and more.

It’s the Monday before Christmas and Omicron is our present. Today’s roundup is (almost) all about what they used to call “vaccine failure” but now euphemistically refer to as “breakthrough cases.” Even three jabs doesn’t seem to stop the new, milder variant. So the Administration is going to “pivot” to a “new strategy” tomorrow, and I bet I can guess what it is. Enjoy.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🌲 Merry Christmas! Joe Biden held an “all hands on deck” meeting with his Covid team late last week and gave a press conference where he said, if you’re uninjected, you’re going to overwhelm the hospitals and then all of you are going to die, and you’re going to take out all your relatives when you go. So. They even reprinted these dire comments on the White House’s website. You probably think I’m making it up or at least exaggerating, but here is exactly what Biden said:

“For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death… for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.”

It’s an emergency! Again.

For some reason, Biden didn’t take ANY questions at the emergency press conference. He didn’t walk himself out, either. Instead, staffers hustled the reporters out — while Biden sat there, blinking and looking confused, ignoring questions shouted at him by the reporters being shooed towards the doors. Not a good look.

Anyway, Biden also announced that he would be making ANOTHER SUPER IMPORTANT announcement about Omicron four days later on TUESDAY (now tomorrow). You have to wait for the super important news! It’s like Christmas!

Except it’s the opposite of a fun waiting game for most of us. And, I guess we already knew it, but Biden’s one of THOSE kinds of people. You know, the ones who say, “hey Jeff, I really need to talk to you about something,” and you say “okay, go ahead,” and then they say “I’ll tell you when we meet up next Friday.”

Oh, thanks. SO annoying. Thanks for giving me something to wonder about and dread for a week. You couldn’t have just kept it to yourself till we got together, could you, Joe?

In other words, if it’s so damnably important, lives are at stake and so forth, why not just tell us right NOW? Maybe that super vital, critical information could be helpful to somebody today. If in fact it is so vitally essential, or whatever.

Instead, he wants to wait until four days before Christmas to give us the bad news? More lockdowns? More forced medical treatments? More disastrous economic policy? Are we giving Taiwan to the Russians this time, because Covid? What’s on your mind, Joe?

Here’s the thing. If we really have to wait, why not just keep it to yourself? Just tell us whatever it is on Tuesday. Why tell us that you’re GOING TO tell us? It’s almost like he doesn’t know what he’s going to say yet, but he just wants some attention or needs some more time or something.

Conspicuous by its absence from Biden’s remarks was any mention of TREATMENT for Covid. Paging Dr. McCullough.

I’ll let you know if he actually says anything important tomorrow.

🌲 The White House is leaking like Doctor Fauci’s adult diapers after a long day of Covid interviews. The gist is that various administration officials and anonymous leakers are suggesting a shift, or “pivot,” from counting cases to measuring severity of illness.

If they can pull it off — which is doubtful — it would be super convenient for the administration, which is facing surging case numbers in highly-injected blue states, and where Omicron is mostly infecting injected people. In fact, the CDC’s latest weekly report, released last week, disclosed that out of all the Omicron cases detected so far, EIGHTY PERCENT (80%) of them are in the double- and triple-injected. So.

Biden put all his chips on the injections. If THEY fail, he fails. The new policy leaks suggest an evolving strategy for the embattled Administration, perhaps to be deployed by its surrogates…

🌲 And just like that, on Saturday — one day after the leaked policy pivot — the National Football League sent a memo to teams saying it was “tweaking” its Covid policy after the league was forced to postpone several games due to a rise in cases.

In what the NFL calls a “more targeted testing program,” vaccinated players no longer have to get tested. That makes sense, right? In a statement, the league even SAYS it’s because of Omicron, which clearly infects injected people: “The NFL and NFLPA have been engaged with our medical advisors to address the emergence of the new Omicron variant and how to stop the spread,” the league’s spokesman said.

See? You stop the spread by NOT TESTING the people most likely to spread the virus. It’s simple. Science! SHUT UP.

According to the Epoch Times, under the league’s original Covid-19 rules, vaccinated staff and players had to be tested weekly. The new rule deletes the testing requirement. Except for uninjected players, for whom there is no change in the NFL’s protocol: they will still have to be tested DAILY.

Makes sense.

🌲 Meanwhile, in California, Gavin Newsom — giving a press conference in a former Soviet-bloc-style mafia track suit — Omicron cases are also hitting the fully-injected, apparently, and blasting the state back to the mask age. “The overwhelming majority [of Omicron cases] have been fully vaccinated. That’s why masking becomes even more important in this environment,” Newsom said.

He also calls it, “Omni-cron.”

Newsom answered an angry reporter who demanded to know why there weren’t more severe punishments for people who don’t wear their masks. Newsom said, “I have more faith than you do in the capacity of people to do the right thing.”

Ouch!

🛳️ Mega-cruise line Royal Caribbean, which requires negative tests AND a vaccine passport from customers in order to board its ships, and has ignored Florida’s vaccine-passport ban for months, just reported a super-spreader event on one of its cruises. According to the Hill, the cruise line confirmed that 44 passengers and crew members tested positive on the cruise that ended in Miami on Saturday.

USA Today reported that the 44 Covid-positive passengers were found through contact tracing after a single guest tested positive and was then quickly quarantined. The first guest’s case “was identified as Omicron,” Royal Caribbean’s spokesman said.

So, that’s 44 MORE cases of Omicron infecting fully-injected folks. All the cases were described as “asymptomatic.”

🪶 A few feathers dropped out of Elizabeth Warren’s headdress this weekend after she announced testing positive for Covid — despite being triple-jabbed. Still, Warren gave thanks to the Mighty Earth Mother for her jabs without which it would have been so much worse. Probably. Apparently, she tested positive after trading for some old blankets with a couple guys who were dressed as US Calvary.

💉 In yet another report of vaccine failure, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) also announced over the weekend that, despite his three jabs, he’s now Covid positive. The healthy senator in good shape is grateful for the shots because he’s 100% “certain” that his case would have been much much more serious otherwise. Probably fatal. Or worse.

That’s TWO triple-jabbed senators with vaccine failures in one weekend. Out of fifty (guessing that the D’s are all 3x-jabbed). So.

💉 The Jerusalem Post reported on a new Israeli study concluding that three Pfizer shots are four times less effective against Omicron — or Omni-cron, whichever — than they are for Delta.

Two shots are DEFINITELY useless. According to the article, lab tests conducted in South Africa last week showed that antibodies from two shots of the Pfizer vaccine may be up to FORTY (40) TIMES less effective against the Omicron variant.

So now, I guess boosters are out, too. Still, four times less effective is — I guess — better than 40x less effective.

But the researchers noted that “it is still unclear” whether the effectiveness of the booster shot will also decrease over time. Who knows? Well, I know what I’d put MY money on.

🌲 Over the weekend, highly-injected New York City reported its highest-ever single day of new Covid cases with more than 21,000 new positives. They should probably think about putting in mask mandates and maybe a vaccine passport system or municipal injection mandates or something.

Oh, wait. Never mind!

🌲 Another 100% injected Ivy League school — Georgetown, this time — has shuttered for the season due to vaccine failure. But it’s going to work, this time. Science promises.

🌲 A federal judge rejected a proposed settlement between the government and opioid-pushing Purdue Pharma. The judge was troubled because the settlement would have immunized the Sackler family — who own Purdue — from any civil lawsuits by victims and their families.

The settlement would also have allowed Purdue to continue selling opioids to victims, while siphoning the victims’ money to the government, which would then use part of the money to help the victims cope with their addictions, which would continue to fuel the settlement. In other words, it would have put the government in the opioid business.

Hey! I have an idea. Maybe if mandatory Covid injections hold up, the government can mandate we all take its opioids too. That would be great for business.

If you haven’t seen it, season three of Amazon Prime’s series “Goliath” starring Billy Bob Thornton is a thinly-veiled reimagining of this case. It’s terrific and I recommend it.

🌲 Finally, Biden’s blockbuster Build Back Better bill bottomed-out in the Senate over the weekend after West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin — the swing vote — declined to support the fantastically expensive pork package. Merry Christmas!

Have a marvelous Monday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow as we count down the last few online shopping days.

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