☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Monday, February 21, 2022 ☙ ILLOGICAL, BUT SO WHAT? 🦠

DeSantis supports unmasking workers; the NYT calls out the CDC for burying inconvenient data; big media notices jab injuries; the Atlantic jumps the Covid shark; and more...

Good morning C&C, and Happy Monday! Today’s roundup includes: Governor DeSantis supports unmasking workers; the NYT calls out the CDC for burying inconvenient data; big media notices jab injuries, a little; Canada throws the whole book at truckers and seizes their money; an MSNBC reporter identifies the democrats biggest problem and you won’t guess who it is; the Atlantic jumps the Covid shark; and a weekly update on Florida’s numbers.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Yesterday, Governor DeSantis tweeted support for employees forced to wear masks on the job:

Ron DeSantis @GovRonDeSantis

Too many businesses, particularly corporate chains, force their employees to wear masks all day. This is unfair to the employees, who should have the same choices as everyone else. It's past time for these workers to be liberated from corporate forced masking policies.

Unmask the workers! It’s yet another example of how Democrats have gone to war against the so-called blue-collar working class. Who or what exactly is their base supposed to be any more?

🔥 Joe Rogan has done it again. It’s hard to recommend these three-hour podcasts, but in the most recent show #1780, Rogan interviews Maajid Nawaz. The discussion in the latter two hours goes over Nawaz’s pandemic theory and it’s a doozy. And, as he keeps saying, he “provides receipts.” It’s definitely worth a listen.

🔥 Yesterday, The New York Times ran a story remarkable in several ways. It was headlined, “The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects.” The sub-head reads, “The agency has withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses.”

The story mentions Public Health Scotland’s decision to stop publishing parts of its Covid data because the information reflects badly on jab efficacy and might be used to increase vaccine hesitancy. And you can’t have THAT. Better to live in fearful ignorance than die from true misinformation, or something. Anyway, Public Health Scotland was a frame to set up the article’s real target: the CDC.

Apparently, unlike Public Health Scotland, the CDC has LONG been hiding data — but for the same reason: fear that the truth would slow people down from getting jabbed: “The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.” Haha! There’s a simple fix: just hide the data. That makes sense. It’s not sketchy at all. Hiding data doesn’t make people vaccine hesitant. No. DATA makes people hesitate.

The Times first cites an expert who calls out the CDC’s horrible logic, pointing out that making people imagine what’s going on is much worse than just dealing with the actual truth, even if it’s inconvenient: “We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats,” said Jessica Rivera, an epidemiologist who was part of the team that ran the Covid Tracking Project.

The paper next quotes Paul Offit, a top vaccine researcher on the FDA’s advisory committee. “Tell the truth, present the data,” said Dr. Offit. “I have to believe that there is a way to explain these things so people can understand it.” Having to rely on Israeli data to make booster recommendations for Americans is less than ideal, Dr. Offit noted, when US data is available but just not being released by the CDC. “The C.D.C. is the principal epidemiological agency in this country, and so you would like to think the data came from them,” he complained.

I’ve been saying for months that the Biden Administration knows exactly what is going on because OF COURSE the CDC collects the data. The CDC is almost certainly the first in the world to know. For instance, I bet they know exactly how many adverse events and deaths are caused by vaccines. They just don’t say.

The whole notion of “informed consent” has been stretched farther than carnival taffy. But maybe the most curious thing about this article is: why now? What is the Times’ angle? Why go after the CDC for long-buried data at this point? Is this battlespace preparation for the CDC to become “more transparent” and reveal that masks don’t work or something? The timing strongly suggests it is part of the Narrative 2.0 program.

🔥 A couple recent articles in Corporate Media sources are finally touching, delicately, on the subject of serious injuries caused by the safe and effective vaccines. The Wall Street Journal published an article last week headlined, “Covid-19 Vaccines Were Deadly in Rare Cases. Governments Are Now Weighing Compensation.”

How about that?

The WSJ’s article begins this way: “Vikki Spit’s partner of two decades received his first Covid-19 shot in early May. Two weeks later, he died from a condition doctors … attributed to a rare vaccine side effect.” Oh. Okay.

It next quotes Kurt Weideling, whose wife Nicola died at age 45 from the jab. “The problems are extremely rare,” he allows, but “that doesn’t make people any less dead.” No, it doesn’t. Too bad she didn’t know she might die before she took the shot. Oh well. Eggs and omelets, I guess.

The weasel words the WSJ uses when equivocating about how common the injuries are is priceless. The paper cautions that “serious side effects so far have been very rare” — so far — and claims hopefully that “the shots’ benefits outweigh risks for most people.” Most people. Not all. It identifies only “blood clotting, nervous-system disorders and heart problems,” which, the WSJ is quick to argue, might be caused by Covid too. So.

The Epoch Times has been more aggressive than other media about reporting jab injuries. Yesterday it published a long story headlined, “US Agencies Quietly Studying Reports of Post-Vaccination Neurological Issues.”

This article says the FDA and NIH both admit they are — quietly and, more importantly, slowly — studying jab injuries. According to the Epoch Times, the two agencies are separately conducting research into post-vaccination neurological issues, including symptoms like facial paralysis and brain fog. The FDA’s project has been underway since April 2021 and is being personally overseen by the FDA’s deputy director, Janet Woodcock.

In an email to a patient in early 2021, NIH scientists acknowledged running similar studies. The Epoch Times cited an email from March 3, 2021 from an NIH doctor to a patient that admitted “we started an effort at NIH to look at neurological side effects of Covid-19 vaccines.” In an email dated July 27, 2021, another NIH doctor told a patient “we believe the symptoms to be real. That is the reason we have been treating patients.”

Officially, both agencies say they haven’t yet identified any serious safety signals with the jabs, but the studies are ongoing. So, you never know. The NIH stopped examining patients in Fall 2021, and one NIH doctor told the Epoch Times his team stopped treating patients because “clinical care is best provided by clinicians in the community or other academic institutions.” Um. So why’d you treat patients to begin with then?

One wonders at what point members of the scientific community themselves will start losing some of their enthusiasm for boosters. Do you really want to roll the dice again, doc? And, again, why now? Why is it safe to talk about vaccine injuries now? Are they becoming undeniably common?

🚛 According the Guardian UK, Canadians arrested at the trucker rally face THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-NINE (389) different criminal charges including obstructing police, disobeying a court order, assault, mischief, possessing a weapon and assaulting a police officer, Ottawa’s new interim police chief Steve Bell told reporters. Almost four hundred different charges seems excessive. One wonders how many crimes there are in Canada, in total. In other words, they aren’t just throwing the book at the truckers. They’re throwing encyclopedias at them.

The article also reports that Ottawa police said 206 bank and corporate accounts have been frozen so far, plus one bank has locked a payment processor’s account holding C$3.8m (about $3 million US dollars).

Thank goodness they’re cracking down on criminals up there. If only the Canadian police would show this much eagerness for arresting Canadian mafia members.

😷 Alex Seitz-Wald, identified as an MSNBC “senior politics reporter,” explained last week that the Democrats’ biggest problem in ending the pandemic is … Democrats:

“For the past two years, so much of the identity of what it meant to be a Democrat — to follow the science — was tied up in masking, in following these rules and regulations. If you didn’t do that, you were a bad person. You were Ron DeSantis. You were a denier. So now, these democratic leaders, they have to get their base comfortable with unwinding all of that.”

Dan O'Donnell @DanODonnellShow

Just an absolutely amazing admission here. An MSNBC reporter notes that the biggest challenge for Democrat governors ending their mask mandates is that liberals have made mask-wearing such an important part of their identity that they might not be able to give it up.

Again with the virtue signaling. How will they live without it? Oh well, I guess we’re all bad people now. Wir sind alle Floridian!

😷 Hahaha! I was going to report about this story in The Atlantic, but then I noticed that other media were writing stories about the Atlantic story, so let’s start with this delicious Fox News headline: “Atlantic Piece Ridiculed for Arguing ‘Mask Mandates Don’t Need to Make Sense’.”

That was the Atlantic Story’s original headline — “Mask Mandates Don’t Need to Make Sense.” It’s so perfect! The writers at The Atlantic got so high on spike protein that they entered a psychedelic trance and discovered the slogan for the entire pandemic: It doesn’t NEED to make sense. Just go with it:

The Atlantic @TheAtlantic

Many mask mandates are arbitrary, inconsistent, and absurd. Here’s how to fix them, @rachgutman reports:

on.theatln.tcMask Mandates Are Illogical. So What?They only need to align with communities’ goals.

The magazine later changed the headline after being mocked more mercilessly than a middle-school boy who accidentally comes to school with his shorts on backwards. It’s not clear the new headline is much better than the original. It now reads: “Mask Mandates Are Illogical. So What?” It sounds like a bad point made late in a lover’s quarrel: “My feelings are illogical, but so what?”

I’m not exaggerating. The article quotes Tara Sell, a ‘senior scholar’ (does that mean a PhD student?) at Johns Hopkins, who remarked “I think that people have this expectation that everything has to be perfect, as far as how the logic works together.” Well, yes. I sort of do expect that. I’m all for logic when it comes to public health policies. I think it’s kind of important, actually.

Anyway, the article argues that mask mandates, ineffective at stopping transmission, could still be okay, even ‘necessary,’ if they “align with the communities’ shared goals.” But not because they work, no. “A mask mandate may not magically swaddle the faces of everyone in its jurisdiction, but it could remind already enthusiastic maskers to avoid large gatherings, or lead non-maskers to give the people around them a little more space,” the Atlantic explained.

In other words, mask mandates tell people when they should be afraid. “From my perspective, the main benefit is not so much the masking itself, but the message to society that this wave is not yet over,” said Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Dave Dowdy. Goody. More fear.

After you finish laughing, there’s a bright side to an article like this. While it appears at first glance to be utter nonsense, it’s not. It’s quite intentional. It’s a bridge: a way for die-hard maskers (who the Atlantic calls “enthusiastic maskers”) to cross over, so that their already-stressed brains don’t finally snap in half from the whiplash as Narrative 2.0 jerks into place. These people are struggling to make sense of how two years of forced masking and social superiority could be just chucked out like the cellophane bag the jumbo-pack of masks came in. After all, they put so much work into their masks.

What are they supposed to do now with all these designer, crocheted, and bedazzled face masks?

📊 *COVID IN FLORIDA AND ALACHUA COUNTY* 📊

Another great weekly report for Florida as the Omicron wave finishes up right on time for the you-know-what next week.

Positivity: down to 8.2% from 14.3% last week.

Cases: down to 42,473 from 103,022 last week.

Death Reports: down to 161 from 195 last week.

R-naught: down to 0.50 from 0.56 last week.

Hospitalizations: down to 4,321 from 6,301 last week.

Cases per 100K: down to 193.3 from 468.8 last week.

First-time Jabs: down to 16,036 from 21,557 last week.

See? We’re looking great. Have a marvelous Monday, and I’ll round up another pot of Covid news for you tomorrow.

---

You can help get the truth out and spread optimism and hope: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-

MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Twitter: @jchilders98