☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Monday, May 16, 2022 ☙ TRUST DOWN UNDER 🦠

Another top public official has a stroke; heroic church attendees subdue a church shooter; NIH scientists grab public cash; the California exodus is worsening; China's universal testing policy; more.

Good morning and Happy Monday, C&C! I hope everyone had a great weekend. Today’s roundup includes: another top public official has a stroke; heroic church attendees subdue a church shooter; public records requests show NIH scientists grabbing public cash; the latest numbers shows the California exodus is worsening; China adopts a universal testing policy; and the New York Times thinks the Australian covid response is the way to go because science, or something.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

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Send contact information and a link or pic to the published article to contest@smartbizlaw.com prior to June 16, 2022. If you’re comfortable with sending it, a pic of the author would be nice too. Good luck!

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

💉 Pennsylvania’s democrat lieutenant governor and current senatorial candidate John Fetterman canceled campaign events this weekend due to having a STROKE. Fortunately he tweeted late this weekend that doctors were able to clear the clot and he expects to make a full recovery after taking some time off.

John Fetterman @JohnFetterman

My entire family is vaccinated + boosted. Vaccines + effective treatments are safe, and still the key to getting us out of this new phase of the pandemic.

I will buy lunch for the first person that can find a picture of Fetterman in anything but a hoodie. What’s up with that? Dude, put on a suit. Show some self-respect.

You may recall that New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján (D) also experienced a stroke earlier this year, temporarily threatening the democrat Senate majority. Rehab has been trying at times, but Luján has been slowly recovering, and bears a visible scar on the back of his head from the emergency cranial surgery that saved his life.

Corporate media reports on Fetterman’s stroke have not mentioned the you-know-what.

🔥 The LA Times reported on a tragic shooting yesterday in a story headlined, “Churchgoers Tackled, Hogtied Gunman After Deadly Laguna Woods Church Shooting.” The shooter was identified as an “asian man” — the shooter’s race is okay to mention this time — in his 60’s, who opened fire, killing one person and wounding five other worshippers.

The church’s pastor hit the man with a chair while he was reloading, and worshipers tackled him, disarming and hogtying him with an extension cord. Undersheriff Jeff Hallock said, “That group of churchgoers displayed what we believe is exceptional heroism and bravery… It’s safe to say that had they not intervened this situation could have been much worse.”

Prayers for the brave church in its time of suffering.

🔥 Nonprofit watchdog group Open the Books released a blockbuster report last week about undisclosed royalty payments paid to NIH scientists during the pandemic. National Review discussed the report in an article headlined, “Did Anthony Fauci & Francis Collins Receive Royalty Payments From Drug Companies?”

This is going to shock you. You better set the phone down. Apparently, and I am not making this up, NIH scientists — including ones that don’t actually do any research like Francis Collins and beagle-beater Tony Fauci — have figured out how to exploit a loophole in the law to accept bribes, sorry, I mean kickbacks, whoops, I mean totally legitimate above-board royalty payments, in the rare cases where they are “co-inventors” of a profitable product. Or just a product. Or just a study.

So it turns out the NIH scientists — including their bosses and administrators that don’t research or actually DO science — are all freaking brilliant, every one of them. It’s not just rare cases, not at all. They invent (co-invent) amazing new products ALL THE TIME! And without hardly any effort, apparently. These NIH brainiacs are inventing wizards. So it’s only fair that they earn hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the best part is where the royalty money comes from. You! Haha, you suckers. You fell for it again. Here’s what Open the Books says about the cash revolver they have over at the NIH:

Last year, the National Institutes of Health – Anthony Fauci’s employer – doled out $30 billion in government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients. … However, … we [also] found hundreds of millions of dollars in payments also flow the other way. These are royalty payments from third-party payers (think pharmaceutical companies) back to the NIH and individual NIH scientists … between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third-parties to the agency and NIH scientists – who are credited as co-inventors.

See how it works? Imagine you’re a scientist. NIH gives you a giant grant. Then you take part of that grant money and you wash it off and then pay it back to NIH as a royalty. It’s so simple. And, how dare you suspect that anyone’s motives might not be pure as the liquid in that vaccine vial that I set down behind you while you weren’t looking.

Open the Books says during the pandemic, Fauci got TWENTY-THREE separate “royalty payments” and his boss, Collins, got fourteen. But guess what? The NIH refuses to disclose the AMOUNT of the royalties or WHO PAID THEM, citing “personal privacy” or something. Could the payors have included Pfizer or Moderna, for example? Could NIH scientists, including Fauci, be receiving co-inventor royalty payments for the COVID DRUGS?

The most transparent administration in history.

🧪 The Wall Street Journal ran a story this weekend about China’s new mass-testing mandate headlined, “Mass Covid Testing, Already a Familiar Ritual, Becomes China’s New Normal.”

More with the “new normal.” I wish they’d shut about about the “new normal” already. None of it is normal.

Anyway, China doesn’t use vaccine passports. People have to show a negative PCR test result taken within the last 48 or 72 hours to go places. The test is needed for everything, like entering a grocery store, getting on a public bus, or being admitted to the hospital. But be careful, if you test positive, you have to go straight to government quarantine without passing “Go.”

Public-health experts quoted for the story said that mass testing is crucial in a “Zero-covid” approach like China’s, where the only goal is to stamp out outbreaks altogether, instead of gradually easing restrictions as immunity rates climb.

The best part was how they ended the story. Citing Hong Kong epidemiologist Ben Cowling, the article finished with this quotation: “Vaccination won’t help to get cases back to zero.”

Hahahahaha! Now you tell us. Thanks experts.

📉 The New York Times published a preposterous, wishful-thinking fairy tale a couple weeks ago headlined, “For Second Straight Year, California Sees a Population Decline.” The NYT heroically tries to scrape up reasons for fleeing citizens that exclude reasons like mandates, taxes, overreach, hypocrisy, and wild woke lunacy of diverse types.

Here are the four causes the Times thinks are “really” shrinking California’s population: “Deaths from Covid. Aging baby boomers. Fewer children. Restrictions on immigration.”

Let’s take them one-by-one. Deaths from Covid. What about Florida and Texas? We’re always hearing about how both those states had more deaths from Covid than California, since they dropped mandates earlier. But Florida and Texas are both GROWING, not shrinking like California. So that’s a dumb reason.

Aging baby boomers? Again, Times? I grant they have a bunch of them, but not only California has baby boomers. And I love the wording. How does baby boomer “aging” shrink your population? Haha, when they DIE. But the Times is too chicken to say “baby boomers dying.” Okay boomer.

Fewer children? It’s true that California has extremely permissive abortion laws. They’re even using taxpayer money to fly people in from other states to get abortions. But the Times didn’t mention that reason, for some reason. Instead they describe it as California girls waiting longer to have kids. The Times is a giant among euphemists.

Restrictions on immigration? The article isn’t clear whether it means foreign or domestic immigration, but regarding foreign immigration, it only cites vague “pandemic restrictions.” But again, any of these reasons could equally apply to either Florida or Texas. Apparently the Times’ credulous readers won’t think that through or something.

Here are some facts the story DIDN’T mention: California features the U.S.’s highest state income tax rates. It has basically shut down new home construction with insane environmental requirements. The public school system is largely a demilitarized zone stuffed with highly-sexualized woke ideology. The state’s idea of forest management is allowing deadly annual wildfires to destroy lives and property. Gas and electric prices are the highest in the U.S.. The state just started water rationing. Housing prices are off the charts there, essentially foreclosing new ownership for young couples.

And let’s not forget about how state lawmakers seem to always be at war with their own citizens. When Elon Musk complained about the county locking down his auto plant, un-ladylike State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez tweeted, “F*ck Elon Musk.” Except she didn’t use the asterisk. The state even kept Disneyworld closed for almost a year longer than Florida while its governor dined maskless in swanky restaurants with healthcare lobbyists.

In case you’re interested, here’s a handy online spreadsheet of companies who’ve fled California lately: https://tinyurl.com/yc6ynjmf.

🔥 The New York Times ran an unironic article over the weekend headlined, “How Australia Saved Thousands of Lives While Covid Killed a Million Americans.” The gist is that we suck, and we should have locked down and mandated more like Australia, and it would have been great and we would have saved grandma. I’m not kidding. The article cites saving grandma in the first paragraph.

(Of course, we have more than ten times as many people in the U.S. as they do in Australia, so you’d expect more than ten times as many deaths, but don’t think about that too hard, because it takes math. Just let the Times tell you what to think.)

Instead of math, the Times blames our poor covid performance on a “lack of trust.” Americans are such conspiracy theorists. The article explicitly rejects the idea that the reason could also have anything to do with Australia being an island nation with low population density and laser like border controls. That had absolutely nothing to do with it, says the Times, without citing evidence. The real difference? Australia MAXIMIZED VACCINE UPTAKE using people’s trust in medicine.

The reporter thinks he figured it out. He reported that, as the pandemic started, 76% of Australians trusted “the health care system” as compared to only 34% of Americans, and cited “community trust” statistics showing high levels of trust for each other. My guess is those numbers are down quite a bit in Australia at this point. He didn’t mention current survey figures.

The story does allow that Australia’s mandates, “at times” were “a somewhat authoritarian approach.” Somewhat. A little, teensy-tiny bit. You could hardly notice. And the pictures for the story don’t show the quarantine camps, protests, arrests, or suicides. They show happy people frolicking down under. I’m not making that up. One large picture for the article shows chipper Ozzie kids riding bikes, above a caption explaining that they are using a nice parking lot in April 2020 helpfully closed by the pandemic. Maskless. In April 2020. Uh huh.

So. It’s pandemic utopia in Australia! Where the pandemic is never over.

Meanwhile excess deaths in Australia are OFF THE CHARTS. In January, the latest reported month, Australia saw a +25.95% increase in non-Covid deaths — the biggest increase in Excess Mortality in Australia since the Pandemic started. It far exceeds the death rate during the 2020-2021 waves. Not too good so far.

Lindsay @TexasLindsay

🇦🇺 Australia 🇦🇺 Data Source: Our World In Data —————— Music Request By: @Jikkyleaks | Song: Down Under

Hey, New York Times! Now do Africa.

Have a magnificent Monday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

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