It’s Thursday! The day before Christmas Eve. Today’s pre-Christmas roundup includes: a Coffee & Covid Christmas poem; twenty-four states file suit against Biden over his preschool mandates; Florida scores a big win in court, in another setback for the Biden Mandates; military scientists have come up with a new “Swiss Army knife” vaccine to protect against all variants; Walensky admits the current injections can’t stop Omicron; the FDA approves Pfizer’s Paxlovid; and a new study says kids have terrific innate immunity to the virus.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

Guys, what can I say? For many of us, it’s our SECOND Christmas together here at C&C. It’s been one strange adventure, and boy, is that true. I am so grateful for all of you, old readers and new, especially those who have blessed us with a subscription, which is helping tremendously to further the C&C mission of spreading hope, light, and common sense.

A few holiday announcements:

🎄 Coffee & Covid will close tomorrow and Christmas Day. Think of it this way: it’s a great time to catch up on all those old posts that you missed! Then next week I’ll be traveling so posts may be spotty. Just work with me.

🎄 Subscribers, watch your email for an announcement. We’ll be holding a year-end Zoom party! Your invitation will go out shortly.

… Now, on to today’s special Christmas post! As my gift to everyone, I have written you guys a fully-derivative Christmas poem. I hope you enjoy it. (And remember, I’m a lawyer, not a poet. Go easy on me.)

🎄 *’TWAS THE NIGHT AFTER DELTA* 🎄

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the lab
Not a creature was stirring, not even a bat.
The needles were lined up in racks ‘neath the tree
Awaiting a visit from old Doctor Fauci.

The children were sleeping as nice as you like,
just not feeling too good since they got their last spike.
Mama counted our grants but was coming up short
like the day they revoked our non-jabbing passport.

I knew at a glance from the look in her eyes
That the grants wouldn’t pay till we said government lies.
Our careers were invested in working with science
but our jobs, they depended on our full compliance.

Downstairs at the door we heard scared monkeys screeching
and knew Fauci was knocking, for Delta’s unleashing.
The door burst its frames ‘fore we knew what to do
And in puffs of black sulphur stood old you-know-who.

“I’ve come for the children,” he sneered with a grin
and I knew in my blood that the demon would win.
The doc’s hands were all covered with virus and clots
from hesitant children who’d refused their shots.

His boots crusted over with hearts he had stepped in,
Fauci leered and revealed his up-next bioweapon.
“It’s for kids too,” said the gene engineer,
and slithered toward Mama, who shuddered in fear.

Mama and I ran upstairs in a thrice
before you could say “any genes to be spliced?”
We piled tables and chairs up in front of the door
while the short devil oozed his way up to our floor.

Mama — she prayed we’d be saved and set free —
while I saw visions of Wuhan and lost beagle puppies.
And just when Doc got there and started to batter,
there arose from the roof-top a thump and a clatter.

That’s when the door burst, it started to break!
And Fauci raced in — for our children to take.
“It’s Delta!” he cried, like a demon from China,
and my heart started swelling and feeling angina.

But then from behind us, a deep jolly old chuckle
from the red-suited fat man with hands on his buckle.
“Not tonight!” he told Fauci; “You, I’ll be collectin’”
and from his great bag tossed me some ivermectin.

In Santa’s left hand was a giant big needle.
He laughed “doc, what you’re doing is fully illegal!”
Then without warning, he moved with alarum
and that needle was sticking from Fauci’s right arm.

We watched with amazement as Fauci then shrank
to no bigger than test tubes at the local blood bank.
Before we could thank him, Santa raced up the flu
“It’s Oh My Chron!” he called, “It’s for everyone, too!”

“On Dancer! On Prancer! On Comet! And Vixen!
That Fauci’s all finished now that I have fixed him.”
And then we were happy; the end of our woe;
I gazed at my bride and could only say … “So!”

— Jeff Childers, Christmas 2021

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🎄 The Biden Administration didn’t even give us a poem for Christmas. Instead he gave us a new mandate. Twenty-four (24) states including Florida have already sued the Biden Administration over its latest unbelievable mandate: forced masks for kids and forced jabs for staff in preschool Head Start programs. The new regulations don’t offer any testing alternative, except that if anyone gets a religious exemption, that person has to pay for their own tests.

Nor was the new jab mandate published anywhere for public comment. It was quietly enacted last month, like all the other Biden Mandates, under “emergency” authority. The jab mandate applies to preschool staff even if they work remotely.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that he will “not allow Texans to be coerced into getting a vaccine because the federal government is giving them an ultimatum to choose between their health or their child’s preschool education.”

Florida AG Ashley Mood said “As a mother, I am very concerned about the latest federal mandates being forced on Head Start staff and students—children as young as two-years old will be required to wear masks and teachers will be forced to receive a vaccination against their will.”

🎄 Yesterday, a federal judge in Tampa granted Florida a preliminary injunction against Biden’s federal contractor mandate. You may recall that on Monday, a federal judge in Missouri also granted an injunction of the same mandate to ten (10) other states.

I really like the Tampa judge, Judge Merryday. He uses the phrase, “and so forth,” which is one of my favorites. Here’s an example of a great line from early in the order granting the injunction:

> “By a several-step process, the executive order requires each employee of a federal contractor or subcontractor (including each subcontractor of a subcontractor, subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor, and so forth) to become ‘fully vaccinated’ against COVID-19.”

Heh. Lines like that are a good signal of which way the rest of the order is going to go.

💉 Just in time for Christmas, but maybe too late for Omicron, military scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research announced they’ve come up with a new vaccine that can work for all variants. They call it the Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle (SpFN) COVID-19 vaccine. It will include ALL the known spikes. A veritable spike-buffet, if you like.

The military scientists said human trials on individuals who had neither been vaccinated nor previously infected with Covid showed the vaccine could protect folks against Covid and all its variants, as well as from previous SARS-origin viruses like SARS-CoV1.

Walter Reed’s SpFN vaccine uses a soccer ball-shaped protein with 24 faces, which allows scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein. So you can get all of them at once. “We need to evaluate it in the real-world setting and try to understand how does the vaccine perform in much larger numbers of individuals who have already been vaccinated with something else initially…or already been sick,” researchers said.

So.

💉 Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, said yesterday that mRNA Covid vaccines “may not prevent infection” from the Omicron variant.

Oops.

Walensky told CNBC that, so far, preliminary data suggests Omicron can breach current vaccine antibodies. That means people need to “continue to wear their masks to prevent the infections overall” because the injections “may not prevent infection.”

Not at all.

Still, Walensky grudgingly conceded that the overall number of Omicron-related deaths appears to be fewer than in previous waves. In the United States, officials think the one death occurred this week in Houston, Texas. It’s a race against time to get everyone jabbed before they develop natural immunities.

The CDC reported Monday that Omicron seems to be spreading quickly and has now overtaken the Delta variant. Omicron accounted for 73% of new infections last week, CDC officials said. On Tuesday, the CDC confirmed the new strain has been detected in most U.S. states and territories.

🎄 The FDA approved Pfizer’s new Covid pill, and the federal government has already ordered $5 billion worth of the drug. Whoooosh! That was super fast. The pill, Paxlovid, is taken twice a day for five days, combined with a a generic antiviral called ritonavir. Paxlovid supposedly helps patients suffering from “mild-to-moderate” symptoms from getting so sick that they need to be hospitalized, Pfizer said.

The FDA stressed that Paxlovid isn’t a substitute for vaccination. In other words, they want you to take BOTH.

That was fast! They sure figured out Paxlovid was safe and effective quickly. What’s taking so long with all the FDA studies on the cheap and widely-available horse dewormer? Oh, never mind.

🔬 A new study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University College London, found that kids have a natural high immune response to Covid infection. The study published yesterday in the journal Nature.

An article in MedRxIV Titled, “Rapid immune response in children protects them from COVID-19,” called the study the “most comprehensive single-cell study to compare SARS-CoV-2 infection in adults and children across multiple organs.“ The research showed that interferons are more strongly expressed in healthy children compared to adults, with a more rapid immune response to infection in children’s airways. This helps restrict early viral replication, and gives children an immediate advantage in preventing the virus from infecting the blood and other organs.

The study also suggests a way to test adults for whether they’ll have a serious case of Covid or not. If interferon levels in the airways are high, then an adult could have a lower risk of severe disease, whereas low interferon levels suggest a higher risk. That could be very helpful.

This is great news for people anxious for their kids because the TV told them that children were at risk from Covid infection. If only they would read C&C…

Have a terrific Thursday, and a very MERRY CHRISTMAS! I’ll see all you guys on the other side to pick up with more C&C before the New Year. God bless!

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

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