☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Thursday, February 10, 2022 ☙ OPEN EVERYTHING 🦠
Bad polling for dems; a classic pivot in Denver; MA, NY pivot on masks; experts call for opening everything and ignoring the unjabbed; Fauci finds natural immunity; a study that's bad for mRNA; more..
Happy Thursday, gang! In today’s roundup: HB 7021 is back; Polling looks bad for Dems in 2022; a classic pivot in Denver; a recap of the task force briefing yesterday; Massachusetts pivots on masks; New York pivots on masks; experts call for opening EVERYTHING and don’t worry about the unjabbed; Fauci discovers natural immunity; more countries relax restrictions; a 40+ author peer-reviewed study suggests mRNA persists; and more.
🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞
🪖 The world of politics and lawmaking is complex and arcane and super tricksy. Yesterday, HB 7021 — the bill that would continue to shield hospitals from legal liability for injuries to Covid patients — was tabled, but only to allow the House to substitute the Senate’s version, SB 7014. This is an elegant parliamentary trick; it avoids the final lawmaking step where the two bills — the House version and the Senate version — have to be reconciled with each other. I have been told by insiders that it will be read for the third and final time today at noon and passed.
I got hold of the internal briefing sheet for the bill that was provided to legislators. It is profoundly deceptive, a puff piece that describes the bill as helping PATIENTS and citizens instead of hospitals. So most legislators probably aren’t even aware how awful this bill is. It’s a stinker.
The “staff analysis” prepared for every bill is a deeper dive for lawmakers who have enough time to dig in. The staff analysis for this bill acknowledges that the liability shield is only available for “substantial compliance with government-issued health standards specifically relating to COVID-19 or other relevant standards.” And that’s the problem. That requirement locks hospitals into the antiquated remdesivir/ventilator treatment protocol and wipes out doctor independence.
It’s going to be up to the Governor soon. The bill needs to be chucked on a pile of gas-soaked, discharged face masks and torched.
🪖 Southwest Florida folks: take a look at the “Let’s Talk COVID Community Conference” in Naples on Saturday, April 9, from 9am to 6pm. Although I’m not in the lineup, it will feature a bunch of other great speakers, including Dr. Simone Gold, M.D., J.D., who founded America’s Frontline Doctors. She is a dynamic and persuasive speaker. Tickets are available at www.scofieldproduction.com.
🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞
📉 Ruh-roh! Biden’s poll numbers are sinking faster than the Titanic. Polls of Biden’s job approval show up to an eighteen point spread in the wrong direction. Real Clear Politics showed Biden at 39.8% approve, and 54.4% disapprove. And it’s still trending down, fast. Bad presidential approval numbers signal party punishment in midterm elections. They have to do SOMETHING.
Makes you wonder how bad the INTERNAL polls are.
🔥 Pivoting! It’s amazing, magical, and everywhere all at once. Here’s a great example. On February 2 — eight days ago — Denver’s School Board tweeted this:
But hey, things move fast during election season when polling is off. Yesterday — one week after tweeting that they’d resist changing mask policy — the very same Denver School Board tweeted THIS:
Hurray! The pandemic is over! Now THAT’S how you do a pivot, folks. Kudos to School Board vice-president Tay Anderson for his flawless execution.
🔥 The White House Covid Task Force announced an impromptu press conference yesterday to say … nothing. The briefing even LOOKED hastily put together: it was just White House Covid coordinator Jeff Zients in front of a green screen, with Rochelle Walensky and Fauci in two Zoom windows behind him. Although everyone was waiting for some kind of big announcement, the briefing seemed designed to just reiterate how well the boosters were protecting people from serious Covid, and how well the CDC’s Covid surveillance programs were going, like by monitoring “waste water” for virus particles. Yech. Dirty job.
There were some hints of Narrative 2.0 though. Zients said federal officials have started talking to state and local leaders and public health officials “on steps we should be taking to keep the country moving forward.” Steps. That would explain the obviously coordinated program to roll back mask mandates, at the least. They’re talking. A lot.
“We are working on that guidance,” Walensky said. “As we’ve been encouraged by the current trends, we are not there yet.” For now, the CDC will stick with recommending indoor mask wearing in places of “substantial or high transmission” of the virus. In other words, the states have to go first. The federal agencies aren’t ready to make their announcement yet. My theory is that the federal agencies will wait until after March 1, so that Biden can decisively announce his changes at the State of the Union. He’ll boldly say something like, “I am directing the federal agencies to …” blah blah.
The briefing was such a non-event that there wasn’t much coverage in the Corporate Media, if any.
Online, comments about the briefing expressed disappointment that the Task Force did not announce any rollbacks, but pushed boosters so hard. My read was different. I think the point they were trying to make was that, for people who are still terrified of Covid, the boosters are available to help them down the off-ramp, and because surveillance is good, the government can react quickly to future outbreaks. They HAVE to deal with the hardcore lockdown folks, most of whom are in their political base. So it seems perfectly consistent to me that, during the Narrative 2.0 rollout, they would also be extolling the virtues of the jabs and surveillance programs.
The jabs are politically necessary to exit the pandemic. Remember: they said in 2020 — after yanking the 14-days promise — that restrictions would last until “safe and effective” vaccines became widely available. The fact of widespread availability of “safe and effective” boosters is their strongest rationale for ending the restrictions now.
🔥 Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker pivoted yesterday, announcing the end of the state’s school mask mandate when it expires on February 28 — the day before you-know-what. The responses to the announcement on Twitter are priceless; lockdowners are LOSING THEIR MINDS.
🔥 New York’s replacement governor Kathy Hochul pivoted on Wednesday, announcing she is ending the indoor mask mandate in New York. Hochul said she would like to see vaccination rates for children improve before she ends the school mandate, in place since August.
“It was an emergency temporary measure,” said Hochul. “Numbers are coming down, and it is time to adapt.” State officials said that the governor based her decision purely on the latest data — and also consultations with public health experts like Doctor Fauci, as well as talks with hospital leaders, labor groups and local officials.
In a glowing New York Times article about the announcement, the paper praised Hochul and reported, with a straight face, that the pivot was “a watershed moment in the state’s coronavirus pandemic response, reflecting the continued decline of the Omicron variant, now understood to cause milder effects than scientists originally knew.” Uh huh.
The Times also pointed out the bright side, how ending the mask mandate — which it has previously described as being GOOD for business — would help New York City’s lagging economy:
The lapse of the indoor mask mandate could be a boon for companies struggling to attract workers back to offices. The Omicron surge had derailed many return-to-office plans over the winter, forcing many parts of Manhattan’s commercial centers to remain eerily empty over the past few months.
Pivoting! It’s so great. It’s good for everybody!
🔥 The Atlantic Magazine, one of the earliest and strongest proponents of lockdowns and Covid restrictions, pivoted yesterday, publishing a remarkable article headlined, “Open Everything.” The sub-head reads, “The Time To End Pandemic Restrictions Is Now.”
The author is an EXPERT — a Johns Hopkins professor and CFR member. He first tackled leftwing pushback against dropping mandates:
Some will inevitably claim that America is [already] no longer closed… But this view ignores how profoundly steps to stop the spread of the coronavirus still affect everyday life, and how much reopening work is left to do. An Axios/Ipsos poll found that only 18 percent of Americans say their lives have returned to normal.
Well. How about that. How reasonable. How Team Reality. And like others we’ve seen, the author hinted at how die-harders will be treated — as mentally ill:
What my colleague Derek Thompson dubbed ‘hygiene theater’ remains widespread, with businesses and government offices engaging in costly deep cleaning even though surfaces are not a significant source of viral transmission.
You see? They’re not DIRECTLY criticizing die-harders. Not yet. But using language like “hygiene theater” shows holdouts the dark places where things could go if they don’t get in line.
The author, admitting he called for “closing everything” in March of 2020, now says that continuing the restrictions would be RIDICULOUS:
No one in a position of authority believes that we’re about to ‘defeat’ the virus. COVID zero is not attainable. Nor are hospitals in imminent danger of collapse. Even at the height of the Omicron wave, some hospitals were strained but emergency rooms generally continued to provide quality care... at this point, the restrictions still shaping everyday life in America have become unnecessary. It is time to draw the logical inference—and end our pandemic purgatory.
Pandemic purgatory! Strong language. There’s a lot more. But I’d just point out one more remarkable part of his argument — it’s time to FORGET ABOUT the unvaccinated:
The unvaccinated are, implicitly, the main justification for ongoing restrictions—in that the pro-restriction camp points to the persistently high death toll from Covid-19 and these deaths are heavily concentrated among the unvaccinated. That attitude is also wrong. We need not put our lives on hold for the indefinite future because others have decided to risk theirs.
Amazing, isn’t it? The experts are pivoting like Russian Olympic ice skaters on opening day. They are using the same technique to end the pandemic that they used to create it: blanketing the airwaves with expert-driven propaganda. And the same people who fell for it all the first time will lap it up again like golden retrievers lapping up water after playing catch in the sun all afternoon.
🪳 On Tuesday, human bedpan Dr. Anthony Fauci, missing from the media circuit for nearly a week, said in a Financial Times interview that the U.S. is almost past the “full-blown” pandemic phase of the coronavirus, and said he hopes that all virus-related restrictions could wind down in a few months.
Fauci said there is no way to eradicate the virus, but he hopes that “we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the Covid restrictions will soon be a thing of the past.”
Protection from PREVIOUS INFECTION. It’s out of the tool bag! They can see it now. They found natural immunity under the couch cushions somewhere, nestled in stale Cheetos and rock hard McDonald’s french fry crumbs.
Fauci also suggested backing off the boosters. Somewhat. “It will depend on who you are,” he said. “But if you are a normal, healthy 30-year-old person with no underlying conditions, you might need a booster only every four or five years.”
It’s a start. And it’s probably the best evidence that they may be backing off the jabs. Politically, they simply cannot do it all at once. The jabs are the off ramp.
🔥 France, Greece, and Portugal are the latest European countries to relax Covid-related restrictions. The three nations eased travel restrictions in various ways this week. For example, France dropped a negative test requirement for injected people traveling from outside the EU.
💉 A new peer-reviewed study published in the respected journal Cell concludes that mRNA can be found in lymph nodes eight weeks after injection — the point when they stopped testing — even though Pfizer and Moderna initially assured everyone that the mRNA particles would “quickly dissolve” in the body. And that’s not the worst news for the jabs in this 43-author study titled, “Immune imprinting, breadth of variant recognition and germinal center response in human SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination.”
The worst news is that the study says that the Moderna or Pfizer jabs produce levels of spike protein as high as those found in severely-ill Covid patients, except the spike lasts much longer in jabbed people. Remember, the spike protein, sometimes referred to as a ‘pathogenic protein,’ is believed to cause most of the worst pathologies associated with Covid infection. In other words, spike protein production is NOT being turned off as promised, perhaps because the body’s immune response against the mRNA particles is either not happening or is ineffective for some reason.
If we HAD any well-funded regulatory agencies in the U.S. dedicated to drugs and disease, then we might be able to look into this particular problem, which begs for further investigation. Oh well.
Enjoy! Have a terrified Thursday, and we’ll pick up the threads of the new Narrative tomorrow morning.
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"They found natural immunity under the couch cushions somewhere, nestled in stale Cheetos and rock hard McDonald’s french fry crumbs." Couldn't agree more. Their house keeping is atrocious.
We can make - and have made - significant headway in many areas. I know there is still a lot of work to be done, but we have to stay vigilant and resilient. The power brokers keep offering up distractions designed to keep us at each other's throats; Divide and Conquer. Don’t take the cheese. This isn’t over. This is war, and war is hell. When you’re going through hell you don’t stop pressing forward or you're toast. Keep moving. Keep the pressure on. There are many battles ahead. It is still “We The People…”
Oh, that Twain was alive today. I know that he'd be a C & C subscriber.
“...no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.” - The Gilded Age, Mark Twain