Happy Tuesday, C&C family! Today’s holiday-decorated roundup includes: BioNTech’s CEO admits that boosters don’t stop transmission either; USA Today predicts Biden’s Big Announcement and it might actually work; CNN’s tv doc says — on air — that cloth masks fail; Jim Kramer’s triple jabs fail; the WSJ says lockdowns fail; the Times says science failed to give people hope; doctor Fauci says masks are here to stay on airplanes; airline CEO’s say masks aren’t needed on airplanes; and a triple-jabbed staffer on Air Force One has an awkward injection failure.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🎅 EuroNews ran an article yesterday headlined, “Omicron: 3 vaccine doses are not enough to stop the new COVID variant, warns BioNTech CEO.” Oh. Now you tell us. After jamming boosters down our throats into our ankles.

BioNTech is the company that co-produced the Pfizer Vaccine. According to the article, BioNTech’s CEO Ugur Sahin — a vaccine scientist — said that “We must be aware that even triple-vaccinated are likely to transmit the disease…It is obvious we are far from 95 per cent effectiveness that we obtained against the initial virus.”

So … “even triple-vaccinated are likely to transmit” the virus. There you have it. “Likely.” Not “rarely.”

That didn’t take long, did it? In one year we went from 95% effectiveness in preventing transmission to even triple-injected are LIKELY to transmit the virus.

The new answer to this development is that the vaccines were “never supposed to stop transmission, just serious disease and death.” Oh, please. These people are like the folks who think Elvis is still alive. So, before some nitwit makes that claim in the comments, you need look no further than Pfizer and the FDA’s statement attached to the approval of its “approved” vaccine:

“The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older.”

See? It was approved “for the prevention” of Covid. Prevention. Not lessening of symptoms. The entire reason for its approval is gone now, and Comirnaty never even made it to market.

But don’t worry! BioNTech’s CEO says that they’ll have a new, improved injection by March and THIS TIME it will work. They PROMISE. Just give them another chance. A few more spike proteins, and it will all be over.

But you know me. I have questions. We now know the original shots’ efficacy fades over a few months. Even if the new shot works and prevents Omicron infections — we’ll see — won’t that just clear the field for Delta to come back? I mean, the protection from Delta would have waned by that point, right?

Science! You know the rest.

🌲 USA Today reported that Biden’s Big Announcement today is expected to be the purchase of a half-billion at-home rapid tests and the deployment of 1,000 fully-injected military medical staff to overburdened hospitals to fight surging blue-state infections and the new, highly-transmissible Omicron variant.

If USA Today is right, this actually signals a major policy change. The Administration has been wary of at-home tests because they aren’t recorded and reported by local health departments. So, if they start giving people at-home tests, it will lower reported Covid “cases.” Ta-da! Presto! It worked!

In other words, distribution of at-home tests is the first thing they are doing that will ACTUALLY reduce cases. People will use the at-home cases and not go wait in line someplace. Reported cases will fall. I mean, it won’t make INFECTIONS go away, but it will make it LOOK LIKE infections are dropping, and that’s just as good, right?

🌲 CNN’s obnoxious TV doc Leanna Wen, who never saw a mandate she didn’t want to marry and have a family with, said this on the air yesterday: “Don’t wear a cloth mask. Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations. There’s no place for them in light of Omicron.”

Hold on, hold on. Wait a second. Cloth masks don’t work? They’re no more than facial decorations? Against Omicron? Is she saying face masks USED to work? Like, with Delta? But now they don’t anymore? There’s something physically different about Omicron that defeats the masks? Wen is a reliable promoter of the narrative. So this must be a trial balloon for a KN95 requirement or something.

Anyway, I can’t wait to hear how they explain this one. They can’t just admit that cloth masks didn’t work all this time for prior variants. So … Science is truly awesome.

🔥 I saw a meme on twitter yesterday: “You don’t believe the science. You believe the television.”

🌲 The splenetic, triple-vaccinated host of CNBC’s Mad Money, Jim Kramer, has tested positive. Another case of injection failure. But even more interesting was how he said he got it:

”I know exactly how I got it. I was at an event where you had to have PCR [tests]. You had to be tested that day. I got it from someone who had to be tested that day,” he said. “And the problem is that it just works so fast.”

So this is interesting. Kramer — and the other recent injection failure cases — are not just evidence that the injections don’t work. They are also evidence that TESTS don’t work. If you can be negative in the morning but infecting everyone by lunch time, then what’s the point of the test? I guess you could say at least it catches SOME cases. But if the tests leak enough to cause all these injection failures lately, they are obviously NOT stopping the spread.

How about we stop testing? I’m just asking. You could treat the sick people and give vaccines to anybody who wants them. Like FLU. I know it’s a radical idea and the whole Covid testing industry will have to stop making wooden wheels and stuff but just tell me you’ll think about it.

One way we could do this is give everybody at-home test kits. Oh, wait.

🌲 Just in time for Joe Biden’s big announcement, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed yesterday titled “The Fickle ‘Science’ of Lockdowns.” The sub-head reads: “Experts foresaw before Covid that the strategy would fail. The authorities embraced it anyway.”

It was well-known before March 2020 — when everyone went insane — that population-level quarantines DON’T WORK:

“Before March 2020, the mainstream scientific community, including the World Health Organization, strongly opposed lockdowns and similar measures against infectious disease.”

The op-ed cites John Barry, who wrote what is currently considered the definitive guide to 1918’s Spanish Flu. In his 2009 book, Barry noted that even in 1918 scientists were experimenting with comparative studies of lockdowns, and were finding them ineffective:

“Historical data clearly demonstrate that quarantine does not work unless it is absolutely rigid and complete,” he wrote in 2009, summarizing the results of a study of influenza outbreaks on U.S. Army bases during World War I. Of 120 training camps that experienced outbreaks, 99 imposed on-base quarantines and 21 didn’t. Case rates between the two categories of camps showed “no statistical difference.” “If a military camp cannot be successfully quarantined in wartime,” Mr. Barry concluded, “it is highly unlikely a civilian community can be quarantined during peacetime.”

Well, but they probably didn’t do it HARD enough.

🎅 The experts are baffled again. Science has failed to give people hope. I know, I know, that’s not news. The experts cannot fathom — not for the life of them — WHY people are having so much trouble adjusting to the new normal. Fox News ran an article yesterday un-ironically titled, “COVID-19 pandemic paradox: People feel powerless despite unprecedented scientific progress.”

Well my goodness, it’s a paradox. And despite all that scientific progress. Somehow science didn’t replace faith after all. People are just refusing to put their trust in science. For some reason.

According to the article, the CDC says some anxiety disorders can actually cause Covid, and are now tied for first place as predictors of death if a person is hospitalized for the virus. It’s not just that. Suicide attempts are way up. For example, the CDC also noted a 50% increase in emergency room visits for attempted suicide among teenaged girls — just through March, 2021. Almost a year ago. It’s got to be higher now.

“Having mood disorders, including depression, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders can make you more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19,” the CDC said. Isn’t that interesting. Too bad we don’t have a well-funded government health agency that could study the connection.

Fox, citing a similarly-themed New York Times article, said people’s resilience is “slowly fading” as Covid “continues to ping-pong the world from schools opening to promptly closing, travel restrictions lifted only to be reinstated, the constant threat of lockdowns, the significant loss of human life, and the false hopes that the end of the pandemic is in sight.”

False hope.

That predicament mostly applies to people who’ve believed the Narrative. Now that the Narrative has sunk, they are adrift in a tiny lifeboat on an angry sea of uncertainty. And that’s not a good place for an anxious person to be.

The Times described it this way: we continue on a seemingly endless rollercoaster ride of unpredictability in an “epidemic” of loneliness. I’m not sure about “rollercoaster,” which is a fun theme park attraction, but it sure is lonely in a lifeboat during a bad-news storm with no shore in sight.

But if you never believed the Narrative in the first place, you aren’t disappointed now, and you haven’t lost your only source of hope of ever getting back to normal. So. Just saying.

🪳 On Sunday, ABC News This Week asked Doctor Fauci if he thinks we’ll ever get to a point where masks are no longer required on airplanes. “I don’t think so,” the beagle-puppy-torturer said. “I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, you want to go that extra step.”

No thank you! Why don’t YOU go that extra step next time you’re in flight, Tony? You know which extra step I’m talking about. One more step right out of the airplane.

Anyway, it seems like I’m not the only one that thinks airplane masking is a dumb failure.

🌲 CNN reported that the CEOs of American and Southwest Airlines both tried to argue for REMOVING masks from air travel in a congressional hearing last week. Gary Kelly — Southwest’s CEO — said, “I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment. It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”

“I concur,” said Doug Parker, CEO of American Airlines. “An aircraft is the safest place you can be. It’s true of all of our aircraft — they all have the same HEPA filters and air flow.”

Parker and Kelly have another thing in common: they have both said they plan to retire soon. After the hearing, American Airlines distanced itself from Parker’s comment, saying in a statement that while it agrees that in-air filtration is excellent, masks are still an important tool for controlling the pandemic.

Well, not according to CNN’s TV-doctor Leanna Wen. Cloth masks failed. They’re just facial decorations. It’s so hard keeping up with the shifting narrative, isn’t it?

🌲 NPR reports that a triple-jabbed “mid-level staffer” who spent half an hour in close contact with Joe Biden on Air Force One Friday had an embarrassing injection failure, developing symptoms on Sunday, and then testing positive yesterday. Biden — also triple-injected — tested negative yesterday. He gets his next test tomorrow — right after his Big Announcement.

Have a terrific Tuesday and I’ll meet you back here for more delicious C&C.

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