Happy Tuesday, C&C family! We have a holiday-themed roundup for you today: a pricey, fully-injected Vermont college shuts down for Christmas after an outbreak of Covid; another NFL outbreak prompts a predictable solution; Reuters debunks the evidence of your own eyes; Britain shifts its threat level, its definitions, and its passport requirements; Hochul re-masks New York, but some counties defy; the Supreme Court passes on two more injection cases; UF Health drops its mandate; a new study funds that double-jabs actually lower antibodies to Omicron; a watchdog group reveals Covid conflicts; and a new study debunks passports.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Uh-oh! They did everything right. Their students stepped up and achieved. They all worked together. And they did it. They hit a 99% injection rate.

But now, Middlebury College in Vermont has been forced to cancel live classes, sports, and performing arts — again — after fifty students and employees tested positive for the virus. The highly-jabbed private liberal arts college re-imposed a strict mask mandate on campus. Now, only grab-and-go meals will be served to students so they don’t have to remove their masks by eating in public.

No eating! Not in the student union, anyway. Eat by yourself.

Middelbury’s annual tuition is $58,316 — right between Weslyan ($59K) and Brandeis ($57K). And they can’t even stop Covid.

💉 Yesterday, in sports news, Reuters reported that the NFL is struggling with a similar problem to Middlebury’s. The highly-injected football league reported a Covid outbreak on its website yesterday — an Outbreak! — with 36 fully-injected players on 18 different teams testing positive. So, it’s super serious.

Unfortunately, unlike fancy Ivy League colleges, the NFL can’t exactly cancel live events, now can it? I mean, nobody’s going to watch football players competing on Zoom, are they? It’s a problem. But they had to do SOMETHING.

Don’t worry! The NFL is on it! They quickly devised a shrewd, well-considered plan. And I bet you know what it is. MORE JABS! More.

In a memo provided to Reuters, the NFL ordered all its fully-injected staff to get a booster shot by December 27. Genius! You know the saying. “If at first you don’t succeed…”

NFL staff are getting spike proteins in their stockings.

🔥 Speaking of spikes, Reuters fact-checked the alarming jump in cardiac events in sports figures in 2021, and found that there was “no evidence” that the increased numbers of players collapsing on fields in various sports has anything to do with the injections. No evidence. Their conclusion? It’s a COINCIDENCE.

The news agency quoted an expert, Professor Sanjay Sharma, a leading sports cardiologist at St George’s University of London. Sharma said the jump in cardiac incidents during soccer games could be — you never know — just due to a “statistical cluster.” That’s a fancy way of saying it’s just a fluke. A random coincidence. A bit of bad luck, and all that.

I don’t know about a “statistical cluster,” but it’s a cluster all right. It’s super easy to find “no evidence” when you’re not looking for any. So don’t believe your own eyes. They’re lying to you.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 After shifting the island nation into its highest Covid alert gear (threat level four), it announced yesterday that the first death involving the Omicron variant has been detected. So, the UK worriedly responded by saying that a valid vaccine passport will now require, you guessed it, THREE shots. People will no longer be “fully vaccinated” unless they’ve had two main doses and a booster shot.

You know, public health experts and ignorant reporters mocked Governor DeSantis a couple months ago when he predicted this very thing would happen. Dummies. It only took two months.

Here’s the deal. It’s not that Omicron is a serious health threat or anything. It just IS. Okay? Does that make sense? UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, announcing the third jab requirement, said “I think the idea that this is somehow a milder version of the virus, I think that’s something we need to set on one side and just recognise the sheer pace at which it accelerates through the population.”

See? It’s the “SHEER PACE.” That’s the problem. To match the sheer pace of increasing infections you have to also increase the sheer pace of the jabs. That’s science. More, faster. It’s complicated. It may not seem logical, but that’s only because you’re too dumb to understand.

Merry Christmas, brits! Hope you like your spike proteins. You can’t return them. Ever.

👨‍⚖️ Continuing its trend of flushing cases involving the injections, the US Supreme Court yesterday denied emergency injunctions in two cases over New York’s jab mandates brought by Christian doctors and nurses. In the minority, Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch all said they would have granted the injunction.

In a dissent in one of the two cases, Justice Gorsuch said the mandate seemed based “on nothing more than fear and anger at those who harbor unpopular religious beliefs.” Well. At least somebody finally said it. Joined by Justice Alito, Gorsuch chastised the court for not protecting the plaintiffs, saying that it “is always the failure to defend the Constitution’s promises that leads to this court’s greatest regrets.”

😷 Messianic replacement Governor Kathy Hochul of New York reimposed the state’s universal mask mandate — and this time she means it. The new mask rule features fines up to $1,000 PER VIOLATION. Could get pricey for all you mask refusing anti-maskers. But not everybody’s happy about the new rule. Several red counties in that state quickly said they won’t enforce the policy. According to ABC-7 New York, Rockland, Madison, Niagara, Chautauqua, Nassau, and Rensselaer Counties have all announced they will not enforce Hochul’s mandate.

Niagara County, for example, said it “will be taking an educate to cooperate approach” instead of enforcement, as county officials decided that “a mandate was not the best approach nor the enforcement of such a mandate the best use of our resources.”

Blue counties in New York, on the other hand, promptly announced they couldn’t be happier with the new mandate. “We recognize Governor Kathy Hochul for her leadership in announcing a statewide mask mandate,” said Westchester County Executive George Latimer (D). “This pandemic has reached crisis proportions in parts of the state, and we can’t be sure that it won’t rise to equal status in the rest of the state.”

You can never be too sure, can you? I bet you weren’t aware that the pandemic has JUST “reached crisis proportions,” were you? The crisis just keeps growing. For some reason.

💉 In another Christmas gift to Florida citizens, UF Health sent a memo to all its staff yesterday announcing the suspension of its deeply unpopular injection mandate. The memo said, “We are suspending our requirement for all faculty and staff at UF Health to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 4, 2022.” The health network giant said its staff doesn’t even need to send in exemption requests anymore.

So, there won’t be any mandatory spike proteins in UF Health’s employees’ stockings this year. Which is probably just fine for them. They didn’t want those spike proteins anyway.

🔬 In another Christmas gift to people who own Pfizer stock, an Oxford University Study published yesterday found that two doses of the Covid injections actually generate a LOWER antibody response against the Omicron variant. In case it’s not obvious, that’s the OPPOSITE of what you want from your virus injection. Yahoo News said the study suggested “the variant could lead to more infections among the fully vaccinated.”

More! The jabs could lead to MORE infections! “Safe and effective.”

The study documents a “substantial fall” in neutralizing antibodies in folks who got two doses of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer shots.

So — of course — the researchers concluded that EVEN MORE injections are the ONLY WAY to handle this disturbing new finding. Lead author Gavin Screaton told media that the study should “press home the message that those who are offered booster vaccination should take it.”

The funding statement at the end of the study discloses that it was “supported by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences’ Innovation Fund for Medical Science.” Uh huh. Thanks, China.

💉 A watchdog group published the results of its five-month research project yesterday, announcing a variety of financial conflicts in US lawmakers’ investments, including the unhappy fact that at least 75 federal legislators have traded Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J stock, many buying early in 2020.

These figures don’t even include relatives of lawmakers who may be holding stock in the injection makers, which could, and probably does, make the potential conflict much larger than it already looks. The research group found at least 24 senators who were directly holding jab stocks, which is one quarter of the entire Senate. That seems problematic.

Nor do the numbers include investments by lawmakers in a vast array of other companies besides the jab makers that are also making huge profits off the pandemic. The watchdogs found there were a ton of lawmakers who have invested in companies making bank off the pandemic, like 3M (PPE), Quest (tests), and Regeneron (monoclonals).

Don’t start quibbling with me about how lawmakers should be able to invest in whatever they want or something. I’m not the only one who thinks this is a terrible idea. In fact, Representative Tom Malinowski, (D-NJ), told MSNBC in April 2020 that “This is not the time for anybody to be profiting off of selling ventilators, vaccines, drugs, treatments, PPE, anywhere in the world.” See?

But, how times change. According to the report, even Malinowski took pandemic profits this year — in Chembio Diagnostics, a company that makes Covid-19 test kits.

See, THIS is our problem now. THIS is why the pandemic isn’t ending. The concretized financial ecosystem around the virus makes it extremely hard to unwind the global health “emergency.” We’re going to have to jackhammer all these interested parties out of the Covid business, somehow. It seems unlikely, for example, that any lawmaker who has a big investment in Pfizer is going to do anything other than vote to keep pushing the jabs, unless I am missing something.

Ditto for tests, therapeutics, and everything else related to the virus.

Anyway, the watchdog group says that it will release the full list of lawmakers and their investments soon. At which point, the C&C Rapid Response Team will get a lot busier than we have been lately. Stand by for orders.

🔬 Another study recently published in MedRxIV is titled, “Evaluating the number of unvaccinated people needed to exclude to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmissions.” The researchers tried to calculate whether vaccine passports work.

What they found was the passports do NOT make sense. Shocking, I know. The researchers calculated that, to prevent ONE single case of Covid-19, you have to exclude 1,000 uninjected people from society. They noted drily that “the harms of exclusion may outweigh the benefits … including staffing shortages from losing unvaccinated healthcare workers, unemployment/unemployability, financial hardship for unvaccinated people, and the creation of a class of citizens who are not allowed to fully participate in many areas of society.”

You don’t say.

Their conclusion was that excluding uninjected people is expensive and doesn’t help that much:

“Conclusions: Vaccines are beneficial, but the high [numbers needed to be excluded] suggest that excluding unvaccinated people has negligible benefits for reducing transmissions in many jurisdictions across the globe. This is because unvaccinated people are likely not at significant risk — in absolute terms — of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others in most types of settings since current baseline transmission risks are negligible.”

The study was NOT funded by China.

Have a terrific Tuesday! I’ll be back here tomorrow with more.

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