Happy Wednesday, coffee guzzlers and Covid news junkies! Today we have a great big roundup for you, as well as my thoughts on how we should respond to Narrative 2.0 as it unfolds.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 On Monday, Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee announced a state partnership with Michigan’s Hillsdale College, launching Hillsdale-based K-12 charter schools. In case you don’t know, Hillsdale College is one of a handful of remaining institutions that does not accept federal funding, and punches far above its weight in the national discourse. I can’t think of anything that could be much better news for kids than more independent Hillsdale charter schools. We need a lot more of this.

🚚 Yesterday, blackface-fan and part-time prime minister Justin Trudeau called the rallying truckers racists, tweeting “Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days.” Well. He forgot sexist.

Meanwhile, to keep busy, the truckers have been organizing food drives for the homeless in Ottawa. So.

The trucker rally has exposed one terrific outcome: the left’s response to the rally has cemented a permanent separation between the left and the working class. No one is more working class than truck drivers. But the leftists — whose slogan was once, “workers unite!” — aren’t even willing to recognize that the truckers have a legitimate CONCERN. By characterizing the truckers’ issues as selfish pretexts for racism, gay-phobias, and so forth, the left is saying clearly that truckers — working class people — are ignorant and evil, and do not deserve even to be listened to.

Buh-bye working class. It was nice while it lasted. The left will never get the working class back on board after this. It’s the most amazingly politically self-destructive thing I’ve ever seen.

💉Hahahaha! Last week, Bloomberg ran an explainer headlined “Why Some Vaccinated People Resist Omicron and Others Don’t.” It works! Sometimes!

Guess what Bloomberg advises its pro-injection readers at the top of the second paragraph of the article? “Life is profoundly unfair.” It’s “unfair” your shot didn’t work! Don’t blame the shot maker! Blame bad luck. If it ever occurred to you that pro-lockdowners are childlike magical thinkers, well, here is your evidence. Isn’t this exactly what you tell kids when you want them to shut up and quit complaining? “Because life isn’t fair, that’s why.”

Anyway the article reports “a recent study led by Harvard and MIT showed that about 20% of people get much poorer protection from their vaccines against omicron … this variability could account for some of the fully vaccinated people who’ve been hospitalized in the omicron wave.” You know, these things are starting to sound more and more like the flu shot, where when it doesn’t work and you complain about it, they just cheerfully chirp, “oh, you probably just caught a different strain of flu than the vaccine was designed for.”

Um. In other words, it didn’t work, right? What am I missing?

So the article goes on to say, don’t use logic or listen to the bad people, keep getting your jabs: “That doesn’t mean the vaccines are pointless against omicron, as some vaccine skeptics have been arguing. It’s still a good idea to get vaccinated, because 80% of us will get good protection.”

Dumb vaccine skeptics. I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that 80% figure will shrink month-by-month, just like all the other numbers have. Remember 95% effective?

Now, this whole “might work” deal is a pretty good position given the evidence sitting right before everyone’s eyes. They’re saying, okay, OBVIOUSLY the injections are failing, but nobody’s proven they don’t work at ALL, not for everybody. The injection might help YOU, so keep taking it. Maybe if you get enough alpha-type spike proteins then it will work. You never know. Don’t listen to those stupid skeptics, they’re just skeptical of everything. Believe!

💉 The BBC announced a documentary on the AstraZenica vaccine; that’s the one jointly developed between Astra and Oxford University, and was initially the favorite in Britain and former colonies. According to the BBC, 2.5 million doses have been given worldwide. A promo for the new documentary describes the AstraZenica jab as a “scientific triumph that went sour.” Citing “concerns over rare blood clots,” the BBC says the vaccine “is now barely used in the UK.”

Barely used.

While it looks like they are preparing to blame AstraZenica’s demise on the FDA’s bias toward Pfizer and Moderna, this is still very telling. AstraZenica is the first Covid vaccine to bite the dust over safety concerns.

So I looked into it a little more and was surprised to find that, at the beginning of December, there were a few quiet stories like this one in the Daily Mail UK: [AstraZeneca uncovers ‘trigger’ of blood clots after its jab](https://tinyurl.com/bdyjabfu).

AstraZenica described the mechanism by which its vaccine causes clots:

“They found that the shell of the vector vaccine — the weakened cold virus used to teach cells how to neutralise Covid — sometimes acts like a magnet and attracts platelets, a protein found in the blood. For reasons the scientists are still probing, the body then mistakes these platelets as a threat and produces antibodies to fight them. The combination of the platelets and the antibodies clumping together leads to the formation of dangerous blood clots.”

So Astra did the right, ethical thing. Once they became aware of the problem, they researched it and published their findings — without regard for how it would affect the injections commercially or whether the findings would cause “vaccine hesitancy.” And that information affected whether people wanted to accept the vaccine; that is informed choice.

I sure hope ALL vaccine makers adhere to the ethical standards set by AstraZenica. I’m sure they do. Right? Good thing the other injections don’t cause blood clots.

🔥 Meanwhile, back in the US, Johns Hopkins researchers published a study concluding that “lockdowns in the U.S. and Europe had little to no impact in reducing COVID-19 deaths.” The study is a meta-analysis of dozens of other studies, and determined that at best, early-2020 lockdowns may have reduced mortality by 0.2%. That’s two-tenths of one percent. So.

The researchers were clear that none of the interventions had any measurable impact, saying “We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality.” They left out masks, but we’ll take it anyway.

On the other hand, the researchers noted that the lockdowns caused “devastating effects” on the economy and other social metrics. “[Lockdown measures] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence and undermining liberal democracy,” the researchers said.

Don’t blame government. Politicians relied on “public health experts” early in the pandemic, like those at the Imperial College of London, who confidently asserted that lockdown measures would reduce death rates by up to 98%.

But the Johns Hopkins researchers strongly rejected those clearly erroneous early predictions: “a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: Lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”

It might be time, sooner rather than later, when we will need to hold the public health experts accountable for what they did. That is going to be an important — if not critical — element in ensuring that our children never ever have to suffer under the “tyranny of bad experts” ever again.

🔥 I have no idea what this means, but it is interesting, and seems related to Narrative 2.0. George Soros emerged from his headquarters under a dormant volcano somewhere smelling faintly of sulphur, and gave a rare public statement condemning Chinese president Xi Jinping. Soros complained that Xi has a policy of “total control,” and has — not surprisingly — promoted the Communist party to harmful effect on private enterprise in China. But it’s even bigger than that. In fact, Soros called president Xi “the greatest threat that open societies face today.”

He gave the address (by video) at Stanford’s Hoover Institution on Monday night. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace is a conservative pro-freedom public policy think-tank, whose fellows include Scott Atlas, Victor Davis Hanson, Jay Bhattacharya, and Thomas Sowell. So it’s an odd place for Soros to be in the first place.

Soros began his remarks by predicting that 2022 will be “a critical year in the history of the world.” If he hadn’t also been condemning Xi and crackdowns on democracy, I would’ve thought Soros was talking about some other kind of crisis more up his alley. Soros continued, observing “we are at, or close to, important decisions that will determine the direction in which the world is going.”

“In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual,” Soros said, remarkably. “As the founder of the Open Society Foundations, obviously I am on the side of open societies.” Obviously on the side of open societies? OBVIOUSLY? Really? Maybe that’s NOT so obvious, George. Work harder.

“[Xi] rules by intimidation and nobody dares to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear,” Soros said, which makes it “difficult to shake [Xi’s] beliefs even as the gap between his beliefs and reality has grown ever wider.” Soros indirectly called for Xi to be replaced: “It is to be hoped that Xi Jinping may be replaced by someone less repressive at home and more peaceful abroad,” Soros said. “This would remove the greatest threat that open societies face today, and they should do everything within their power to encourage China to move in the desired direction.”

It’s a bacon-wrapped mystery tied around a cheese riddle stuffed into an enigma hot pocket. Why is Soros publicly opposing Xi? What’s really going on in the Cuban-cigar-smoke-filled back rooms at Davos? Does Soros honestly oppose Xi’s communist party, or is he pressuring Xi to do something Soros wants but Xi doesn’t want to do? Why would Soros suddenly become an activist for “individual rights”?

Clearly, we have no way of knowing. But these are odd times, my friends. Very odd.

🔥 Finally, I have some thoughts about Narrative 2.0. They stared percolating when I saw some comments about the Canadian Truckers expressing that folks wished people in the U.S. had stood up as well as the truckers have. That is a short-sighted take. I do not agree with that. We HAVE stood up.

The pandemic is ending because of what normal people in the U.S. have done. Biden’s only option now is to end the pandemic to stop the political bleeding. If soccer moms hadn’t swung the Virginia elections, if Florida and Texas hadn’t used the pandemic to scoop up the most productive citizens in the country, and for that matter, if Florida hadn’t flipped majority-Republican for the first time in history, if conservatives weren’t relentlessly beating on school boards and county commissions all across the country, if blacks and hispanics and working-class people and other historically liberal constituencies weren’t flipping republican faster than Joe Biden can screw up a talking point, the world would be descending into totalitarian hell right now.

Thank the U.S. Constitution, which preserved just enough freedom for Americans to push it all back.

Stop for a second and think about all the most influential anti-lockdown docs and scientists. Jay Bhattacharya, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory, Ryan Cole, Simone Gold. What do all these folks have in common? They’re Americans. Pre-pandemic, they were ordinary Americans. I don’t want to take away from non-American allies, Sunetra Gupta being one who comes to mind. But the beating heart of the public scientific resistance lies in the States.

Don’t get me wrong. Europeans, Australians, and even Canadians have all contributed. The battle for freedom is raging worldwide. It might not have been possible, probably would not have been possible, without our brothers and sisters in arms around the globe.

The lockdowns began in China, and they are ending here in the U.S. And when the U.S. ends the pandemic, it will roll out to the rest of the world, including China. The pro-lockdowners here in the U.S. have incentive to end the worldwide pandemic. It can’t exist elsewhere but just not here. The trick will be in the packaging, so that Biden and the democrats can claim the credit.

And it will work, too. Biden is going to get a huge boost in the polls when he announces the pandemic is over. It’s inevitable. People will be so relieved, and the economy will be so encouraged, that he is going to benefit from a social, political, and economic renaissance, and any number of democrats will see their electoral chances jump. Take away the desperation that a lot of people feel for their kids and their livelihoods and inability to travel, and they will be grateful to get out of politics and just get back to normal life.

It will totally change the calculus of the 2022 midterm elections.

You will be tempted to feel bitter about it. Don’t. Do not. If, as I expect, it happens, CELEBRATE. The temporary loss of political advantage is a small price to pay to escape from this totalitarian black hole we’ve been sucked into. The right way to view this is that it is a chance to use our newly-recovered freedoms to make change, and to make sure this never happens again. The right way to respond is to NOT go back to pre-pandemic normal and to not forget about politics and to not just go back to working on our private lives.

If the pandemic ends next month, and I hope it does, it will be time to start the accountability phase. All the so-called public health experts who destroyed lives and economies will need to be held to full account. And guess what? The democrats will not protect them. Why should they care? The public health experts who led the pandemic are expendable useless idiots.

The next phase for us is a county-by-county rescue mission to permanently change the character of the country to ensure freedom and liberty for generations of future Americans. And to perform surgery on all the various problems that existed before the pandemic but which the pandemic has fully exposed. I’ll be writing about all this a lot more, soon, once it becomes clear that we ARE headed in the right direction into the next phase.

So keep the faith, be encouraged, and have a wonderful Wednesday. More tomorrow.

Help me rescue the country county-by-county. https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-

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Twitter: @jchilders98