☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Wednesday, January 5, 2022 ☙ TEST FREE 🦠

Updates on current cases inc. an Amicus brief; Eric Adams stands up for open schools; Biden pushes Pfizer's new drug; great Omicron news; bad cloth mask news; Viagra rises to the challenge; & more...

Happy Wednesday, C&C family! We’re halfway through the first week of the new year. In today’s roundup: updates on a couple cases that I’m working on; NYC mayor Eric Adams stands up for kids going back to school; Biden pushes Pfizer’s new drug in a non-press-conference press conference; the Wall Street Journal says cloth masks don’t work FOR OMICRON; a UK nurse gets a boost from an erectile dysfunction drug; the CDC updates its updates quarantine guidance, again; and some great news out of South Africa on the immunizing effects of Omicron.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🪖 Updates on a couple cases I’m working on:

— Yesterday I joined a case with attorney Nick Whitney where we’re trying to get the court to order Mayo Hospital to allow a ventilated patient’s doctor to come in and treat him with the horse dewormer, so he can be stabilized and removed from the hospital.

Here is a link to an Epoch Times story about the case: [Mayo Clinic Patient’s Family Makes 2nd Desperate Appeal to Judge for Ivermectin](https://tinyurl.com/ybc9b9vu).

We are relying on Florida’s Patient’s Bill of Rights, § 381.026, which provides (in relevant part):

“A patient has the right to access any mode of treatment that is, in his or her own judgment and the judgment of his or her health care practitioner, in the best interests of the patient, including complementary or alternative health care treatments.”

We framed the issue to the court like this: If there are two possible courses of treatment, each supported by at least one doctor, who gets to decide which one is used — the dying patient or the hospital’s administrators? Our position, of COURSE, is that the dying patient should get to choose.

Here is a link to our motion for rehearing, filed yesterday, if you’d like to read it or if it could help someone else: (https://tinyurl.com/mr2dwjut).

There’s a hearing today, stand by for further updates. If the court doesn’t see it our way, we’ll appeal the case to the First DCA on an emergency basis, and I hope to make some new law.

— I’m also preparing an Amicus brief to file in the U.S. Supreme Court in the OSHA case, which is set for emergency oral argument on Friday. My client is Phil Kerpen’s American Commitment Foundation, and the brief includes work from Doctors Jay Bhattacharya and Andrew Bostom. The brief discusses how the Omicron variant changes the risk analysis for working-age people, neatly eliminating the entire rationale for a vaccine mandate, even if one existed before.

Once it is finished and filed, I’ll post a link for those interested in reviewing the latest and greatest on Omicron. Of course, C&C readers are ALREADY well informed, but this is the real gold standard.

I couldn’t do this kind of work without all your support. We are helping a LOT of folks. Thank you!

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Eric Adams, New York City’s new mayor, replacement for that lunatic DeBlasio, has not seemed very promising so far, having upheld all DeBlasio’s Covid policies. All but one, apparently. Yesterday, Adams told a skeptical-looking blonde CNN anchor that he does NOT favor school closures, and he wasn’t coy about it: “The thing in the country and the city right now is that adults must stop traumatizing children. We must stop giving the appearance that there is hysteria among those making the decisions.”

I think this is the first time that a public official — certainly, a BLUE public official — has publicly observed that HYSTERIA isn’t a good look for leaders. Progress!

🔥 Joe Biden, the 47th vice-president of the United States, held a press conference on Covid policy yesterday. Well, I guess you could call it a press conference. Or maybe not. Is it still a “press conference” when they don’t answer any questions from the press? And when he’s sitting down the whole time? Or is it just an “announcement?”

Anyway.

Guess what Biden is reading from his teleprompter now? Information about THERAPUETICS. Well, SOME therapeutics, anyway. Specifically, the new big-pharma drug from Pfizer, the umbrella corporation that owns the US government. “These pills are going to dramatically decrease hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. They’re a game-changer,” Biden promised.

The late vice-president then dunked on uninjected people, of course, saying there is “no excuse” not to take the jabs and warning parents to keep their kids away from scary uninjected people. Coughing and clearing his throat twice in one sentence, and talking in a condescending tone you would use explaining something to a five-year-old, Biden instructed, “for parents with kids too young to be vaccinated, surround your kids with people who ARE vaccinated.”

For parents with kids over five, Biden encouraged jabbing them. Immediately. For safety. “Look out for their interests here. It’s the best way to protect them,” he prodded. Hmm. Would you let Joe Biden BABYSIT your kids? Just a random thought. Just musing.

NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell reported on Twitter that, as Biden ended the briefing, he refused to answer ANY questions from the media. “The president declined to answer questions from the small number of journalists observing his remarks on COVID. The questions could be heard,” she posted.

Can you imagine how they would have described Trump’s refusal to take questions in the middle of an Omicron explosion? Just another random thought. Apparently the bar is all the way on the bottom setting for Joe.

😷 I know this story is getting redundant, but COME ON. We’ve been shouting that cloth masks don’t work for almost two years now. I’ve interviewed multiple experts and learned all about “industrial hygiene” trying to explain how physics works to courts. You’ve got to let me enjoy a few more.

This time, it’s the Wall Street Journal, which published a straight news story Sunday headlined, “Why Cloth Masks Might Not Be Enough as Omicron Spreads.” Haha, they’re not suggesting giving up the masks. No, that would be crazy. Instead, they want you to use TWICE AS MANY, or buy more expensive ones. No more homemade masks, in other words.

The WSJ isn’t exactly forthcoming about the REASON why cloth masks don’t work. You could be forgiven for thinking it has something to do with Omicron or vaccine failure after reading the poorly-informed article. Well, the Journal informs us about SOMETHING, but it doesn’t guarantee we’ll be WELL-informed.

💊 Monica Almeida, fully-vaccinated 37-year-old British mother of two and respiratory nurse, caught Covid anyway, and wound up on the vent in a medically-induced coma for 28 days. When she was just three days away from being yanked off the ventilator to die, her nurses (nurses!) decided to try Viagra. Well, why not? It’s not like it’s also used for horses. Monica perked up immediately, and within two days she was off the vent and a week later home for Christmas.

Apparently it has something to do with Viagra’s effect of increasing blood flow to various parts of the body, including, presumably, the lungs. Now, there’s a lot of material here and you know I could have some fun with it, except I want to point out two items that came up in all the news reports on Monica’s story.

First, she initially took an ambulance to the hospital with low oxygen and after coughing up blood. Guess what the hospital did? Of COURSE, it sent her right back home — without treatment — to wait till things got worse. Because what else could they do? Giving her early treatment isn’t anywhere near as profitable as a month on the vent, now is it?

Hospitals, especially the large corporate hospitals, have utterly failed us.

Second, when interviewed after her miraculous recovery, guess what product she pushed? Well, Viagra of course. “It was definitely the Viagra that saved me,” she told the UK Sun. But also one more! The jabs, of course! Almeida told reporters that her condition would have been MUCH WORSE had she not been jabbed; she probably would have died instead of just being in a month-long medical coma and ALMOST dying.

Thank goodness she had her shots.

😷 The CDC got a lot of pushback from pro-lockdowners about its new 5-day quarantine guidance — especially the part that allows asymptomatic folks to return to work after only 5 days — and WITHOUT testing. Apparently a lot of people want recovered folks to get tested first.

So the CDC “updated” its guidance yesterday, including a new optional section for people who “want” to get a test before coming back to work. In other words, the guidance STILL allows folks to return to the workplace after 5 days — as long as they aren’t showing symptoms. But now, you can test if you want to!

The CDC’s new guidance is one of those “compromises” that isn’t really a compromise. I guess they really wanted to stick with the “no test” option.

Oh. One more thing. The CDC also clarified that the loss of taste and smell doesn’t count as a symptom, at least, with regard to quarantines. You can still get back to work without your tasters and smellers. It’s only two senses, you still have three other ones.

Last week, Walensky had clarified that the PCR tests are just “too sensitive,” and that’s why the CDC isn’t requiring them as a condition of ending quarantine. “We know that PCR testing would not be helpful in this setting as people can remain PCR-positive for up to 12 weeks after infection and long after they are transmissible and infectious,” she said, at the time.

The CDC’s insistence on a test-free, short-quarantine policy is starting to make me suspect this might be a play to help the court case at the Supreme Court. In other words, the government’s lawyers can now say, “hey judges, the CDC just reduced the burden on employers from the testing part of the mandate. So we’re all good now.” Or words to that effect. We’ll see.

🔥 Data out of South Africa strongly suggests that Omicron antibodies work against all prior variants — including Delta. Combined with the increased transmissibility and the mild symptoms associated with Omicron, this could actually signal an “off ramp” from the pandemic.

🦩 In 2018, Florida’s winter flu season recorded that 194 people were hospitalized per 100,000 in that pre-pandemic year — for all causes. This week, in the middle of the Omicron surge, Florida’s 7-day rolling average all-cause hospitalizations amounts to only 197 per 100,000. In other words, about the same as 2018.

For the U.S. overall, national hospitalizations are currently significantly LOWER than historical rates for this time of year. So.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! I’ll see you tomorrow, java’d up using one of the new sample mugs from our forthcoming C&C swag store.

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