Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup today includes: Moderna announces scads of new mRNA drugs for newly-common health problems; study “counterintuitively” says that kids actually prevent serious covid; dems try to differentiate Biden’s documents and we find out more about what Biden was hanging on to; the Times dunks on DeSantis for ignoring them; The FTC proposes to end non-compete contracts; the price of eggs; Twitter survives despite dire predictions of demise; short-staffed hospitals; Biden improves the border; CTV finds reason for excess deaths flying around the field; and good news from the House.

🗞*WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

💉 Good news everybody. Sort of. Moderna issued a press release yesterday announcing it has made oodles of progress on its other, non-covid mRNA drugs, titled “Moderna Announces Advances Across MRNA Pipeline and Provides Business Update.” Hooray. It’s good news for Moderna, as the statement said it’s still making container-loads of cash selling its covid snake oil to the rubes and the bought-off politicians.

Messenger-RNA is the new pharma firm’s bread basket; the term is right in its name (if you haven’t noticed): ModeRNA. Two standouts now in trials are its drugs for repairing heart damage and for treating melanoma.

I know, I know! I don’t want to talk about where all the heart damage and melanoma is coming from today.

Having observed this current giant covid mRNA experiment, I question whether mRNA drugs can ever work at all. The great promise of mRNA is that it can deliver a payload directly to the heart muscle, and cause your own cells to start producing a growth hormone or something. Sounds nice in theory, but now we know they lack any concept of how to practically control the process.

It’s Frankenstein. You can bring the damned thing to life, good for you, a marvelous accomplishment and whatnot, but then it bashes down the lab, goes rampaging across the countryside, and gets the villagers all riled up.

mRNA fans argue that the new therapies don’t make spike protein, as if that were the only problem. I’ll grant you that’s a good start, but there are plenty of other unsolvable problems with mRNA.

What I mean is, the mRNA does NOT stay at the injection site. It travels. It spreads. While it might be nice to have a damaged heart’s cells producing growth factor, for a while, I’m not too sure it’s a great idea to do that in THE BRAIN. Or the testes, or the big toe, or lots of other places.

The injection is like an artificial virus, infecting cells, hijacking them, and tricking them into producing something they don’t normally make. But the immune system isn’t cool with cells that acting weird. The immune system tries hard to destroy the hijacked cells. And when the immune system wrongly attacks its own cells, that’s called “autoimmune disregulation.”

While it might be nifty to grow some new heart cells, at the same time the cells producing the growth hormone are being destroyed by the immune system. So… how does it all net out?

Furthermore, it’s now painfully obvious to the meanest intelligence that the mRNA does NOT shut itself off after a few hours or days after all, like the useless imbeciles at the FDA credulously believed.

Follow me here. Since you can’t shut it off, questions remain about how MUCH growth is a good idea in the heart, even if they could keep the mRNA contained there, which they can’t.

And don’t even get me started about the reverse-transcription problem where the mRNA could be permanently encoded into DNA. There’s evidence it happens, and no evidence that it’s safe in the long term.

The mRNA drug therapies are nowhere near close to being ready for primetime. Test them all you want, but keep them away from me.

🔬 Last month, New York Magazine ran a long-overdue story headlined, “Why Spending Time With Kids Might Actually Help Protect You From COVID.” The gist is that researchers found — completely unsurprisingly — that “exposure to young children was strongly associated with less severe COVID-19 illness.”

Imagine that. In other words, hysterical teachers demanding protection during the pandemic from all those little disease vectors were also hurting themselves. It’s sort of karmic.

Specifically, the study’s researchers reviewed the medical records of more than three million adults in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health system, and found that the beneficial effect of being around kids wasn’t just a little statistical signal. It was huge:

[T]hose without identifiable household exposure to children based on health insurance enrollment had a 27% higher rate of COVID-19 hospitalization and a 49% higher rate of COVID-19 hospitalization requiring ICU admission than those with young children.

On an aside, if they can calculate the differential risks of hospitalization from being around kids, why haven’t they calculated the same figures for the jabs? It’s weird, but you know the reason.

Anyway, I guess the experts got that one wrong, too, even though they knew better. How could kids help protect from serious covid? The radical theory proposed by the study authors is that people’s immune systems need exposure to germs in order to work well. Who would have thought.

But the New York Mag describes the findings as “counterintuitive:”

Taken together, the findings suggest that social distancing and isolation at a population level, particularly from young children, may have counterintuitively put some people at /greater/ risk of COVID infection or severe disease once they resumed normal contact. (Several of the experts I spoke with noted that this doesn’t mean social distancing wasn’t beneficial for those at high risk of bad outcomes who were able to remain uninfected until they were vaccinated.)

Apart from that caveat about the high-risk folks, all the article’s experts said, duh, nothing to see here, that’s just what we’d expect. But where were all these well-informed experts two years ago? That “well-known” information might have been useful back then, to help keep a few schools open.

Here’s a link to the study.

🔥 And so the great double-standard game begins! Yesterday democrat Senator Dick Durbin explained how Vice-President Biden’s classified document problem is NOTHING AT ALL like President Trump’s recent conflict with the feds:

See? It’s because of how fast Biden sent the documents to the National Archives. That makes it okay. And, Biden only kept the documents for SIX YEARS, versus Trump, who had his docs for six long months.

Conservatives are having a field day recycling goofy comments various democrats made back when they were totally outraged about President Trump “jeopardizing the nation” by keeping a few classified documents in a locked closet in a Secret Service monitored location. But nobody else wants to talk about all the Democrats’ hysterical, overheated, and totally irrelevant remarks about Trump.

Yesterday CNN broke more information as to what KIND of classified documents the former vice-president had squirreled away in his forgotten office. The Post Millennial ran an awkward story yesterday headlined, “BREAKING: Biden Kept Classified Docs Related to Ukraine, Iran, UK From 2013-2016: Report.”

Ukraine! Of course.

Stand by for developments in this fascinating breaking story.

🔥 The New York Times ran a sullen story yesterday headlined, “Can Ron DeSantis Avoid Meeting the Press?” The sub-headline whined, “The Florida governor easily won re-election despite little engagement with mainstream news outlets.”

Get that? DeSantis won re-election “despite” ignoring corporate media like the Times. Um, not just that. The Governor won re-election IN A LANDSLIDE, despite ignoring corporate media.

Gosh, it almost seems like, the more you reject corporate media, the better you do. I think the Times missed the lede. Let’s rewrite that headline. How about these suggestions:

• “Is The New York Times Completely Irrelevant, or Just Partly?”

• “Is It a Good Use of Ron DeSantis’ Time to Engage With Mainstream Media Outlets?”

• “Should Anyone Pay Any Attention to the New York Times?”

• “Watch Us Cry Like a Baby About Being Ignored.”

The Times’ editors aren’t completely brainless. They get it, and even basically admitted that things are different now:

[DeSantis’] success is an ominous sign for the usual rules of engagement between politicians and the press as another nationwide election looms. Presidential candidates typically endure media scrutiny in exchange for the megaphone and influence of mainstream outlets. But in an intensely partisan, choose-your-own-news era, the traditional calculus may have shifted.

See that? They’re blaming us, the readers, for being partisan. Maybe they should think about why nobody trusts what they say anymore.

🔥 In what should be much bigger news, yesterday the Federal Trade Commission published a proposed new rule, which started the comment period. The new rule would essentially ban all employee non-compete contracts. It’s hard to imagine how this could ever squeak past big corporation lobbyists, but it is interesting.

I’ve often litigated non-competes. The best argument for non-competes is that an employer has invested a lot of time and money developing the employee’s skills. The worst arguments for non-competes surround low-skill jobs, or jobs where a professional begins work already having the required skillset.

I have mixed feelings about the proposed rule. As a federalist, I think it should be left to the states, which already have a wide variety of different approaches to non-competes. But if there will be a federal rule, my opinion is it should only protect highly-skilled positions where the employer invests a lot in the employee.

The new rule would be a giant federal power grab over the states who’ve historically managed their own employer-employee relationships. I think it’s telegraphing that the Biden Administration is trying to goose wages, which are always “sticky” in an inflationary economy. Biden officials probably believe that, if employers lose the protection of non-compete provisions, they’ll have to immediately offer more money to hold on to their good employees.

Here’s a link to the rule and where you can comment.

🔥 Speaking of inflation, eggs (albeit organic) are on sale in many places over ten dollars a dozen. Here’s just one example:

Thanks, Joe Biden!

🔥 It’s been several months now, and Elon Musk didn’t wreck Twitter after all. Lefty media Cassandras were wrong again.

On November 8th, ZDNet’s Steven Vaughn Nichols wrote, “Why Twitter Will Fail Shortly.” The same day, MIT Technology Review ran an article headlined, “Here’s How a Twitter Engineer Says It Will Break in the Coming Weeks.” In mid-November, the Atlantic lamented, “Twitter’s Slow and Painful End.” On December 2nd, Wired warned, “We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion.”

Within the last two weeks, Musk tweeted that Twitter is now on course to break even — ahead of schedule. And that’s despite many corporate advertisers still avoiding the platform.

The question isn’t about why they’re wrong so much. The better question is, when are they ever right?

🔥 US News ran a story last month headlined, “The ‘Great Resignation’ Is Taking a Toll on U.S. Health Care.” The gist is that surveys show increasing numbers of Americans complaining about understaffed hospitals, and the alleged explanation is “pandemic burnout” is causing lots of nurses and staff to resign. The recognize that a lot of nurses and staff “resigned,” which is why they’re calling it “the Great Resignation.”

But I think they’re looking in the wrong place for the reason. The words “vaccine” and “mandate” appear nowhere in the article.

Oh! And the new word is “understaffed,” not “overwhelmed.”

🔥 Joe Biden visited the border last week and he’s happy to report things are totally under control. Specifically, he went to El Paso, where alert residents posted some telling “before / after” pictures:

Look at that beautiful January city street in El Paso! You see what this means, don’t you? All we need to do to get the border under control is coordinate a Biden tour of all the border cities, and Shazam!

Another way of looking at it is, El Paso officials could do this anytime they wanted. They just don’t WANT TO.

🔥 CTV News, which just had a stroking reporter problem, ran an informative story yesterday headlined, “Loss of Pollinators Causing More Than 400,000 Early Deaths a Year: Study.”

It’s the bees.

The article cites a ‘study’ by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which ‘estimated’ that ‘inadequate pollination’ has led to a three-to-five per cent loss in fruit, vegetable and nut production. Try to follow me here. The researchers then connected the loss of fruits and nuts to excess death, because people are eating too much junk food or something.

The food-linked health issues, like heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some cancers has caused an estimated +427,000 excess deaths annually, the researchers said.

Ta-da! There you have it — the cause of all these excess deaths. Stupid, lazy bees under-pollinating crops. Don’t argue, it’s science! So now shut up about excess deaths, and quit eating all that junk food.

“This research establishes that loss of pollinators is already impacting health on a scale with other global health risk factors, such as prostate cancer or substance use disorders,” one of the authors claimed. But for some reason, middle and higher-income countries, with ready access to food, experienced a greater ‘health burden.’ The study authors ascribed that to the fact that higher-income countries — with all their advanced healthcare — normally have higher rates of non-communicable diseases.

It’s so weird how we spend more money than anyone and have worse outcomes. It’s almost like modern medicine is making us sicker. But that can’t be right.

Can it?

🔥 The House of Representatives formed the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government yesterday on a party-line vote: 221 to 211. Every single democrat voted against the committee.

We are off and running. Let’s go, legislators.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! I’ll meet you back here tomorrow for another roundup.

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